“She’s not a soldier though,” Blake mentioned then. “Not really.”
“I know.” I nodded. “But I think she’ll be as tough as she can be. Our only hope is that she was…” I paused, then—insensitive or not—I continued. “That she is strong enough to buy us time.”
“What is time?” Hayley asked.
“One, two days… tops.”
“So we’ve got two days to get all the way home?” Hayley didn’t like my answer.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Maybe less.”
“So…” Hayley spoke slowly.
“We have to go.” I turned and headed back toward the others, Blake and Hayley at my heels. My mind was swimming in the deep ends of that message. Storm coming? Cleaning house? It has to be an actual storm. But cleaning house? Why would they be going in now?
“Everything okay?” Ava asked as we rejoined the group.
I gave my most reassuring smile. “For now.”
“We ready to go?” General Niles asked.
I held a thumb up. “Ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Then let’s do this,” the general replied and shut his Hummer door.
Yes. I nodded. Let’s do this.
FORTY-SIX – Only Gets Worse (Ryan)
Wednesday was a stormy, nerve-wracking day on Redemption. Since Deacon and Royce had left us last night—to join Trigger and Twix on Kauai—we hadn’t heard anything from them. No one at Area 52 had either. Due to the mole concerns at the Hexagon, we knew the “radio silence” was intentional—but that didn’t make it any easier to take. Tara was going crazy. Kaci was going crazy not hearing anything back from her brother. I was going crazy not hearing anything from Danny or Hayley. There was a lot of crazy.
Dad had suggested we all hang out at the Brady house—Blake and Kaci’s—so we could stay by the computer and at least get weather updates from Nicole or Damien. That was fine for a while, but the Brady house was only spacious enough for maybe four people. Six adults and a baby were too much.
By mid-afternoon, Tara’s patience was completely fried. “I need to go take a walk.”
“It’s a little insane out there,” I objected. There were frequent wind gusts upward of fifty miles per hour. It wasn’t a good idea.
“I didn’t say you had to go,” she snapped.
I wasn’t in the mood for a fight. I raised my hands, submitting, and turned back to the computer. I heard the door open and close behind me. I had my hands on the back of the chair Dad was sitting in. He turned his head and looked up at me.
“What? I don’t want to fight, Dad.”
“Okay. But put yourself in her shoes. Do you think she wants to be alone out there?”
I glanced around the room. Kate held Ollie and was bouncing him around. She didn’t look at me. Jenna and Kaci had gone into the kitchen. “I don’t think she wants me with her.”
I expected an argument but didn’t get one. Instead Dad pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’ll go with her.”
“Dad, you don’t have—”
“She shouldn’t be out there on her own.”
I agreed with him, so I shut my mouth and nodded.
He hurried out the door after her.
They came back a half hour later, and Tara took Ollie from Kate to put him down for a nap. Dad closed the door to the office so no one could overhear what he was going to say. “You were right, Ryan. She didn’t want you out there. She is rather angry with you.”
I hung my head. I knew it.
“But.” Dad placed his hand on my shoulder. “She’s more angry at herself.”
I highly doubt that.
“Look, I know you—and I know you probably don’t believe me… but it’s the truth. Some of this you need to hear from her, but I do need to say that this wall you two have built between each other… it’s nothing—it’s imaginary—for now anyway. Tara has lost so much—not that we all haven’t, of course—but she only had her parents and Emily before the attacks. Now she’s got you, and us, but the thought of losing Emily… I don’t know if this makes sense but it’s more than just losing Emily. It’s losing her entire past. Everyone else here still has someone from that past. She doesn’t.”
I could tell by the way Dad was speaking, by the pauses and tone in his voice, that he didn’t know if he was saying it right or explaining it well enough. But somehow I understood exactly what he was saying. I nodded. “I get it.”
He hugged me. “Go talk to her.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
I tiptoed into the bedroom where Tara had put Ollie down for his nap and slipped over to the bed. I leaned in to see her face in the dark and saw her mouth was slightly open—her chest steadily rising and falling. She was asleep.
Ollie was lying beside her, his mouth open as well—also knocked out. There was enough room beside Tara for me to squeeze in and I really wanted to, but I didn’t. She needed her sleep more than she needed a hug. I grabbed my journal from my backpack and slipped back out of the room.
I sat in the kitchen and wrote for a couple hours. I found an envelope in Blake’s office and folded in the letter I’d written Tara. I took it into the bedroom at four to check on Ollie. He was stirring but she was still out, so I slid the letter into her bag and took Ollie out of the room with me. She hadn’t slept this well in quite a while. This would be good for her. We could always talk later.
FORTY-SEVEN – Darkness Falls (Ryan)
Tara joined us for dinner at seven. The sleep had certainly done her good. She wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t angry—somewhere comfortably in between. After dinner we checked in with Nicole at the Hexagon and moved everything valuable into the bunker under Blake’s office—all our bags, keepsakes, electronics, etc. Then we headed over to the Big House.
Everything in the big house was built around the kitchen so Dad felt that was where we should be—the least exposed place on our island.
It was only slightly after 9:00 p.m. on Redemption now, but it was dark enough to be midnight. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a blacker sky. Random light gray lines across the sky mimicked the sun’s rays but held no real glow—no warmth. An eerie chill had taken over.
The waves rolling past our island were huge—mostly ten to twenty feet tall, some approaching thirty feet. We knew they were pounding the western shore of Ni’ihau, which was—thus far—sheltering Redemption from the brunt of the storm. But we also knew the waves were getting bigger and stronger as they approached Kauai. The water level had to be creeping up—the flood surge moving through the streets—and the worst of the hurricane was still probably an hour or so away.
The winds were getting vicious. The tree house, as stable as it was, had begun to sway and creak around us. Best guess, we were currently getting regular gusts of sixty to seventy miles per hour, and the wind continued to pick up.
The kitchen was built around the thickest tree of the bunch, with walls to the north, south and west—it was wide open facing east. There was a large window on the west wall that we’d covered with blankets and roped off, and a railed veranda wrapping all the way around the kitchen. We had a number of escape routes if something went terribly wrong—or when something went wrong—but there really wasn’t anywhere to go that was safer than this.