Page 34 of South of Nowhere

Sixty seconds later, backpack resting heavy on his right shoulder, he was climbing down the hill toward a faint shiny patch in the river about five feet from shore. The Never Summer was much wider here and the current was moving more slowly.

He strode to the edge.

Paused and stared down.

And found himself shaking his head.

As he wondered howtwohousehold appliances—this one a Kenmore dryer—had managed to end up in the waterway.

A white pickup approached and parked. Climbing out was a man with short dark hair and mustache. He wore a navy windbreaker and orange safety vest emblazoned with the lettersHFD.

Shaw climbed to meet him.

“Mr. Shaw?”

A nod.

“Tomas Martinez.” He seemed to note there was nothing urgent about Shaw’s behavior and lifted an eyebrow.

“Appliances.”

Martinez’s face fell. A sigh. “Where do you think they are, sir?”

“Stuck somewhere the drone couldn’t see it. A cave maybe. I saw a lot of them.”

“That’s right, and some are definitely deep enough to hide a car, even an SUV. Old mines too.” He sighed again. “And if they got washed into one of them, we’ll never find ’em.”

Shaw typed commands to untether the drone from the float, and sent the UAV back north, toward Hinowah, to continue searching in case it had missed the vehicle on the way down. It would eventually land beside the Winnebago—or ditch in the river if the batteries didn’t hold.

Martinez asked, “I’m wondering if we should move from rescue to recovery at this point. I mean it’s been a few hours.”

The pivot point where you admitted the objects of your search were dead and the mission became one of finding their bodies.

“No,” Colter Shaw said with hesitation. “Not yet.”

14.

The aftermath of a mass disaster can be heartbreaking.

Dorion Shaw had witnessed firsthand the hollow gazes and tear-soaked faces of families as they stared at the ash-filled foundation pits that had once been their homes, and the repositories—naively considered impregnable—of mementos that represented sometimes centuries of family history.

She recalled one family sifting through flattened ruins searching for the tiniest object to salvage—only to find that the devastation was so great on the street that they’d been searching the remains of aneighbor’shouse.

Dorion Shaw absolutely did not want the citizens of Hinowah to face that fate, but her priority was to make certain they were safe from far worse: the deaths and injuries themselves.

She was going door-to-door, delivering the warning in her stern voice. William and the girls had learned that her “mean look” was mostly inadvertent—or a bluff—but to those not in the know it could be quite intimidating. Mary Dove had said once that her children could make up the Police Force of Shaw. Russell would be SWAT and intelligence.

Colter the detective.

And Dorion would be the no-nonsense traffic cop.

Sir, I do not believe you only had two beers. Please step out of the car…

She had learned much about building and infrastructure in her years on the job, and she recognized an irony in Hinowah that was true in many places. If the levee were to go, the Never Summer tidal wave would most likely destroy the newer houses. Thinner studs and economical Sheetrock meant vulnerability. But the older structures had been built according to the conventions of the day: your house was to be passed down for generations—hundreds of years—and that meant tamarack and cedar and oak construction. Some houses in Hinowah were log cabins, but the settlers here, like most in the 1800s, preferred their wood hewn into flat planks, which were stronger in support and lasted longer than the raw, round timber used by early pioneers.

Over the next half hour, she dislodged two dozen families and individuals and, with a metaphoric butt-swat, sent them on their way to Hanover College.

She walked past a transformer station, a twin to the one that had blown up earlier; Dorion had texted or emailed everyone who was or might be a responder about the dangers of electricity in a flood.

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