“I’m a pastor’s daughter. We see rain this hard so soon after all the craziness in the world and we check for animals lining up two by two.”
Hatfield grunted out a chuckle. “Don’t worry. Prepared as my dad was, there’s probably an ark at the homestead.”
Jess laughed a little, but her face stiffened at the sight of the road up ahead. The I-77 bridge was out. From a distance, all they could see was a giant roadblock. It wasn’t clear if the bridge had been damaged or flooded.
Hatfield slammed on the brakes, brought the car to a hard skid, and turned it around—a tough move with rain so heavy.
“Do you know another way to get there?” Jess asked.
He paused, searching his brain for an answer until it was obvious he didn’t have one. “I’m sure it won’t be hard to find.”
With the rain now battering the Hummer, Hatfield narrowed his eyes to focus on the lump ahead of them obscured by a sheet of rain. It looked like a crowd—perhaps a group of looters. He honked his horn, but they stayed put.
Out of options, he tried a sharp swerve to the right but then lost traction on the road and skidded out of control, with knee-high water splashing everywhere.
Something rocked against the underside as Hatfield tried—but failed—to tame the wheel’s wild twists. The Hummer’s left side lifted off the ground as they barreled from the road and speared away, surrounded by a pool of dark mud.
Once off the road, the Hummer’s ride came to a loud and clunky end, getting wedged sideways between thick branches of a balsa wood tree
The violent crash into murky land had tossed all bodies aboard into a chaotic mess. Jess and her husband smacked into the dashboards; their kids went face-first into the seats in front of them. Seat-belted as they were, the contact was light, with the shoulder and waist straps’ hard yank doing most of the damage.
Worse yet, the danger wasn’t over. The watery steps of outsiders drew closer and closer.
It took a second, maybe two, for Hatfield to recover, climbing to his feet—not easy with the vehicle tilted that way. “Everybody okay?” he asked, gripping the dashboard tightly to avoid tumbling down and squashing his wife.
After a round of tense “yeah,” he reached for his gun, yanking it free with one hand while unrolling the driver’s side window with the other, his knee hooked around the steering wheel.
After jabbing both arms through the window, he snaked out, pulled himself up, and propped himself at the elbows. He could feel the looters grabbing at the car, tugging at it violently. “Get away from this car now!”
With the rain beating down on the ground and on his Hummer, his words may have gotten lost in the noise. So he tried a less subtle approach, firing his Sig Sauer into the sky three times.
The looters froze. Not another sound.
Still unable to see them, he pulled himself farther out, arching his body to find the assailants. Three people stood there motionless. In the violent rain and the dark, he couldn’t tell anything about them. But he knew they meant him and his family harm. Raising his gun, he screamed again, this time louder until his voice had nearly worn itself out. “Move back from the car! Now!”
All three of them obeyed, hands high.
“Now get out of here! And if you take longer getting out of here than I want you to, you might just catch one in the back!”
“Please don’t shoot! We were just trying to help!” A voice whimpered. High and soft, kind of motherly. A woman?
“Step forward!” he commanded, then added, “Slowly.”
They followed his order. It seemed odd to him that looters would be so reasonable and so afraid.
The closer they got, the better he could scope them out. All three of them wore hooded, camouflage raincoat parkas. “Take those hoods down!”
They did as he demanded, revealing the faces of two bearded men and a woman, her face trembling and streaked with tears.
“Why did you approach my car?”
One of the bearded men spoke. “At first, we just needed a lift back to our homestead. Then we saw you crash and wanted to help you up and out of the mud.”
Hatfield studied their faces. The men were young, teens, maybe twenties. One of them had dark hair, sharp features, his beard thick and long, but more hipster than Amish. The other was a redhead, same age. His thin goatee was barely visible against his pallid face. The men were less afraid than the woman in the center, but they seemed honest. No obvious agenda beyond getting home and helping a stranger along the way.
“Tell me about this homestead.”
The dark-haired man shrugged. “What’s to tell? It’s a giant cabin.”
“And?”
His friend spoke more calmly. “We’re not at liberty to give more information than that.”
Hatfield lifted his gun again, trained it on the redhead. “Why not?”
“Security purposes. If we gave you a complete rundown of the facilities, we’d be putting ourselves at risk. Don’t get me wrong, we’d appreciate a ride there, and we’d be happy to offer you a meal in exchange for the assistance, but that would be it.”
The other one spoke. “You mind if we continue this conversation inside the Hummer? I’m sure your passengers would rather not be tilted at their side like that. And we’d much prefer not to be in this rain.”
“So you’re going to help set the Hummer down?”
“Yes, sir. That’s why we came over in the first place.”
Hatfield gave their faces one final scan, then holstered his gun. “Okay, let’s do it.” He looked back inside the vehicle to see all three faces aimed at him in curiosity and a little fear. “I’ll be back in a second, guys. Keep your belts on; things might get a little shaky.”
He yanked himself completely out, then jumped down, landing in a pool of light-brown water littered with tree branches, trash, and leaves. The five of them positioned themselves in front of the car. “Okay, guys,” he yelled. “We’re gonna lift then go right. After that, we let it down nice and easy.”
With a huge collective grunt, they heaved the Hummer up and over. Hatfield then arranged for them to bring the car down slowly to the ground. It came down without a sound. He waved the three strangers toward it. “Come on!”
The four of them settled inside. “Jess, Justin, Tami, meet…”
They introduced themselves with warm and polite handshakes. They were Grace, Andy, and Gary.
The woman’s name put a grin on Jess’s face.
After intros, Hatfield gazed into the sky. “Looks like it’s easing up a little.”
“Should be stopping altogether soon,” Gary, the older man, said.
Hatfield turned. With a smirk, he said, “According to what? Some folk wisdom?”
“We’re not at liberty to say,” he answered.
“Why not?”
“Like I said, for security purposes, we can’t divulge the kind of equipment we have at the homestead. But let’s just say you’d be impressed by our ability to predict weather trends.”
The smirk on Hatfield’s face disappeared. Dad would be impressed, he thought to himself.
Jess turned, offered the strangers a friendly smile. “Look, I don’t mean to be indelicate, but we know your names, but not… your story.”
“Far as I can tell, these three good Samaritans were on their way home. All they need is a lift, right?”
She said, “Honey, why don’t you let them tell their own story?”
Knowing when he was outranked, her husband lifted his hands in mock surrender.
“Well, ma’am,” Andy started. “as the gentleman said, we just needed a lift back to our homestead. Nothing more. We saw the Hummer got into a scrape, so we came over to help, simple as that.”