Landfall (11 page)

Maggie raised the shotgun just a hair. “That doesn’t—” she started, but then she heard a whining, almost keening sound, like someone slashing a bow across the strings of a violin, and a section of sheet metal or aluminum, maybe a piece of someone’s storage shed, came whipping through the air.

Boudreaux turned to look when she did, but it wasn’t soon enough to get out of its way. It banged into and across him at the midsection, then was flung into the water beside him, where it was quickly carried away in the fast-moving water.

When Maggie looked back at Boudreaux, he had his mouth open as though he was about to say something, and then, all at once, his white button-down shirt was flooded with red, red that soaked the shirt from the inside, just above his waist, from one hip to the other, with remarkable speed.

Boudreaux didn’t seem to notice it until he saw her face, then he looked down and placed a palm on his stomach.

Maggie opened her mouth to yell a warning as a fresh surge from the creek cascaded into the yard, carrying with it clumps of debris. In an instant, the water was above Boudreaux’s knees, and just as he looked up at Maggie, part of an old railroad tie bumped into his leg and Boudreaux went to his knees.

The water pushed him over to one side, then face first into the swirl, all in the span of just a few seconds. Maggie took one step toward the stairs, then froze as she saw Boudreaux get swept away toward the chicken yard, then disappear altogether beneath the water.

She turned around and ran back into the house, skidding on the now much larger puddle in front of the door. She looked around for a moment, then spotted the man’s cell phone on the kitchen counter and ran over to it.

She flipped open the phone, tapped his call log and looked at the number he’d dialed 17 times. She didn’t recognize it. She tapped it, and it was answered on the first ring.

“I still got an hour of driving,” a woman’s raised voice said. “I’m going as fast as I can!”

“Who is this?” Maggie asked evenly.

There was a long pause before the woman’s rough voice came back across the line. “Who is
this
?” She sounded panicked.

“Maggie Redmond,” Maggie answered.

“You murdered our son, you whore!” the woman yelled. “You killed my Richard!”

Maggie let out a slow breath. Ricky Alessi. This crazy woman had raised the meth dealer who’d tried to kill Maggie, and now she was raising poor Grace’s kids. She was about to ask where they were when the woman yelled at her.

“Where’s Dewitt?”

“Giving an account of himself to God,” Maggie said. “You want to be next, Mrs. Alessi? Keep coming. I’ll blow a hole in you big enough for me to crawl through.”

“You evil little—” the woman’s scream was cut off and there was nothing. Maggie looked at the phone. It was dead. She allowed herself one second to be furious at herself for wasting the last few seconds of its battery life, then slammed the phone down on the counter.

Maggie spun around and nearly trod upon Stoopid, who had come into the kitchen to give her an update on the weather, their situation, or his desire to be fed. “Move, Stoopid!” Maggie snapped, as she hopped over him, and he turned and flailed onto to the bottom rail of the kitchen island.

Maggie ran back out onto the deck, shutting the door behind her to keep Stoopid from running outside.

She scanned the front and left side yards for a few moments, constantly wiping the rain from her face, before she spotted a flash of white over by the garden.

Boudreaux was hung up against one of the raised beds. He was partially on his side, one elbow up on the topmost railroad tie, but his face was in the water.

Maggie half ran, half slid down the deck stairs and jumped into the water. It was up to the bottom of her backside, and she was amazed at how powerfully it pushed against her legs. They’d had flooding before, but not like this, not this deep and this fast-moving. Not in her memory.

She had to alternate wading with the current and dragging her feet in order to remain standing, but she still came close to falling several times, as she stumbled against a rock or a hump in the dirt. At one point, something slammed against her calves, and she almost went down.

She had to stop periodically, turn her body, and force her way diagonally toward the garden again, as the water sought to push her past it. She had a vision of herself, running against her will with the water, into the woods and on out to the river beyond them.

She finally reached Boudreaux, and she tried to brace herself against the raised bed with one hip as she bent down and turned him over. His eyes were closed.

“Boudreaux!” she yelled over the noise of the storm. It was the first time in her life that she hadn’t addressed him as ‘Mr.’

“Get up!” she yelled at him, pulling on the shoulders of his shirt. His eyelids fluttered a moment, then he opened his eyes. He didn’t seem to see her at first.

“Move! I need you to get up!”

He finally focused on her, raised one arm up out of the water and pointed beyond her. “Get inside,” he said, and she read his lips more than she actually heard it.

She leaned away from the raised bed, tried to plant her feet on the slick ground, and bent to slide her wrists under his arms. “Get the hell up!” she yelled again.

He struggled to get his feet underneath him, as she struggled to pull him upward without losing her own footing. The water was tugging at her lower legs like a thousand insistent toddlers, and she knew that if one foot left the ground, they both would.

Once she got Boudreaux to his feet, she was thrown for a moment by the sight of his midsection. His shirt, still mostly tucked in, had been rent almost from one side of his waist to the other. She wanted to spread the fabric open to the see the wound, but she was afraid she’d find it discouraging and that this would only distract her from getting him to the house. The amount of blood, and the fact that it was still seeping through the shirt and had soaked the top of his trousers, let her know all she really needed to know at this point: the help he needed was beyond her limited training.

“Where’s your phone?” she yelled over the wind.

He had one arm draped over her neck, and raised the hand of the other one to pat his empty shirt pocket, then shook his head at her.

“Never mind. Let’s go,” she said.

She’d thought moving with the water was difficult. She could see immediately that working against it was going to be much harder. The house was very slightly uphill from the chicken yard and garden area, which she supposed helped make the flow so fast. She also knew that the water was not only making its way downhill, but also back to its own source. Several hundred yards through the woods in back, the river curved around and made its way to what would eventually, in five miles or so, be Scipio Creek, and then the bay.

Maggie had always loved that she had water on both one side and the back of her land, but at the moment, the flood water on her property was essentially connecting the two, and this wasn’t a good thing. One way or another, everything was going to flow to the river, whether it wanted to or not.

M
aggie bent at the waist, leaned into the wind and took the first step back toward the house. It had occasionally seemed like a bit of a hike to the house from the garden or chicken yard, mainly when she was exhausted or Stoopid was throwing himself in her way in a fit of nerves or agitation. However, the hundred feet or so that she and Boudreaux now needed to traverse seemed like a great distance indeed.

Apparently, everything was far away if you needed to get there dragging a half-dead man through thigh-high water that was moving in the other direction.

The wind and the rain wanted to push them away from the house, as well, and Maggie almost appreciated the irony of her loving storms so much. She’d never had to fight one so hard. She’d always just prepared for them as much as she’d needed to, then hunkered down to wait them out and enjoy them as much as she could.

She’d always felt somewhat guilty and secretive about her love of bad weather, especially after storms like Katrina, but she couldn’t help welcoming a good pounding rain, or the rumble of thunder overhead. Some part of her mind that wasn’t preoccupied with survival wondered now if she would lose that pleasure.

Boudreaux spoke to her a few times as they fought their way toward the house, but his words were lost in the wind, and overwritten by her single-minded focus on moving forward. Every time Maggie looked up at the deck stairs, she felt like they should be closer than they were, but they were at least making progress.

Maggie could feel her legs trembling from the strain, and this seemed incongruous with all of the hours that she had spent in her lifetime, running out into the ocean against the surf. She’d always loved bodysurfing, and she and her parents, and she and David, had spent countless days at Fort Walton Beach or Destin, running out into the surf, then riding it back in, from sunrise to sunset, almost without rest.

How was it that the same legs she’d had then were trying to let her down now, after just a few minutes of work? If the situation weren’t so serious, she might have laughed at the idea that she could handle the surf at Orange Beach, but couldn’t handle the surf in her own front yard.

When Maggie felt her foot hit the old brick fire pit, she knew they were getting close, but looking up into the rain was excruciating and nearly pointless, so she kept her head down, and she and Boudreaux stumbled into it and stepped over the other side.

It was then that Maggie heard someone yell “Mom,” though it seemed to come from a long way away.

She looked up and squinted into the liquid needles, and her heart flipped over a few times. Sky and Kyle were on the deck stairs, standing at the water line, about three steps up. Sky had tied together the ropes that had been used to bind their wrists, then tied one end to the bottom of one of the balusters.

“Get back inside!” Maggie yelled, and it seemed pointless. She could almost feel her voice whipping past her own ears and into the woods behind her.

Sky either heard her anyway, or chose to look up at that moment. “Mom!” she yelled. She was hurriedly tying a bowline knot at the loose end of the rope to make a loop.

“Get inside!” Maggie yelled. She and Boudreaux were only about fifteen feet from the stairs, but it seemed like a mile, and the water wanted to push them along the side of the house and to the back. She felt as though she were pushing against an automatic door that wanted to shut itself.

Sky ignored Maggie and, one hand gripping the loop she’d made, she jumped into the water. It nearly pushed her off of her feet, but she managed to right herself, and once the rope had played out to its full six feet or so, she stretched her free arm out to her mother.

The idea that Sky would not be out of the water until she was spurred Maggie on, and she pushed against the water with her legs. She wouldn’t look away from Sky long enough to look at Boudreaux, but since she felt like she was dragging him, she thought he must have fallen unconscious.

She did glance beyond Sky to Kyle, and the sight of him standing on the stairs, gripping the rail with both hands as the wind and rain whipped at him, was terrifying but mobilizing at the same time. She would get there, and she would get the kids back into the safety of the house, and after she had clutched them to her, she would scream at them.

Suddenly, the water was higher, reaching Maggie’s waist, even though she knew she was moving to higher ground with every step. She looked up, and saw that the water seemed to be moving faster, as well. Her brain was still working this out when she saw her Jeep begin to move forward.

It took a second for what she was seeing to fully register. The Jeep was slowly moving toward the deck stairs. Kyle saw it, too, and looked over at her, his eyes impossibly wide. Maggie saw him turn as though to run up the stairs and she screamed at him.

“Kyle, jump!”

Kyle was an amazing kid. He was kind and he was funny and he was incredibly smart, but if Maggie could change one thing about his character or behavior, it would be his tendency to be so distracted that she had to repeat commands several times before he acted on them.

This one time, she didn’t have to.

If Maggie had had time to thank God, she would have done it as she watched Kyle leap from the bottom of the stairs into the water. He was almost shoulder deep when he landed, but landed not too far behind Sky, who already had a hand stretched out to him. The water started to push him past her, but he grasped her hand and swung around in front of her before he found his footing. Then the Jeep bumped into the staircase.

Even at the slow pace it was traveling, between the water and the one loose piling, the Jeep’s impact was enough to take the stairs down. Maggie and Sky watched them tumble, watched the railing tilt over sideways before breaking in two and falling over into the water.

As they did, Maggie saw Sky’s arm jerk violently, and realized Sky was still holding the length of rope.

“Sky, let go!” she yelled, and Sky looked at her hand like it was someone else’s, then let go of the rope. The portion of railing that the rope had been tied to spun towards the kids, then past them, nearly clipping Maggie on its way toward the garden.