by Lis Wiehl
“What are you thinking?” Reese said.
“I think I could jump it on the Grizzly,” Tommy said. “I just don’t know if I could make it with both of us on it.”
“So go,” Reese said. “I can walk back.”
“Are you sure?”
“After what we’ve been through tonight? You think this is going to stop me?”
“Take this,” Tommy said, handing Reese his flashlight and his phone. Reese examined the phone briefly.
“You mind if I make a video of you jumping the stream that I could put on YouTube?”
“That would be awesome,” Tommy said.
He turned the ATV around and raced up the hill. He’d once gotten the Grizzly up to 65 mph on dry pavement, on level ground. This was downhill; he should be able to go even faster.
He took a deep breath, then opened the throttle to full with his thumb and gunned it, heading straight for the buckled pavement. He had no idea how fast he was going when he hit it, but the ATV launched into the air, just as he’d planned. He leaned back and pulled on the steering bar to raise the front wheels but stayed forward enough, knees bent, to remain centered above the airborne vehicle. Alive, he thought thankfully, and then the back wheels hit, hard enough to bounce him completely out of the seat, his legs lifting high above his head behind him. He clung to the handlebars, managing to pull himself back down as the ATV bounced twice more before settling to a stop.
He turned around and saw he’d cleared the rivulet by twenty feet. Reese waved to him.
Part of him thought that if the private detective thing didn’t work out, a new career as a stuntman was waiting for him.
The warning horn, three longs and three shorts in a repeating pattern, required as many members of the volunteer fire department as were available to meet at the service road leading to the dam, the rendezvous point laid out in their disaster preparedness training. As he gunned the ATV past his driveway, he came to a more formidable roadblock—Dani, standing in front of his Jeep, between the headlights, her arms crossed against her chest.
She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the beam of the ATV’s floodlight.
Tommy hit the brakes and slid sideways, skidding to a stop next to her. He turned off the light.
“Where’s Reese?”
“He wanted to walk,” Tommy said. “He didn’t like the way I drive. He’ll be here in maybe twenty minutes.”
“I said I’m coming with you,” she said. “Tonight. Thick or thin. You and me.”
He’d wanted only for her to be safe, but he understood. They would be together, through anything, always.
“I’ll drive,” he said, moving the ATV off the road and parking it. He grabbed the floodlight and ran around to the other side of the Jeep. He climbed in and threw the light into the back.
“What have you heard?” he said, turning on his high beams and shifting from second to third as he sped away.
“The National Guard is on the way,” Dani said. “The roads are bad all around Westchester. They’re trying to get everybody out of town but …”
She didn’t have to say more. If the dam gave, the town would be destroyed. After what had gone wrong in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers had examined and certified that the earthworks, built in 1897, would hold up to the most severe storms and associated flooding, but they couldn’t possibly have prepared for this sort of assault from the elements.
“Everyone at the house is okay?”
“They’re okay. Casey said he’d call if he learns anything. I got a text from Quinn. He destroyed the virus.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I can’t reach him.”
“Nuts,” Tommy said, braking suddenly.
The road in front of them was gone, another washout, but this time there wasn’t a ramp for Tommy to jump the stream, and he wouldn’t have made it in the Jeep anyway. The raging water here was a hundred feet across. There was water everywhere he looked, the whole world saturated, with nowhere for it to go, and it was still falling from the sky.
“What do we do?” Dani asked.
“Plan B,” he said, backing up and reversing direction.
“What’s Plan B?”
“It’s what you do after Plan A fails,” he said. “Or as my dad liked to say, ‘Use common sense and make something up.’”
A quarter mile up the road, he turned into the parking lot at the Pastures, roared past the darkened clubhouse, and skidded onto the first fairway, which sloped down toward the lake. The Jeep’s knobby tires left deep grooves in the spongy turf as he navigated past sand traps filled with standing water.
“They’re not going to like that,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the ruts he’d made before turning right and leaving the golf course to crash through the brush and maul his way through the fence that separated the Pastures from Gardener Farm. He skewed his way through a small apple orchard and slowed as he approached a flooded field.
“Hang on,” he told Dani. “I don’t know how far this will get us.”
He shifted into second gear and stomped on the gas as he hit the water, spraying a rooster tail behind them as he plowed forward, fast at first, then slower and slower as the water deepened.
“Where are you going?” Dani said. “The road—”
She stopped talking then as the Jeep’s headlights fell on the Boston Whaler Tommy had left moored to the dock after getting the lake water samples Quinn had requested. The boat was now floating almost level to the front porch of the Gardener home.
The Jeep’s engine coughed, sputtered, and died as the water rose above the air intake. They were fifty yards short of their goal.
“Come on!” Tommy said. He reached in the backseat and grabbed the floodlight. He tucked it under one arm and jumped from the vehicle. The water was waist deep.
“Yowza, that’s cold,” Dani shrieked.
“Try not to think about it,” Tommy said, taking her by the hand to make sure she didn’t trip and fall.
“How can I not think about how cold it is?” she said. “I’m waist deep in a giant bucket of ice water.”
“You should try peeling onions.”
“What?”
“Peel onions,” Tommy said. “That’ll make your ice water. Sorry. That’s from a Marx Brothers movie.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Have you noticed how screaming at each other like this actually makes you feel warmer?”
“I noticed.”
By the time they reached the Whaler, they were both shivering. He lifted her up over the transom, handed her the floodlight, then climbed aboard.
While Dani cast off, Tommy started the engines. He reversed slowly, backing the boat out from the trees and into the open water.
“Grab on to something!” he shouted, and pushed the throttle to full. The three massive 300-horsepower engines kicked the craft forward with enough force to knock Dani off her feet and back into the seats.
The hardtop canopy over their heads and the windshield in front of them provided minimal shelter from the rain, but enough of a windbreak that if they shouted, they could hear each other.
“Plan B seems to be working,” Dani yelled. “What now?”
“Plan C,” Tommy shouted back. “Obviously.”
“Which is … ?”
“Why are you looking at me?” Tommy said. “I came up with Plan B. It’s your turn.”
“I’ll tell you the second I think of something,” Dani said.
Tommy turned the volume on his marine radio to ten and dialed in channel 16, the emergency distress frequency. Ahead, where the earthworks held back the water, he saw a single orange flasher—and closer to the road, the flashing lights of a police car. He turned on the floodlight on the bow and aimed it as far forward as possible.
He held the microphone to his mouth. “Mayday, Mayday! Whoever’s on the dam—I’ve got a boat on the water,” he said. “What have you got? Come back.”
“We have maybe five minutes to failure,” someone said. “That you, Tommy?”
“Who’ve I got?”
“DeGidio,” the radio said. “Turn around. Get to shore. We can’t fill it. It won’t hold.”
“Fill what?”
“There’s a gap. The earthworks is breached,” DeGidio said. “We’re trying to slow it down, but it’s just getting wider.”
“What about the overflow sluice?”
“Already full capacity. There’s a flood sluice at the bottom, but we can’t open it. Something’s blocking it.”
“Did you send a diver?”
“No time,” Frank said.
As Tommy approached the dam, he saw what Frank was talking about. There was a weak spot at the top of the earthworks, a gap, and water was pouring through it over the lip of the dam. Frank and two utility company workers were trying to throw sandbags into the gap, but the water just flowed around and over them.
“Get to your car!” Tommy shouted. Dani turned the floodlight and shone it where the men were working frantically to save the town. Tommy turned on his ship-to-ship hailing speakers and repeated his suggestion. “Get to your car—I’m going to plug the hole!”
Frank DeGidio made an X over his head with his arms to tell Tommy to back off, that it was no use, but Tommy ignored him. Fifty yards from the breach, he turned the boat to starboard and then circled back, bringing the Boston Whaler around slowly until it was parallel to the dam before inching forward into the current, using his bow thrusters to position the boat more precisely, drifting sideways toward the gap. The force of the water took the Whaler the rest of the way, wedging the 37’ long, 13,500 pound craft in the gap to temporarily plug the hole. It was only after he’d done it that he stopped to think that had he misjudged the distance or the current or the size of the gap, the current would have pushed him over the dam, either bow first or stern first. That would not have ended well.
“Go, go, go!” Tommy told the three men, waving his arms frantically. “Dani, go with them!”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to hold the boat here as long as I can,” he said.
“Then I’m staying.” The look on her face told him there would be no further discussion.
He waved Frank DeGidio off and angled the floodlight up to light the way, then watched as Frank and the others reached the squad car and headed toward higher ground, their taillights disappearing in the rain.
He moved aft and saw where the floodwaters coursed behind the boat, then ran forward to the bow, where the same thing was true. They’d plugged the hole in the dam, but now there was no way off the boat. Sooner or later, perhaps in only a few minutes, the dam would give. They’d bought the people in the town below some time, but failure remained inevitable.
Dani was a step behind him; Tommy grabbed two lifejackets and handed her one.
“I’m glad I’m here,” she told him. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
“I can’t say I’m glad you’re here, but I’m glad you’re here. You’d better put this on,” he said.
“Ya think?” she told him, taking the lifejacket from him and helping him tighten the straps on his own. Then she grabbed him and pulled him close.
“Tommy Gunderson,” she said, “you’re the most amazing man I have ever met in my entire life. It just blows me away, day after day. You’re funny and smart and handsome as all get-out, but none of that matters compared to how pure your heart is, and I love you the way I have never loved anybody. Will you marry me?”
“What?” he said.
“Will you marry me?” she said.
“No, I heard you,” he said, at a loss for words. “It’s just … You have no idea.”
“Don’t say no or I’ll throw you off this boat.”
He fished in his pocket and found the ring he’d been carrying with him for the last four days, the blue velvet box soggy enough to crumble in his hand.
“I’ll marry you if you’ll marry me,” he said. “I got you a ring.”
He opened the box, squeezing the soggy lid until it fell from the hinges, but the ring shone brightly. She reached into her pocket and produced a similar box.
“I got you one too,” she said, opening it to reveal a band of broad silver with two small diamonds set into it side by side, a ring that was clearly masculine and, Tommy thought, more precious than the cost of its components. “I went to Gruen’s.”
He put it on. It fit. Dani’s ring fit her as well.
“That guy can keep a secret. You know, technically, as the captain of this boat, I’m legally empowered to marry us right now. If you want.”
The boat shifted beneath them, lurching a foot closer to the edge.
“I was sort of hoping we could have a big wedding in a church,” Dani said.
“So was I,” Tommy said, thinking that if they made it out alive, that was exactly what he wanted. “So it’s a date?”
“It’s a date.”
She kissed him, and he kissed her back, and the earth moved under their feet, or rather, under the boat.
Tommy opened his eyes and saw that the dam was collapsing.
44.
December 24
8:11 p.m. EST
Tommy leapt for the controls, gunned the engines, and turned the wheel hard to port, his propellers churning mightily against the current. But as the water poured over the top of the dam, the Whaler, moving full speed ahead, only held its place, pulling slowly forward at first but losing ground as the speed of the water flow increased.
He pushed hard against the throttle.
“Come on!” he shouted at the boat. “Gimme more!”
The engines strained. The boat inched forward. For a second he believed he’d reached escape velocity. Then the big boat moved backward again. He didn’t dare turn the wheel in any direction except straight against the flow, but he was losing ground.
He pointed to Dani to buckle her seat belt as he fought to stay above the brim.
“Hold on to something!” he yelled, but he realized as he shouted that it was pointless. They were going over the dam, as were the contents of Lake Atticus. It took him just a split second to decide that if he was taking a “Nantucket sleighride,” he’d rather go facing forward. “Are you buckled in?” he shouted.
“I’m good—go for it—I trust you!”
He swung hard about and launched the Whaler into the darkness.
The boat fell out from underneath him—only his hands on the wheel saved him from flying straight up in the air. It was 120 feet from the lip of the dam to the catchment area below, but to Tommy, it felt like he was weightless for a full minute, everything in slow motion, water all around him, water below him and above him and to every side. The boat accelerated and pitched forward, yawing right and rolling such that it finally landed tilting thirty degrees to starboard, the bow completely submerged, the deck and cockpit awash before the unsinkable Whaler lived up to its name and righted itself.
He looked over at Dani, whose eyes were open wider than he would have ever thought possible.
“You okay?”
She gave him a thumbs-up, pushing her wet hair away from her face.
As the decks cleared of water, Tommy heard the automatic bilge pumps kick in and wondered how much water they’d taken on, though the cabin hatch was closed. Judging from how the boat rode, it appeared that the hull had maintained its integrity, but now they were riding the flood, moving fast.
“Watch out!” Dani shouted.
Tommy turned the wheel to avoid hitting what appeared to be a small floating house, or perhaps a garage, grateful he still had engine power. He throttled all the way back, carried along by the force of the water, short of the leading edge of the flood, keeping only enough power to maneuver as the wall of water picked up speed, destroying everything in its path.
Up ahead he saw a large building, lights aglow in the darkness.
“Look!”
&nb
sp; He pointed at it just as the mass of water poured over the stone walls surrounding St. Adrian’s Academy and arced through the air. A million tons of water landed on the main building, crushing it into pebbles. The dormitories, the new science building, the art museum, all fell before the power of the raging waters.
But now he felt himself falling again. Dani grabbed hold of his arm and held tight as the earth itself gave way—as the weight of the water pressed down on the campus of St. Adrian’s and the hollow caverns beneath it.
A split second later, the place where the school had stood turned into a colossal waterfall.
The boat lurched beneath his feet as they went over the falls. He lost his footing and felt himself falling overboard—then Dani grabbed him and held on to him. They circled once in a whirlpool before spinning out again. Tommy got to his feet and worked his way back to the steering wheel.
“The town!” Dani shouted. “It’s below the school.”
“Get on the radio,” he said, handing Dani the microphone. “See if you can—”
He stopped.
“See if I can what?” Dani asked him. She shook his arm. “Tommy—see if I can what?”
“Never mind,” he said, his voice relaxed now. He regained control of the boat, then tapped Dani on the shoulder and pointed. “Look.”
She turned. Below the cliff where the campus had once stood, a pair of angels were holding their wings out wide to divert the flood. Charlie and Ben. They’d promised to be there when they were needed, and here they were now, fully revealed in holy raiment, their forms shimmering with a golden light where they stood above the waters. The town below the school was safe.
Tommy wrapped his arm around Dani’s shoulders. She put her arms around him and held him close.
“That’s Plan C,” she said. Then out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of something flying above them. Tommy looked up and saw the drone.
“Tommy and Dani. You okay?”
It was Reese’s voice, coming over Tommy’s Bluetooth earpiece.
“We’re fine,” Tommy said, giving the drone a thumbs-up. “Is anybody there hurt?”