CHAPTER SEVEN #2
Gaspar studied the water. Ghost sat silent beside the fuel cans, watching floating grass bend around whatever lay beneath. Ian and Baptiste argued in low voices over whether a distant line of poles belonged to the old shrimp road. Luc finally spoke.
“They belong to a fence.”
The fence ran through eight feet of water. Beyond it, the marsh had opened into a wide slate plain. The sun appeared for less than a minute, a pale coin behind cloud, and vanished without improving anything.
At 1100 hours, all seven teams checked in by relay. Team 1 had cleared three empty houses and found a family sheltering in a church loft.
Team 2 had marked two washed-out bridges and delivered insulin to a man who refused to leave his cattle.
Team 3 had located the source of the knocking: a sheet of roofing striking a half-submerged propane tank.
Team 4 had four humans, two dogs, and one profane bird in transit.
Team 5 had two evacuees, one injured.
Team 6 was behind schedule but intact.
Team 7 had reached the outer camps and found them abandoned. Luke listened to the reports, counted the unchecked names, and watched a new bank of cloud deepen in the southwest.
The church had floated six inches off its foundation and settled crooked against two oaks. Luke’s boat nosed through what had been the front doors. Hymnals drifted among dead leaves. A white choir robe hung from a ceiling fan and turned whenever the wind found it.
In the loft, a mother, her brother, and three children had spent two nights with rainwater in cooking pots and crackers from the nursery. The youngest child stared at Hex’s beard and asked if he was a pirate.
“Search and rescue,” Hex said with a smile. “Pirates have dental coverage.”
From below came a heavy knock against the hull. Everyone froze until a pew surfaced, rolled, and sank again. Eric found the church bell rope trailing from the rafters and rang it once. The note rolled over the flooded woods, enormous and lonely, and something far off answered with another knock.
The children came down one at a time in life jackets. Ben carried the smallest, whose bare feet were white with cold. Cam checked them while Luke tied the church’s communion rail to a tree so the building would not pivot farther into the channel. The mother kept apologizing for the trouble.
“This is literally why we brought a boat,” Eric told her.
She laughed once, a cracked sound that became a sob, and turned her face away. Nobody mentioned it. They loaded the family’s names into the radio relay and started toward high ground.
1200 hours brought heat without brightness. Steam rose from wet roofs. Mosquitoes swarmed the boats whenever they slowed. Fuel gauges sank.
The men ate crushed protein bars and drank warm water while motoring. Every surface was slick. Every object in the bayou had become either a landmark that lied or an obstacle that waited.
Team 2 followed what should have been a drainage canal and emerged in the drowned yard of a school. A basketball goal stood from the water like a gallows. Carl looked at the rim.
“Two points if you clear the snake.” There was, in fact, a snake coiled on the backboard. Hunter backed away without attempting the shot.
They found Mrs. Bellamy at 1234 hours, standing in waist-deep water beneath her raised house and beating mud from a rug with a broom. She was eighty-two, furious, and entirely uninterested in rescue.
“My son’s coming,” she said.
Nathan checked the list. Her son lived forty miles away, across two closed highways. Joseph showed her the satellite phone. Adam showed her the weather notice. Carl pointed at the alligator watching from behind a floating trash bin. Mrs. Bellamy looked at the animal.
“That’s Clarence.”
“Clarence looks hungry,” Carl said.
“Clarence always looks judgmental.” Hunter offered his hand. After a long stare, she took it.
“Just out of curiosity, Ms. Bellamy, is Clarence related to Alvin?” asked Carl.
“Distant cousins. Or so Irene said.” She said nothing else, just staring straight ahead as Clarence followed their boat.
At 1310 hours, Team 3 heard shouting. It came and went with the wind, too faint to place. Kiel shut down the motor. Five men listened. The bayou ticked and dripped around them. Then came three sharp calls from the east.
Fitch pointed through the trees, but the chart showed no residence there.
Liffey climbed onto the forward seat and saw a flash of blue tarp.
They pushed into a cut barely wider than the boat, ducking branches, Robbie sounding off the depth, Duncan sawing through a pine top. Halfway in, the hull struck wire.
The wire tightened around the lower unit and pulled the stern sideways. Water climbed the transom in quick brown gulps. Kiel killed the engine before the prop could wind them under, but the current kept levering the boat toward a submerged trunk.
Fitch clipped into a safety line, put a knife between his teeth, and went over the side. The water swallowed him to the shoulders.
“If anything bites me,” he said, “tell it I’m union or I’m a friend of Alvins.”
“You’re not union,” Duncan said.
“Then tell it I’m expensive.”
The wire was barbed, pulled from a pasture fence, and it sawed against Fitch’s glove while something bumped his shin below the surface.
He cut one strand. The boat dropped another inch.
He cut the second, and the tension released so violently he slammed backward against the hull.
The shouting came again, closer now—and stopped in the middle of a word.
The blue tarp covered a hunting platform wedged high between cypress trunks.
On it sat a man with a broken ankle and a woman holding a laundry basket.
Inside the basket were four sleeping newborn puppies.
Their mother paced the platform, growling at the boat.
The couple had climbed there when their camp broke apart.
“We heard engines yesterday,” the woman said. “Couldn’t make anybody hear us.” Kiel looked at the black water below them and then at the sky.
“We hear you now.” The dog did not consider this sufficient reassurance.
Liffey rigged a rope cradle while Robbie held the bow under the platform. They lowered the injured man first, his face gray with pain. Duncan took the basket. The mother dog followed only after Fitch climbed up and let her bite his glove for ten straight seconds.
“Negotiations concluded,” he said, lowering her.
Rain began—not the next storm, only a narrow shower passing through. The drops struck leaves and water so loudly the world disappeared. Team 3 waited beneath the trees until the curtain thinned, carrying seven living things where there had been none on the map.
By 1400 hours, nineteen residents had been accounted for and eleven evacuated.
The fire landing served as a transfer point.
Medics worked beneath a canvas awning tied to a dump truck.
Volunteers labeled pets with masking tape.
The parrot had learned to say, ‘watch the prop,’ though not always at useful moments.
Luke’s team exchanged passengers for fuel, grabbed dry blankets, and went back out. Nobody sat longer than necessary. Beyond the landing, clouds stacked over the trees in dark ledges, and thunder muttered too far away to count.
The unchecked list had narrowed to five names at three addresses. One was a seasonal camp, probably empty. One belonged to brothers who trapped crawfish beyond the west basin. The last was a widow named Elise Darden, whose house stood near an old oil-service canal.
Team 4 had tried the canal and found it blocked by two barges driven together in the storm.
Team 7 believed they could approach from the outside.
Team 6 was closest to the brothers.
Team 5 turned west to support them. Luke sent Teams 1 and 2 toward Darden by separate routes, keeping Team 3 moving evacuees.
Team 6 found the crawfish camp at 1447 hours. The cabin had folded into itself, tin roof resting in the trees and the porch gone. Two aluminum traps hung from a limb twenty feet above the water. Irish circled once, searching for movement.
Hoot shouted. Bone fired the air horn. Nothing answered. Then Bogey saw a red fuel can wedged at the mouth of a narrow slough. Fresh rope marks crossed its handle. They followed the slough until both banks closed tight around them.
A quarter mile in, they found an overturned airboat jammed under sweetgum branches. One brother clung to the exposed hull. The other lay on a hummock above the water with a branch pinned across his legs. He had been there since the storm.
Team 5 arrived from the opposite end, engines muted, Jalen’s crew visible through the trees like figures in a broken mirror.
“We brought seven,” Chief called.
“Show-off,” Irish answered. Between the two boats they stabilized the wreck, cut away the branch, and moved the injured man onto a backboard.
The trapped brother had no feeling below one knee and a fever that worried HG. His older brother would not stop talking, describing every hour since the water rose, every failed attempt to free him, every sound in the night.
Will gave him water in measured swallows. Chase found their radio in the wreck, its casing crushed. Benji lifted a crawfish trap from a tree and set it atop the ruined boat.
“Evidence,” he said.
“Of what?” Milo asked.
“That dinner escaped.” Nobody laughed much, but the older brother did, and for a moment his shaking eased.
At 1515 hours, Darden’s house remained unconfirmed.
Team 7 reached the outer side of the barges and found the canal choked with floating drums. Team 4 worked from the inner side with axes and lines. Team 1 approached through a submerged cane field while Team 2 searched along the old parish ditch.
Radios overlapped with bearings, depths, and warnings. The sky dimmed until afternoon resembled evening. Thunder moved closer. Nobody said the forecast had promised this rain would wait.