The last one. But it was the big daddy of them all. This was a multimillionaire’s yacht with what must have been half a dozen cabins and a couple of bathrooms. In the near darkness the thing looked like a big, angry bear that swung from side to side to butt the jetty with those crashing blows.
“Go back,” Finch bellowed. “I’ll have it tied in a minute.”
“You’ll never manage it by yourself.” Gerletz shook her head in disbelief. “I’ll climb onto the boat and throw another line.”
“This is good enough.” The ex-cop looked furious that we were trying to help him. His eyes blazed at us through the spray.
“The line’s not strong enough,” she said. “You need thicker rope.”
“It’s not safe out here,” Finch insisted. “The surf will wash someone into the lake.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make it.” With that, Gerletz bounded from the jetty onto the boat. The girl must have been scrambling across boats in all weathers since she could walk. Even though the boat bucked under her, she ran from one end of the deck to the other without touching the guardrail once. In seconds she’d pulled a hefty orange rope from a locker, uncoiled it, tied it to the deck cleat, then hurled it at us. The thing nearly got away from us into the surging water, but Ben got a grip, and soon we were all hauling the rope. It was like trying to pull a house from its foundations. For a while I didn’t think we’d bring the pitching boat under control, but at last it moved. Soon it lay hard against the jetty. It still rose and fell with the waves, but at least it no longer battered the wooden structure like a gigantic hammer.
“It should hold,” Gerletz shouted from the deck. “But I wouldn’t put my shirt on it.”
She returned partway down the deck, but instead of returning to the jetty she opened a cabin door.
Finch shouted at her. “Where are you going?” The alarm in the man’s voice startled her.
She looked back at him. “The boat’s too low in the water. She might have a leak.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Finch cried. “Leave it until the storm’s dropped.”
“But it might-”
“It’s not safe on there. The damn boat might sink with you on it.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, puzzled by his manner. “It won’t sink yet.”
“Get off the boat; you can’t be certain.” Lightning lit up his face. There was something terrible about his expression. Like he’d seen a room full of corpses. “Just get off the damned boat, OK?”
“No.” This time she sounded annoyed. “I’m not leaving it like this. You can wait on the beach, but I’m going to pump out the bilges.”
She’d ducked her head to go into the boat. Thunder crashed across the lake so loud that I saw Ben wince at the sheer volume. I also saw Finch. He was tense and staring at the boat. The man’s reaction to Gerletz entering the boat just didn’t make sense.
Or at least it didn’t make sense then.
Because five seconds later Gerletz came scrambling out of the boat onto the deck like she’d been thrown there. She looked through the dark maw of the cabin door, then called back to us. This time her voice was high, anxious-sounding.
“Greg. Come up here quick.”
With the boat securely tied I had no difficulty in climbing up onto its broad deck. I shot a questioning look at Gerletz.
“You better take a look at what’s in the cabin,” she said.
With the electric storm lighting the boat like a strobe I took a single cautious step through the doorway.
I stopped dead and whispered, “Oh, Christ.”
Outside Finch was groaning, “No, no, no, no…”
There in the gloom, lit only now and then by the flicker of lightning, were a group of faces. As I looked at them, they looked back at me, their eyes seeming to glow in the storm light.
“Valdiva,” called one of the men back on the jetty. “What the hell’s going on?”
I stepped back onto the deck. “There’s a bunch of kids in there.” I took a breath. “They’re outsiders.”
Twelve
This is when the impossible happened. When the town of Sullivan learned that the old ex-cop, Finch, had been hiding outsiders on the boat, it exploded. There’s no other word for it. As far as the public was concerned Finch became enemy number one. Not content with arresting him and locking him in the town’s four-cell jail, they wrecked his house and smashed up his car. Someone even went down to the bottom of his yard, where he kept his dog. They burnt the kennel, then shot his animal as it cried for its master. Man, you could have taken a knife and carved the mood of savagery that hung over the town.
Just twenty-four hours after the outsiders had been found, Finch stood trial in the courthouse. It sickened me. OK, Finch had risked infecting himself and thereby others on the island, but it was that volcanic eruption of public fury that got me. I know the people were scared, but it was how they dealt with it that turned my gut. As I sat on a patch of grass outside the courthouse that Monday afternoon I told myself there’d be a lynching. Hundreds of people seethed like a boiling lake outside the doors. Already some children had thrown stones. One cop wound up with a busted cheekbone. The fury had infected everyone from ninety-year-olds down to toddlers.
Ben sat beside me. He looked restless, uneasy. “They want Finch’s blood, don’t they?”
I nodded. “I think they’re going to get it, too.”
“So what’s the point of a trial? They’re going to find him guilty anyway.”
“They already have,” I told Ben. “Now they’re deciding the punishment.”
“Jeez… he was only trying to help the poor devils.”
I knew Ben had been down to the boat where the outsiders had been secretly hiding out and that had now become their prison that morning. I asked him what was going to happen to them.
“It’s already happened,” he replied. “The Caucus didn’t waste any time.”
I shot him a questioning look. The mood the townspeople were in, I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot the strangers dead just like they killed Finch’s dog.
Ben noticed the expression on my face. “Don’t worry, they haven’t been harmed. At least not yet. Old man Gerletz took the boat to the far end of the lake. They’ve been put down on the shore there.”
“Where they’ll be left to starve, no doubt.”
“Gerletz dumped some food with them. So they’re OK for now.”
“ For now being the key phrase. Jesus, there might be bread bandits out there.”
Ben shrugged. “Orders from the Caucus.”
“Yeah, orders from the Caucus. What will they end up deciding next?”
“They’ve already ordered that the boat they were using be burnt out in the lake so as not to risk contamination.”
“But Finch could be contaminated. What’s the point in going to all that trouble when it might already be too late?”
Ben just shrugged again. “People are frightened; they’ve got so desperate they’ll do anything if they think it will save them.”
“From what I saw of the outsiders, they just looked like a couple of ordinary families. They had kids with them.”
“But you don’t know that. What would happen if you got that sixth sense of yours going? And you knew they were infected? You’d have waded into them with an ax, wouldn’t you?”
I looked at him, burning with anger for a moment; then it passed. “I guess you’re right, Ben.”
“This way the town has at last done its own dirty work instead of leaving it up to you.”
He was right again. Even so, it seemed so unfair. Those outsiders might have been free of the virus or whatever. They might have lived here and never developed Jumpy in twenty years. Just then, over at the courthouse, shouting rose into a roar. The doors opened and a bunch of cops and Caucus members left the building. They climbed into cars and screeched away.
“I guess they’ve made their decision,” Ben said, looking as if an unpleasant taste had found its way onto his
