“Leave her out of this,” he said in disgust and faced the tossing lake again. He could still sense the subtle shuddering of the stones beneath his feet. Was it his imagination, or was the tremor growing?
“She’s a smart woman, your sister-in-law. You should get acquainted. She could tell you a thing or two about watersheds and water tables.”
He set his jaw. A sudden flash of lightning split the clouds, and thunder blasted with deafening force, shaking the air. The sky opened up, and rain roared down like a waterfall. At the far end of the levee, a pile of stones fell with a rumble, and a stream of water coursed over the gap.
Mel swore and grabbed Kitt’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
For once she didn’t argue. She put her free arm up to shield her face from the blinding rain. They jogged back to the road, which streamed with brown rivulets. Mel glanced at the water trapped between the two levees. It was rising with a great, rushing sound.
The water on the road was covering the asphalt; their feet splashed at every step. “Are you up to running in this?” Mel asked from between his teeth.
“Yes!” she said with fervor and gripped his hand more tightly. Heads down, they sprinted in the direction of their cars.
She was small but fast, and she managed to keep up with his longer strides. But just as they had reached the first of the model houses, she stumbled, cried out and fell to her knees in the streaming rain.
The water swirled along the road more wildly now. It was nearly to Mel’s ankles. He hauled Kitt to her feet, but she winced when she tried to put her weight on her foot. She grimaced. “My ankle. I felt something—tear or snap.”
He hoisted her into his arms. “Hang on,” he ordered.
She obeyed, wrapping her arms around his neck. As he held her against his chest, he glanced nervously at the creek bed. It meandered only fifty yards or so from the paved road.
When he’d jogged to the dam, just minutes ago, it had been like a long, deep, quivering puddle. Now brown water coursed down it, spilling the banks and swiftly spreading.
“My God,” he said.
His heart hammering, he held Kitt tighter. The torrent in the creek bed was growing higher, wider and wilder, and that could mean only one thing. The first makeshift dam was breaking down fast. And when it gave way, the second, weaker one would go, as well. A wall of water would come crashing like a juggernaut through this valley.
Kitt saw, too. “We’ve got to get to higher ground,” she screamed in his ear. She pointed at the steeply sloping mountainside. “Go up! Go up!”
He swore and veered toward the mountain. The rain poured, and the slope was steep and slippery. He could barely keep his footing. From behind them came a deafening rumble, a hundred times louder than the thunder. He knew it was the huge, weakened wall of stones of the first levee giving way. He climbed more desperately, half-dragging Kitt, supporting her with one arm and using the other to pull his way up by bush or root or outcropping.
“Higher,” Kitt cried. “There’s a path, if you can get higher.”
He couldn’t answer her. His breath tore his chest. His lungs burned, and his legs ached. He was a swift runner on a straightaway, but this incline challenged all his energy.
Slick with rain, the ground was a treacherous quagmire of mud studded with stones. He lost his footing, slipped. For a terrifying second, he thought they would both plunge back down the hillside. But he kept tight hold of Kitt and dug his heels in until he found enough purchase to stop them from sliding back toward the valley.
He regained his footing and hoisted Kitt into his arms again. He started to climb again, then turned to look down. He stopped as if paralyzed. He held her more tightly and both of them stared in disbelieving horror.
Water came roaring through the valley, an immense foaming brown wall of it, twenty feet high and broad as the valley itself. The flood wave seethed and rolled forward like some great dragon uncoiling to strike.
The creek disappeared beneath it. The land, boulders, cactus, trees disappeared. The road disappeared. Two bulldozers vanished, and an empty yellow truck was swept along like a toy.
Mel swore in awe and dread. The wall crashed into the white houses and knocked them from their foundations. It was as if they were the toy houses on a game board, and a giant hand had sent them spinning into the whirling water. Two of them crashed together, and the splintering of their timbers was like the snapping of tiny sticks in the tumult of the flood’s rush toward the highway.
One house toppled onto its side, another simply split apart and sank before their eyes. Kitt clutched Mel more tightly. Stunned, holding on to each other, they stared down as the water spread and grew. They were safe. But everything that had once been Bluebonnet Meadows was gone.
KITT WAS A REPORTER; she’d seen disasters before. She’d covered train crashes, plane crashes, car crashes. She’d seen what fires and floods and explosives could do.
But she’d always seen the aftermath. She had never before watched, helpless and horrified, as such a thing happened before her eyes.
She wasn’t the person who reported action news from its white-hot center. She did not deal with the chaos of violent events in the present. She probed the forces that caused them, the human consequences that followed them.
Even as she clung to Mel, soaked and aching, the rain pouring down on them, she fought to make sense of what she’d seen. The water had not oozed up over the landscape like a normal flood, steadily rising. It had not come rushing in a straight, high burst down the creek bed, overflowing the banks as it came.
No, this had been a churning, crashing mass of water that changed its shape like some creature of evil enchantment. It did not slowly cover what lay in its path. It drowned all obstacles or swept them away.
The houses still intact bobbed as forlornly as cardboard boxes tossed about by a monstrous tide. The yellow truck zigzagged off in the swirling froth like a child’s sinking plastic toy.
The wall of water moved not straight forward, but crookedly. It surged along the snaking bed of the creek, and its height loomed or sank as the floor and walls of the valley channeled it.
It lashed against first one side of the valley, then the other. When it had smashed into the houses it had been a mountain of water, but now as it reached the highway, it lowered, flattening and spreading.
From the heights, Kitt and Mel saw the wave wash away the barricades as if they were toothpicks. It carried off both their cars. It covered the highway as if it had never existed, and it rolled on, with a sound like a hundred jet engines.
She watched as her own car sank from sight. Mel’s was dashed against a huge limestone boulder, then both the boulder and his car disappeared under the surging waves.
“Good Lord,” Mel said in a ragged voice.
She understood. They were lucky not to have made it as far as the cars. If they had stayed on their course, they’d be dead or dying now. She laid her face against his chest. For a moment, she wanted not to see the destruction below them. But she did not cry. She would not let herself cry.
“Come on,” Mel said in her ear. “Let’s try to get to higher ground. I don’t feel safe even here. Can you take being moved any more?”
She raised her head and nodded. “We should call the sheriff’s department. Warn people.”
“I lost my cell phone,” he said. He stared down into the valley, the swift, tumbling water surging between the hills. “It’s down there, somewhere.”
She groped for hers, belted to her waist. But it was cracked and useless. She must have smashed it against a rock when they fell.
Mel frowned at the southern horizon. The water was still swelling forward, spreading like a great stain across the countryside. “How many people live downstream from this?”
“Nobody for miles,” Kitt said. “It’s mostly J.T.’s ranchland. Beyond that? Some isolated farms. But a settlement? Not for twenty miles…”
Her voice quavered, trailed off. There was no tow
n for twenty miles, but there were roads with people traveling on them. There were bridges that could wash out as drivers tried to cross them. There could be wranglers riding out in the storm, trying to bring in cattle.
She looked into Mel’s eyes pleadingly. “Surely to God people heard it. When that dam gave way, it sounded like—like hell cracking open.”
Her head still rang with the sound. She knew she would hear it in her nightmares for the rest of her life.
“Yes,” he said, his jaw muscles tight. “People heard. Surely to God.”
CAL MCKINNEY HEARD IT. He’d been riding out toward J.T.’s most northeastern section. He’d been glad to get out of the house. His father was still disgruntled about Three Amigos; he’d been glum and silent all day.
Jennifer’s pony, a renowned escape artist, had slipped out of its paddock early in the afternoon. Cal had tracked her down and was leading her back through the drizzle. He’d decided to ride up Stony Hill, where he’d have a good view of how the creeks were running.
He’d reached the hill’s summit just as the sky opened in a ferocious cloudburst. “Hellfire,” muttered Cal, moving his horse and the pony beneath the shelter of a ledge. “Ain’t riding back in this.”
He pulled his hat lower. Looking through the rain was like squinting through a watery curtain. Fabian’s stupid lake was hidden by the ridge. His five houses looked like white pinpoints. Cal gazed at the scene idly. He wished he was back at the house with his wife and kids, J.T.’s dark mood be damned.
Then the air was rent by a rumble unlike anything Cal had ever heard. Did he imagine it, or did the solid stone that sheltered him seem to groan and vibrate with the din?
Suddenly, from the direction of Fabian’s lake, he saw a mass of water, a shimmying wall of it, coming like a tidal wave. He saw the houses flicker, then spin away, like tiny flakes in a torrent. His heart nearly stopped in his chest.
The dam broke. The flood’s covering the highway. It’ll go for miles, clear to the river.
Cal whipped his cell phone from under his slicker and punched 911. The dispatcher, Margaret, answered. Cal’s horse began to dance and kick, rebelling at the danger it sensed. Cal hung on and fired his words into the phone, “This is Cal McKinney. I’m on the Northeast section of the Double C. The dam at Bluebonnet Meadows gave way. It took those five houses down like they was sledgehammered. You got a flash flood coming right down the whole of Lower Crystal Creek—”
“Flash flood?” Margaret asked. He could barely hear her over the rain and the roar of the great wave drowning the valley. “Has it reached the highway?”
“Yes.” Cal yelled to be heard. “This is an emergency, Margaret. Get word out, for God’s sake.”
“Was anybody on the road?” she asked.
“I can’t tell,” he practically screamed. “Get out the word, dammit!”
Serena and his children were safe, he knew, because J.T.’s house was out of the flood’s path. J.T. and Cynthia were with them, and safe. His sister’s place in town should be fine.
But who else was out there in the path of that man-made tidal wave?
J.T. WAS PROFOUNDLY GRATEFUL to have his family all in one place. His daughter Lynn and her family had come as soon as they heard the news.
But Lynn was grim-faced, and so were her two adopted daughters, sitting on either side of her. Allie looked nervous and Sandy angry as they all listened to radio reports of the flood.
In three hours, the crest of the flood had plunged along the path of Lower Crystal Creek until it had begun emptying into the Claro River. It had hurled and twisted for twenty-one miles. The water lowered as the valley widened; its velocity slowed.
But the damage was done. And nobody knew how much. Fifteen buildings at the water’s farthest edge were flooded, in a little community called Baswell. So far nobody was reported killed, but there were people unaccounted for.
No one could speculate on the amount of physical damage. Trees had been uprooted, crops drowned, cattle killed, roads washed out, bridges collapsed. Roadblocks had been set up, and the Crystal Creek water supply was compromised; nobody was supposed to drink from it.
“I wish we’d kept protesting last summer,” eighteen-year-old Sandy muttered. “We should have stood up to Fabian then. We never should have backed down.”
Lynn stroked the girl’s long, fine hair. “We decided to settle it legally.”
“Legally,” Sandy scoffed. She stood and tightly crossed her arms. “Look where legally got us.”
J.T. had to agree with the last part. If they hadn’t blocked Fabian, he’d have had time to build a real dam at his lake. He sighed and stared out the picture window. Beyond the rivulets of rain that streaked it, he could see only blackness.
Cynthia came to her husband’s side and put her hand on his arm. “J.T.,” she said, “you don’t blame yourself for this do you?”
Dear Cynthia, he thought. He turned to her, taking both her hands in his.
“We fought. Maybe we shouldn’t have. But we tried to fight fair.”
“I know you did,” she said. She rose on tiptoe and kissed his jaw.
“Daddy,” Cal said with a frown, “you had to take him to court. He can’t mess with the water rights the way he did. It affects everybody downstream. You. Aunt Carolyn. Mark Devlin. Jake Zangwell… You had no choice.”
Sandy said, “He stopped construction even though he knew there was danger.” She said it with great bitterness. “If that creek ran a little farther west, this flood would have taken out most of Tyler’s vineyard.”
Her father, Sam, patted her arm. “It didn’t. It took a few acres, that’s all.” But Sandy had thought about it too much and started to cry softly.
“Damn Fabian,” she choked out. She laid her face against Sam’s chest, and he wrapped his arms around her.
Cal moved to the window beside his father and stepmother. “Those fancy houses of Fabian’s washed away like paper boats,” he said. “So far he’s hurt himself more than anybody,” he said.
“Only so far,” said Sam. “Not everyone’s accounted for.”
J.T. nodded and drew Cynthia closer to him. He and his were all right. His hands and their families were accounted for. He’d heard from Carolyn; she and Vernon were fine. So were Ken and Nora. Bubba and Mary Gibson were okay except that they had a lot of very wet ostriches, and Bubba, enraged, was sputtering his head off about suing Fabian.
Every five minutes, it seemed, the phone rang with someone else reporting in and asking if they were all right. Right now Serena was talking earnestly with Tracey Hernandez, who’d called long distance from Abilene. No sooner had she hung up than it rang again. This time J.T. picked it up himself. “Double C. J. T. McKinney speaking.”
“J.T., it’s me again,” said Ken Slattery. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Nora’s worried. She hasn’t had any word from Kitt since about five-thirty. They talked, and she told Nora she was going to find Mel Belyle.”
J.T. tensed. He’d been concerned about family, friends, neighbors. The little redhead had completely slipped his mind. “Belyle? Where was he?”
“Kitt didn’t say,” Ken told him. “She said she’d phone after she talked to him. That’s the last we heard of her. I called the Sheriff’s Department. State Police, too. Nobody knows anything about either of them.”
J.T. swore under his breath. He wouldn’t give a damn if Mel Belyle got swept into the Claro River and turned into fish food. But Kitt Mitchell? She was such a little thing—a wall of water like that could have carried her off as easily as if she were a child.
Ken said, “Nora’s getting frantic.”
“Kitt’s got a good head on her shoulders,” J.T. said. “She seems like the kind who can take care of herself. But I’ll put the word out. You and Nora want to come over here?”
“No. She wants to stay close to the phone here. But thanks.”
J.T. said goodbye and hung up. The others looked at him expectantly. “Nora hasn’t heard from her cousin
. Kitt Mitchell.”
Their faces went wary, and Sandy looked as if she might cry again. Nobody said anything. All they could do was wait.
“MY GOD,” Mel said in Kitt’s ear. His voice was hoarse. They’d reached the ledge that formed a narrow path that led upward. The ground beneath them was stony and muddy—but blessedly level.
He’d nearly crawled the last few yards to the ridge, pulling Kitt with him. Now they lay, collapsed, on the ledge. They held each other, and Kitt could feel his heart hammering next to hers. Her breath came in torn gasps.
Kitt wanted to weep with relief. But she had no strength for weeping. All she could do was lie beside Mel, stunned at still being alive. She didn’t know how he’d managed to toil up the steep slope until he reached the path. In places it was nearly as sheer as a cliff.
The sky had turned black, the rain blinding.
He’d stumbled too many times for her to count, he’d slid backward, he’d fallen twice, but he never quit. And he never loosened his grip on her. Sometimes he had her slung in-elegantly over his shoulder. Sometimes he clutched her against him protectively as he crawled and clawed his way higher.
Now she lay pressed against him, her own heart pounding and the blood ringing in her ears. She raised herself weakly and tried to look over the ledge. A distant flash of lightning briefly lit the sky a dull blue.
Far below she glimpsed a black swirling sea, valley wide. The unleashed water rushed and roared. If Mel had really fallen—or if he’d lost his hold on her just once…she wouldn’t think about that.
She turned away, tears stinging her eyes, and fell back against the wet earth. Her ankle throbbed. She felt scratched, bruised and battered all over.
Beside her Mel moaned and swore. He raised himself on his free elbow. “We’ve got to get out of this rain. You said there was shelter somewhere? How do we get there?”
She stayed where she was, protected in the crook of his arm. “I don’t even know where we are.”
A Little Town in Texas Page 23