The Island - Part 2 (Fallen Earth) Read Online Free PDF

flapped wildly.
    “Go on now. See about them kayakers.”
    I drained the last of the coffee, and headed back out into the wind. Angel bobbed at the dock like a cork on the water. Getting the buggy off her cabin roof was hard enough when she was sitting still.  Elsie had a point though. The life-saving station stood a good half-mile from where we had tied up.  The buggy would make transporting her, Daniel, and food a lot easier.
    Moving the extra gas and kerosene came first. I unlashed them from the top of the box and set them across on the dock. On a calm day, I would have probably tried to hoist the box across with sheer muscle power. Tied up to the dock, with the sailboat bouncing up and down, that idea generated a fine image in my mind of the buggy, box and me ending up in the bay.
    Inste ad, I moved it in sections. The batteries went first since half the weight came from the bank of batteries that powered the thing. Dad had used a steel frame, but everything else he had crafted out of aluminum tubing or aluminum supports made of thick L-shaped pieces. I reached down to give it an experimental tug and ended up jerking the entire vehicle out of the box. Rather than stop and try to balance on the wobbly deck, I kept the motion going moving sideways and plopping it down on the nearby dock. From crate to dock took less than two seconds.
    Scrambling over, I started putting it back together. The upright pieces folded up straight and locked into place. The seat was little more than a bench made of plywood bolted down on supports and covered with foam rubber. Six batteries powered the electric motor, turning out somewhere around eight miles an hour at top speed. The overhead--I couldn’t call it a roof--had been constructed to hold the solar cells mounted on Angel cabin top. The rear support on the driver’s side held a socket the same size as one mounted on Angel’s rear. Both were designed to hold the windmill stored in the rear locker.
    Dad had told me that he ran the buggy for five days on his last trip with nothing but sun and wind power. Given that 90 percent of his time had been spent fishing, not driving, I didn’t doubt those numbers. At the same time, I didn’t expect them on a continuous run either.
    The entire vehicle stretched almost five feet long, ran nearly three feet wide and sported oversized balloon tires. I couldn’t imagine it getting stuck in sand, mud or anywhere else for that matter.
    Once I had the pieces together, I hooked up the air pump stored on the back of it to a 12-volt outlet on Angel . Twenty minutes later the ugly little vehicle looked like it was ready for a Baja run.
    Elsie stuck her head out when she heard the air pump shut off.
    “That is the strangest contraption I have ever seen. I’d be embarrassed to be seen on it.”
    I raised my eyebrows. “Really? You planning on walking up to the station?”
    She wrinkled her nose.
    “I guess not.”
    I climbed in and flipped the switch that sent power to the engine. The controls were simple. The transmission had come from a riding lawn mower, leaving only two options, forward and reverse. He hadn’t installed seatbelts. Then again at eight miles an hour, I’m not sure how useful they would have been.
    I pressed down on the accelerator. The buggy lurched forward, the only noise coming from the tires rolling across the wooden dock and a slight whine from the transmission. I hit the sand just beyond the dock and climbed through it easily. Just beyond the slight rise, the ATV path led off to the right in a long loop around the town. I ignored the cut-off that led up through the old village and headed for the swamps at the far end.
    The wind had grown stronger, blowing hard enough to whip a fine stream of sand across the path. Out on the sound side, the water didn’t have the long rolling swells that had been pushing through the inlet. Instead it looked choppy as hell, with short, steep waves and boiling whitecaps.
    I found their camp about