AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Two hours ago that ruined face had worn a smile. Two hours ago a soggy cigar had been clamped between strong white teeth, and a grin curled the lips. Burl had been that kind of a guy. You couldn’t depress the sonofabitch. No matter how bad things were, he could find something to crack a joke about. He’d always get people to laugh at funerals, even the family members. He killed them when he gave a toast at the union Christmas dinners. Tall, but nowhere near as tall as Jake’s six-eight, and built like a cannonball on bowed legs. A John Goodman kind of guy, bigger than life in every way. And smiling. Always smiling, no matter how bad the shit was coming down, or how late an emergency shift went, or how tough a job was. Always laughing.
Until three teenage girls came out of the woods and ate the smile off his face.
The thought—the memory—was so insanely vivid, playing in his head in HD with surround sound. All the colors, all the sounds.
They had been out here working the storm because the weather service said this was going to be a nut-buster. A hurricane, or whatever you call a storm like that this far inland. A supercell. Something like that. Torrential rains, hurricane-force winds, and an absolute guarantee of flash flood.
This was the storm, everyone said, that would finally break the levees.
Everyone always said that.
They were always wrong.
Until they were right.
Until today.
Jake and his crew were at it before the sun was even up yesterday morning and they kept at it all the way past midnight, working with bulldozers and front-end loaders, including his own big Caterpillar 950H. The one under which he lay. The crew were hard at it all damn day, pushing hundreds of tons of dirt into berms to reinforce the levees, cutting rain runoff lines, trying to help the town get ready for the storm. They needed five times as many men and machines on the job, but they used what they had. Did some good, too. The levees held north of the town proper, which is where everyone said the water would do the most damage. Jake and the guys saved maybe fifty, sixty farms from being flooded by dirty river water.
Below the town line, though, the National Guard was supposed to be doing the same job. And they had more equipment.
But then Magic Marti on the radio said that the levees had collapsed down there. Jake never got all the details, though. Not on that and not on whatever the Christ else was happening over there in Stebbins. Even with headphones on, between the rain and the engine roars, it was too loud to hear much of the news. And reception was for shit. He lost Magic Marti, whose radio show on WNOW came up from over the Maryland line, and when he had the chance, Jake tried to pick up the network news out of Pittsburgh. Got a little of it, but the news guy seemed to be losing his shit. Typical newspeople, he’d thought at the time. They go ass-wild whenever things get really bad, so instead of reporting the news they act like the news is all about them. Like Anderson Cooper standing in the fucking wind during Katrina. They shout a lot so you know they’re taking the big risk, but they don’t say much of anything people can use.
Like today.
Nobody seemed to know what in the blue hell was going on.
Certainly no one on the stations Jake listened to when he could get a signal. And no one he talked to. Lots of cars went by, but everyone was driving so fast you’d have thought the devil was after them.
Then those three girls came out of the woods.
Jake saw them and he was so startled that he almost ran his bucket through the berm he was building. He jerked to a stop to watch.
The girls came walking slowly out of the woods like there was no crisis, no storm, no goddamn ocean of water pounding down on them.
And damn if one of them wasn’t naked.
These were high school girls, or maybe college.
The one on the left wore jeans and a torn sweatshirt, the flaps of it hanging down to expose a blue sports bra and pale skin. The one on the right had a windbreaker on with the logo of some sports team Jake never heard of. Probably a school team. But the one in the middle was as naked as if she was taking a shower instead of walking through the woods where everyone could see her. She was thin, with tiny breasts and visible ribs.
Jake had two reactions.
The guy in him immediately checked out her body.
The man in him became instantly concerned. She was young, naked, vulnerable, and clearly out of her mind. Drugs? Something else?
All three of the girls had marks on them that looked like cuts, but the distance and the cleansing rain made the marks look blue and bloodless.
The girls came straight across a muddy field, negotiating the uneven terrain where heavy-equipment wheels had created an obstacle course of wheel ruts. One by one the other guys killed their engines. They all stared. A few of the men were smiling, and one clown whistled, but the sound was shrill and it died in the air. And these kids were clearly in trouble. That bullshit about construction crews sitting around whistling and acting like they had dicks instead of brains may be true sometimes, but nearly every man here had a family, kids.
Burl was the first guy to do more than sit there and gape.
“Yo!” he cried as he jumped down from the cab of his Cat D9. “Yo, kids … what the hell’s going on? Yo
u girls okay? What are you doing out here?”
He kept up a string of questions as he jogged heavily through the mud to intercept them. The girls paused for a moment—just a moment—as he drew close, and it seemed to Jake that in the cold and misty rain they’d been unaware of him until he spoke, until he moved.
