Chapter 1

Archie Dawes watched the seabirds settling in for the evening, as the sunset began to die away behind him. As small waves smacked at the Gulf shoreline at his right; his gait left uneven shoe prints in the soggy sands. “Lurchie” is what they had called him at school: his weaker left leg had never matched the length of the right, and was also twisted aside so his feet never paralleled.

No matter, his school days were long over.

It was time to settle for the night, and his shelter was drawing near. Archie had begun his solitary trek on the Bolivar Peninsula just east of Galveston Bay. Moving east he had passed alongside the reconstructed communities and vacation homes lining the Gulf shore.

In 2008 Hurricane Ike had smashed, submerged, and scraped the Peninsula and the east Texas shore all the way to beyond the Louisiana border at Sabine Pass. Highway 87 no longer connected the two ends of this coastline.

Archie’s shelter was an abandoned beach house within what had become a federal wildlife refuge. Like many of these vacation homes, it had been built up on piers ten to sixteen feet above the marshlands overlooking the beach. Ike ripped away the outer stairway and decks, but a concrete parking pad and internal stairway gave access to the interior.

Protected by heavy shutters, the windows were mostly intact; unsurprisingly the power and water supplies were long gone. He took a moment for a gulp of bottled water and some crackers.

Ascending the stairs while checking his footing, he used the least-damaged bedroom and stretched out with a groan. It would be another long night.