Page 41 of South of Nowhere

“Now!”

“All right. Geez.”

Colter saw the big vehicle turn.

While Tolifson, Officer Starr and Dorion ran to their vehicles, Colter did his motocross run again, straight down the hill.

He nearly wiped out in the “puddle” at the bottom; it was a foot deep. But he yanked back on the bars and lifted the front wheel just before it slammed into the far side, and he went over. He drove thirty or forty miles per hour until the mud slowed him and he had to stop. He didn’t need to set the Yamaha down. It got stuck straight up in the goo.

He jogged to the retaining pond. Bubbles? Impossible to tell. Water continued to cascade from the levee into the pond and then on into the spillway.

With a groan of the powerful diesels, the fire truck approached. A truck of this sort would weigh twenty thousand to thirty thousand pounds. The engines were massive.

Behind it were Dorion’s SUV and the police department’s pickup, driven by Tolifson. Debi Starr was in the passenger seat next to him.

Colter gestured the muddy pumper to a spot where there was the most access to the pond.

Buddy, a balding and rangy forty-year-old in overalls, climbed from the cab.

Colter asked, “What’s in your tank?”

“Eight hundred gallons.”

“And capacity?”

A hesitation.

Tolifson muttered, “Tell him, Buddy. The man’s in charge. My Lord. It’s not trade secrets.”

“A thousand gallons per minute.”

“Your attack line?”

“One and a half inches.”

“So you can pump about six minutes’ worth.”

Buddy frowned in curiosity. “Well, that’s right. Say, you fire service?”

Colter said nothing about the fact their father’s survival education was, to put it simply, comprehensive. He said, “Nozzle the line and bring it with you.”

“Whatever you say, boss.” His attitude had flipped, fast, one-eighty. The man fitted a brass nozzle to the metal end of the canvas attack line and dragged it from the spool, jogging toward the retention pond.

Colter called to Tolifson and said, “Have the team up there drop a dozen sandbags and get them over here.”

Without questioning why, Tolifson fired up his pickup and, with Starr in the vehicle, sped to the south side of the levee. A moment later, the larger of the corporals and a massive townsman were flinging the bags over the side. They cleared the spillway and landed with a sucking thud in the mud.

Colter looked to the top of the levee, noting where Louis Bell’s pickup truck was still stuck. The family’s Suburban had been behind it, and like the pickup and the blue sports car, the driver of the SUV would have accelerated to try to beat the collapsing roadway behind it. Using the pickup as a reference point, he estimated where the family’s SUV would have ended up.

He pointed to a spot in the center of the pond.

“Buddy,” Colter called to the fireman. “What you’re going to do is shoot into the water there.” He pointed. “And zigzag. We’re looking for an SUV.”

Buddy blinked. “The family! They’re here, not the river! Never thought of that! Yessir.”

The truck arrived with the bags and Tolifson got out and dropped the gate on the bed.

Colter called, “Keep them there for now.”

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