Awesome.
The next two people up—one at a time—were two kids who looked about twelve to Spencer but were probably fourteen or so, and while they were both Elsie’s height, she could probably have bench-pressed both of them together. She got them both into the copter, but she was tired; he could hear it.
“Spence,” she muttered, setting the crane to lower the harness and stepping over Colonel to sit in the cockpit, “I’m done. I about blew out my back helping that last kid in. It’s your turn.”
She buckled herself into the copilot’s seat and took over the controls while Spencer unhooked all his stuff and went to man the crane to pull the next person up. As he left the cockpit, Colonel whined, and Spencer unhooked his lead.
“Colonel, stay,” he ordered, putting him next to one of the boys and hooking his lead to the seat. He took stock of the kid—probably 100 pounds soaking wet and looking like a drowned chicken with ice-white skin and improbable ears—and said, “Pet him. It’s your job.”
The kid didn’t even look at Spencer, just dug his shaking hands into the ruff of fur and started a dog massage that probably went down in the top ten of all dog massages. The kid across from him—dark skin, giant eyes, same drowned-chicken body and improbable ears—leaned forward and started to love on Colonel too, and Spencer left them to it.
He’d hooked his carabiner to the safety bar when he realized the rope was still slack. He leaned over the edge of the copter and took stock.
The harness had gotten down there, but what looked like another drowned-chicken kid, this one a girl with more hair than shoulders, was balking at putting it on.
Spencer didn’t hear what she was screaming about, and he didn’t care.
“Put it on!” he barked. “Fucking now!”
He knew his voice carried because the girl stared at him with giant eyes he could see from fifty feet away.
“Now!” he re-emphasized, and the adult with her, a man too young to be her father and too old to be another waterlogged hen, gave her a firm little shake on the arm and started helping her hook the harness up again.
It wasn’t an easy feat. Spencer could admit that. The young man was fighting the same winds Spencer was, and he was fighting them while standing on the equivalent of a floating garage door, trying to usher a half-grown human into equipment that probably made as much sense as macramé in the middle of all that debris.
Spencer had to hand it to the guy.
He was determined to get that kid up into the helicopter.
After a final click of the harness, she was coming up too, up to the part where Spencer could see her head and torso above the deck of the copter and could tug on the super-tough nylon-wrapped steel rope to pull her in. She reached out a hand, and he grabbed it, getting most of her inside, with one foot onto the copter’s deck, when a sudden gust of wind hit them broadside.
That moment would be forever seared into his gray matter.
The girl, flailing, terrified, as she bobbed in and out of the helicopter’s cargo area; Colonel, barking, excited, and unhappy; and Spencer, balance wavering as he grabbed her arm and practically threw her into the bay of the Black Hawk.
And then the terrible vertigo when he realized he couldn’t stop his momentum and haul himself back right when the aircraft pitched sideways one more time.
Followed by a jerk at his side, where his harness was, the sound of ripping, and the awful realization that his flight suit and harness had given at the worst possible time and he was going to fall.
“Goddammit!” he snarled as he fell. He didn’t flail, and he didn’t panic. He and Elsie had done so many fucking drills ditching into the ocean when they were in the Air Force, he would have remembered to cross his arms in front of him, duck his face against his chest, and hold on to his radio headset as he fell if he’d gone into that swirling morass of floodwater in his sleep.
But if he had gone into that frothy contaminated sewer in his sleep, the shock of the water as he’d hit would have woken him up damned quick.
Rescue-ee
THEO Wainscott didn’t like to swear. As the local youth leader through the La Pierre County Parks and Rec department, he felt like it set a bad example for his charges, and it just generally made for bad habits all around.
But his father had spent twenty years in the military before marrying his mother, and Big John Wainscott could outswear pretty much the entire US Army before he’d left. Big John had taught him many interesting words before he’d passed away of a heart attack, mad at the world for not having more time with his wife and son.
For instance, Big John would have called this entire day a clusterfuck.
When they’d awakened that morning to find out the first storm had petered out, leaving the main street of Sticky, Oregon, flooded, the first thing Theo had done was call the sandbag brigade at the small rec center to find out if they needed his teenagers to help make more bags.
Imelda—queen of the local rec center—had told him that they were up on bags, but Thelma Andreas had been out in her little house in the woods without communication—or transportation—since Laurie hit. Could Theo take his youth group to go help her round up her stupid cat and get her to town until everybody had power?
Of course, it had taken him three hours to push through the flooded roads in his SUV. The kids had to get out every fifty yards, it felt like, to drag branches out of the way so cars could pass, but since their entire reason to get out of their safe, mostly unflooded houses was to help their community, none of them complained much, not even Maisy, who would probably rather be sewing quilts with her mother’s church.
They’d been about half a mile from Thelma’s place when Theo’s radio had squawked.
“Imelda—”
“Theo, the dam’s gone. Just… gone! You’ve got five minutes, maybe ten, before your truck’s a boat. Find high ground now!”
Theo had stared at the stretch of pitted, sand-and-branch covered road in front of him, done the math, and consigned his poor vintage Chevy Tahoe to the junk pile.
“Hold on!” he’d barked to the kids, because although he knew they had their seat belts on, they sure as shootin’ weren’t ready for the next two minutes.
He floored the accelerator, steered around as many obstacles as he could, and ran flat over the ones he couldn’t. He figured that if the axle broke, he and the kids would be running, but until then, the SUV would get them as far as it could go faster.
By the time they got to Thelma’s tiny cottage with the big garden porch, the water was up to the first of the porch’s steps.
Theo took stock as they got out of the SUV and splashed toward the house. Thelma’s son had recently rebuilt the thing—it had a fancy garden hose winder, a built-in wooden supply box for garden tools, and a sturdy guardrail all the way around it, except for the steps. The porch’s four-by-four support posts had probably been driven in pretty deep, but they were already loose in the saturated soil. The slats that made up the deck of the thing looked sturdy. Theo figured—or desperately hoped—that if they detached the porch from the house, it would float.
And since part of Thelma’s roof had caved in during the storm, they were going to have to pray it did.