The Lucifer Gospel

34

Finn woke to the terrible, windborne crying of the gulls and the savage echo of broken surf pounding on the reef. She vaguely recalled the night before in brief images and sensations: the pressure of the mounting wind, the monstrous sounds of nature unleashed, the harsh, pervasive slanting rain so powerful at times it almost stole her breath. The sound of water swirling at her feet. The knowledge that there was no hope left.

Instead of hope there had been the fickle randomness of storms. Late in the night and early the following day the wind had veered a mere two points in a new direction, the hurricane had shifted its wheeling carnage overhead and slipped away, and finally the waters had receded. In the cold lens of the NOAA cameras roughly twenty-three thousand miles overhead, the pinwheel of the hurricane cloud began to shred and tear.

Opening her eyes, it took her a moment to realize that she was lying just inside the entrance to the abandoned hut next to the lighthouse. The dead cat was gone and so was most of the litter. The cat’s ghost still occupied the hut with its musky, dead animal odor. The strap on her bathing suit had been repaired with a neat reef knot. There was no sign of Hilts. Finn suddenly realized that she had a splitting headache. She was also cold.

Shivering, she sat up. She looked around. Somehow the sheet-metal roof of the hut had managed to stay nailed to the rafters, and it was obvious that Adamson’s prediction about the island being covered by the storm surge had not been borne out because, thankfully, she was high and dry.

Finn stood up, still groggy, and ducked through the entrance. The sky was hammered blue, the sun a blinding disk as it rose in the east, and the sea was like liquid metal, dark lines of heavy breakers destroying themselves loudly against the line of the invisible reef.

There was a strange, unpleasant taste in the air, like hot blood on tin or what she imagined death by electrocution would smell like. She made her way down to the spot where the marram grass met the sand and dropped down, hugging her knees as she stared out to sea. She realized that she was both hungry and terribly thirsty. She heard a faint sound and turned; Hilts was approaching from down the beach, hauling what seemed to be their flotation vests behind him.

In his other hand he was dragging the limp body of a large, brownish-gray bird with a long sharp beak and legs like sticks. The front of his once white T-shirt was stained pink with his own blood, and the gash in his forehead had scabbed over in a horrible-looking mass of caked blood and serum. His lips were bruised and covered with a cracked white layer of salt. His eyes looked bloodshot and feverish but he was smiling.

“Finished your beauty nap?”

“I’m thirsty,” she said, her voice croaking.

“Go back to the lighthouse. There’s a few puddles around the base. Drink up now because they’ll evaporate soon enough, and I couldn’t find anything to store water in.” He lifted the dead bird by the neck. “I’m going back to the hut. Start a fire with one of the vest flares. Cook up old Ichabod here. Found him with a broken neck up the beach a ways. We might die of thirst but at least we won’t starve to death while we’re doing it.” He gave her a grin, then plodded up the beach, heading for the hut. Finn climbed to her feet and headed for the lighthouse at the other end of the narrow little spit of land.

By the time she drank her fill and returned to the hut Hilts had already gathered driftwood and debris and had a blazing fire going, initiated by one of the emergency flares in the dive vests. He was on his knees in the sand in front of the hut, busily gutting the large, heronlike bird with his vest knife. He held up the blood-covered, razor-sharp tool and smiled.

“Adamson must have thrown the vests in for authenticity.”

“Maybe he’ll come back to see if we survived,” said Finn. “Did you ever think about that?”

“Why would he bother?” Hilts said. He scooped the bird’s entrails into his hand, pulled hard, then threw the guts downwind along the sand. The gulls screaming above them in the air dropped out of the sky and began to tear at the offal like vultures.

“The fact that we survived last night at all is a miracle. We’re not going to last for very long without water. Unless Fidel’s navy finds us or we’re visited by your friendly neighborhood cocaine runner, we’re pretty much screwed.” He found a long piece of driftwood, speared one end into the bird’s stomach cavity, and laid it across the flames. The feathers began to smoke and burn. It smelled horrible.

“That’s disgusting,” said Finn.

“That’s lunch,” Hilts answered.

After the bird had spent almost an hour in the flames, Finn tried the charred sour meat, and after throwing up she returned to the steadily drying puddles that lay around the concrete pad of the lighthouse in a gleaming string of little lakes, fading like mirages as the Caribbean sun rose overhead. She dragged herself back to the fire in front of the hut. The remains of the heron carcass had been discreetly removed. Hilts now had the dive vests laid out on the sand and was picking them over.

“Six flares, two knives, a reel of safety line we could maybe use for fishing if it wasn’t so big, an aluminum mirror, two personal first aid kits, two dive computers, a Garmin IPX7-Z series submersible GPS unit, and some shark repellant. They always seem to have more useful stuff on those reality TV shows.” He put a hand to his mouth in mock horror, eyes widening. “Could it be that reality TV isn’t real after all?”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re so happy about.”

“It’s all relative. We could be dead but we’re not.”

“But we soon will be by the sound of it.”

“Maybe the Buff Divers will show up from Katy, Texas, you never know.” He shrugged. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” he added philosophically.

“The man who said that also said, ’walk sober off; before a sprightlier age comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage,’ ” said Finn.

“Show-off,” replied Hilts. He squatted in front of his little pile of booty like one of the dealers in the City of the Dead bazaar in Cairo.

“I’ve never really understood how GPS works,” said Finn, staring at the exotic Garmin unit that looked like an outsized bright yellow cell phone in the pile.

“It’s pretty simple really,” Hilts explained. “It was originally designed by the military. They shot up twenty-four satellites into stationary orbits around the earth so two of them were always above the horizon anywhere in the world. They had base-station receiving units on the ground that picked up the signals broadcast by the satellites and triangulated off them to give you an exact location. The system was put into use just in time so that our boys didn’t get lost in the Iraqi desert.” He picked up the unit and switched it on. “The ones they have now are a lot more sophisticated. Like little computers. With the right map chip it’s like having an atlas in the palm of your hand. This one has North America and the Caribbean programmed into it.” He looked down at the display. “That’s us: eighteen degrees, fifty-five minutes, sixteen seconds north, sixty-six degrees, fifty-four minutes, twenty-three seconds west.”

“What did you say?” Finn asked.

Hilts sighed and repeated himself. “Eighteen degrees, fifty-five minutes, sixteen seconds north, sixty-six degrees, fifty-four minutes, twenty-three seconds west.”

“That’s it,” she said, nodding.

“What’s it?”

“The cards. The way they were arranged on the table in Devereaux’s cabin. The table had the Acosta Lines logo on it, a compass, remember?”

“A compass rose, right,” he answered, nodding.

Finn closed her eyes, concentrating.

“A three, an eight, another three, a pair of twos, and a five to the north. Thirty-eight degrees, thirty-two minutes, twenty-five seconds north.” She paused, trying to remember. “Two eights, a jack, which stands for ten, and a pair of twos on the west side of the table.”

“Eighty-eight degrees, ten minutes, twenty-two seconds west,” filled in Hilts, keying the figures into the unit. He stared at Finn. “You’re a genius!”

Over the water, in the distance, Phil Stubbs was singing about a group of tadpoles celebrating their journey to frogdom, backed up by a chorus of squeaky six-year-old girls telling what da froggies say. Squinting into the sun, Finn saw Tucker Noe’s ancient flatboat appear around the reef, heading past the lighthouse toward them. It looked a little battered by the storm but it was still afloat. Phil’s singing became louder, his strong voice carrying easily across the water to them.

“Kalik,” said Hilts, pronouncing it like a native and licking his lips.

“What are the coordinates for?” Finn asked, keeping her eyes on the decrepit old boat just to make sure it was real.

Hilts looked down at the Garmin unit.

“They was hoppin’ and skippin’ an jumpin’ an leapin’, come back to the pond, come see,” sang Phil.

“Rutgers Bluff, Illinois.”