Enduring the Crisis (7 page)

Just when Ben, Nate, and the crew had settled down after all the excitement, a wicked storm blew in so fast, Ben didn’t see it coming. He sure felt it, though. Fortunately, his medication was actually working.

He made his way back to the wheelhouse hanging on to any rail, or rope he could find to ask how much longer before they were on land again.

Randall was on the radio and seemed a little stressed.

Once he was done, Ben asked, “Are we fishing soon? How much farther do we have to go?”

Randall was busy navigating the boat, studying the churning water when he answered. “That attack back there changed plans, a lot of plans. You lucked out. No fishing this time around. This storm is a bit stronger than I anticipated and I thought it would hit us when we were closer to Dutch Harbor. Which means it hitting us now isn’t good because I think we took a hit from that blasted cruiser and these swells are what’s causing us to take on water.”

“What? Are we going to make it?” Ben gripped the handle on the wall near the door and scanned the deck for the lifeboats.

“It’s not that much water but the waves are so strong, they could cause more damage to the hull that is already compromised now.
Then
we will be in more trouble.”

“Is there anything I can do?” When he asked the question, he felt even more helpless.

“What you can do is stay out of the way unless one of the crew needs a hand. You greenhorns are a hassle unless you know what you’re doing.” Randall took a moment to look at Ben and his tone softened. “I doubt there’s anything to worry about. We’ll get there no matter what. We can call the Coast Guard if things get really bad. Now if we can leave Dutch Harbor after we get there, that one I can’t answer.”

That left Ben totally speechless. He had no idea where Dutch Harbor was on the map. What would that mean for him and Nate? He left the wheelhouse to go find his phone.

Of course there was no service that far from shore. There wouldn’t be any potential for service until they reached a town. Hopefully. Unless Dutch Harbor was really just a small harbor to park a boat with only a few services. It wasn’t like he could look it up on his phone to learn more about it either. There had to be a physical map somewhere on board. If the crew wasn’t so busy making sure the trawler stayed above water, he would have asked one of them if they could show him where they were going.

When he looked for Nate, the poor guy had fallen asleep with his head on his arms at the table. Those pills did make a person drowsy and he was feeling it too. He went back to his bunk where he left his suitcases and only took off his rain gear. He let his feet dangle over the edge of the bunk and skimmed through the pictures that Tammy had been sending him while he was away. They were only of the girls, though. She never liked to take any of herself and she hated selfies. Suddenly he wished he had a picture with her in it. He wondered how she was faring. She was great at making sure they had all the things from all the food storage lists that she researched and collected all the things she’d need for long-term power outages. However, she wasn’t good at camping. He smiled as he heard her voice in his head telling him she wasn’t a happy camper. She struggled to light fires probably because she was rather anxious around any flames, even the barbeque and gas stoves caused her anxiety. Even after all the shooting outings he had with the girls and church activities with friends, she had no interest in learning about guns at all. He had a number of guns at the house and the girls were the only ones that knew how to use them. She was strong though. But strong sometimes wasn’t enough. Just the few things Tammy wasn’t good at were the things that worried him the most about her trying to deal with the disaster at home alone.

He paused on a picture of all five girls together. If anything, the girls looked a lot like her so it wasn’t like he couldn’t remember what she looked like. He tried to think about that instead of all the things that could go wrong and who could harm them because Tammy didn’t know how to use a gun.

“Hey, cracker boys. We need some help,” Slim hollered into the crew’s quarters.

Ben had his raincoat back on in a hurry and Nate followed him down to one the fishiest smelling places he had ever been in his life. The engine room must be close to the place where they stored the fish.

“Doesn’t this boat hold a lot of water when it has fish in it?” Nate asked sloshing through water on the floor around the engines.

“In the right places. This is not one of them. Actually, we need a hand with some mechanical stuff. Captain said you crackers might actually know a thing or two.”

Ben hadn’t noticed at first but they really weren’t moving all that fast.

Once Nate and Ben did some troubleshooting on the engines, unlike any he’d never seen before, they figured out what was wrong. It had a clogged fuel filter. Luckily they had one onboard.

By then the water was up to their ankles. Slim took them to a pump.

“This is not the time for this thing to stall out either.” Slim stuffed his hands in his pockets while he acted as if the back and forth motion of the boat was nothing.

They had no idea how to fix the pump. They tinkered, they checked everything they could check. As a last resort, Ben smacked it hard with the pipe wrench after it failed to start and the thing actually kicked on.

The three of them cheered. “If all else fails, just smack it around.” Ben shouted over all noise and handed the pipe wrench to Slim.

“Well, I thought I hit it pretty hard after it quit.” Slim scratched his head and scowled at the pump.

“I probably jiggled something back in place or maybe it shorted out. Make sure you hit where I did.” Ben shrugged.

“We just need it to work, that’s for sure.” Slim tossed the pipe wrench on a ledge.

“It’s doing a good job now.” The water level had already dropped an inch or so.

“Yeah, I was getting nervous. Motor out and the pump goes out too in this weather. I thought that explodey boat had it bad.” Slim rubbed his chin.

“Don’t you have people that can fix this stuff out here?”

“Captain can do it but he wanted us to ask you first. I think he’s still nervous he’s going to find another one of those ships and it could sneak up on us with the terrible visibility right now.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” Nate said.

“We’re good now.” Slim patted the pump and it shut off again. “What a piece of…” He hit the side with a pipe wrench. It started up again.

Ben backed away to head for the stairs. “Hopefully all is good for the moment. If it won’t come back on, we can try taking it apart to see what wires are loose. That will take time though.”

“Yeah, we’ll call on you again if we have another something crap on us down here before we get to Dutch Harbor.”

It was a huge relief that Amanda was home and Tammy could finally focus on getting things done. After the meeting at the church, the rest of the day was spent trying to take care of all the canning and drying of food while the girls bantered relentlessly. Sometimes technology was a great distraction for teens and she was starting to miss it because she was about to lose her sanity from how ridiculous her daughters were.

Zoe had dug around in the garage and found a cassette player boom box and the old cassette tapes. The rest of the day was listening to a lot of 80’s music. She’d found Ben’s Depeche Mode, U2, Eraser cassettes and also brought in Debbie Gibson and Tiffany that had belonged to Tammy when they were teens. Much silliness came out of the rest of the evening while the girls pretended they knew how their parents must have danced back in the day.

By the time Tammy crawled into her full-sized bed in the safe room, she was totally exhausted and emotionally spent from watching the girls carry on, laugh, and fight intermittently while she remembered way back to when she was dating her husband as each song that she had known so well played.

Because she had slept on the sofa the night before, it hadn’t really hit her until she looked at the empty space where Ben should have been that it really hit her. He wasn’t going to make it home. The craziness, stress from Amanda not being there, and not knowing what the full situation was regarding the power outage kept her from dwelling too much on if Ben would come home at all.

The reality of that prospect broke her. She had cried herself to sleep the night before. This time she shed tears but it was different. Her chest hurt, an ache in her heart, unlike anything she had ever felt before. How could she be so brave in front of her daughters  and then become completely undone once she was all alone?

All the scenarios of what could have happened in Alaska played like horror movies in her head. They could have been invaded or worse, they could have been bombed and everyone there could be dead. Perhaps they were just in the dark just like the rest of the country and it was about to be bigger problem there with the nights growing longer and their winter was close to setting in.

She wiped her tears with a blanket and rubbed the sheet on the empty side of the bed. “Please bring him home,” she whispered. “I want him back. He can’t be gone.”

How Tammy wished sleep would overtake her. Sleeping was when she’d finally feel peace and free of her worries as long as she wasn’t having nightmares.

She listened to the quiet in the room and it was unnerving. She hated it when silence made her ears throb. A white noise machine would be nice, if she had electricity. Even the crickets chirping outside would be something. If she opened the door to her room, she would probably hear the girls breathing and that would be somewhat reassuring. But Holly snored like a man and that would be worse than the swelling of her eardrums from the quiet.

Tammy jumped when there was soft knock on her door. She heard the door open even though she couldn’t see a thing.

“Mom,” Amanda whispered.

“Yes?”

“I hear noises upstairs. Something crashed on the floor and I can hear someone walking around.”

“I can’t hear anything, how can you hear that?”

“I was sitting near the door with a light while I wrote in my journal.”

“You shouldn’t be able to hear much there either.”

“Well, it was loud. I dunno. There’s someone up there.”

“I thought you locked the backdoor after you brought Buddy in.”

Amanda was silent.

“You don’t remember doing it, do you?” Tammy sat upright and turned on a tap light to look for her slippers.

She started to stutter, “I…I don’t remember. We never lock it, though.”

“I told you to do all the locks.” She grabbed her robe.

“I know, I know. I just wasn’t paying attention.”

Tammy wrapped her robe around her body. She searched her room hoping to find something she could use as protection. Her heart raced at the thought of having to confront the uninvited visitor. She found the bo staff she had tucked under the bed the last time they camped in the safe room. It was her husband’s and she had no clue how to use it the way he did. However, it had great reach and it would hurt for sure.

“What about the guns, mom? Do you think he might be armed?” Amanda started for the gun closet.

“No gun. I think they’re looking for food. There isn’t much else they would be after up there. All the jars with meat that I canned today are sitting on the counters. I’m not going to let them take it but it’s not worth killing them for it either. What if it’s a kid?” Tammy hesitated to open the door. What if it
was
a kid? She gripped the staff tighter as she slowly unlatched the door. “Don’t wake anyone and lock this after I leave.”

“No, mom. What if there’s more than one person up there?” Amanda grabbed the floor duster and removed the handle from the base.

What if there
was
more than one person? Tammy controlled her breathing and crept up the stairs to the backside of the bookshelf that hid the passage to the safe room. She listened. They weren’t outside the door.

She motioned for Amanda to stay put but it was so dark, she doubted her daughter even saw her hand move. “Stay put,” she whispered. “Don’t leave here unless I call for you.”

“What? When you’re on the ground dying?”

“You and Charlie have so little faith in me.” She shook her head and opened the door slowly. It was completely dark everywhere, she had to feel her way around to find the next flight of stairs when she heard another crash on the main floor. It sounded like glass breaking. Her fear steamed up into a fit of anger. Hopefully they weren’t trashing her day’s worth of work and weeks, perhaps months, of potential dinners.

She crept up the next half flight of steps to the main floor and kept her back pressed against the wall, trying to figure out where the person or people were. If only she didn’t board up the windows so well. Finally, they made a noise, more noise than she expected and she jumped. They weren’t on the main floor. They were upstairs, where her bedroom and two of the girls’ rooms were.

“Where are they? I know they’re home,” a man mumbled as he descended the stairs, just around the corner from Tammy. Once he hit the bottom of the stairs, he only had to turn a corner and he would walk right into her.

She instantly broke out in a sweat as she took a stance in the center of the stairs with the bo staff ready.

Unfortunately, he did exactly as she anticipated. He rounded the corner and was right in front of her. She jabbed him hard in the gut with the staff. He backed up, hunched over. Tammy made quick work of hitting him hard across his back. It didn’t quite knock him down so she skirted around to his backside and shoved his butt with her foot and he sprawled out on the ground. He recovered faster than Tammy expected when he rolled over, grabbed her foot, and pulled.

She fell hard on her backside. Stunned by the fall and how quickly he was on top of her, she gathered her wits and knew she needed to recover in a hurry. He was trying to yank the staff from her hands. She twisted and shoved the staff at the same time, releasing his grip, and forcing him back. All she could see was the outline of his body. Even though his facial features were barely illuminated, she knew who he was. It stirred up a wild fury in her chest and she was determined to stop him before he hurt her girls.

She had a good hold of the staff as she swung for his head and tagged him good, sending him completely off balance to the floor. She rolled the same direction as he fell and was on her knees. He swore as he held his head. She was about to stand up when his hand flew up and he tagged her right in the nose. She fell hard again. Her eyes watered so much, she couldn’t see him as he took the staff and pressed it against her chest, shoving her back to the ground again.

“I could take care of you right here, right now, old lady. Choke you with this stick. I’d have everything I need. Your car, all that food, and all those girls will be mine.”

The scrawny young man had no idea how strong Tammy was, or her girls for that matter. She glared at him as she grabbed the staff, letting him think he had the best of her as he smiled maliciously while he slid the staff closer to her neck. She pushed up as if she was lifting a dumbbell. He was dumb. It was too easy. She let him try harder. He sat up on his knees to put his weight into trying to push the stick down. That gave Tammy all the room she needed. As she was about to press back hard to knock him off and knee him in between the legs, she barely saw a flash of light that reflected off the thing that hit him upside the head. It clanged as if it was hollow. Tammy imagined it was the guy’s hollow head and not the thing that hit him.

He fell with a thud and stopped moving. Whatever hit him knocked him out.

One of the LED battery lights turned on in the kitchen. Standing in the doorway to the downstairs was Charlie. Amanda was on her knees beside Tammy. Something metal fell to the floor beside her.

“What did you hit him with?” Tammy looked down and that’s when she felt a gush from her nose and saw the blood. That explained the horrified look on her daughters’ faces. “Paper towels, please. I’m sure it’s just a nosebleed.” She cupped her hands under her nose and watched the unconscious idiot on the floor for a moment to make sure he really was out. As she struggled to get back on her feet, her favorite stainless steel metal water bottle rolled on the floor beside her with a dent on the bottom edge. It was now her most revered water bottle.

Tammy struggled to clean up her face without having any running water. It was taking too long even with Amanda’s help as she poured water in her hands to clean her face. They needed to hurry and take care of the house invader before he woke up. “Charlie, go find the really big zip ties. We need to make sure he’s not able to attack us again when he wakes up.”

Her daughter promptly ran through the house to the garage.

There wasn’t any way to clean up her nightshirt or robe so she left it for the time being. She sure didn’t want to traumatize the younger girls. “Amanda, check to make sure your sisters are in bed. I don’t want them to see me like this or see him. They don’t need to be a part of this right now.”

She nodded with tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry, mom.”

“Honey, this was bound to happen at some point. It just was. However, we have to be extra careful from now on. I will be okay.” She gave Amanda a hug. “It’s okay.” She let her go and gave her gentle push. “Please check on your sisters and then come back up and help me take care of him.”

“What do you mean?” Her eyes were big.

“What do you think I mean?” Tammy asked and then realized what Amanda must have thought. “We’re making him leave. I’m not shooting him or anything like that.”

“Oh, okay.” Amanda wiped her face as she went down to the safe room.

Charlie was all too eager to help Tammy ziptie idiot boy’s hands behind his back where he lay on the floor. She even went so far as to write “home invader” and taped it to his back with some her fancy patterned duct tape.

Once they had his hands tied behind his back, Tammy, Charlie, and Amanda all sat in chairs and waited for him to stir. Tammy had a handgun that wasn’t even loaded on her lap. She took in slow deep breaths so her hands wouldn’t tremble as they waited. Charlie had the stun stick. Of course she would love any excuse to try it on someone. Amanda held the bo staff. The three sat in silence, practically holding their breath, once he started to move.

When he couldn’t move his hands, he woke up real fast and looked around the room until he spotted the three of them.

Tammy gripped the handgun and pointed it at him. “You’ve messed with the wrong women. I highly suggest you stay very, very far away from my daughters, my house, and my neighborhood or else the next time I see you, we won’t be so forgiving.” At least the light in the room was so dim, he couldn’t see how flushed her skin was.

He frantically scooted away from the three of them once Charlie pressed the button on the stun stick. It zapped so loudly, he probably thought for a second Tammy might have shot at him. He blinked several times when he realized what had happened.

Once Tammy stood, Charlie and Amanda did as well and the three of them were tense as Tammy motioned for the door. “Leave.”

Charlie went around him in a wide circle as she jogged for the door and opened it so he could do as he was told. She backed out of the way with her stun stick ready as he staggered for the door.

He paused before he left and narrowed his eyes as he stared at Charlie and a slow sadistic smile spread across his face. “We’ll meet again.”

Charlie’s redheaded temper flared and she lunged for him. He gave her the excuse she needed to try out the stun stick as she jabbed it against his ribs in stun mode. “No we won’t,” she said as idiot boy screamed in pain and nearly collapsed as he fell against the door.

“Charlie,” Tammy reprimanded her. “You’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”

“Good. Then they can all see what the local home invasion idiot looks like.” She smiled in satisfaction.

Amanda pressed the stick against his arm to send him on his way. He staggered as he went, heading across the lawn for the street.

He shouted obscenities as he went, cursing at the three of them. A couple of flashlights lit up in front of several houses nearby and they started to circle around idiot boy where he stood in the street.

Tammy had a bad feeling as she pulled her girls inside and shut the door, locking and double-checking each and every lock.

Idiot boy kept shouting and then there was screaming.

The three leaned against the wall. Amanda covered her ears and Charlie was about to head for the window when they heard a shouting match going on between several people and then gunshots.

Charlie went back to where Tammy and Amanda were and her eyes were wide. “Did they kill him?

Stunned into silence, Tammy shook her head and shrugged her shoulders indicating that she didn’t know. She crouched down, rubbed her face, and quickly regretted it. Her whole face hurt. Amanda sat on the floor beside her as Charlie kneeled in front of them both. “He was going to kill you, mom.”