CHAPTER SEVEN
Hurricane Irene had passed two nights before, but she had left her handwriting everywhere.
Along the Gray Wolf LEGACY staging bank, seven shallow-draft boats sat nose-out in the mud while men loaded fuel, bottled water, trauma kits, chain saws, rope, axes, tarps, and enough bad coffee to strip paint.
Another rain system was due in three days. They had nine hours of useful light and a list of remote residents who had not checked in. There were others that weren’t even on the list. Men and women who chose to live off the grid. They would be harder to find.
Luke stood on the hood of a battered truck with a laminated map in one hand and a grease pencil in the other. The communications systems and satellites were still sketchy, so they were relying on good old-fashioned paper maps.
The map had been corrected so many times it looked diseased. Wind worried its corners.
“Markers are gone,” he said. “Banks moved. Cuts that were deep last week may be roofs today. Nobody runs blind. Nobody runs fast. We check every address, every camp, every boat tied where a house used to be. If you find survivors, stabilize and call it. If the radios fail, flare colors are green for found and moving, red for immediate help, white for—”
“Ghosts?” Eric asked.
“White for position. Ghosts file their own paperwork,” smirked Luke. A branch cracked somewhere in the flooded timber. Nobody turned toward it. Luke folded the map. “Try not to become paperwork.”
Although the average person wouldn’t understand it, the way that the team dealt with the stress, pressure and horror of the situation was humor. The darker and more ridiculous the better. They understood it. They forgave it. It didn’t matter if others did or not.
Team 1 took the north reach: Luke, Cam, Eric, Hex, and Ben.
Team 2 drew the drowned parish line: Hunter, Carl, Adam, Joseph, and Nathan.
Team 3 would work the cypress maze: Kiel, Liffey, Fitch, Duncan, and Robbie.
Team 4 had the refinery cut and the old trappers’ camps: Bodhi, Remy, Cade, Magnus, and Wade.
Team 5—Jalen, Chief, Milo, JT, Chase, Will, and Benji—would sweep the west basin.
Team 6—Irish, Hoot, Bone, HG, Garrett, Bogey, and Jean—had the long southern loop.
Team 7—Nine, Gaspar, Ghost, Ian, Baptiste, and Luc—would take the outer channels where the radio signal weakened and the marsh widened toward open water.
The older men knew the back trails and old shacks better than anyone. If someone was alive out there, they’d find them.
At 0720 hours the outboards coughed awake. One after another the boats slid from the bank, gray hulls parting a skin of oil and pine needles. The air smelled of gasoline, wet earth, and the sweet rot of broken vegetation.
Clouds opened briefly in the east and light struck the floodwater like tarnished metal. Then the opening closed. Luke watched the last familiar road sign vanish behind the trees.
“Nine hours,” Cam said.
“Three days until more rain,” Luke answered. Eric pulled his hood tighter.
“Good. I was worried the schedule lacked urgency.”
The north reach had once been easy: green marker, dead cypress, split left at the bait shack.
The green marker was gone, the cypress floated ten yards downstream, and the bait shack stood hip-deep in the bayou with a vending machine lodged against its roof.
Hex leaned over the bow with a boat hook, feeling ahead.
The pole struck something solid beneath the surface.
Cam throttled down. The boat kept drifting. Ben peered into the tea-colored water as a dark shape rolled beneath them and vanished.
“Road?”
“Could be,” Hex said. “Could be a refrigerator.” Eric considered that.
“Roads generally have fewer compressors.”
The hook caught, bent, then sprang free. They eased around the obstruction and heard a line of nails rake the aluminum hull from bow to stern, slow as fingernails testing a coffin lid.
On the parish line, Hunter’s team found the first porch detached from its house. It drifted sideways among buttonbush, complete with two rocking chairs and a ceramic frog. Carl raised a hand in solemn greeting as they passed.
“Mayor,” he said.
Adam scanned the bank through binoculars.
Joseph called addresses from a waterproof clipboard while Nathan watched the depth finder jump from six feet to eighteen inches and back again.
The old channel had filled with storm-torn limbs.
A new one had cut through a stand of willow where the map showed solid ground.
Hunter chose the new water. There was no good route, only the route that had not yet tried to kill them.
By 0815 hours, Team 3 had entered the cypress maze. Kiel stood at the console, Liffey on the bow, Fitch reading bearings, Duncan clearing vines, and Robbie marking their route with orange survey tape.
Within twenty minutes they found one of their own ribbons floating beside the boat.
“Excellent,” Duncan said. “We’ve discovered where we’ve already died.”
“Or where the bayou wants us to think we died,” Robbie said. The joke landed badly because no one could prove it wrong.
The trees crowded close, their roots hidden under floodwater, their crowns knitted against the weak sky. Somewhere beyond them, sheet metal knocked three times, stopped, then knocked three times again. Nobody could tell if it was loose roofing, somebody signaling, or the storm practicing.
At 0840 hours, Team 4 reached the first occupied camp.
It leaned around a pecan tree, one corner sunk, flood line staining the siding chest-high.
An old man in orange suspenders stood on the porch roof holding a cast-iron skillet.
Behind him were a woman, two beagles, and a green parrot in a travel cage.
“You took your time,” the man called. Bodhi looked at the skillet.
“That how you planned to signal?”
“No. That’s how I planned to greet looters.”
Remy climbed onto the roof while Cade steadied the boat. Magnus checked the woman for dehydration. Wade coaxed the beagles aboard. The parrot watched them and spoke with terrible clarity.
“Damn fool.”
“Which one?” Cade asked. The bird declined to specify.
The old couple refused evacuation until Bodhi showed them the forecast printout sealed in plastic. Three more days, then rain enough to lift the bayou again. The man’s jaw worked. He looked at the line on his house, at the water lapping beneath the porch roof, and finally at the woman beside him.
“Fine,” he said. “But the bird rides with you.” The parrot responded once again.
“Damn fool.”
Remy tied their small bateau to their own boat and marked the camp cleared. The cloud cover thickened as they started back toward a volunteer fire landing that no longer possessed either fire station or landing. Mike and the boys were manning the station, ever faithful.
Near 0930 hours, Team 5 found a skiff pinned beneath a fallen live oak. Its bow protruded from dark water and a length of blue rope ran from the stern into reeds.
Jalen killed the engine. Chief and Chase pulled the rope hand over hand until it tightened around a mailbox post. On the opposite bank, an elderly woman waved a red dish towel from the second-story window of a narrow house.
Beside her stood a teenage boy with his forearm wrapped in a blood-soaked bath towel.
“Found two,” Jalen radioed. Static answered. He tried again, then fired a green flare through a gap in the branches. It climbed into the low clouds and made the whole bayou briefly poisonous green.
JT and Benji crossed by rope while Will held the boat against the current. The boy had cut himself breaking an attic vent after the stairwell filled. The bleeding had slowed, but the hand below the wound was pale and cold.
Milo splinted the arm once they had him aboard. The woman carried a grocery sack containing medicines, three cans of peaches, a Bible sealed in a freezer bag, and a framed photograph.
“That all?” Chief asked gently.
“That’s what matters,” she said. Behind them the green flare faded, and the darkness seemed to settle lower.
Team 6 made slower progress than anyone. The southern loop was a junkyard under water.
Irish piloted while Hoot and Bone probed ahead. HG watched the engine temperature. Garrett tracked their position by compass because the GPS showed them crossing dry land. Bogey and Jean cleared fishing line, wire, and vines from the prop every few minutes.
At 1011 hours, the bow rode up on something and stopped hard. Everyone lurched forward. Beneath them, metal boomed once, and a stream of bubbles broke the surface beside Hoot’s boot. Bone pushed down with the pole and heard a hollow clang.
“Car,” he said. Hoot looked over the side.
“Make?”
“Submerged.”
“That model never held its value.” The boat shifted another inch, as if whatever lay below had exhaled.
The current rotated the stern toward a tangle of fencing.
Jean threw a line around a cypress knee; Bogey hauled until his shoulders trembled.
Irish reversed in short bursts while Bone levered the hull sideways.
Metal shrieked beneath them. For one long second the engine died and every man listened to water slap the boat’s skin.
Then it caught again. They slid free minus a strip of paint and most of Hoot’s confidence.
“Put it on the damage report,” Irish said.
“Under what heading?” HG asked.
“Bayou attempted theft.”
Farther out, Team 7 lost the last cell signal and then the last recognizable landmark. Nine checked the compass. He smirked at the others and laughed.
“Like old times. Good old-fashioned paper maps, a compass, nothing electronic that can break.”
“I heard that,” said Ace. “Careful what you say. We almost have everything up and running again.”
“Maybe hold off for twenty-four hours, brother. I’m enjoying my boy scout days right now.”