Taken by Storm

by Tamara Mataya

  “So? We’re short staffed as it is, I—”

  “We’re covered and you have a head injury. Turner and Diamond Valley have sent their guys in. They’ve called in the army.”

  The army? “How bad is it?”

  Kyle shook his head. “It’s not a flood. It’s a disaster.” Neither spoke for a moment. “They strapped you in, waiting for evac now. Chopper should be here in about five minutes. ”

  “Where’s Leila?”

  “Who?”

  Your sister. Who I had sex with. On a pool table. “Leilani.”

  “My Lani? Why would my sister be with you?”

  “She was at the bar when the wave hit.”

  Kyle turned an alarming shade of purple and swore creatively and thoroughly until his face returned to a more normal color. “What the hell was she doing there? She said she was safe when I texted her!”

  “Technically she was at that point. We left when a tree slammed into Glitters. But you haven’t seen her?” His head started pounding worse than before, and he winced with every heartbeat. “Let me up!”

  Kyle walked a few paces away and began talking into his radio in a hushed agitated tone. Being strapped to the stretcher was the single most frustrating experience of his life, and he writhed against the restraints as the unmistakable churning of helicopter blades filled the air. He could see down his body to the bird, where it landed thirty feet away on the road, another firefighter waving him down to the right spot.

  “Kyle!” Wow, yelling was a bad idea. Spots appeared in his vision.

  Kyle walked back, looking marginally better. “She’s fine. I’m going to kill her.”

  “What happened?”

  “They found you guys on a car. She’d wrapped your leg and flagged down a boat after you got hit by a tree.”

  He’d process those things later. “But where is she?” Medics came and they lifted Ryan and started walking him to the chopper. “You know I can walk.” He knew the argument was fruitless.

  Kyle smiled. “You know we can’t let you. Lani’s headed home. They grabbed you in the boat, and she caught a ride with another team, made sure to tell them to tell me she was fine. I’m going to kick her ass. The other drop zone is up by the grocery store. They couldn’t get to us.”

  “This is so bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, all she cared about was your safety, and not worrying you by letting you know she was out there. Take it easy on her.”

  “I’m still going to kill her.”

  ***

  Leila hadn’t noticed that the mosquitoes had been quiet until they reappeared and began biting her in entirely inappropriate places. People are going to think I have crabs or something wrong with my ass. There’s no way I won’t scratch these as soon as I’ve got a free hand. She lifted her legs higher and called back to the firefighter driving the frontend loader, “There’s a car!” She shined the light at it, and he angled them farther to the left while she hung on with the hand not holding the flashlight.

  Surprised when her rescue hadn’t been another boat but a frontend loader with a fork-like attachment on front, Leila nevertheless scrambled onto the front—a stretcher laid across the forks in a makeshift bench—with a smile. They’d told her to hang on, and drove back the way they’d come—unable to follow the direction the boat had gone. “We’re not going that way?” Leila asked the firefighter who sat next to her.

  “It’s too deep. We can manage a few feet in this, but with the dip in the road, it’s about six feet.” And off they’d gone, him and Leila using their flashlights to scout the dank water for debris, while mosquitoes feasted on her legs, back, and ass. And arms.

  I hope Ryan’s okay. She gnawed her lip, worried about the germs on her face from the water, then remembered she’d already swallowed some, and continued gnawing. Fuck it. If anything happens to Ryan … But something had happened to him. And it was all her fault. If I hadn’t stormed off like such a dumbass, he wouldn’t have followed me. Wouldn’t have been right in that place at that time for the tree to smack into him. Her stomach tightened and bile rose in her throat, scalding the inside of her chest.

  Why hadn’t she just listened to him? He was a firefighter, he knew his way around an emergency, but she had to storm away, and right now, she couldn’t even remember why. It had seemed so important at the time, a matter of pride, but it was stupid and useless, and if Ryan didn’t pull through she’d never forgive herself. He’d done nothing but try to keep her safe the whole time, and how had she repaid him? By getting him hurt, possibly worse.

  Her shoulders shook, and hot tears carved trails down her cheeks. She was glad of the darkness, of the loud motor hiding her breakdown. She didn’t deserve sympathy. She’d done it to herself. Worse—she’d dragged an amazing man down with her.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “ … but the wave came and blew the steel door right open like somebody had kicked it in. We had to run upstairs. The wife grabbed the cat, but there just wasn’t time to grab anything else. Luckily, the neighbor had a dinghy and took us out on that. Not easy holding a pissed off cat in an inflatable boat. Nearly as scary as the wave itself. I don’t know what we’re going to do. We left with nothing.” The man spoke to the woman sitting across from Ryan.

  She shook her head. “It’s nuts. I was in the library when it happened.”

  “You were inside? Why hadn’t they told you to get out?”

  “No idea. They’d diverted some traffic near us, but no one told us to get out. Water started coming in the back door, and we were moving books from the bottom shelves, trying to save the collection. We were keeping an eye on the water. That’s the crazy thing! It was fine until all the sudden it wasn’t, but by then it was too late and we were surrounded by water. We had to smash out a window to get out—the water had gone over the doors too far for us to force them open. Water pressure. We were stranded on the roof for seven hours before they rescued us. I had to haul an eighty-year-old patron out the window while another librarian pushed. It was insane. I guess they rescued something like one hundred people from roofs—at least they had at that point. It’s probably more now.”

  Five hours in emergency had exposed him to a lot of stories about the flood, all of them awful. One young woman had been admitted, treated for shock, with her baby and three-year-old in tow. She’d been in the convenience store when the water hit, trapped inside. She’d resorted to standing on the counter for hours, holding her baby in one arm with the toddler in her other, trying frantically to hold on. The water had just covered her ankles when help came.

  He saw a few familiar faces, and those people latched onto him, bombarding him with desperate words, pleading with him to reassure them that the town was okay, that their families were okay. He couldn’t give that to them and it killed him. He wanted to be with the station, with his guys, back there helping, but he didn’t have the answers to give, and he wasn’t in any shape to be rescuing people from a dark, flooded town.

  He knew he had a concussion, and his leg hurt a bit, mostly itched, but he wasn’t going to take the bag off and expose the injury—however minor—to emergency room air. No sense giving germs another chance to infect him. He’d be lucky to escape unscathed from infection as it was. God, Leila. Why had she run off like that? Now that he knew she was safe, his frustration came back full force. She was so stubborn, and that bullheadedness could have gotten them both killed. It had gotten him hurt.

  He felt like an idiot, sat with a compress on his head for the swelling, and his leg wrapped in medical tape and the fancy leopard print duct tape. He caught a few stares, which he found alternately amusing and annoying, depending on how badly his head was pounding at that moment.

  Finally, it was his turn—so many injuries worse than he was, the hospital was clogged with patients—and he sat on one of the beds. Waited for the doctor. He laid back, suddenly exhausted. The clock above the nurse’s station was barely visible, but read after five a.m. He’d slept
maybe four hours in the last forty-eight, and every minute pounced on his eyelids and weighed them down at once. Man it felt good to rest his eyes.

  Something pinched his index finger. “Don’t.” He jerked when a hand pried his eye open and shined a light in it. He opened both and sat up.

  “There he is.” The thin, attractive woman—a doctor—smiled. “You worried us. Hold still.” A nurse slipped oxygen onto him, and he held up a hand to protest, but noticed an IV in his arm.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m guessing your day caught up with you.” She shone the light in his other eye. “Look up.”

  The nurse strapped on a blood pressure cuff while he looked up.

  “You passed out for a little while. Not good when you’ve got a concussion, though I’m guessing yours is mild. Look down.”

  He looked down. “I’m fine. I’m a firefighter, all up on my first aid. It’s mostly that I haven’t slept much in the past few days.”

  “Fair enough. But I’m going to put you on a diuretic just in case, and keep you for observation overnight.”

  “Fine by me. I don’t know how my house is, and right now I’m running on TMI.”

  “You from Silver Springs as well?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You wouldn’t be getting in anyway, even if you were fine. “

  “What?”

  “The town’s under a mandatory evacuation.”

  What? “The whole town? For how long? As of when?”

  “Not sure for how long, but they radioed us to let us know to brace ourselves. We’ve been getting the main brunt of patients, but I think they’re going to start taking people to Natoni instead.”

  Natoni was a small town, about twenty miles farther away.

  The whole town was under evac? Who had ordered that? When would they be let back in—not that he had a car anyway. He was possibly homeless, truckless, townless … At least he had work. If the town was under evac, no one but emergency services would be in. As soon as he could get back into town, he had a job to do.

  “I can’t believe it. It’s bad, but I didn’t think it was still that bad. It’s been hours. The water should have gone down by now.”

  She pumped and looked at the numbers on the cuff. “I’m sorry. I’m fairly new here, but I went there for a day trip once. Gorgeous little town. Can you wiggle your toes for me?” He wiggled them like a good little patient, and the Velcro made a loud ripping sound when she removed the cuff from his arm.

  Gorgeous little town? He sighed. “Not anymore. It’s a wet mess.”

  “I’m going to have a look at the leg. Your face is fine and won’t need more than a butterfly bandage and a cleaning. I’ll have one of the nurses take care of that after.”

  “Okay.”

  He sat up further, and she cut the bag off his leg, revealing a monstrosity of a bandage, featuring a wad of the medical tape, not very white anymore, but it went with the leopard print of the duct-tape covered grocery bag.

  The doctor frowned. “You did this?”

  He laughed, knowing she was remembering how he’d said his first aid was current. There had to be a half a roll of tape on the thick gauze pad. “Hell no. I was knocked out for that.”

  The doctor unwound the tape, wrapped around and around his leg. Had Leila been trying to waterproof it? Man. She was probably panicking when I was knocked out. She was alone in the dark with an injured me, trying to wrap my wound. Still, she went way overboard. He felt more contrite, though it seemed funnier the more tape the doctor unwound from his leg. It was ridiculous. Layer after layer after layer, gathering into a ball as she went.

  “Ridiculous.” Ryan smiled.

  The doctor grinned back. “I think we’ve reached the gauze.” Now there was a square layer of white, and some long strips across the edges and middle. His skin was stinging a bit from the tape, but the air felt nice. She peeled off the edges of the tape, and Ryan tried not to flinch as he lost some leg hair. She pulled the gauze pad, or rather, wad, away from his leg. The skin beneath the bandage was slightly lighter than the rest of his leg.

  On the outer side by his knee, just below it, was a triangular cut shaped like a bird’s beak. Each of the two cut lines were only maybe a half an inch long. Leila had gone way overboard for that tiny cut. “That’s not so bad.”

  The words were barely out before blood started spurting down his leg.

  The doctor moved quickly, pressing on his leg to halt the bleeding, and called for a nurse. “How long were you waiting to get here?”

  “I guess six hours from the time I got hurt.”

  “Well, whoever made that monstrosity of a bandage? If they hadn’t wrapped you up the way they had, you wouldn’t have made it.”

  Ryan’s head swam. The cut hadn’t looked like much until the blood came. Leila had saved him? “You mean she saved my life?”

  “Yes.”

  ***

  There was a new lake where the road should be. Leila almost laughed at the horror of the situation, how badly she’d underestimated the reach of the flood. She’d honestly thought, “I’ll just get to Twelfth Avenue and zip right up it, home free.” The water hadn’t looked that bad—it had gotten shallower as they’d moved up Third across the river. The bridge near Birch Street was smaller but held out against the water.

  But it had never ever flooded up here before. And she was seized with fear for the first time that her dad’s house might not be okay. Real fear. Not the general worry she’d felt at the bar when surrounded by water. If fear could buoy her, she’d have flung out her arms and ran across the surface of the water like one of those crazy lizards.

  As it was, she stood on a high patch of asphalt, wishing.

  “I think they’re bringing another boat soon.”

  Leila looked at the pretty brunette twenty-something woman, wondering how long she’d been standing beside her, while she’d been lost within herself. “Yeah?” A few boats had come already, but most were reserved for people who were injured, or needed across sooner. One woman had been on oxygen, and only had an hour of battery time left. Leila’s nerves had further frayed, imagining herself in that situation, and worrying for the stranger.

  “Yeah. Where were you when it hit?”

  “Glitters.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Walked part way, then got picked up by a frontend loader.”

  “Fancier than my friend and I—we were picked up by a dump truck!”

  Leila smiled and offered her hand. “I’m Leila.”

  “Ella. You from here?”

  “Not originally, but we moved here when I was in high school. I’m just back in town for my dad’s wedding.”

  “Oh! Mr. Spencer and Maggie!”

  Small freaking towns. It shouldn’t surprise her, but it still did. “You know them?”

  “Mr. Spencer saved my dad when he’d had a heart attack. Kept him going until he got to the hospital. And Maggie’s just delightful. Everyone loves her flower shop—though I guess we won’t be seeing that for a while.”

  Leila hadn’t even thought about Maggie’s small business. “Probably not. Fucking flood.”

  “I hear that.”

  “Where were you when the wave came?”

  “Getting my taxes done.” She pointed back toward the accountant’s office. “I’d been thinking, well, the day was ruined. Nothing worse than taxes, right?” She lightly elbowed Leila.

  “I think we finally found something. You think they’ll let you off if you’re a few days late?”

  They looked at each other silently for a second before saying simultaneously, “Nah!”

  Ella grinned. “They can put you off for any reason. Somehow I don’t think they give a tiny crap about our town being wiped out.”

  The levity left them at her last words.

  “Do you live … I mean, do you think your house is okay?” Leila asked.

  Ella nodded. “I live in one of the only apartment buildings in town. E
ven if it floods there, I’m on the third floor. I’ll never bitch about the stairs again. Your dad’s house?”

  “I thought it would be fine. But I also thought I’d be fine once I got here, and I’d just stroll up the road, and over a few blocks, and be home safe and dry. Now I have no idea what to expect.”

  “Yeah, my car’s screwed.”

  “Mine’s still downtown. Do you think insurance will cover it?”

  They laughed together as another boat pulled up.

  Leila gave Ella her number, as she’d lost her own cell phone back on the hood of the SUV. Though she doubted she’d be back to visit much, there was always social media. Hopefully, she had more time for that while going to school again.

  But the good feelings she and Ella had generated diminished when they parted, and evaporated completely when she veered off away from a group of people headed to the evacuation center at the high school. It was the third site they’d used to evacuate people—the first two flooded. It was after five a.m. when she made it to her dad’s street.

  Panic squeezed the air from her lungs as she hurried up the sidewalk and the three cement steps to the front door. Though the curtains in the downstairs window were dry, visions of nine feet of water in the basement flashed before her eyes. The doorknob wouldn’t turn. Locked. Dumbass. You locked it before you left. Breathe!

  Another flash of panic when she thought she’d lost the keys, but finally found them hiding in a tear in the lining of her purse that she hadn’t realized was there. Swallowing down the nausea, she slid the key into the lock, and opened the door and flicked on the lights. To her surprise, there was power. Must be on a different grid than downtown.

  She nearly fainted with relief when she saw the carpet down the steps was dry. Shutting the door behind her, she toed off her shoe, peeled off the sock-sandal, and stripped her soggy skirt off right by the front door, not wanting to get that putrid water on the carpet. And the thought of wearing them for one more second was unbearable.