Luke set his jaw. “We all did our part.”
Doc’s mouth softened. “We’ll argue about credit when the sun’s out.”
For a frugal stretch of seconds, the storm felt ordinary—the kind you can drive through, the kind you curse for cancelling a ballgame. We took breaths that didn’t scrape. We counted names that matched faces. The floodlights buzzed, the generator puttered, and the rain drummed a beat you could almost hum to.
Then someone on the bridge pointed upstream and the almost broke.
A dark shape—long, blunt-nosed, the size of a small car—unmoored from somewhere higher, riding the greasy top of the flood like it knew our coordinates. A dumpster, spun from a construction lot and set free to roll whatever it met. It bumped a floating log, corrected, and came broadside across the current, lining itself up with the pit like a cue ball with a pocket.
