Page 15 of Hurricane Irene

Team 2 followed what should have been a drainage canal and emerged in the drowned yard of a school. A basketball goal stood from the water like a gallows. Carl looked at the rim.

“Two points if you clear the snake.” There was, in fact, a snake coiled on the backboard. Hunter backed away without attempting the shot.

They found Mrs. Bellamy at 1234 hours, standing in waist-deep water beneath her raised house and beating mud from a rug with a broom. She was eighty-two, furious, and entirely uninterested in rescue.

“My son’s coming,” she said.

Nathan checked the list. Her son lived forty miles away, across two closed highways. Joseph showed her the satellite phone. Adam showed her the weather notice. Carl pointed at the alligator watching from behind a floating trash bin. Mrs. Bellamy looked at the animal.

“That’s Clarence.”

“Clarence looks hungry,” Carl said.

“Clarence always looks judgmental.” Hunter offered his hand. After a long stare, she took it.

“Just out of curiosity, Ms. Bellamy, is Clarence related to Alvin?” asked Carl.

“Distant cousins. Or so Irene said.” She said nothing else, just staring straight ahead as Clarence followed their boat.

At 1310 hours, Team 3 heard shouting. It came and went with the wind, too faint to place. Kiel shut down the motor. Five men listened. The bayou ticked and dripped around them. Then came three sharp calls from the east.

Fitch pointed through the trees, but the chart showed no residence there. Liffey climbed onto the forward seat and saw a flash of blue tarp. They pushed into a cut barely wider than the boat, ducking branches, Robbie sounding off the depth, Duncan sawing through a pine top. Halfway in, the hull struck wire.

The wire tightened around the lower unit and pulled the stern sideways. Water climbed the transom in quick brown gulps. Kiel killed the engine before the prop could wind them under, but the current kept levering the boat toward a submerged trunk.

Fitch clipped into a safety line, put a knife between his teeth, and went over the side. The water swallowed him to the shoulders.

“If anything bites me,” he said, “tell it I’m union or I’m a friend of Alvins.”

“You’re not union,” Duncan said.

“Then tell it I’m expensive.”

The wire was barbed, pulled from a pasture fence, and it sawed against Fitch’s glove while something bumped his shin below the surface. He cut one strand. The boat dropped another inch. He cut the second, and the tension released so violently he slammed backward against the hull. The shouting came again, closer now—and stopped in the middle of a word.

The blue tarp covered a hunting platform wedged high between cypress trunks. On it sat a man with a broken ankle and a woman holding a laundry basket. Inside the basket were four sleeping newborn puppies. Their mother paced the platform, growling at the boat. The couple had climbed there when their camp broke apart.

“We heard engines yesterday,” the woman said. “Couldn’t make anybody hear us.” Kiel looked at the black water below them and then at the sky.

“We hear you now.” The dog did not consider this sufficient reassurance.

Liffey rigged a rope cradle while Robbie held the bow under the platform. They lowered the injured man first, his face gray with pain. Duncan took the basket. The mother dog followed only after Fitch climbed up and let her bite his glove for ten straight seconds.

“Negotiations concluded,” he said, lowering her.

Rain began—not the next storm, only a narrow shower passing through. The drops struck leaves and water so loudly the world disappeared. Team 3 waited beneath the trees until the curtain thinned, carrying seven living things where there had been none on the map.

By 1400 hours, nineteen residents had been accounted for and eleven evacuated. The fire landing served as a transfer point. Medics worked beneath a canvas awning tied to a dump truck. Volunteers labeled pets with masking tape. The parrot had learned to say, ‘watch the prop,’ though not always at useful moments.

Luke’s team exchanged passengers for fuel, grabbed dry blankets, and went back out. Nobody sat longer than necessary. Beyond the landing, clouds stacked over the trees in dark ledges, and thunder muttered too far away to count.

The unchecked list had narrowed to five names at three addresses. One was a seasonal camp, probably empty. One belonged to brothers who trapped crawfish beyond the west basin. The last was a widow named Elise Darden, whose house stood near an old oil-service canal.

Team 4 had tried the canal and found it blocked by two barges driven together in the storm.

Team 7 believed they could approach from the outside.

Team 6 was closest to the brothers.