“Take a left up here,” Omar called back, pointing at a street sign. The water reached halfway up its pole.
“Heard anything from Amy?” Jack asked.
Omar dug his phone from his dry bag, checked the screen quickly, and called over his shoulder, “Nothing new. I’m sure they’re getting busy with people showing up.”
Jack wanted to press his best friend to try texting her again. He didn’t like the thought of his sister on her feet, working through the night in the temporary shelter she was helping set up. She’d had major surgery only a few months ago and needed to be at home, taking it easy. Although, if she were home alone, he’d worry about that, too. Omar had once been on Jack’s side when it came to protecting Amy—okay, overprotecting Amy—but the longer he’d been married to her, the more easily he deferred to her stubborn confidence.
“She knows what she can handle,” Omar added, apparently reading Jack’s thoughts.
“Still can’t believe she drove over there in this,” Jack grumbled.
Omar barked a laugh. “Wonder where she got that from.”
“Says the guy who runs into burning buildings for a living.”
“Nah. By the time she came to me, she was already like this.”
She’d come into Jack’s life already like this, too. She’d been stressing him out since he was nine years old.
Jack kicked the outboard motor back up and cruised down a channel that had once been a road, careful to dodge the handful of cars drowned along the curbs. Garbage bins, tree limbs, and other debris bobbed past. Only the crossbar of the swing set and the upper level of the slide remained visible in the park Jack knew to be on their right.
“Over there!”
Jack followed Omar’s direction into a short cul-de-sac.
On the porch of a little blue house at the end of the lane, three figures waved erratically. An elderly woman in a trash-bag poncho braced against one of the porch posts, the water just above her knees, while another, younger woman carried a bag on each shoulder and something big in her arms—a pack of some kind. Behind her, a child, who was also wearing a trash bag, stood on a table just out of the water. “Over here!” the younger of the two women called out, her voice hoarse like she’d been at it a long time.
Jack steered the boat up over the submerged front lawn, and Omar caught the porch railing to prevent them from ramming it.
“What did I tell you? Here are the helpers,” said the young woman brightly to the girl, who was maybe seven or eight. With her arms still full, the woman crouched as if to piggyback the kid.Her mother, Jack realized.
The trio’s relief was so palpable, it seemed to surge through him, too. Who knew how long they’d waited for help while the water kept rising, while they watched boats zoom down other streets?
When Omar reached to help them onto the boat, though, the mother looked Jack dead in the face, something like shock in her wide eyes, and stood straighter, preventing the kid from climbing up. “Never mind.”
“What?” Omar called over the rain.
“We’re okay. We’ll get the next one.”
The next one?Jack made his way to the bow, bobbing with the current. Then he saw it, the slick, primary-colored cover on the pack. She’d changed her clothes, but it was definitely her, the reckless blonde crusader from the library, still carrying around those birds.
And she would rather risk drowning than get on his boat.
The table wobbled under the girl’s unicorn boots, and she shrieked. “Mom?”
Her mother snapped to her senses, crouching for her climb up again. “God, sorry. Of course we’re coming.”
As the kid wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck, something white and fuzzy dropped into the water and immediately drifted out of reach. “Beans!” the girl cried.
Jack lunged and caught the stuffed animal as it slipped around the hull, but not before the woman went for it herself, despite having no free hands and her kid on her back. She misjudged her step and nearly plunged right off the porch. The child’s cry pierced through the drumming rain. Jack reached to stop their motion, stretching himself so far over the side of the boat he almost sent himself overboard. A burst of needles prickled under his skin.
“Thebirds,” he said through gritted teeth. It was all the language he could access through the adrenaline.
She gulped a bracing swallow then huffed. “I couldn’t save them from drowning in the library to let them drown in my house.”
He’d meant for her to pass him the cage to free her hands, but apparently she’d interpreted it as chastising. And, yeah, now that he thought about it, it was insane to continue hauling around those birds while she had a child and an elderly woman in her care. “Would you please,” he said with hard-fought control, “get on the goddamned boat?”
“Iwas,” she said. But as she turned for Omar to lift the kid over the side, she added, “Of all the freaking rescue boats in all of Houston…”