Chapter Six
Auralia
Kamar and Mohammed left their bags at their chosen spot and came over to sit with the women.
Auralia accepted her phone back from Doli and said, “I’m going to show you something.” She paused, looked over to Doli, who had her phone out with her fingers tapping, and then turned back to Kamar. “This is a personal text string from a Marine friend.”
Kamar accepted Auralia’s phone and read over Creed’s texts. “Creed’s your friend with the dog, and Gator’s your brother, right?” Kamar let his gaze slide around the dell. “Bunch of combat vets saying they got a prickle on the back of their neck? Shit.” He handed her phone back.
“He mentioned the bowl of land. Doli said earlier that there’s a rainstorm coming.” Auralia pulled up a topo. “They’ve been having an inundation in the mountains since the early hours last night.”
Kamar and Mohammed exuded urban energy, and Auralia wasn’t sure they had rural survival skills under their belt. She held her phone in the flat of her palm, and all four looked down at the map. “This is us here. Can you see how this dips down?”
“The red lines there?” Kamar pointed. “Those mean dip?”
“Right.” Auralia wiggled her finger over the blue line. “It would take a lot of water to breach these banks. I looked over the side of the bridge on the way in this morning, and they’re pretty steep. But if the water did rise above that, can you see what would happen?”
“This dell would become a swimming pool?” Mohammed asked.
“Worse,” Doli said. “There are two sources of water. These rivers join here, and this new section takes it on to the James. If both rivers are flooding to the point that the rivers rise to spill over the banks, all the land in this whole area, this whole property, and everything between the two will turn into one massive raging water source.”
“We’d be trapped,” Kamar said on the exhale. “I mean, there are the two bridges out, but they’re old as sin, and I could see them washing away pretty easily. Being in this dell, that’s not survivable. A person couldn’t swim out of that.” He eyed Mohammed.
Mohammed put his hands on his head. “I don’t know how to swim.”
“Is this a setup?” Kamar asked. “Are you trying to scare us off, so we don’t report?”
Auralia and Doli stared at him.
“Sorry.” Kamar placed a hand over his heart. “That was so wrong of me. I’m flustered, I guess. What are you going to do? Does it depend on the rain falling here? We could just leave if it starts to rain?”
“Everyone will leave if it starts to rain,” Mohammed pointed out. “We’ll be in traffic, trying to get to the bridge.”
“Rain here isn’t the problem,” Doli explained without looking up from scrolling her phone.
“Rain that lands here moves on. Rain in the mountains accumulates. I’m trying to pull up a recent report from west of us.
They’re all on flash flood alerts. Their topography is less worrisome than being in this bowl. ”
“Your brother’s team can’t just up and leave,” Kamar said. “What would they do?”
“The corporate mansion has a basement, which makes it less likely to float away. It’s on high ground and has three stories and the servants’ quarters in the attic,” Auralia said. “They go up there and move to the highest floor, if not out onto the roof.”
“We could do that.”
“Not if the hundreds of people expected today panicked and headed in that direction,” Auralia countered.
“Iniquus would announce the problem from the stage and talk people through. I’ve seen their work in hundreds of videos,” Kamar said.
“You seem to think I’m suggesting you leave,” Auralia said.
“I’m not. I know what Doli and I have trained to stay alive in natural disasters.
We’re both whitewater swimmers. I have support here.
I don’t know what you know or what skills you have tucked away.
I’m simply providing you with this warning because it’s the moral thing to do for a fellow journalist.”
“Doing this search, there’s not much,” Doli said. “A guy up in a cabin says it’s coming down too hard to see to drive, and while he has connectivity, he’s trying to read up on what happened in North Carolina and the mudslides. He’s looking for survival techniques.”
“I looked at the radar earlier, and it says the band of precipitation is still pretty far west,” Auralia said.
“What are the survival techniques for that man in the cabin?” Mohammed asked.
“Pay attention to the warnings and get out in advance,” Doli said dryly.
“I know this much: If you have time, open the down slope windows. Move upstairs into an interior room or closet. Unlike an earthquake, you want to stay away from heavy furniture unless you’re sitting on it to get up higher because it can shift and trap you. ”
“Jeezis.” Mohammed had yet to drop his hands from his head. He gripped his hair in fistfuls.
“And from there, you listen for sounds that might give you a clue what’s coming next, things like trees snapping or boulders tumbling.”
Doli came from canyon country, and they had flashfloods on the regular. The last time Doli talked about it, she’d told the story of a group of tourists who went hiking and got swept off the cliff wall. Only one survived, and he had all of his clothes and most of his skin abraded away.
“But that’s not here,” Mohammed said.
Auralia’s phone pinged. “Creed sent me this map of river depths,” Auralia held the phone out. “So you see the problem.”
Kamar looked at the phone, then lifted his gaze to look at his cameraman.
“Naw, man,” Mohammed said. “I got nothing.”
“Look down.” Auralia slid the heel of her boot out to scuff the ground. “Clay.”
“I’m from Philly,” Kamar said, “this all means zip to me, Blue Bayou.”
Did Auralia mind that he called her Blue Bayou?
He was probably trying to convey that they were teammates of some kind by giving her a nickname.
She needed to remember that Kamar spoke English as a second language and nuance was often difficult.
She’d let it slide. There were worse things to be called.
Auralia saw the look on the men’s faces that she recognized as the one she often wore when she sat with her mentor and Remi explained the dangers.
It was a lot. “Let’s walk through it. Bowls fill with water.
That can happen in one of two ways. First, the water from the mountains overflows their banks, flooding the parking lot.
But, looking at the river heights Creed sent me, I don’t see that happening. ”
“Okay, good,” Kamar said.
Auralia shook her head.
“Something worse?” Mohammed asked. “Aw shit, what?”
“The rainstorm on the radar is heading in our direction. We’ve been in a drought.
The clay is baked and can’t absorb moisture.
That means the clay turns slick, so no one can get traction as they try to drive up out of the bowl.
Imagine all these cars start skidding down the hill and crashing into each other at low speeds.
Damage? Some. Not much. People could get trapped, especially if they’re unable—for whatever reason—to get out of their windows or moon roofs.
Tow trucks couldn’t get in and deal with it.
Nope, if we get a heavy rain here, this is going to be a big ol’ mess.
If the rain is coming down hard and we have limited visibility like the guy on his search engine looking for a way to save his life, if I were a betting woman, I would see a slippery hill as the problem. ”
“Where’d you park?” Mohammed asked.
“Nose out right by the gate at the top of the bowl,” Doli said.
“All right, yeah, I saw Auralia’s car coming in. We’re a bit lower on the slope than you,” Kamar said. “So water’s coming down, it’s heavy, people run for their cars.”
“Tires are spinning,” Auralia painted the picture. “People are fighting for space to get momentum to get out, they slide like it’s ice, it’s a pile up.”
“Are you positioning to tape and report?”
“Me? In pouring rain?” Doli asked. “No. I plan to be the first car over the bridge.”
“But if we get up on our roof,” Mohammed said, “I’d have a great view of it. After the rain stops, we could even live-stream the aftermath and get eyeballs involved.”
Auralia wrinkled her nose.
“What?” Mohammed asked.
“Nothing. You do you. I hope it all works out the way you want it to.”
“Don’t play, Auralia,” Kamar scowled, “just say it.”
Doli leaned in. “The mud wrestling only happens as a single event to contend with if it were raining heavily here and only here. You seem to be forgetting that it’s raining on the mountain.
All that water from up here,” Doli tightened the map so they could see a bigger surface area, “is flowing somewhere from two separate river systems. And this is a delta of land surrounded by the two.”
“Auralia just said that the river heights looked okay,” Kamara said.
“That’s a picture of now,” Auralia was patient with her explanation.
If you didn’t know how to extrapolate data to possible outcomes, if you’d never been exposed to the possibilities, this was a lot to take in.
Auralia got it. She still felt that way in war zones.
“It has nothing to do with what we might contend with if the cars are in a mud pit, people are trapped, and hours of water accumulation change that calculus.” She flipped back to her maps app.
“And I’ll add that there are two bridges that can take you to a main highway,” Auralia said.
“Both bridges were flagged as needing immediate repairs because of their age and decrepitude.”
“Decrepitude?” Doli asked. “I like that word, decrepitude.” She turned toward the parking area. “What I don’t like is that we have to drive on them. They seemed fine to me. But I wasn’t dangling over the side assessing the rusted joints.”