Chapter 2
“Nature’s a bitch,” I said, looking at the swollen Little Melvin River roar by, no longer contained by its banks.
We’d gone to Oddities and taken a quick hot shower together, almost worth the near disaster but not quite and changed into dry clothes.
Rose cleaned the gash in my side and bandaged it.
I didn’t scream during the process, being a manly man, but it had hurt like crazy.
Then we’d returned to the scene of accident, but had been forced to stop short, just before River Road, since the water was too high.
There was no sign of the Pathfinder. It was downstream somewhere.
And there was no sign of the forest bridge.
The abutments on both sides, if they were still there, were now underwater.
“Bullshit,” Rose said. “Not a bitch. It’s Tropical Storm Francis. A man. Nature is a bastard. Own it, Max.”
She was in a bad mood. I’d learned over the last several months of living together that meant she’d sometimes snap at me even when I wasn’t the cause of her irritation.
Proximity damage. In this case I had to take one for my gender.
She had every reason to be in a bad mood.
Everyone in Rocky Start did. Because this was bad and going to get much worse.
Personally, I’d been in tougher situations but not with someone I cared about as much.
Nor had I ever been as vested in a place as I was now, either small and large: Rose’s cottage which was now cut off and on the other side of the flood.
On this side was Oddities, the store that her daughter Poppy now ran; and Rocky Start, the small town I called home. The first place I had ever called home.
What really concerned me was that the river was still rising.
The storm’s winds had died down as it made its way from the Florida panhandle north across Georgia to the mountains, so they were not the problem.
The rain, which had preceded the bulk of the storm for several days and then intensified as it passed by was.
“It’s going to get bad,” I told her.
“This isn’t bad?” Rose said, looking at me.
According to Rose I have a tendency to “lead with the headline’” and she’d pointed out that it was too abrupt for many people.
I also tended to understate bad things. Apparently, there are people who prefer to get the truth and bad news slowly and in pieces rather than smack in the face. My people skills needed some work.
Francis had dumped an obscene amount of rain in the part of the Smoky Mountains in which our town was located.
The Little Melvin River had belied its name, becoming this surging torrent that was on the verge of taking over the valley.
Given Rocky Start was in the bottom of a steep valley on a bend in the river, this was not good.
“We have to get back to Oddities,” I told her. “Start moving everything to the second floor.”
Rose blinked. “That bad? The town?”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“How deep?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but the basements will be flooded and it will probably go into the first floors.
She nodded, accepting the inevitable and we quickly walked back. The store, and the apartments above, were currently empty since Rose’s daughter Poppy and her boyfriend Marley were in New York City visiting friends.
We began to carry up the most valuable, and easily water-damaged, stuff to the second floor.
Just piling it wherever there was open space.
It took a while since the first floor of the shop was crowded with all the crazy stuff old Oz had gathered, plus what Poppy had accumulated in the months she’d owned the place.
I did tell Rose that we had to prioritize because there were others who needed our help.
I’d already done the calculating as I carried things.
When we got the most important stuff to a higher floor, we went to Jackie Quill’s medical clinic because it was a priority for the town.
It used to be a funeral home called Nice Funerals, which probably wasn’t the best vibe for a medical clinic.
Worse than that, it had also been home to the town’s resident serial killer.
We’d taken care of the serial killer, but still, I suppose not every town has a resident serial killer.
Who ran a funeral home. Although, if you think about it, the connection between those two things seems kind of obvious in retrospect. But that story is best told elsewhere.
Rocky Start was unique because a percentage of the population were retired covert operatives. Another long story for another time.
My buddy Luke, yes, retired spook, had already been helping her and since he could carry me up and down stairs in one hand without breaking a sweat, they were in good shape and she was preparing to triage, which hopefully we wouldn’t need since there was hardly anyone left in town.
Luke was a large Black man who had been smiling a lot lately; I chalked that to the fact he’d moved in with Jackie.
Good women have that effect on men with a bad history.
Most of the town’s residents had evacuated a day ago and I’d noticed many of the remnants heading out while we moved stuff.
Because they weren’t stubborn idiots like me and Pike and Luke and a handful of others.
Mostly those with a covert operations background that made us think we were invincible, even from a massive, history making, storm.
However, nature didn’t care about our backgrounds.
“You’re bleeding,” Jackie pointed out when we took a short break, indicating my shirt.
“No time for that,” I said. Remember. Manly man.
“If you don’t make time, you’re going to lose enough blood that I’ll have to put you down.”
She made it sound like I was some rabid dog.
I wasn’t sure if she meant like on a stretcher or permanently.
Jackie, a roving emergency room doctor, had come to town right after our troubles late last year with that serial killer after she inherited the local pharmacy from a relative she’d never met.
A relative who’d been stepping on and moving major cocaine weight for the Chicago mob, aka the Outfit, but, that’s for another day.
You think that might dissuade someone from staying, but we’d taken out the serial killer, with extreme prejudice, and between her daughter loving it here, our need for a doctor, and, not to be dismissed, the presence of Luke, she’d stayed.
We’d also scared the Outfit off from Rocky Start. It had been a busy few months.
Fortunately, her daughter was also out of town for some reason, which I could not presently recall.
So I sat down and peeled my shirt off. She was right. Our makeshift bandage was in tatters and the wound was beyond just slapping some more bandaids on it.
“Stitches,” she announced.
“Go for it.” I know Rambo sewed himself up, but there’s dumb and then there’s stupid.
She jabbed me with a needle to numb the edges, really not necessary for a manly man but I reluctantly put up with it, not wanting to hurt Jackie’s feelings by rejecting it. She grabbed an armed suture. “It will leave a scar.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Will give me character.”
She rolled her eyes then jabbed the point in, perhaps a few moments before the painkiller was ready. She worked fast and efficiently and was done in a minute, expertly tying off the suture. Then she put a bandage over it.
“Good as new,” I said. “Your mother ever tell you growing up that if you roll your eyes too many times, they’ll get stuck?”
“Give it a break, Max.”
I pulled my shirt on and got back to it.
Once Jackie was satisfied we’d done enough and the stuff that could be water damaged was out of harm’s way, Rose and I moved on to Coral’s bakery.
Pike, an old retired covert operative who’d helped found Rocky Start along with the late great Oz who’d been Rose’s boss at Oddities, was helping her, but they were both in their seventies, so they were limited.
Marley’s younger brother Reggie was doing most of the heavy lifting.
Both Reggie and Marley had been adopted by Pike when they’d wandered into town after walking here from Central America after being orphaned by bad guys; just because we’d done bad things in our past didn’t mean we couldn’t do good things in our present.
I assumed Pike had had some sort of dealings with their parents while he was working covert ops.
There was only so much we could transplant upstairs.
Her heavy ovens, booths, and the beautiful glass display cases were going to have to ride it out.
I considered, then discarded the idea of sandbags.
I knew the power of moving water. I’d gone to Danish Combat Swim School when I was in Special Forces, and the sadistic Danish instructors had made us try to swim into the mouth of a river that was outflowing twice as fast as we could fin.
So even though we did our best, we went in the wrong direction until they finally had mercy on us and picked us up.
It had been humbling and instructive and extremely disorienting. Besides, we didn’t have sandbags.
“Velocity squared,” I said as Rose and I took a break on the rooftop of the bakery, next door to Oddities.
The rain had slackened but it didn’t matter.
What was coming down the river had already been dropped in the surrounding mountains and gravity ruled.
Already there was water flowing in the lower areas of the town, along River Road and in some dips on the main thoroughfare, State Street, which was also the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.
A thin blue line down the middle of the road marked the artificial boundary drawn up by men a long time ago.