Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,31
shaken off the back porch and then all holy hell broke loose as the section peeled away and the floor seemed to buckle and I felt my head take a shot from something heavy with a squared-off edge and there was a sudden coolness on my chest because I’d lost my grip on Sherry’s warm body, and then blackness.
ELEVEN
Maybe it was fifteen minutes, maybe an hour. My sense of time was gone with the wind. But when my head finally started to clear it was still in the pewter haze of a washed-out sunrise. There was a dim grayness all around us and when I focused my eyes, I realized I was staring out onto an open horizon. The back and side walls of the room were gone, simply obliterated or just picked up by the wind and sailed far away. I panicked, jerked against what I was leaning into, and Sherry groaned deep in her throat. We were up against the remains of the kitchen sink cabinet, wedged partially between it and the still-standing refrigerator. I moved my legs, turned on one hip and looked into Sherry’s face. She was conscious, her breathing shallow but steady, her eyes at half-mast, almost like she was simply taking a lolling rest after one of her long-distance runs.
“You OK?” I asked stupidly. “I mean, shit, how long have I been out?”
She didn’t respond at first and seemed to be looking out past me into the gray light.
“OK,” she finally whispered and then focused on my eyes. “I’m OK, I didn’t know what to do, Max. No place to go.”
I moved my arm, aimed my hand, found the side of her temple with my fingertips and stroked the side of her face.
“Jesus, Sherry. You OK?”
Maybe she was smiling at my denseness, but the corners of her mouth turned up, just a fraction.
“Hell of a night,” she said. “It’s morning, but I can’t get up.”
She reached down with her left hand but only got to her hip and stopped. She had a rag tied around her thigh, tight from the look of it. The torn piece of sheet and the fabric of her sweatpants were stained a rust color. I sat up, felt a spin in my head like I was a kid on the tilt-a-whirl for a second, and then moved down without too much pain to Sherry’s leg.
“Puncture?” I ask, probably hoping for something minor.
“No. It’s broken.”
“Compound?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thigh bone came right through the skin on the interior side. I thought my muscles were stronger than that, that they would’ve kept it in.”
She was a cop. We’d both spent a lot of time at accident scenes gabbing with paramedics, picking up their medical cant.
“I was trying to drag you over here after the side wall ripped away,” she said. “My foot must have gone right through a split in the flooring. I fell over and the bone just snapped.”
I was staring at her face, trying to comprehend what she was telling me.
“When I felt for the pain I found the bone with my fingers. But I had to move, get us over. When I pulled my leg back out of the hole, I must have pulled the bone back in because it’s not exposed anymore.”
“Christ, Sherry.” It was the only thing that came to my lips.
“When I got us a little out of the wind I was going to use your shirt to tie it off but a bedsheet came whipping by like I’d ordered the thing from room service.”
Levity, I thought. She could have been crying, instead she was cracking jokes. Her blond hair looked almost brown, drenched and stringy with shards of wind-blown sawgrass stuck in it. Her face was smeared with dirt and streaks of her own blood wiped there from her hands. I was looking in her eyes for some sign of trauma or shock that just wasn’t there.
“I’m OK, Max. I passed out a couple of times but it feels kind of dead right now. I’m not sure that’s going to last if I try to move, though.”
Sherry’s brave suggestion motivated me to roll over to my own knees and then, slowly, gain my feet. There was an uneasy shift in my brainpan, like a load of water in a tub tipped from one side to the other, but I maintained my balance and the feeling passed.
In the dim light, I took in the shredded remains of the Snows’ fishing camp. The western wall that we