Page 62 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

62.

The gunshots had started three or four minutes ago.

Mary Dove Shaw instinctively knew they were at first coming from small arms, being traded back and forth over her head and that of Mrs. Petaluma.

Some rounds were from the hill to her left, where the command post, her daughter and younger son were. And some from the right where she could just see the tops of a few black SUVs. Then longer rolling booms from a hunting rifle, the shooter on the SUV side, hidden somewhere in the trees.

“Stay low,” she said to Mrs. Petaluma, who nodded. Her eyes revealed not panic but concern. A bit of anger too. She was the sort of woman, Mary Dove assessed, who did not like her life to stray far from where she had tucked it into a high-fence corral.

They crouched behind the open driver’s side door of Mary Dove’s pickup.

A lull in the gunfire.

Broken by an altogether different—and more horrifying—sound.

Her eyes, and her companion’s, cut fast to the Hinowah levee.

Whose midsection blew outward under the force of powerful explosives.

A huge U-shaped portion from the top to the river bottom gave way, sluicing downward, tumbling into town, an avalanche of black mud and rock and water.

“Shit,” Mrs. Petaluma muttered.

Mary Dove looked for cover, and finding none, turned her eyes back to the earthwork. She couldn’t help it—she marveled as the huge thing collapsed, dissolving, a mythical animal dying.

And at the wall of water that cascaded out directly for them.

There was nothing to do.

Nowhere to hide.

The flood would strike them in fifteen seconds.

Snap their necks probably, so powerful would be the force.

Certainly, if that was not their fate, it would slam them into any number of the blunt objects that sat behind them.

She had a fast memory of Ashton Shaw lecturing the children on surviving shark attacks. “It was simple,” he said. “Never go in the ocean.”

Ah, as troubled as the man was, he certainly had a sparkle from time to time.

How she missed him…

She glanced toward where Dorion and Colter were, hoping for a last look at her children.

No. she couldn’t see them.

Ah, well.

She braced for the impact.

Then something odd happened.

The wall of water deflated.

As it surged into town, the depth dropped fast, from ten feet to five to three to one.

The flood became an inch-deep pool, the sort that might ease into your backyard after an ordinary rainstorm.

They regarded each other, and then Mary Dove scanned the scene in front of them.

She understood what had happened.

There had been two sets of explosions. The first had destroyed the levee and started the flood. But almost simultaneously another explosion had brought down a wall of rock upstream, filling the narrow notch the Never Summer flowed through just north of Hinowah. It effectively created an impromptu dam, cutting off the current entirely before it even got to the levee.

No time for elation, though. After only a moment, the gunfire began again.