Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

either. When the sun got high on that first day, I looked deep into my clump of trees, deep where the storm had piled trash and sand and tree limbs. The Missus was laying there, pale and slack-mouthed. I felt like she still needed someone to fetch things for her. Just someone to take care of her. But I couldn’t do her any good, not now, so I stayed put. We waited together, the Missus and me.
    When the rescuers came, the captain asked me who I belonged to. I opened my mouth to say they were dead and shut it again. I’d lived through a hurricane, but I was scared to death of the auction. I opened my mouth again and said, “I belong to Mister Courtney. Mister Courtney Stanton. He’s the master at Innisfree.”

Chapter 28
    Sometime before dawn, the storm broke. At first light, Faye and Joe executed their plan to slog through the floodwaters, dragging Douglass to his boat. Surely it had survived the storm. Or, if not, surely its radio had survived the storm. Plan B involved using the Gopher and its radio. There was no Plan C.
    The sneak stairs were so cramped that there was no way for Faye to help Joe with Douglass, so she led, as if her slight weight would keep them from falling if Joe failed to support the wounded man’s bulk. For just a few seconds during the escape, they would be visible from Cyril’s window. If they could dodge him for that long and if one of the boats did its part, they would soon be headed for the safety of Wally’s Marina. Or any portion of Wally’s Marina that the hurricane had allowed to remain standing.

    The Senator heard bumping and scraping behind his wall. He had spent the night comparing the eccentric shape of his room’s interior with the shape and size of the house’s exterior. The only rational explanation for the discrepancy between indoor and outdoor dimensions was a hidden staircase, and he knew Faye was using it. He had been waiting for this moment for hours, ripping Faye’s sheets and clothes into long strips, knotting them together, knowing that a controlled slide down this fabric rope would take him to the ground faster than any cramped staircase.
    He backed out the window and down the steep roof, then slid down the rope. The knots passed through his fingers, slowing his descent, and the water cushioned his landing. The look on Faye’s face as she emerged onto the porch where he waited was priceless. He aimed and fired.

    Faye dropped into the murky, hip-deep water. The shot had missed her, but there were no more. He was still conserving ammunition, waiting to shoot until he got a good look at her. Pressing her belly to the floorboards, she swam and slithered through the flooded dogtrot, hoping to get to the back of the house and some kind of cover before she had to breathe.
    The dogtrot formed a bottleneck and he followed her into it, grabbing at her with his free hand. It shocked them both when she rose out the water and slashed at him with Joe’s makeshift stone scalpel. She connected with his right arm. The damage was minimal—a torn sleeve and a deep cut about the length of his thumb, but the gun and the stone tool fell into the water.
    It was a small victory, because he was far larger than she was. His fingers closed around her throat. She was bending backward, heading for the water, when she saw Joe behind him, silhouetted at the entrance to the dogtrot.
    Faye hated to believe that her last thought was going to be a whiny, “Where have you been? I’m dying here.” Then she saw where Joe had been.
    In the left arm that was drawing back to deliver a killing blow, Joe held the atlatl , the spearthrower that he had reworked as a gift to her, still fitted to the spearhead and haft he made with his own hands. She pushed hard against the Senator’s grip, trying to keep him standing as a more-or-less upright, unmoving target, and she was rewarded.
    Joe let the weapon fly. The force of his muscles, amplified by the atlatl’ s whiplash action, drove the spear into the back of the Senator’s neck until Faye could see the stone point protruding through his throat.

    Faye rested on the floor of her bedroom, having insisted that Joe deposit Douglass on the bed and having refused to be left alone anywhere else. Joe had left them to look after each other while he went to check the condition of the boats and their radios. He also claimed to know some herbs that would bring down her fever, and Douglass’, too.
    Faye imagined that any herb on Joyeuse Island that had