a life jacket onto Mrs. Bassett while the other man in the boat manned the motor. It squealed as it fought the current to stay in place. Once Mrs. Bassett was secure, the motor revved and the boat took off upstream, back toward the houses. Gretchen pulled Josie’s tether until she was close enough to climb back inside the boat. Brownlow made another hard turn and steered his boat back upstream, drawing closer to Hayes’s boat until they were side by side. Mrs. Bassett’s house came back into view, then those on the rest of the street.
“Nice save,” Brownlow yelled to Josie.
She was about to answer when a series of cracks shattered the air. All their heads turned, searching for the source of the sound.
“Was that thunder?” Gretchen asked.
“Don’t think so,” Brownlow answered.
The sound came again as a new surge of water roared toward them. With a sickening sense of dread, Josie realized the sound was caused by one of the nearby houses shifting and breaking away from its foundation.
“It’s one of the houses!” she shouted.
They all watched the row of houses on Hempstead, the porches now fully submerged. More cracks and pops sounded, then Mrs. Bassett’s house started to slide, listing toward the left in slow motion. One side of the house slumped. The porch roof splintered.
“It’s going,” Hayes yelled. He made a circular motion in the air with one of his hands, and both boats began to move away from the house as it slid completely off its foundation. Sagging, it tumbled face down into the water and floated away. It moved strangely slowly, given the force of the current. Hayes looked down at Mrs. Bassett, who was drawn in on herself, arms wrapped around her knees. Josie thought she heard him say, “Sorry about your house, ma’am.”
A hysterical laugh bubbled from Mrs. Bassett’s diaphragm. Josie couldn’t hear it over all the noise around them, but she could tell by the woman’s face and the way her shoulders shook, dwarfed by the life vest. They all stared at her, but her laughter continued unabated. Josie recognized it as the kind of strange and inappropriate laughter that erupted occasionally after someone experienced a trauma. Josie had dealt with countless victims of traumatic events. In rare instances, people got so overwhelmed, they laughed instead of breaking down in tears. Finally, Mrs. Bassett stopped. It was difficult to tell if she was crying with the rain pouring from the sky, but she wiped at her eyes. Josie couldn’t hear what she said to Hayes.
The boats bobbed violently in the current, still fighting to get upstream. Everyone paused for a somber moment, watching nature’s breathtaking savagery all around them.
Where the house had been was now churning brown water swirling with debris, creating a momentary whirlpool as the water rushed into the gap created by the missing house. A large chunk of concrete popped up and floated away, followed by several smaller pieces. Josie spotted what looked like a washer or dryer and pieces of pipes rising from the water and being carried away by the current. As the floodwater rushed past where the house had been and dislodged more of the house’s foundation, something bright blue emerged. At first it just looked like a piece of fabric flapping in the current, held in place by something beneath the water. Then another large chunk of concrete sprang up and floated downstream, and the unseen part of the fabric bobbed to the water’s surface, revealing that the fabric was part of something larger. Much larger. Human-sized.
“What the hell is that?” Brownlow yelled as the object came into relief, the pounding current cleansing it.
“A body!” Josie and Gretchen both answered loudly.
The blue fabric was a large plastic tarp, wrapped tightly around its contents which Josie estimated to be no longer than six feet and no wider than two feet. Duct tape wound round the tarp in four separate places.
Josie got up onto her knees and met Gretchen’s eyes. Gretchen gave her a nod and turned to Brownlow. “Get over there!”
He raised a brow. “You crazy?”
Josie stood, bracing herself on the boat’s edge. “We have to get it. It’s going to come loose any second.”
“What are you doing?” Hayes hollered over the radio. “Let’s go!”
Brownlow spoke into his own radio, tucked safely in its waterproof pouch, “She’s going after it.”
“You can’t! It’s too dangerous. We have to go!”
Josie tugged on her tether and spoke into her own radio. “I’ll grab it and Gretchen can pull me