Page 11 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)
11.
Shaw was driving quickly, but not motocross fast.
A decision dictated by the slick surface of Route 13, south of Hinowah.
Tomas Martinez, HFD chief and town council chairman, was ten miles south and heading north toward him, on the way to the geotagged spot; Shaw’s drone and float had spotted something.
The camera offered only a vague image of a discoloration in the water, which he hoped might be the roof of a vehicle otherwise embraced by the mud of the riverbed. The radar, similarly, showed nothing beyond a shape.
Had the family escaped? Were they currently hiking through the woods or even along the shoulder of 13 somewhere for him soon to see, drenched and exhausted, waving him down?
Martinez had discovered nothing on his search so far; he had had to rely on his eyes and ears and much of the Never Summer was hidden by trees and brambles and its course created a constant rush of noise that would obscure all but the loudest shouts.
And what of his calculation about oxygen?
From what he’d seen on the drone images, the vehicle might have been sealed in mud up to a point, but above that, water would leak in.
Had they drowned or suffocated?
Both would be hard ways to die, but suffocation was slower and accompanied by the agony of CO 2 poisoning.
He put those thoughts aside and continued the drive. He was one mile out from the geotagged spot.
He reflected on Dorion’s decision to pull off the other searchers and rely on Shaw’s drone-floatie system, alongside Martinez’s physical search.
Shaw himself might have gone with a larger search party, but she made the call that an evacuation was more important.
He couldn’t argue.
Like rewards-seeking, disaster response required difficult decisions.
Besides, having seized the operation from the out-of-his-league mayor/chief, it was now her show.
He took a call from Martinez, tapping the hands-free bud to answer.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Shaw? I’m about seven miles south of where you had that hit on your drone. I can be there in about ten minutes. Are you there yet?”
“About two minutes.”
“Does it look like a vehicle from the camera?”
“Likely, but impossible to tell for sure.”
“Just to let you know, I’ve searched all the way down to where the Never Summer meets the Little Silver at Fort Pleasant. There’s flooding but it’s a broad watershed, only four or five feet deep, even now. Definitely no vehicles.”
Moving the needle a few degrees closer to the likelihood that the ambiguous square on Shaw’s video feed was indeed the family’s SUV.
“Almost there. I’ll call you.”
He drove over a bridge and braked fast; he was close to the flashing red dot, to his left, fifty feet through the dense woods, the ground swampy. Under the bridge, however, ran a shallow stream from the forest into the Never Summer. He skidded to the right, nosing down a hill, and stopped on the bank of the stream. He could hike along the bank to the geotagged spot and avoid the tangle of the plants. He killed the engine, dropped the bike and sprinted east toward the river.
He thought of the rescue gear in his backpack. The diamond-edged circular saw, diamond-tipped drill, steel glass-break tool, hoses, a scuba pony tank holding nineteen cubic feet of air, enough to keep someone alive for twenty, thirty minutes. There were regulators too—mouthpieces. But that would require cutting a larger hole in the roof and the water would pour in, drowning them. It would have to be a hole the size of the tube—a half inch.
Hurrying through rushes and muscling aside branches, negotiating the slippery rocks as best he could, he made his way to the river.
Yes, the glint was of metal, exposed briefly as the waves dropped, then vanishing again underneath.
He forced his way through an infuriating tangle of brush and reeds and saplings and clabbered onto the shore.
Breathing hard, Shaw looked down.
He sighed.
Why on earth would someone go to the trouble to toss away a refrigerator into a river?
Why not go the extra distance and dispose of it in the county dump?
And not waste his time.
He texted Tomas Martinez, copying Dorion.
False alarm. I’m continuing south after the drone. Should meet you soon.
He received back two texts.
Thomas’s was a simple:
K
His sister’s read:
Got the txt. Army engineers here, sandbagging starting soon. Bringing in sealant to shore up levee as soon as weather’s clear enough to fly choppers.
Now it was Shaw who gave the single letter acknowledgment.
He started back up the gulley, under the bridge, getting a whiff of the mold and fungus that were coating the old stones. Then to the Yamaha.
Shaw was no more than four feet from the bike when he heard two things.
One was the snap of a twig behind him.
The other was that nearly imperceptible sound that someone makes drawing a breath when they’re about to swing a deadly weapon—say, a pipe or baseball bat—your way.