CHAPTER EIGHT
The Call
Renz
The warning came in on a Tuesday, which was, Renz would think later, exactly the kind of ordinary day disaster always seemed to prefer — no gathering, no gear check, just an average work afternoon, the sky over Ridgeline Bay gone that strange flat yellow-grey that old hands on this coast had learned, long before the Bureau caught up with a name for it, to trust more than any forecast, a colour that lived in the back of every local's memory as a warning older than any app on their phone.
He'd been at Rivers when it started, dropping off a tray of scones for the counter, and Layla had looked up at the sky through the front window mid-sentence and gone quiet in a way that made him follow her gaze, and neither of them had said anything, just stood there a moment reading the same wrongness in the light that every coastal local carried somewhere in their bones whether they could have explained it or not.
He thought, briefly and involuntarily, of the wind shift on the burn a few weeks back — the same specific betrayal, conditions turning faster than any forecast promised, and felt something tighten in his chest that had nothing to do with fear for himself and everything to do with a sudden urgent need to know exactly where Pip was standing at that precise moment, the particular sharpened protectiveness of a man who'd once had eight seconds' warning of what it would cost him to lose someone and had never quite let the lesson fade.
The text came through to the group chain at 2:14pm. East coast low intensifying faster than modelled. Storm surge warning upgraded. Evacuate low-lying caravan park + boat ramp precinct immediately. All available crew to muster.
Renz was at the station within eleven minutes, which was two minutes slower than his personal best and he noted it with the particular clean-headed calm that came over him whenever an actual emergency arrived to replace the small manufactured ones he usually organised his days around — because whatever else Renz Kowalski didn't know how to do gracefully, an actual crisis was not on that list. A crisis had a checklist. A crisis needed tables set up, just tables made of triage tags and headcounts instead of tablecloths, and he was, it turned out, exactly as good at that as he was at everything else, and considerably more at ease in it than he ever was at a party thrown in his own honour, because a crisis asked for competence and nothing more complicated than competence, no gratitude to manage, no thanks to deflect, just a clean job with a clean measurable outcome.
By 2:40 the picture had sharpened and worsened in the way these things did — the low deepening faster than any model had shown, a king tide arriving at the worst possible hour to meet it, and the caravan park at the mouth of the estuary, forty-odd vans and cabins packed with families who'd come down for the school holidays and had no earthly idea the coast could turn like this, having spent the morning building sandcastles on a beach that would be underwater within the hour, was going under water faster than the evacuation could clear it.
Jax ran the muster the way he ran everything, flat and fast, no wasted words, standing on the back of a ute with a whiteboard someone had produced from somewhere, marking off resources as they were confirmed.
"Marine Rescue's already got two boats in the water, SES is bringing sandbags nobody needs anymore because we're past sandbags, Surf Life Saving's got jet skis coming off the beach at the north end, and the chopper's fifteen out.
" He looked around the assembled crew — every one of them, Renz noted, every single face from the gathering three weeks back, back on the coast on leave or between postings or simply never having left, all of them here now, because that was the actual shape of the Brotherhood, not the coin ceremony, not the fairy lights, this — "Cal, you're on the chopper the second it lands, you know this coastline better than the pilot they've sent.
Josie, medical triage at the surf club, that's your ground. Arjun—"
"Already on it," Arjun said, already moving toward the ambulance staging with the flat unhurried competence of a man who'd once triaged a flooded outback town with nothing but a field kit and his own two hands, and this, by comparison, at least had roads, had proper equipment, had backup arriving by the minute instead of a single Cessna and whatever he could carry.
"Mia, you're not rated for this airspace, but if the chopper needs a second set of eyes reading that estuary from above, you're the best pair I've got, so you're in Cal's back seat and you're navigating."
"Copy," Mia said, already halfway to the pad, tying her hair back with the brisk efficiency of a woman who'd done exactly this kind of scramble more times than she could count, just usually somewhere considerably drier.
"Small mercy in all this," Cal said, already halfway into his harness, "at least nobody's called a diver.
Last thing we need today is ringing that mad unit up in Broome and waiting six hours for him to fly down.
" A few of the crew huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, the specific dark humour of people about to do something dangerous, the kind of joke crews made not because it was especially funny but because making it at all was proof nobody had frozen yet.
Dom stood at the edge of the muster with his daughter on his hip, having brought her along on the school run before the alert came through and had nowhere safe yet to leave her, and Jax caught his eye across the assembled crew, reading the situation in half a second the way he read everything.
"Dom. Take her to Layla's. Rivers is high ground, she'll mind her, and then I want you back here running the SES liaison — you know that side of the operation better than anyone since your secondment last year.
" It wasn't a question, and it wasn't a demotion either, both of them understanding without needing to discuss it that a father with an infant on his hip couldn't be first through a flooded fence line but could still be entirely essential to the operation from a different angle. "Go. Ten minutes, no more."
"Copy," Dom said, already moving, and Renz watched him go with a small pang of something he couldn't quite name — recognition, maybe, of a man managing two competing kinds of essential at once, the fierce practical love of a father and the fierce practical duty of a crew member, and finding, apparently without too much anguish, a way to honour both without sacrificing either.
It occurred to Renz, standing there in the gathering wind, that this was perhaps the actual shape of the family thing Dom had been talking about at the last gathering — not a competition between the crew and the kid, but two loves running in the same direction, each one making the other stronger rather than weaker.
"Renz." Jax turned to him last, the way he always seemed to, the reliable one saved for the job that needed reliability most. "I need you running comms and headcount out of the surf club.
Every family that gets pulled off that park, every name, cross-checked against the evacuation list, because in about forty minutes we're going to have parents screaming for kids we haven't found yet and the only thing standing between chaos and a coordinated search is someone keeping a clean list. That's you. Can you do that?"
"Yeah," Renz said, and was already moving before the word had finished landing, because this — organising, tracking, making sure nobody fell through a gap nobody else had thought to check — was the oldest and surest language he had, and for the first time in his life it was going to matter more than it had ever mattered at a birthday party, more than a tablecloth squared just so, more than any amount of cray pots correctly timed.
Wes and Tam were already moving toward the SES trucks, Wes shouting instructions to a young volunteer who looked barely out of his teens and considerably out of his depth, Tam close behind with a first aid kit slung over one shoulder, the two of them falling into the same easy wordless coordination Renz recognised from every crisis this crew had ever faced together, years of practice making a genuine emergency look, from the outside, almost like choreography.
"You right?" Wes called to Renz as their paths crossed near the trucks, not slowing down.
"Yeah. You?"
"Always." Wes grinned, quick and fierce, the specific expression of a man who'd found, somewhere along the way, that fear and readiness could occupy the exact same body without contradiction.
"Tam's got the ramp end covered with Arjun.
I'm on the park itself. See you at the club when it's done, mate. "
They peeled apart, each toward their own piece of the unfolding crisis, and Renz felt, watching them go, the familiar warm certainty of a crew that had rehearsed this exact kind of coordination so many times over so many years that nobody needed to be told twice what their job was, everyone simply knowing, the way a body knows how to catch itself falling, before the conscious mind had even finished registering the danger.
? ? ?
Pip was three streets back from the caravan park when the surge hit, doing the ordinary unglamorous work of doorknocking the low-set weatherboard cottages the official evacuation zone had missed by a hundred metres of outdated mapping — because someone always missed a hundred metres, and someone always had to go back for it, and on a day like this, in a town like this, that someone was whoever happened to be closest and willing, and Pip, driving home from work when the alert came through, had simply turned the car around and started knocking, leaving her own half-packed duffel forgotten on the back seat for possibly the first time in nine years, her mind entirely elsewhere, on other people's exit routes instead of her own.