Chapter 2
The last bus was still there.
It waited outside the evacuation station with its engine running. Rain and ash slid down its windows while frightened faces crowded behind the glass.
The driver was closing the folding door.
I ran toward it.
"Wait!"
Pain shot through my right knee. I nearly fell, caught myself against the bus, and struck the glass with both palms.
"My name is Claire Morgan. I had a seat."
The driver looked toward the registration table.
A county worker searched the evacuation list on her laptop. Her fingers stopped moving. She looked at me, then back at the screen.
"It says you're already accounted for."
"I'm standing right here."
She slowly turned the laptop toward me.
My name had been crossed out.
CLAIRE MORGAN—ACCOUNTED FOR / EVACUATING WITH SPOUSE
Grant's identification number appeared beneath the update.
The time stamp was from forty minutes earlier.
Before he reached my clinic.
Before he looked me in the face and told me another bus was coming.
"My husband changed this?"
"He confirmed he was transporting you."
The worker glanced over my shoulder, as if Grant's truck might return through the rain.
"He wasn't," I said. "He took someone else."
Her lips parted, but no words came.
I pressed one hand against the table because the room had begun to tilt. Grant had not simply refused to give me his passenger seat.
He had told the entire rescue system I no longer needed one.
"Put me back on the bus."
"I can correct your status, but the bus is at capacity."
"I had a seat."
"I know."
"Then give it back."
Her gaze shifted toward the entrance.
Two emergency workers were pushing an elderly woman across the parking lot in a wheelchair. An oxygen tank rested against her knees. Her gray fingers clutched the edge of a thin blanket.
The driver opened the bus door again.
One space remained near the front, cleared for the wheelchair.
The seat had been mine.
But the woman's lips were turning blue.
I stepped away from the bus.
"Where's the next pickup?"
"There isn't one."
The worker changed my status to STRANDED and grabbed her radio. Static swallowed her first call. On the second, a voice shouted that the south bridge was closing.
My name remained on the screen between two lies: accounted for and with spouse.
"Give me a map,"
I said.
"The main road is already blocked."
"There's an old maintenance slope behind the railroad line. It reaches the north ridge."
Her eyes widened.
"That route has been closed for years."
"I drew it into the town evacuation plan."
The full route was inside the red binder at Natalie's feet. So were the gate key, emergency cash, and access codes.
Grant had taken everything I prepared for our survival and driven away with it.
But I had studied that map until I could see the red line with my eyes closed.
Past the water tower.
Behind the abandoned feed store.
Across the drainage channel to the old pump house.
Then uphill.
The bus driver called for the doors to close.
The wheelchair was secured. Through the windows, people watched me standing alone in the gray rain.
The bus pulled away.
Its red taillights disappeared around the corner.
Then the warning siren changed.
The rising and falling evacuation signal stopped.
A single continuous tone began.
The worker's face lost its color.
The mudflow was no longer coming toward Alder Ridge.
It had reached us.