didn’t seem so now. Now, the only thing on her mind was the approaching storm, and the disquieting notion that she was leaving her post at a critical moment. Why had Shaw insisted she go home? It didn’t make any sense to her, not with so much going on.
She stood on the edge of the walkway, watching her canoe floating the water, tethered to the rig’s rearview mirror, and tried to think it through.
But nothing came.
Shaw had always been a private man, never the kind to open up around those with whom he worked, especially when those people were younger than he was by a good twenty years and considerably below him in rank. But Eleanor had picked up a good many things over the two years she’d worked in the EOC, most of it by listening in on the edges of conversations, and she knew his talk of duty wasn’t just a front. He really did think that way, as though the big concepts in life like duty and honor and justice were living things that could be fed and nurtured, the same way you would with children. And she knew the commitment he felt to those big ideas had made him unpopular with the department’s current administration. They looked on him as an inflexible, hardheaded dinosaur, more a nuisance than an asset, somebody who needed to be put somewhere out of the way, where he could work out his remaining few years until retirement in relative isolation and then, they hoped, go away quietly. She thought of him going into that horde of reporters, the camera crews looking as though they might chew him to pieces, and smiled bitterly. Fate, it seemed, had other plans for Captain Mark Shaw.
Still, the canoe waited. Her family waited. She thought of Madison, who, at the beginning of this mess had helped her move their household supplies upstairs with the bored air of a teenager going through the motions, but who was now acting as a full-time nurse for Ms. Hester, carrying the weight of responsibility like a grown-up, and Eleanor wondered if Shaw hadn’t had a point about the family being the prime duty of a human being. Hadn’t that been what attracted her to working in the EOC in the first place? Didn’t she feel a sense of rightness when she prepared her family’s disaster plans? Maybe it made sense after all.
Eleanor untied the canoe and set out.
She paddled away from the Student Service Center, through the ghosts of flooded buildings and over the roofs of submerged cars. Occasionally she heard an antenna scraping against the metallic bottom of the canoe.
Then she went under the freeway, and when she came out on the other side she was in open water. In the distance she could see I-45, a dark spine of concrete stretching across the horizon. It took ten minutes of paddling to put the campus well behind her. Home was another three miles to the south, and she figured she’d be able to make the distance in plenty of time to help Jim and Madison prep the house for the storm.
In her mind she went through the lists of things he’d mentioned on the phone, small chores that had to get done, damage that had to be repaired before Mardel made landfall, and soon she found herself drifting through a neighborhood.
She stopped paddling and looked around.
All the houses were dark, of course. That didn’t surprise her. Nor did the extraordinary amount of damage that had been done. What did surprise her was the quiet. There were no cars, no planes in the sky, no screaming kids or lawn-mowers or ringing phones. A strange, eerie calm had settled over the houses, and the stillness that dropped over the city was both hypnotic and terrifying.
Off to her left, in the space between two houses, she saw a darkened figure wading toward her, chest deep in the flood water. She was pretty sure it was a man. He was moaning. Something about the sound chilled her nerves, and she took up her paddle and moved out again.
The man was far away, but even still, she nudged the AR-15 at her feet a little closer, just in case.
CHAPTER 5
The hammer
She stood on the edge of the walkway, watching her canoe floating the water, tethered to the rig’s rearview mirror, and tried to think it through.
But nothing came.
Shaw had always been a private man, never the kind to open up around those with whom he worked, especially when those people were younger than he was by a good twenty years and considerably below him in rank. But Eleanor had picked up a good many things over the two years she’d worked in the EOC, most of it by listening in on the edges of conversations, and she knew his talk of duty wasn’t just a front. He really did think that way, as though the big concepts in life like duty and honor and justice were living things that could be fed and nurtured, the same way you would with children. And she knew the commitment he felt to those big ideas had made him unpopular with the department’s current administration. They looked on him as an inflexible, hardheaded dinosaur, more a nuisance than an asset, somebody who needed to be put somewhere out of the way, where he could work out his remaining few years until retirement in relative isolation and then, they hoped, go away quietly. She thought of him going into that horde of reporters, the camera crews looking as though they might chew him to pieces, and smiled bitterly. Fate, it seemed, had other plans for Captain Mark Shaw.
Still, the canoe waited. Her family waited. She thought of Madison, who, at the beginning of this mess had helped her move their household supplies upstairs with the bored air of a teenager going through the motions, but who was now acting as a full-time nurse for Ms. Hester, carrying the weight of responsibility like a grown-up, and Eleanor wondered if Shaw hadn’t had a point about the family being the prime duty of a human being. Hadn’t that been what attracted her to working in the EOC in the first place? Didn’t she feel a sense of rightness when she prepared her family’s disaster plans? Maybe it made sense after all.
Eleanor untied the canoe and set out.
She paddled away from the Student Service Center, through the ghosts of flooded buildings and over the roofs of submerged cars. Occasionally she heard an antenna scraping against the metallic bottom of the canoe.
Then she went under the freeway, and when she came out on the other side she was in open water. In the distance she could see I-45, a dark spine of concrete stretching across the horizon. It took ten minutes of paddling to put the campus well behind her. Home was another three miles to the south, and she figured she’d be able to make the distance in plenty of time to help Jim and Madison prep the house for the storm.
In her mind she went through the lists of things he’d mentioned on the phone, small chores that had to get done, damage that had to be repaired before Mardel made landfall, and soon she found herself drifting through a neighborhood.
She stopped paddling and looked around.
All the houses were dark, of course. That didn’t surprise her. Nor did the extraordinary amount of damage that had been done. What did surprise her was the quiet. There were no cars, no planes in the sky, no screaming kids or lawn-mowers or ringing phones. A strange, eerie calm had settled over the houses, and the stillness that dropped over the city was both hypnotic and terrifying.
Off to her left, in the space between two houses, she saw a darkened figure wading toward her, chest deep in the flood water. She was pretty sure it was a man. He was moaning. Something about the sound chilled her nerves, and she took up her paddle and moved out again.
The man was far away, but even still, she nudged the AR-15 at her feet a little closer, just in case.
CHAPTER 5
The hammer
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