John Sandford - Mad River

“You need one?”

“Yeah-if you can get. . You gotta go around. .”

“Get in,” Virgil said.

The man wasn’t wearing rain gear; he was wearing an athletic jacket and jeans and running shoes, and sputtering with the rain he’d absorbed. He said, “Go that way,” and Virgil went that way. The man said, “There’s a house down. They think a kid is still inside. I don’t know, he’s probably dead.”

Virgil didn’t have anything to say to that, and the man said, “We saw it coming. Thank God, we saw it coming. I think most people made it down the basement.”

They traveled in a jigsaw route along back streets and down an alley, ran over electric wires a couple of times, dodged downed trees, and then the man pointed at a crowd of people working around what must have been an old Victorian house. The man got out in the rain and said, “Let’s go,” and he darted off toward the downed house.

Virgil zipped up the rain jacket and got out, pulled the hood up against the rain, and ran over to the house. A line of men were prying away pieces of siding and structural lumber and beams, and throwing them aside. When Virgil asked what they were doing, the man ahead of him said, “We can hear the kid. Four-year-old.”

They threw lumber for ten minutes, then a big fat man suddenly disappeared into the hole they were making, and a couple of people yelled, “Take it easy, Bill, take it easy. .”

Another man near the hole said, “He’s got him. He’s got him. He’s alive.”

A minute later, the fat man popped out of the hole, holding a kid like a rag doll. Then he bundled the kid in his arms and said, “Where’s the ambulance? Where’s the fuckin’ ambulance.”

Virgil yelled, “We’ll take my truck. We’ll take my truck.”

The men carried the kid down to Virgil’s truck and laid him in the back, and another man crawled inside with him, and the fat man yelled, “Down to Ericksons, everybody who can make it. Down to Ericksons.”

Virgil turned the truck, hit the lights and siren, and took off.

VP was eight miles south of Bigham and the Bigham Medical Center, which Virgil knew well. He made it in seven minutes, the truck rocking in the wind and the rain, while the man in back shouted, “You gotta hurry, you gotta hurry.”

At the medical center, two people ran out into the rain with a gurney and lifted the kid aboard. One of the two was Frank O’Leary, the youngest of the boys. He apparently didn’t recognize Virgil, wrapped in the Musto suit, and the two of them pushed the boy off into the emergency room.

The guy who rode with Virgil shouted, “We gotta go back.”

Virgil made three trips, the two ambulances seven or eight more. On his last trip, Virgil took a woman who might have had a broken hip, in the back, while an elderly man, who’d ripped his hand on a nail, rode in the passenger seat.

VP was still a mess, and people still roamed the town looking for dead, injured, and missing, but mutual-aid cops and ambulances were flooding in, and a disaster headquarters was operating, and Virgil wouldn’t be needed again.

The old man told Virgil he’d gotten hurt dragging broken lumber off a downed house, where they were looking for another old man who lived alone. They hadn’t found him. The old man with the ripped hand said, “That sonofabitch is trying to get out of our golf game,” and then he started to cry.

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had come, and the wind was gone; Virgil could see stars down toward the horizon.

When they got to town, Frank O’Leary came out with the gurney to get the woman with the hip, and Virgil realized that the woman helping him was his sister, Mary. Virgil led the old man inside, attracted the attention of a nurse, who looked at the old man’s hand and took him away.

Before she went, she said, “There’s coffee and cookies just down the hall.”

Virgil went that way, and got a cup of coffee, and because there were plenty of cookies, took six. Then he went back in the hallway, toward the entrance, then stopped to watch the emergency reception area.

There were several gurneys and beds with people on them, and he saw Jack O’Leary, the med student, taking notes from a woman who lay propped up on a wheeled bed. He was nodding as he took notes, and then he stood up, said something to her, patted her on the arm, and moved on to another bed.

A moment later, John O’Leary came out of the back part of the ER, what must’ve been an operating room. He was wearing an operating gown with a spot of blood on the belly of it. He stepped over to Jack and asked him something, and Jack pointed to one of the beds, and John O’Leary went over to look at the patient.

Another of the O’Leary boys showed up, dressed like his father; what he’d been doing, Virgil had no idea, but he was wearing an operating gown and booties.

Wu, the doc who’d treated Virgil, came out of the back and called something to John O’Leary, who turned and went after him.

Virgil watched it all for another five minutes, and then when they were all occupied, slipped out the door.

Ten minutes later, he had his gear out of the hotel and back in his truck: they needed all the rooms they could get, and he wasn’t that far from home; or, he could go into Marshall, which was pretty convenient. If he went to Marshall, he could be back in Bigham early the next day.

He drove out to the highway, to the stop sign, looked both ways.

He could be back the next day, to interview the O’Learys. The emergency would be over by then.

Or he could say, “Fuck it,” and go home.

Let it go.

If the whole crew of O’Learys had resurrected one person, one kid, from the calamity of Victoria Plains, that would make up for any number of Murphys, wouldn’t it?

Well, no, Virgil thought, it wouldn’t. The O’Learys, he was convinced, had violated one of God’s own natural laws: Thou shalt not kill.

On the other hand. .

Virgil sat at the stop sign for five minutes, staring blank-eyed into the night. Remembering all those O’Learys, dark-eyed, bright, hardworking kids, hovering over the mass of injured and dying, doing what they’d been so well programmed to do. Would the knowledge of their crime be enough punishment? Would it haunt them down through the years?

What to do?

Five minutes.

Then Virgil sighed, said aloud, “Fuck it,” and turned toward home.

The next day, the weather guys flew over what would be known as the Victoria Plains F4, the biggest tornado of the year in Minnesota. It had been on the ground for almost forty miles, knocking over a few farmhouses and outbuildings here and there. The storm killed twelve people in VP, and injured forty-odd more.

The track itself looked a little like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a pig. The southwestern tip showed a few downed trees, some messed-up fields; then the path got wider, and the damage more extensive. Then the trail got really fat, and in its fattest part, whacked Victoria Plains. After VP, it went off to the northeast, slimming down, and then, twenty miles farther along, lifting off the ground altogether.

The weather guys would have needed God’s Own Camera to see it, but just where the trail had started to get fat, right at the head of the pig, the tornado had crossed a cornfield owned by a man named Alex Brown, and then barreled into an old woodlot, long neglected and overgrown with trees, brush, and not a little wild hemp; ditch-weed; marijuana.

If they’d had God’s Own Camera, and had been able to see through the tangled mess of downed timber and layers of shredded brush, they might have seen the outline of a carefully dug grave, unexpectedly disturbed by the tree roots wrenched from the wet earth. And now, sticking up from between the roots of a dying marijuana plant, a few fingers.