Page 8 of Hurricane Irene

They had two flare rounds, one working flashlight, a folding saw, a trauma kit already half-emptied, and food for less than a day.

Their orders were simple: document blocked roads and structural damage, locate anyone left behind, and mark places that would need boats, medical crews, or heavy equipment when organized rescue reached the area.

Later other groups would take the boats out to sift through what was left of the bayou.

They had expected devastation. They had not expected every landmark to be erased or the flood to cut them off from their own staging point.

At the crossroads, the water deepened suddenly. Luke stepped into a drainage channel and disappeared to his shoulders. The rope snapped tight. Hex and Whiskey hauled him back while a refrigerator floated past on its side, door hanging open, jars and plastic containers bumping inside like loose teeth.

A section of porch followed, then a dead hog swollen against a fence panel. Farther out, something pale rolled once just beneath the surface and vanished in the brown current.

They climbed onto the concrete slab of a ruined filling station. The canopy was gone. Two gasoline pumps had been ripped from their mounts, hoses trailing like severed veins.

In the service bay, an aluminum fishing boat had been driven through the wall and pinned there under rafters. The men found three residents on the roof of the attached store: an older couple and a boy wrapped in a curtain. The woman had a deep cut along her forearm, packed with a towel gone nearly black. The boy had not spoken since midnight.

There was nowhere safe to take them. The school shelter had lost its roof. The volunteer fire station was under eight feet of water. The parish clinic had been opened by a fallen oak, its examination rooms filling and emptying with every surge.

So the team made the filling station roof into a refuge. They lifted the residents one at a time, bracing a ladder against the slick block wall.

Cam dressed the woman's wound with the last broad gauze pad. Eric tied the ladder down. Whiskey collected rainwater in a clean oil-change pan scrubbed with a rag, and Hex watched the road for movement that never came.

“We’ve got several at the old filling station,” said Cam into the walkie. “When you’re able to send someone this way, we’ve put them on the roof to keep them out of the water.”

“Roger that.” The voice of his father, Nine seemed to calm him somewhat. No one was sitting this one out. They would all need help.

By late afternoon, cries began to rise from the flooded houses beyond the pecan grove.

The men left Cam with the family and pushed west toward the sound. The water carried nails, splintered lumber, roofing screws, broken glass, and coils of wire hidden under the surface. Each step was an argument with the current. Once, Grant lifted his boot and found a strip of metal driven through the sole. It had missed his foot by less than an inch.

They found a woman standing in the fork of a magnolia tree with a dog tucked inside her shirt. Her trailer had rolled twice and split open against a power pole. The bedroom end lay in the pasture, crushed flat beneath a water oak. The kitchen end had disappeared. She could not tell them whether her brother had escaped.

Luke climbed first. Bark sloughed under his gloves, slick with rain and mud. The dog snapped at him until the woman surrendered it to Whiskey below. Then Luke lowered her into the water, where Hex and Eric guided her by the rope.

Behind them, a cattle shed broke loose from its foundation and came down the flooded lane in pieces, posts and corrugated panels battering trees with cannon-like blows.

They searched the trailer debris until darkness thickened. Beneath a mattress wedged against the pole, they found a man's hand. The rest of him was trapped under twisted flooring and the axle. There was no safe way to free him while the current ran so hard. Luke covered the hand with a torn blanket and made himself turn away.

They found others alive: two farmhands clinging to the loft beam of a collapsed barn; a grandmother and infant in the cab of a cotton picker; a man with a broken leg lying on a dining table that floated against his ceiling.

They marked each location with strips of orange cloth torn from a survey vest, though they knew no helicopter could see the marks beneath the clouds.

At the cotton picker, the infant was cold and barely crying. Grant held the child inside his vest while they ferried the grandmother across a drowned pasture. The baby's skin felt waxy against his chest. He kept whispering, not because he knew what to say but because silence seemed dangerous.

They returned to the filling station after midnight with eleven people crowded onto the roof. The slab below had disappeared under rising water. Vehicles bumped and turned in the lot, their alarms long dead, their windows filmed with mud.

Across the highway, flames climbed from a ruptured gas line and burned blue at the base, orange above, illuminating rain that fell sideways through the wreckage.

Morning brought no light worth naming. The second day arrived gray-green and windless, the clouds pressed low enough to touch the torn crowns of the trees. Belle Fleur lay beneath a broad, moving sheet. Only roof ridges, grain bins, and the upper arms of oaks broke its surface.

The water had risen during the night. It lapped at the roof's edge and pushed trash into dense mats around the building: lumber, plastic toys, fence rails, propane cylinders, deer carcasses, shingles, branches, a baby's high chair, a red door with its brass knob still attached. Mosquitoes appeared in clouds over the trapped grass. Flies settled where the dead animals collected.

The team divided a sleeve of crackers among seventeen people. Whiskey rationed the clean rainwater by capfuls.

“The others should arrive soon with provisions,” said Cam. “We’ve got a mess. Fifteen other groups of six are out there encountering the same thing. This is not something we can rush.”

The older woman with the arm wound had developed a fever. The man with the broken leg drifted in and out of consciousness, his boot cut away, the lower limb purple and badly swollen. The infant's breathing had strengthened, but there was no formula, and the grandmother's hands shook when she held the child.

Luke climbed the remains of the canopy support and raised the radio. Static flooded the speaker. For one second, a voice broke through—two syllables, perhaps a call sign, perhaps only interference—then vanished. He transmitted their location until the battery warning blinked.