paradises.”
“Not if all the tree cover is destroyed by settlers and the ecosystem collapses in response and desertifies. Then they look like this,” Alex replied.
She shuddered. “It’s awful. Who lives here, anyway?”
“Workers at the salt factory. About eight hundred of them.”
“Are they okay after the storm?” she asked in quick concern.
“They were evacuated by the salt company. We’re the only people back on the island.”
“Wow. We’re really all alone on a desert island, then?”
He smiled reluctantly. “Yes. We’ve got to make our way to the shore on foot to catch our ride. I hope you’re up for a hike.”
The last time he’d asked her that, they’d been fleeing with an hour-old Dawn stuffed inside her coat and a war raging behind them. “Are you kidding? Piece of cake.” She just hoped no wars were about to break out around them. She had a sneaking suspicion one might, though, before this was all said and done.
Alex took off across the pale dirt. The going was easy for about three minutes. And then they reached a patch of ruined vegetation, twisted and flattened by Hurricane Giselle into a nearly impassable tangle of jagged wood, sharp-leaved foliage and hidden rocks waiting to turn the unwary ankle.
Thank God she’d been working out like a maniac since he’d left. She was panting like a dog, but so was Alex. It took them something like an hour to cover a quarter mile.
“How far do we have to go in this stuff?” she finally broke down and asked Alex.
“Just over the ridge.”
Awesome. They weren’t far from the crest now. Another fifteen minutes of carefully picking their way forward, and they topped the low rise.
The ocean and a blond beach stretched away in front of them. And praise the Lord, this side of the ridge was bare of vegetation until the margin of the beach below. They made their way down the hillside relatively quickly with only sharp stones and treacherous slides of gravel to avoid.
But then they got to a literal wall of destroyed scrub trees, bushes and random vegetative debris. It was easily eight feet tall and looked like a loofah sponge. “How on earth are we supposed to get through this?” she demanded. “Even if we had a machete, it would take hours to hack through all that.”
“That, grasshopper, is why man conquered fire,” Alex answered.
“Isn’t it too wet to burn?” she asked dubiously.
“Only one way to find out,” he answered absently as he commenced laying a fire at the base of the pile. The wind was still brisk in the lee of the hurricane and the fledgling flame blew out twice before it finally caught and held.
In seconds, though, it flared from the size of her hand to waist high, and from there to well over her head. Apparently, enough of the material had been dead long enough that a single day in the sun and wind, posthurricane, had dried it out. The pile went up in a firestorm that swept down the beach at shocking speed. No fire department on earth could put that out. She and Alex scrambled back from the intense heat as the debris burned with a roar of sound.
“My God! What if there are houses down the beach?” she cried.
“No house survived two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds for fourteen hours. And if one did, it was wrecked, anyway. A stone structure might survive the hurricane, but it won’t burn.” Alex shrugged, pragmatic. “Burning this stuff off is how a cleanup crew will get rid of it, anyway.”
She watched the fire rip down the beach in front of the stiff wind with deep misgivings. The good news was the wind was headed out toward the ocean. If they were lucky, they hadn’t just set the entire island on fire. And the salt factory was on the other side of the island, well upwind of this conflagration. Still, the ease with which Alex had taken radical action without concern for peripheral damage sent up warning flags in her head.
The debris burned hard for maybe thirty minutes. Where there were decent-size tree trunks and brush, the fire continued to burn. But here and there, where the pile had been mostly small brush and dead vegetation, the fire started to blow out.
Katie spied a small shape well out on the water. “Is that a boat?”
Alex pulled out binoculars to have a look. “That’s our ride,” he announced. “Time to head down to the water. Keep your feet moving and your shoes won’t burn as we cross over the embers.”
She stared at the remnants of the fire in front of her, maybe fifteen feet wide. Whoa, whoa, whoa. “I don’t do the walking-across-beds-of-coals thing, Alex.”
“Walk lightly and quickly on your entire foot. Don’t run. You’ll be fine.”
She scowled ferociously at him, but he only shrugged back. “Follow me.”
This was how life was always going to be with him, wasn’t it? He would blithely lead her into danger, and she’d follow along like a lamb for the slaughter. She sighed and walked fast across the coals, distributing her weight across her entire foot with each step.
Vague heat registered around her, but before she knew it, she was on the other side of the glowing ember field. Her heart was racing like a runaway horse, and one spot on her leather hiking boots was smoldering a bit, but otherwise, she was intact. That hadn’t been so bad, after all, darn it. She hated it when he was right.
A dark-skinned man angled a crappy little fishing boat toward them. It barely looked seaworthy and was in desperate need of a barnacle scraping and paint job. He stopped about a hundred feet shy of shore and gestured for them to come out to him.
“How are we supposed to get out there?” Katie asked blankly from the edge of the beach.
“Swim. Why else do you think I made you put your gear in a waterproof bag?”
She scowled at him again. “I thought it was for rain.”
“C’mon.” Alex was already stripping off his shirt, pants and shoes, and stowing them in his bag.
“I don’t have a bathing suit!” she cried in sudden horror.
“You have underwear. Same difference.”
“Not the same, thank you very much.”
“I’m sure Pedro won’t mind if you want to swim out there naked. God knows, I’ll enjoy the view.”
Thinking terrible, murderous thoughts about him, she stripped down to her underwear and stuffed her clothes in her bag. “You’re such a jerk sometimes,” she muttered.
“You knew what you were getting into when you insisted on coming with me,” he said stonily.
He was right. But that didn’t make her any happier to be swimming out to a total stranger in lingerie, darn it. She was so getting even with Alex for this.
To make matters worse, the water was freaking cold. Apparently, the hurricane had stirred the ocean, pulling shallow, warm water out to sea and cold, deep water
