white hair was caked back on his crushed skull, darkened by the muddy water and his own gore. The stone-white surface of his gashed face glistened with beads of water and drying blood.
The dead man’s eyes stared back at Philip, their violent surrender to death like the carved expression in a grotesque statue.
Verna tugged at his sleeve. “I know the Caldwells are safe, aren’t they, Mister Harper? You’ll help me look for them, won’t you?”
A frantic smile broke across her lips. “And I’ll help you find Mister McGowan! Please sir! I ain’t got no family I know of and they’re everything to me.”
Philip put his arm around Verna’s shoulder and guided her back toward the line of survivors milling around the fire. “You got to warm yourself first, child.” He stumbled, his feet feeling heavier with each muddy step.
“Are you hurt bad, Mister Harper?
Philip wondered how long the tears had been trickling down his cheeks. He hadn’t noticed until Verna mentioned it and he did his best to hide them behind a smile. “Stand close as you can.” He guided her as near as he could.
Philip prayed as he walked, trusting God would take this grievous burden away from them before the weight crushed those already broken by something worse than any storm’s fury.
The afternoon sun blazed down on the gathered survivors staggering around the yard of the Ursuline Convent and Academy.
Bret, pummeled, thrashed, and bloodied by the hurricane’s ferocity, stumbled toward the survivors. Gabrielle will be there. She must be.
After plodding only a few feet, he stopped. There, still clinging to a large, broken branch, a woman, her ghostly white face torn and lacerated, stared up at him from the mud.
Bret stepped closer. He paused and stared at the dead nun holding a little girl. Around the nun’s thick waist, nine children were tied, each with a rope knotted to their waist. What remained of their small, crushed bodies lay scattered around her, some, their frail, broken arms still outstretched toward her.
Bret could not pray because there were no words he knew that could carry the anguish of hopelessness consuming his soul.
He dropped on his knees to the bloody mud and wept.
The massive, ten-foot high brick wall surrounding the convent school had been reduced to scattered mounds of rubble.
The cries of the wounded and the moans of the dying filled the grounds as exhausted nuns moved among the survivors attending to each the best they could.
Bret raised his eyes to heaven. Columns of smoke rose from the streets, clouding his view of the brilliant azure blue Gulf sky. He flinched at the stench—the ever-growing intrusive vapors of decaying and burning flesh—filling his nostrils as the blistering afternoon sun beat down on his head. No waiting in this heat. They’ve already started burning. He turned and vomited.
Short of breath, Bret sat in the soggy grass, head slumped forward, feeling a craving for his medicine so deep that it seemed now to have settled into a solid, living thing in the pit of his gut.
If not for his unwavering hope of finding Gabrielle alive—the heartbreaking desire to hold and kiss her once more—that seemed to drag his body by an unconscious force of its own, he was certain he would keel over on his side at any moment and willingly join the dead scattered around him.
Bret wiped his mouth, drew a breath, and staggered up again on his feet. “Gabrielle!” He tried to raise his hoarse voice to a yell. “Gabrielle Caldwell! Has anyone seen her?”
A half-naked man, his sickly pallor like one risen from the grave and wearing only torn shreds of black tuxedo pants, drifted by him as though walking in a trance toward some unseen beacon in the distance.
Bret recognized the ghostly face of a businessman who knew Arley Caldwell but the person’s name escaped him. He grabbed the former gentleman by the shoulders. “Have you seen Gabrielle Caldwell?”
The man paused for a moment but kept staring straight ahead. Bret shook his shoulders. “You know Arley Caldwell. Have you seen his daughter, Gabrielle?”
“Jenny . . . where’s my Jenny? She has to wake the children.” The man continued walking like a lost soul in search of something it would never find.
Bret heard a child cough and turned. The little girl in the nun’s arms, a drooping freckle-faced girl with red ribbons on her ponytails, coughed and cried out from the dead sister’s protective embrace.
He rushed to her side, untied the rope and carried her toward the main courtyard