A Cold Creek Reunion (14 page)

The stranger, who must have restrained her from jumping in after them, spoke. “Three minutes. Maybe four. Not long. I pulled into the parking lot just in time to see her running down the bank screaming something about her kids. I stopped her from jumping in after them and called 9-1-1. I don’t know if that was right.”

He would shake the guy’s hand later and pay for his whole damn stay, but right now he didn’t have even a second to spare.

“You did exactly right. Laura, stay here. Promise me,” he ordered. “You won’t find them by jumping in and you’ll just complicate everything. The water is moving too fast for you to catch up. Stay here and I will bring them back to you. Promise me.”

Her eyes were filled with a terrified anguish. He wanted to comfort her, but damn it, he didn’t have time.

“Promise me,” he ordered again.

She sagged against the stranger and Jan and nodded, then collapsed to her knees in the dirt, holding on to her mother.

He raced back to his truck, shouting orders into his radio the whole time as he set up a search perimeter and called in the technical rescue team. Even as one part of his mind was busy dealing with the logistics of the search and setting up his second in command to run the grid, the other part was gauging the depth of the water, velocity of the current, the creek’s route.

Given that the incident happened five minutes ago now, he tried to calculate how far the children might have floated. It was all guesswork without a meter to give him exact stream flow, but he had lived along Cold Creek all his life and knew its moods and its whims. He and Trace and their friends used to spend summers fishing for native rainbows, and as he grew older, he had kayaked the waters innumerable times, even during high runoff.

Something urged him to head toward Saddleback Road. Inspiration? Some kind of guardian angel? Just a semi-educated guess? He didn’t know, but a picture formed itself clearly in his head, of a certain spot where the creek slowed slightly at another natural bow and split into two channels before rejoining. Somehow he knew
that
was the spot where he needed to be
right now.

He could be totally off the mark but he could only hope and pray he wasn’t.

“Battalion Twenty, what’s your status?” he heard over the radio. Trace.

“Almost to Saddleback,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’m starting here. Send a team to the road a quarter mile past that. What is that? Barrelwood?”

“Copy. Don’t be stupid, Chief.”

One of the hazards of working with his brother—but he didn’t care about that now, when he had reached the spot that seemed imprinted in his mind, for all those reasons he couldn’t have logically explained.

He jerked the wheel to the side of the road and jumped out, stopping only long enough to grab the water-rescue line in its throw bag in one of the compartments in the back of his truck. He raced to the water’s edge, scanning up and down for any sign of movement. This time of year, mid-May, the runoff was fast and cold coming out of the mountains, but he thanked God the peak flow, when it was a churning, furious mess, was still another few weeks away as the weather warmed further.

Had he overshot them or had they already moved past him? Damn it, he had no way of knowing. Go down or up? He screwed his eyes shut and again that picture formed in his head of the side channel that was upstream about twenty yards. He was crazy to follow such a vague impression but it was all he had
right now.

He raced up the bank, listening to the reports of the search on his radio as he ran.

Finally he saw the marshy island in the middle of the two channels. A couple of sturdy pine trees grew there, blocking a good part of his view, but he strained his eyes.

There!

Was that a flash of pink?

He moved a little farther upstream for a different vantage point. The instant he could see around the pines, everything inside him turned to that crackly ice again.

Two small dark heads bobbed and jerked, snagged in the deadfall of a tree that was half-submerged in the water. The tree was caught between two boulders in the side channel. From here, he couldn’t tell if the kids were actually actively holding on or had just been caught there by the current.

He grabbed his radio, talking as he moved as close as he could. “Battalion Twenty. I’ve got a sighting twenty yards east of where my truck is parked on Saddleback Road. I need the tech team and Ambulance Thirty-Six here now.”

He knew, even as he issued the order, that no way in hell was he going to stand here and do nothing during the ten minutes or so it might take to assemble the team and get them here. Ten minutes was the difference between life and death. Anything could happen in those ten minutes. He didn’t know if the children were breathing—and didn’t even want to think about any other alternative—but if they weren’t, ten minutes could be critical to starting CPR.

Besides that, the water could be a capricious, vengeful thing. The relentless current could tug them farther downstream and away from him. He wasn’t about to take that chance.

This was totally against protocol, everything he had trained his own people
not
to do. Single-man water rescues were potentially fatal and significantly increased the dangers for everybody concerned.

Screw protocol.

He needed to reach Laura’s children. Now.

This would be much more comfortable in a wet suit but he wasn’t about to take the time to pull his on. He raced upstream another ten yards to a small bridge formed by another fallen tree. On the other side of the creek, the children were only a dozen feet away. He called out and thought he saw one of the dark heads move.

“Alex! Maya! Can you hear me?”

He thought he saw the head move again but he couldn’t be sure. No way could they catch the throw bag. He was going to have to go after them, which he had known from the moment he spotted that flash of pink.

If he calculated just right and entered at the correct place upstream, the current would float him right to them, but he would have to aim just right so the first boulder blocked his movement and his weight didn’t dislodge the logjam, sending the children farther downstream.

He knew the swift-water safety algorithm. Talk. Reach. Wade. Throw. Helo. Go. Row. Tow. The only thing he could do here was reach them and get them the hell out.

He tied the rescue rope around the sturdy trunk of a cottonwood, then around his waist, then plunged into the water that came up to his chest. The icy water was agony and he felt his muscles cramp instantly, but he waded his way toward the deadfall, fighting the current as hard as he could. It was useless. After only a few steps, the rushing water swept his feet out from under him, as he expected.

It took every ounce of strength he could muster to keep his feet pointed downstream so they could take the brunt of any impact with any boulders or snags in the water. The last thing he needed here was a head injury.

He must have misjudged the current because he ended up slightly to the left of the boulder. He jammed his numb feet on the second boulder to stop his momentum. A branch of the dead tree gouged the skin of his forehead like a bony claw, but he ignored it, fighting his way hand over hand toward the children, praying the whole time he wouldn’t dislodge the trunk.

“Alex, Maya. It’s Chief Bowman. Come on, you guys.” He kept up a nonstop dialogue with them but was grimly aware that only Alex stirred. The boy opened one eye as Taft approached, then closed it again, looking as if he were utterly exhausted.

The boy’s arm was around his sister, but Maya was facedown in the water. He used all his strength to fight the current as he turned her and his gut clenched when he saw her eyes staring blankly and her sweet features still and lifeless.

He gave her a quick rescue breath. She didn’t respond, but he kept up the rescue breaths to her and Alex while he worked as quickly as he could, tying them both to him with hands that he could barely feel, wondering as he worked and breathed for all three of them how much time had passed and what the hell was taking his tech rescue crew so long.

This was going to be the toughest part, getting them all out of the water safely, but with sheer muscle, determination—and probably some help from those guardian angels he was quite certain had to be looking after these two kids—he fought the current and began pulling himself hand over hand along the tree trunk, wet and slippery with moss and algae, pausing every ten seconds to give them both rudimentary rescue breaths.

Just as he reached the bank, completely exhausted by the effort of fighting the current, he heard shouts and cries and felt arms lifting him out and untying the kids.

“Chief! How the hell did you find them clear over here?” Luke Orosco, his second in command, looked stunned as he took in the scene.

He had no idea how to explain the process that had led him here. Miracle or intuition, it didn’t matter, not when both children were now unresponsive, although it appeared Alex was at least breathing on his own.

Satisfied that his crew was working with Alex, he immediately turned to the boy’s sister and took command. He was the only trained paramedic in this group, though everyone else had basic EMT training. “Maya? Come on, Maya, honey. You’ve got to breathe, sweetheart.”

He bent over the girl and turned her into recovery position, on her side, nearly on her stomach, her knee up to drain as much water from her lungs as he could. He could hear Alex coughing up water, but Maya remained still.

“Come on, Maya.”

He turned her and started doing CPR, forcing himself to lock away his emotions, the knowledge that Laura would be destroyed if he couldn’t bring back her daughter. He continued, shaking off other crew members who wanted to take over.

Some part of him was afraid all this work was for nothing—she had been in the water too long—but then, when despair began to grip him colder than the water, he felt something change. A stirring, a movement, a heartbeat. And then she gave a choking cough and he turned her to her side just in time as she vomited what seemed like gallons of Cold Creek all over the place.

Pink color began to spread through her, another miracle, then she gave a hoarse, raspy cry. He turned her again to let more water drain, then wrapped her in a blanket one of his crew handed over.

“Oxygen,” he called. Maya continued to cry softly and he couldn’t bring himself to let her go.

“Good job, Chief!”

He was vaguely aware of the guys clapping him and themselves on the back and the air of exultation that always followed a successful rescue, but right now he couldn’t focus on anything but Maya.

“You ready for us to load her up?” Ron asked.

He didn’t want to let her go, but he knew she needed more than the triage treatment they could offer here. There was still a chance she had been without oxygen long enough for brain damage, but he had to hope the cold water might help ease that possibility.

“Yeah, we’d better get her into the ambulance,” he answered. When the EMTs loaded her onto the stretcher, he finally turned to find Alex being loaded onto another stretcher nearby. The boy was conscious and watching the activity around him. When Taft approached, his mouth twisted into a weary smile.

“Chief.” The kid’s voice sounded hoarse, raw. “You saved us. I knew you would.”

He gripped the boy’s hand, humbled and overwhelmed at that steady trust. “What happened, Alex? You know you’re not supposed to be near the water.”

“I know. We always stay away from it.
Always.
But Lucky ran that way and Maya followed him. I chased after her to take her back to Mama and she thought it was a game. She laughed and ran and then slipped and went in the creek. I didn’t know what to do. I thought…I thought I could get her. I had swimming lessons last year. But the water was so
fast.
”

The boy started to cry and he gathered him up there on the stretcher as he had done Maya. What a great kid he was, desperately trying to protect his little sister. Taft felt tears threaten, too, from emotion or delayed reaction, he didn’t know, but he was deeply grateful for any guardian angels who had been on his rescue squad for this one.

“You’re safe now. You’ll be okay.”

“Is Maya gonna be okay?” Alex asked.

He still wasn’t sure he knew the answer to that. “My best guys are just about to put her in the ambulance. You get to take a ride, too.”

Before Alex could respond to that, Taft saw a Pine Gulch P.D. SUV pull up to the scene. His brother’s vehicle. The thought barely registered before the passenger door was shoved open and a figure climbed out.

Laura.

She stood outside the patrol vehicle for just a moment as if not quite believing this could be real and then she rushed toward them. In a second she scooped Alex into her arms and hugged him.

“Oh, baby. Sweetheart,” she sobbed. “You’re okay. You’re really okay? And Maya?” Still carrying Alex, she rushed over to Maya and pulled her into her other arm.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we need to transport both of the children to the clinic in town.” Ron looked compassionate but determined. “They’re in shock and need to be treated for possible hypothermia.”

“Oh. Of course.” Her strained features paled a little at this further evidence that while the children were out of the water, they still required treatment.