The Surface, page 30
Now the crew rowed the last leg of the trip to Yost, in hopes that some of the people in the nearby guest cottages could have made it into the upper floors of the dorm. Cage began to push a little harder as Holly urged them on. “I definitely see it. It's right there!”
Maybe she saw it because she knew where it was on the GPS. But she hadn't steered them wrong before, and they had to get these students. Cage pushed harder on the oar.
So far, no one else had gone overboard. And though it wasn't rational to think they would do so, the fear remained in every beat of Cage’s heart. He was confident the others felt it too. This was virtually the same crew that had gone out the first time, though they’d replaced Sky and Roxie with Mickey and Chester.
Ginnifer had gone out with the B crew, but first she’d fiddled with all the devices, pulling them out of the plastic as they came off each person. She replaced all the batteries and reset them to make a larger electric field.
“It should hopefully work better,” she announced as she gestured with the one in her hand. She clearly felt awful that the first iteration hadn’t saved Sky’s life like it should have.
It could work worse, for all Cage new, but it was all they had. And they did know that when Sky went overboard—when the device was underwater—it had worked.
So he rowed until he heard the faint shouts and began to see the outlines of the students standing on the roof of Yost dorm. They waved their arms and jumped up and down, scaring him as they came perilously close to slipping off the slanted roof and plunging into the water.
“Over here, over here!”
69
“I think you're right.” Joule had stopped rowing. They were almost halfway back to Reservoir Road, and she was counting that they'd picked up another batch of students without any mishaps as a win.
“What did she say?” Mickey’s deep voice questioned from behind her. Still rowing, he didn’t miss a beat, despite leaning forward to hear what Holly had said to Joule.
Joule leaned back and repeated what Holly had told her. “We think the rain is getting lighter.”
“Oh my god.” Mickey’s voice held a hard swath of awe in it and she saw in her peripheral vision, as his face tilted upward to look at the sky, there was maybe a little bit of light in the distance.
“Lighter rain” didn't mean too much in the grand scheme of things. They still had to have several of the students they’d picked up at Yost dorm bailing the boat. It was an ongoing process. Bailing kept them light—the work of bailing meant that those using the oars had an easier time pushing the boat forward.
Hope bloomed in her chest.
She punched it down with every stroke she took.
Joule could not afford to get excited about something that was not guaranteed. She could not afford to shift her attention. None of them could.
Even so, she heard the sound ripple through the boat, excitement at Holly’s words.
“The rain is letting up.”
“Look, you can see it over there. The sky is brighter.”
She couldn't resist turning her head and looking when the rest of them did. And sure enough, a line seemed to cross the sky with the dark rain over their heads and to their right, a gray that was merely paler. But it was enough to offer hope.
“It's your turn.” Chester surprised her by shoving the GPS at Joule and making motions with his hands to take the oar from her.
Joule slid to one side, her butt splashing into the several inches of water in the base of the boat as she let her knees slowly unfold. She’d been nearly locked and cramped into position. Though she'd made sure everyone took turns rowing on both sides of the boat, it still wasn't easy work. It had left her aching in her bones in a way that felt far beyond her years. Then again, all of this had been beyond her years.
She told herself that the pale light off in the distance didn't matter, and she crawled toward the front of the boat. Holding the phone with the GPS, she checked it out for a minute, getting familiar with the layout where they were. The phone was not her own and was connected through USB to yet another backup charger that Ginnifer had made sure was working.
Joule had become more impressed with Ginnifer as the days went by. Marcus had tried to save her—and honestly, had probably succeeded. Ginnifer would most likely be dead without his intervention. He shouldn't have died from the venom, but he had. Or maybe it had been something else. They wouldn't know for some time.
While Joule wanted to believe that it was Ginnifer’s fault for getting bitten by a rattlesnake in the first place, no one had predicted at that point just how wild the wildlife would be.
And Ginnifer had surprised her yet again by coming out and rowing with B Crew. She’d insisted that she was healthy enough, and she wanted to do her part. Joule wasn't quite ready to trust her roommate fully, but she was grudgingly stepping back from her anger. It was hard to lose Marcus for someone she didn’t like very much.
“A little harder on the left,” she called out, her finger pointed in the correct direction in front of her. She stayed crossed legged, down in the water, because she simply couldn't sit on her knees another moment. “Aim to the right.”
Her fingertip did not cross the edge of the boat when she pointed. Nothing did anymore. When they put the new students in, they trained them quickly to stay within the boundaries and smacked down anybody who dared to reach over the side.
As the person who was navigating, she was on fin alert. Though she did see several, she also saw what she thought were black, swimming snakes. The last thing they needed was another threat in the water. The rain might be clearing, but the water was never going to be safe.
They were passing the halfway mark when she spotted the large building on their right. That was their landmark. She geared them around it, working on not getting stuck in any trees.
“Holy shit,” Cage said, his voice feeling closer than where he sat in the boat.
“I know. The water level is definitely dropping.”
“Maybe they opened some locks or something,” one of the other voices in the boat offered a theory.
Joule didn't think that the Bay itself had locks that could be adjusted, but maybe the rivers and waterways around here did. Maybe it had been enough to change the levels. When they picked up each batch of students, the water had been noticeably lower to the roofline. Both buildings were the same number of stories, so the water should have been similar in height as it had been at the Freshman Sophomore College dorm. And yet, they'd had to have students carefully hang off the edge of the roof and drop into the boat.
It had petrified Joule, having them drop in like that. The boat had rocked and threatened to eject students each time someone landed. But they’d all made it, and the drop meant the water was at least seven or eight feet lower.
Now, the buildings jutting up around them showed more above the surface than the last time they’d been by. They could see the top edges of the windows on the upper floors.
The water was definitely going down.
She looked forward again, still aiming them the last leg of the way toward Reservoir Road, when she heard a droning, cutting-type sound on her right.
She found herself trying to keep her eyes on navigation and yet wondering what the mechanical-bee-like noise might be. It wasn’t something new in the boat that a student had brought in. She ignored it until the tiny dark patch that had formed up and to the right became something more than just a blob in her vision and Joule saw what made the sound.
It was a helicopter.
70
“Are? You? Safe?”
The words had come through as individual syllable chunks, loud and grating over the helicopter’s bullhorn.
The next set of instructions told them to wave their arms for “yes” and stay still for “no.” Cage and the others lifted their arms and made bold motions to the helicopter. The students they had just picked up were perhaps the most enthusiastic of all.
The bullhorn cut on again, a sharp click cutting through the air before the words reached him. “Do you have a safe place to go?”
Again, the entire boat erupted, this time, led by the crew. The students they had just picked up had been told about the Winchester house, and the Tamblyn house, but had not yet seen land.
“Good.” The bullhorn word was bracketed by clicks again. But then the next part came in a more conversational tone. Words flowing together as the voice from the helicopter attempted to explain that it had medical injuries on board to attend to, that the Coast Guard was going to leave them to row on their own way.
Cage, for one was glad. He didn't think it would be safer for the helicopter to try to medivac any of them up in the basket. They'd all watched, stunned, as the helicopter moved and hovered over the house that pushed up out of the water just ahead of them.
First, people emerged from the windows, leaning out and waving their arms. It had taken a good while for the helicopter crew to instruct them to go back inside and cut a hole in the roof.
The little boat’s crew had watched with bated breath as inside, someone used an axe to chop through the roof. Then five people crawled out of the hole, birthing themselves onto the slick, wet shingles. One by one, they were hauled up in the basket as it swayed precariously in the wind.
That had to be terrifying, Cage thought. They’d listened as the helicopter spoke back and forth, asking how many there were in the house. What were medical injuries they needed tended. One of the people looked as if he was in very bad shape, one leg covered in blood and maybe not fully attached. He didn’t move well, either.
The chopper hovered low and close enough to the surface of the water that it was blowing their tiny boat farther and farther away, farther and farther off track. But they'd waited in case something happened, in case somebody rolled off the roof. They were closer than the helicopter, all of them ready to row hard and fast if something went wrong.
Still, Cage wasn't sure that they could save someone with the rotor wash constantly blowing against them. But they'd all agreed to stay and try. The helicopter crew finally got all the people on board and said goodbye to the boat. The chopper and its heavy noise receded farther and farther into the distance until the chopper was just a change in the gray, and then gone.
“Joule.” He looked at his sister. “Shall we head on?”
She nodded, and slowly she directed them all to begin rowing in a slightly different direction, this time to make up for how far they'd been blown off course. But the hope that surged in his heart was real now. The rain must be lighter, because the helicopter was out.
They saw two more rescue teams out and about before they ran the boat up on the road to the Winchester’s house.
“Look!” His sister jolted in her seat as the front end of the boat ground itself into the pavement. “We're much farther down than we were last time.”
The walk will be longer, he thought. But Cage welcomed walking on pavement over rocking in the flimsy little inflatables any day.
When they had returned from the first trip, they’d instituted a new protocol. Two people took the newest arrivals as a group and walked them up the road to the Winchesters. The goal was to get them dry and fed as quickly as possible. The rest remained behind to man the boats.
As they deflated each one enough to get it out of the water until the B Crew came along, Cage noticed that his sister—for whatever reason—looked exhausted this time. Was she coming down with something? He wanted to send her on ahead, but he knew that those who went ahead were already heavily armed and he struggled to think of an excuse to change protocol for her.
In the end, he didn’t say anything and just went about the task of securing the boats. He kept his hand on the gun he still carried. The water might be receding, but it didn't mean the wildlife was any less hungry. And he didn't want to be separated from his sister.
71
Joule woke slowly, eyes peeling open one at a time.
She couldn't quite focus, so she lay there. The soft sounds of the bedroom that they’d decided to camp in eased her into the world around her.
It was dark. The windows were still barricaded. While she knew that hadn't really made a difference before, she’d realized when she went to sleep that it did now. The world was getting brighter.
Rolling her head over slowly, she looked to the upper edge of the glass where they hadn't quite managed to cover the entire window. And, yes, light was coming in. She tossed back the covers and stood up, her knees still protesting from having knelt in the boat for so long. Her shoulders whined from too many strokes with the oar. Switching sides had helped, but her muscles still balked from doing work they weren't used to.
She looked at the small phone by her bed. It was hers. There was something comforting about carrying it. The generator Ginnifer had set up was doing its job and keeping them all charged. They'd found more gasoline when Mickey and Chester had gone out, and they managed to keep the little machine chugging along.
They found and plugged in a high-efficiency/low-output space heater for use in this room, something they'd been able to do by venting the generator outside. It would have been easier to leave the generator itself outside and run extension cords, but Ginnifer and Mickey had fought hard to keep it inside. They’d argued that they didn’t want anyone to have to go out into the rain and the wildlife if it needed any troubleshooting. They’d won that argument.
Joule frowned at the time. It looked too late in the day. Had A Crew gone out again without her?
Tip-toeing to the door, she tried to not wake up the sleeping students. They'd probably dozed some while they’d been on the roof, but the snores and the deep breaths now told her they'd not had much real rest in days. Still, she dashed away, afraid she would find her brother gone. But when she stepped into the living room, she saw him immediately, sitting on the couch, staring at his phone. Likely reading.
“We missed our shift,” she told him.
“I know. I got up and Kimura and I talked. Everyone else was asleep.” He stopped for a moment, tipping his head as though thinking what to tell her. “And, well, we decided not to go back out.”
When she frowned at him, mad that the decision had been made without her, Cage raised his hand and pointed to the top of the window.
“Holy shit,” Joule said. The living room faced a different direction than the bedroom window. From here, the world outside appeared practically sunny. “Did I sleep through the end of the rain?”
Cage shook his head. “It's still coming down. But it's so much lighter that it seemed like things are changing.”
Joule was still startled by the idea. Unless the water was gone, people would still be stranded. She was opening her mouth to protest. Surely there were more students waiting. Every time they'd gone out, they'd come back with a boatful of people.
“B Crew went again. After they got back, they hauled the boats all the way in. They said it was getting more difficult with the water receding. There are new currents and eddies, and they are getting stronger as the water level goes down. It's a much farther walk to get to the water now. B Crew said they had to hike almost a mile up the road.”
Joule felt her jaw drop. When they’d first arrived, the water had been five houses away from the Tamblyn house.
“It's not safe for us,” Cage continued. “And the official rescue crews are out now. We might only interfere. B Crew saw those little motor-powered inflatables—”
“Zodiacs,” she added.
He nodded. “With Coast Guard and National Guard volunteers.”
“Wow.” Joule took a moment to sit and absorb the fact that her brother was right. They didn't need to make another trip. They would hurt more than they helped. And she did not want to go on to the water again.
But something about Cage’s expression made her wary.
Kimura sat in another chair, tapping on his phone, not reading. Probably researching. He was tethered to the generator, the short cord making him lean awkwardly over the side. He didn't look up until Cage specifically said, “Dr. Kimura? You should tell Joule what you wanted to do.”
When the professor looked up, the light in his eyes should have been reassuring, but it only made her more worried.
Oh hell no, Joule thought.
72
Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here?
Joule felt the words roll through her brain over and over. They almost masked the instructions Dr. Kimura was giving them.
Holly, of all people, had jumped up and volunteered to be part of the “specimen collection committee,” as Kimura had dubbed it.
Joule wished Roxie would have volunteered. Her friend was wonderful at tasks like this—organized and clear-thinking. But Roxie still hadn’t really moved from where she’d sat on the couch. Joule understood Roxie would likely not be volunteering for a while.
She was deep in her grief, and Joule could not imagine losing a twin, let alone a twin who shared your face. Lord knew, she looked in the mirror and saw her own mother and father often enough to be startled by it. What would she do if her own face was also theirs?
So they'd made sure that Roxie ate and that she slept as she could. They all took care of her the best they were able. Then they made sure that Dr. Kimura had a team with some scientific practice, and they headed out into the rain, once again.
B Crew had deflated the boats and brought them up to the garage, thinking their use was done. Now the small “science team” had to haul them back down to the water's edge. Bulky and heavy, it was no easy feat to carry them along. Even though the winds had died down a good bit, a small gust could lift the boats.
Joule had been pleased when Mickey suggested that they use the wheelbarrow. The boats still didn't quite fit. But with a few people balancing them, and two others holding the handles, it did make the trip much easier.
