Ms. Patel was already kneeling on the bank with the pizza box roster, rain dripping off her chin, eyes moving down names and then up to faces. “That’s all of them,” she said again, this time to Luke. “They’re all out.”
He nodded once, water cutting a clean line through the mud on his cheek. The nod carried a weight nothing in this storm could wash away.
The river took another godless bite from the road. The outermost volunteers staggered and found each other. A driver on the bridge, engine idling high, inched his pickup forward on the captain’s signal. Firefighters slid a chain from the truck hitch to a concrete stanchion and back, turning two unstable things into one good anchor. The winch cable paid out with a sound like a zipper on a tent you hope is waterproof.
“New plan,” the captain said to Doc and June, quick but not rushed. “We keep civilians out of the pit and move to shoreline care. We’ll secure the bus to prevent drift and wait for heavy wrecker—no one else inside.”
