Page 44 of South of Nowhere

As the boy was passed through the freezing stream of water, he began to revive and gasped at the freezing bath. “Mom…”

“I’ll…be…there…” Her words stumbled out before stopping. She blinked fiercely against the flashlight beam. They would have spent the last few hours in the dark. He helped her into the front seat and then handed her up to Buddy, far stronger than his slim build suggested. He simply plucked her from the front seat.

“My husband…George. My…”

She muttered some more words, but by then she was outside.

Colter shone his light into the back, playing the beam over the interior, noting that they had sealed the door and window seams with fingernail polish.

This too was smart.

Improvised survival techniques.

The water inside was now up to the bottoms of the seats, slowly rising. Toys and luggage and clothes and boxes and food and cups floated everywhere. In the rear was a man lying on his back, feet pointed upward.

Colter crawled closer. Was he unconscious?

Or dead?

“George!”

He couldn’t get close enough to the man’s head or chest to see if he was breathing or otherwise responsive.

The water was rising fast. Soon, Colter would be in danger himself. If the man was in fact deceased, Colter would have to escape.

But he needed to know for certain.

Colter tugged the man’s right shoe off. He used the handle of his unopened knife and ran it firmly along the underside of the foot. The maneuver, known as the Babinski reflex, will elicit a response in even comatose patients—though not with the dead.

His big toe curled and the others spread wide.

He was alive.

“George!”

He grunted and shifted.

“I…Sonja!”

“Your family’s okay, George. You’re okay. But we have to get out of here. It’s going to flood any minute.”

“I…” He began to cough. And, Colter believed, sob.

He was not groggy in the same way the others were, and Colter guessed he had not taken any of the pills, leaving those for his family. He had probably just passed out from the depleted oxygen and carbon dioxide poisoning.

“You’re going to have to move on your own.”

The man began to work his way over the second row of seats. Once there, Colter could help him. As they made their way into the front row, Colter noted that he was hampered by holding something in his right hand.

“That?” Colter asked. “Just drop it.”

The man stared at what he gripped and Colter realized it was a wadded-up bouquet of plastic film—the sort that dry cleaning is wrapped in.

Ah, he understood.

He recalled Tolifson’s words about Mrs. Petaluma’s possibly choosing not to go on in life without her house and garden.

That was an end Colter simply could not reconcile.

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