Page 21 of South of Nowhere

Starr shook her head. “All we know is it’s not local. All the white Suburbans registered here’re accounted for.”

This was unfortunate. If they had a name he could contact other family members about the incident—and learn if they had any particular skills that might help in survival.

Colter consulted his phone. The drone and float were now several miles downstream. Dorion, scanning the evac progress, didn’t bother to glance his way. The two had worked together from time to time and they tended not to pepper their conversation with unnecessary queries like “See anything?” Or “You’re okay?” On the theory that if the other had seen something or was not okay, there’d be an announcement.

A flash of dark motion took their attention. Another trough opened at the crest of the levee and more water gushed downward, adding to the flood in the spillway, and sending a brown tidal wave over a large retention pond.

A huge flash filled the western portion of the town, near the spillway, then a crack like a gunshot, as the substation exploded.

“Lord,” Tolifson muttered.

Dorion’s voice was dark. “Wanted to blow the south side of the spillway but the copper mine here didn’t have any gel. Hate it when comms go down.”

At that moment, Shaw’s phone gave a trill. He looked down. A small red dot had appeared on video feed from the drone. “May have a hit.” The others turned quickly.

“About three miles downstream.” He looked at the screen. “Could be a vehicle roof just under the surface.”

He sprinted up the hill to the camper, pulled his backpack frombeside the front seat and, running to the back, pulled the Yamaha bike off the rack. He climbed on and fired up the engine. He didn’t bother with the U-shaped switchback road that offered a gradual descent into town. He went straight down the north hillside into the village and toward the spillway bridge, feeling a faint chill down his back as above him the levee disgorged another massive wad of mud. It slid near but not into his path. The flow of water increased once more.

Then he was climbing up the opposite hill, catching air and landing on smooth asphalt.

Soon, he was heading south at seventy miles an hour, weaving through an obstacle course of branches and patches of leaves that would be slick as ice.

8.

Dorion and the six employees of Shaw Incident Services, LLC, regularly engaged in studying natural disasters to better understand the behavior of fire, oil, wind, rain, snow, metal fatigue, electricity, toxic waste and myriad other substances and devices—all of which posed an infinite and, sometimes, insidiously clever threat to human beings.

She felt that they were like the criminal perps her brother sometimes pursued: individuals with motivations that some might see as evil but was hardly that at all (murderers, after all, are the heroes of their own stories).

Water was one of these creatures too.

As she looked over the fragile town of Hinowah, California, she was thinking of the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake and tsunami, whose epicenter was in Indonesia, and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Those terrible disasters left huge death tolls: nearly 250K dead in the first, and 20K in the second, with the vast majority dead from the water, not the collapsing buildings from the earthquakes.

Floods are particularly tricky. While the water set in motion by an earthquake can travel at five hundred miles per hour under thesurface in a deep ocean, it is barely noticeable on top; those on ships sense only a slight swell. When it reaches shore in shallow water, the speed slows to twenty to thirty miles an hour, still far faster than a person can run, and like a car in low gear, the force behind it has the power to destroy buildings meant to withstand hurricanes.

In Hinowah, the wall of water would not reach the hundred-and-twenty-five-foot waves in Tohoku, but it would have a similar speed and the same force.

You could not ride out a flood of this sort. Escape was the only sure method to save lives.

Dorion recalled the story of ten-year-old Tilly Smith, visiting Thailand with her parents from the UK in 2004. The girl noticed the sudden recession of the resort beach water, and she announced to her parents that a tsunami was coming. She had learned in school how the phenomenon often sucks water from a beach before the deadly waves slam into the land. Tilly simply would not be ignored and talked her parents into warning the resort. They closed the beach and got everyone off—minutes before a tsunami did indeed hit. It was one of the few beaches in Thailand where no deaths occurred during that storm. She was credited for saving more than a hundred lives.

Dorion was amused to think that here, today, she herself would have to be as persistent as a ten-year-old girl.

She, Tolifson and Debi Starr stood at the command post, looking down at the evacuation effort.

The mayor sighed. “The minute the storm hit, I heard the Never Summer was rising. I should’ve closed the damn highway.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said, her tone soft. “The volume of the snowpack melt surprised everybody. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. I know this part of the country. And you’ve never had to deal with anything like this. You just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, Mayor.” She smiled.

His face flushed, and she guessed he was regretting his first impression of her.

Which was not unwarranted. She could be a real bitch when it came to saving lives.

Just then two black SUVs with U.S. government plates appeared on the south side of the levee. They pulled onto the shoulder. Two men in olive-drab military uniforms got out, each a driver of his respective vehicle. They walked to the end of the asphalt and surveyed the scene. Pointing, conversing, nodding.

Dorion’s phone hummed. A number she didn’t recognize.

“Hello?”

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