Mysterious Ways by Wendy Wunder

Author:Wendy Wunder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Flash Flood

Only the woodland creatures saw it coming. It wasn’t a flash flood for them. For them, the water rose slowly, saturating everything from the ground up, filling the rooms of their warrens and drowning the baby bunnies in their sleep.

The grieving older rabbits fled for higher ground, as did the snakes and the woodchucks and the porcupines, but they didn’t wake Scott, who for some reason camped at sea level that night when authorities knew he knew better than that, especially these days, with all we know about the floodplain after the thaw.

It had been raining for five days. And the river, white at first, lashed and licked violently at the rocks, devils’ tongues. But then it rose, jumping and flickering until it galvanized itself into a thick black lava, swallowing whole giant boulders in its wake. At dawn, the entire forest was a brown, churning lake filled with silt and floating debris … a swing set, a rogue kayak, a coyote floating by nervously on the roof of a shed.

Maya awoke to the sound of news choppers overhead. They had to get live footage for the old ladies who loved to catastrophize. That line from the Morrissey song came into her head. The one about not watching the news because of the news’s secret plot to frighten us. She sang it out loud as a joke, the choppers practically drowning her out, as she came into the kitchen to get some coffee.

She thought her parents would laugh. The choppers always came when the river rose a little. Her parents always made fun of the newsertainment on local TV. But this time their faces were gray and grave. Their eyes rimmed in red, as if they’d been up all night.

She read it in their minds before they had to say it.

“NO!” Maya said. “No no no no no!” she cried.

“Maya,” her mom finally said, looking up. “It’s Scott.”

They had found him still in his sleeping bag, battered and bruised from his violent trip down the rapids. The coroner promised that a blow to the head killed him instantly, and he didn’t have to endure a death by drowning, which was apparently a worse way to go. This was supposed to be comforting.

But something was off about the whole scenario. Scott was a survivalist. He knew how to survive everything. Even a flash flood.

Maya’s parents fretted. They thought this would be a setback for Maya, just when she was getting into a groove, so they tiptoed around her and let her mope, weep, and do whatever she wanted, even cut school that day, and what Maya wanted, needed really, was to talk to Sheila. Something compelled her to find Sheila, actually, so she pulled on her rain boots and left.

Sheila was at the café, and Maya could see her inside, but it was already eleven o’clock, and she hadn’t flipped the closed sign around. Big plastic pickle buckets formed an obstacle course around the shop, catching the drips that loudly and intermittently plopped from the leaking ceiling.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.