No Ordinary Day (12 page)

And gasped.

“Miss Sullivan?” he stammered.

Lucy was collecting the rock samples from the other kids in the group. “Dominic, help us pick up, please.”

“Miss Sullivan,”
the little boy insisted, “there’s a
lot
of water on the playground.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lucy said, taking the igneous rock specimens out of the box to keep them from breaking. “We can still go outside at recess unless Mrs. Cox makes an announcement.”

A violent pounding in the hall, followed by the scream of fire alarms, tore through the air.

Lucy looked up in shock, then out the window.

A small stream, widening by the moment, was rushing past the windows between the playground and the school building.

As if in answer to the internal alarms, from every side of the town beyond the windows, sirens and honking horns took up the call.

The principal’s voice came over the loudspeaker, crackling and intermittent.

“Everyone stay calm, please. Faculty members are to initiate fire drill procedures but remain in your classrooms with the doors closed until fire department personnel come for you. Classrooms on the eastern corridor will be evacuated first. Make sure your emergency windows are unlatched. Repeat, everyone, please remain calm.”

Lucy swallowed hard. Her classroom was in the western corridor, near the northern door that led out onto the playground and to the sports fields of the high school beyond.

Farther away from the river.

If that stream is all the way over here, I can only imagine what the eastern side of the building is seeing,
she thought anxiously.

The students dashed to the windows as fire trucks and rescue vehicles began arriving on the track at the high school, five hundred or so feet away. The circling lights seemed to entrance the students, shaking as they were from fear.

Lucy clapped her hands, but the noise was lost in the thundering alarms.

“Everyone line up like it’s a fire drill,” she said as calmly as she could. Her voice wobbled a little, but still sounded rational. “Over here, please. Now.”

She exchanged a glance with Kelly Moran, who was already bringing Kristen in her wheelchair forward. The assistant teacher’s large, dark eyes were wide with barely-controlled panic; Lucy could see that she was unsure how to rescue her student in the event that the hallways were flooded.

She looked out the glass window in the classroom door.

Trickling water was already running down the western corridor.

Lucy went to her desk as the children lined up behind Mrs. Moran and pulled her purse from the bottom drawer. She grabbed her wallet, a slender cloth one, and slipped it, without thinking, into her bra, then looked up to see all thirteen students staring at her.

She cleared her throat. “Line up in pairs, please. Find a buddy. Hold hands.”

Loud sounds were coming in from the hallway, the noise of boots and children’s voices rising and falling over the wailing sirens and Mrs. Cox’s regular assurances over the loudspeaker. Lucy wasn’t certain, but it seemed to her that the principal’s voice was becoming thinner and more frantic with each announcement.

Or perhaps it was just the crackling of the PA, which was starting to show signs of failing.

Her students were beginning to make noise about needing to use the bathroom, even though they had all visited the restroom after snack.
Oh great,
Lucy thought. She could not possibly let them out of line, but knew the prospect of having an accident was particularly upsetting to children who had only become reliably toilet-trained in the last two or so years.

She loosed the hands of her “buddies” and grabbed a plastic bucket of crayons. She dumped the crayons onto her desk and held up the bucket.

“Who needs to go?” she asked. “You can use this.”

The children looked at each other in horror, then stared at her, aghast.

“Is there anyone who can’t wait?”

Thirteen heads shook quickly from side to side.

“All right. Well, if anyone needs to go before we get outside, you can use this and we will all close our eyes.”

Just then the door opened with a screech, and an ankle-high rush of water poured in through the doorway.

Three first responders in fire helmets came rapidly into the room, scanning the situation as they did, two of them pushing the door shut behind them with great effort.

The one in the lead was someone Lucy thought she recognized.

Ace Evans conferred with the other two firefighters, then held up what looked like a cord belt and a hook, several of which he had slung over both his shoulders, as did the other rescuers, one of whom was carrying a wide coil of rope, which he put down on Lucy’s desk.

“Hey guys—my name’s Ace. We’re here to take you out. Can you all raise your arms over your heads like this?”

He held up his own, straight, with his hands pointed toward the ceiling.

The children obeyed.

“Excellent.” He handed the rest of his belts to the other firefighters and walked over to Kristen, who was trembling in her wheel chair. “You’re first, miss. We’re going to be partners, ok?” The little girl nodded, looking terrified. He slipped the adjustable cord, called a gut belt, around her waist, and attached a carabineer to it, then slid it through the D-ring on his own belt.

“Keep your hands up until you’ve got your belt,” he said as the two firemen began attaching the gut belts to each of the other kids. “Then you can put ’em down.” He turned to the two women.

“Can you put on your own?”

Both women nodded uncertainly.

“Good.” He smiled slightly at Lucy. “You’re going to have to trust me today, ma’am. Sorry about that.”

Lucy just swallowed as she took the webbed belt he handed her and put it around her waist, cinching it tight.

It only took a few moments for everyone to be belted up, after which the man with the large coil of rope took it off the desk and clipped his rescue belt to the reinforced loop at the end of it, tightening the carabineer.

“So here’s how this works,” Ace said in a voice that was commanding, while at the same time calming, to the children. “We are all getting tied together, as you can see.” He leaned down to the trembling child in the wheelchair. “What’s your name?”

“Kristen.” Her voice was a ragged whisper.

“Kristen and I are the leaders. Everybody else is going to follow the leaders in a single-file line. We’re going up the hall that way—” he pointed north toward the exit door. “Then we’ll turn left and go right out the door and across to the football field.”

“What about the water?” Dominic asked, his voice quavering.

“We’re going to walk right through it—there’s a line of firefighters standing across the stream, and each of them is going to pass you along to the next one, like you were a football,” said Ace as the other two responders checked each of the carabineers, twisting the locking mechanism on each one. “No worries—we’ve gotcha. Right, gentlemen?”

The two firefighters smiled slightly for the first time since they had entered the room and nodded.

Ace looked at Kelly Moran, then at Lucy. “Let’s put her in the center,” he said to the first responders, indicating Kelly, “and Miss Sullivan at the end of the line.” Then he turned to the kids.

“You ready?”

He got a minimal response.

Ace cleared his throat.

“I said ‘are you ready?’ ” he growled, but his eyes twinkled. “The answer is ‘yes, sir!’ ”

“Yes, sir!” the children shouted back, energized.

“All
right,
” Ace said cheerfully. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

He signaled to one of the first responders, who took up his position at the door, then he bent down to Kristen.

“Ready, Miss Kristen?” The little girl nodded. Ace scooped her carefully up in his arms and signaled for the door to be opened.

Another swell of water, this time almost up to the children’s thighs, swept through the door, stinging cold, causing a number of them to scream.

Ace turned back. “No worries, polar bears. We gotcha. And you guys are North Country born and raised—this is nothing for you. Come on.”

He started out the door, the children being pushed along by the two firefighters, anchored in the center and at the end by the teachers, who were trembling as violently as the kids were.

This can’t be happening,
Lucy thought as she struggled to remain upright in the river that was now coursing through the western corridor. The water was slightly lower than it had been when it rushed through the doorway, but still the children were fighting to remain standing in the chilly current.

“Repeat after me,” Ace called in between blasts of the fire alarm. “Hup, twop, three-p,
four,
hup, twop, three-p,
four
—”

The students began chanting the cadence, following Ace around the corner to the side door of the school.

They were so engrossed in the chant that they didn’t notice the sizzle of the overhead corridor lights as the last of the power in the building blinked out.

Lucy looked back through the windows as the line of kids began to turn the corner and saw similar lines of roped children and staff with other firefighters leading them, making their ways to the bucket-brigade-type lines of rescuers in the rushing river that was spilling now down the sides of the building. Every now and then some sort of trash—tree branches, garbage cans, or other junk swept up in the flood—would impact one of the people in the rescue line, causing a hiccup in the process, but for the most part the passage seemed to be working well.

A growing cluster of kids and teachers was gathering on the football field, out of the way of the flood.

Just as she made it past the exterior door, she looked around for her missing students, the five girls Mr. Daniels had “snagged” earlier in the morning.

And did not see them.

A knot tied itself in her throat.

The baker’s dozen of kids from her class were now being passed along the rescue line, Ace and Kristen at the lead. The National Guardsman was sturdy enough to make his own wake as he passed through the floodwaters, leading the rope line of kids, but each person in the bucket brigade of eight firemen put a steadying hand on him anyway, just to be sure.

Every few moments, as the current grew swifter, one or another of them would grab a kindergartner who had tripped or fallen and pull that child up, steadying him or her, before encouraging them onward. It was an agonizingly slow process, especially for Lucy, at the end of the line and looking anxiously around for Glen Daniels, who she was certain would have evacuated with her students.

She saw both of the other kindergarten teachers, huddled with their classes, writing names down on clipboards provided by the fire department, counting and hugging each child as blankets were wrapped around them by rescuers at the scene. The sirens were still wailing, the fire trucks honking and the lights spinning, making the gray world seem like a waking nightmare.

The student line was almost across the rushing torrent.

A bullhorn broke through the noise.

“Evacuate!” the voice, that of a middle-aged fireman, roared across the football field. “All faculty and volunteers, get these kids west to the far side of Tree Hill Park. A new swell is approaching upriver from the dam—repeat, get the kids to the far side of Tree Hill Park!”

Pandemonium and a considerable part of Hell broke loose.

The students and teachers in the water tried to rush forward, causing the roped line to collapse. The bucket brigade reached quickly into the blasting current and dragged the little people up to a stand again, then passed them as quickly across the newborn river as they could.

Beyond the line of students ahead of her, Lucy could see adults, mostly teachers and first responders, but some that she recognized as parents, grabbing children by the hands and urging them forward, in a blind run to the higher ground of Tree Hill.

Except for a scattered number of parents she recognized.

The first to catch her eye was Corinne’s father, Professor Isaac Byrnes, standing beside his wife, Dr. Patricia Byrnes, staring at the school, and at her, fear in their eyes visible even as far away as they were standing, surrounded by their four boys. Not far from them was Reverend Fuller, the pastor of the Obergrande Community Church and his wife, holding their son’s hand, also searching the oncoming line of children, looking desperately, she imagined, for Grace.

Oh God,
she thought,
they didn’t get out yet
.

Panicked, she pawed at the carabineer, trying to free herself from the rope without success until she figured out that it was just a metal nut she needed loosen.

She unclipped the carabineer and turned in the water to the firefighter at the end of the line.

“I have to go back,” she stammered, handing the child to him.

Then Lucy took off, splashing back through the rising water to the school.

The startled firefighter shouted for Ace.

She cast her eyes around, as best as she could, looking for a passable way back across the rising water, but still did not see a single one of the five girls that had gone with Glen Daniels an hour or so before.

As the evacuation order was repeated over the bullhorn, the Sergeant, who was now out of the floodwaters and pulling kids rapidly out as well, handed Kristen off to other first responders. He unhooked each child as he or she made landfall, then sent them to a secondary line of responders and faculty, including Mrs. Cox, who was at the water’s edge, counting every child that crossed.

“Hey! Ma’am! What are you doing?”

Lucy kept going, fighting the current.

“What are you doing?”

“Ace!” she shouted back. “I’m missing five kids!”

The Sergeant heard his name, but not the rest of her call. He pointed at his ear, then made a looping gesture, signaling for her to repeat her message.

“I’m missing five kids!” she shouted again.

The Sergeant’s eyebrows drew together as he took a silent count of the line, only two of which had not already been pulled out of the floodwaters.