Island of the Innocent by Lynn Morris

Author:Lynn Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619701298
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
Published: 2012-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Cheney looked at her hands.

They were strong hands, long-fingered, agile, lissome. She kept her nails short but filed to pleasing ovals and buffed to a high gloss. She’d always been grateful that she’d inherited her mother’s trait: clear, ivory-white half-moon cuticles. Cheney considered that one feature to be very ladylike, and it was a rare mark of beauty that women envied. They were steady, sure hands, nimble and quick. She was grateful to the Lord that He had given her such good hands.

A weak and tentative light rested on her hands. Abruptly Cheney realized how well she could see. At that moment the sun threw its floodlight onto the scene, the instantaneous black-to-white sunrise of a flat eastern horizon.

“Ohh,” she murmured in revulsion. Several women screamed, men cursed, and children started to cry. Surrounding the forlorn little group of boats were thousands, perhaps millions, of dead centipedes. Even at a cursory glimpse Cheney could see that many, like the monster she’d seen in the guest house the night before, were at least a foot long.

“Calm down, everyone,” Shiloh called sturdily from the jetty. “Just calm down. They’re dead, and they’ve just about stopped coming.”

Cheney stared at him. He looked unearthly, like the Greeks must have pictured a fire god, like Mercury. The rising sun turned his thick hair to a silvery fire. He stood shirtless, vigorous and unyielding. The clean geometrical planes of his brow and cheekbones and jaw were carved in golden relief in the light of the morning sun. He showed no weariness at all.

Along the flat stones of the jetty, Walker held the reins of Indie, one of the cart horses. Walker looked exhausted, his back bent, his head bowed. Shiloh stood behind him, holding the gelding Plato’s reins, petting him and soothing him. Then came sturdy old Sultana. The oldest and calmest of the four, she stood alone, tethered to a docking ring inset into the rock, shifting her weight patiently. And behind Sultana, Konrad Zeiss stroked his horse Kaiser, as he had done off and on all night.

The barrier fire the men had built across the jetty’s walk had died down. Cheney was relieved, not only for the fact that the centipede plague appeared to be over, but because the stench of thousands of burning insects had sickened her all night.

She looked around the boats, taking stock again, as she had done hundreds of times during the endless darkness. Mama Nomi dozed in her specially built dinghy, splendidly alone in the boat that was wide in the draft and low in the water. Her boat alone had not needed to be bailed. The rest of them—more because of panicky flailing by the passengers—had taken water. A young Hawaiian man got stung by a jellyfish that landed in his canoe. Tang Lu, in the canoe next to Cheney’s with her four children, was bitten twice by centipedes. A Chinese fisherman whom everyone called Dooley was bitten, and his brother Dan was bitten twice while trying to help him.

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