Sweet Saturday Sample: Flood

Hello and welcome to Sweet Saturday Sample.  After you finish here you can find more samples at http://www.sweetsatsample.wordpress.com.  Before I share my sample which comes from my current WIP, let me say that my dog doesn't like it much that I had to start back to school.  He expressed himself on Thursday and Friday, and his last post follows my Sweet sample.  If you see anything wrong in the sample, tell me what it is.

Sample: From Flood  My heroine Aria, is a vet who's trying to find the location of a dog fighting ring.

Clariee scowled at her. “If you cross that creek I’m going with you.”

Aria gave up. She had tried reasoning with her mama before. When Clariee got stubborn, even her father gave in without a fight. “Let’s go, then. Hurry.”

They made it across Pigeon Creek just fine, but by the time they reached Aria’s house, it was raining so heavily and the clouds were so black that it looked almost dark. “The river’s up, but it still has a ways to go before it reaches the house,” Aria yelled above the roaring of the water and the pounding of the rain.

“Just hurry,” Clariee begged. “This place feels dangerous right now.”

Once they went inside, the feeling of danger receded. The power was still working, and when the lights came on, everything looked familiar, safe, and cozy. Aria found two towels and handed one to her mother. “We might as well dry off even though in the long run it won’t matter much.”

“Lots better,” Clariee approved as she dried her soaking hair.

Aria went to the refrigerator and poured both of them a glass of orange juice. “Something happened at the clinic right before you got there.”

“Oh?”

Aria told her about the drowned dog and what her neighbor's son had heard. “I think that’s where they hold the fights, and at least one of them keeps his dogs there.”

Horror darkened her mother’s eyes. Clariee loved animals. “You said the dead dog was on a chain?”

Aria nodded.

“How do you think he got away?”

“I don’t know.”

 Clariee’s eyes looked sick now. “If one dog was left chained to die, the others probably are too.”

Aria’s stomach churned. “That’s what I was thinking.”

Clariee set her orange juice down with a thump and tossed her towel into the kitchen sink. “We have to find them, Aria. We have to make sure they’re safe.”

Aria peeked out the window. It was still raining. “We’ll have to go by land if we go at all. We can’t take a boat on the river. The current is so swift it would be suicide.”

“Then we’ll go by land.”

Aria scrambled to find two big flashlights, a coil of rope, and a scalpel. At the last minute she picked up a grappling iron that the river had washed up two days ago. “What else do we need, Mama?”

“Something to cut a big chain.”

Aria ground her teeth. “I don’t have anything like that. I don't even have a sharp knife.  I’m taking a scalpel so I can cut through their collars if I have to. They’re probably made of leather. The dog my neighbor brought in had on a leather collar.”

The lights flickered and went out. “Hurry,” Clariee begged.

The minute Aria opened the door she saw that things had gotten a lot worse. The rain was falling almost horizontally as the wind screamed and blew. “The water’s almost to the steps now,” she cried as she ducked her head against the fury of the storm.

Rascal here. Obviously, nothing I said has persuaded my mama to stop teaching school. She even dropped the small human off at daycare!  I suppose I can always go back to bed after she tells me goodbye every day, and I do have my sister Sasha to play with. As long as Mama doesn't neglect my morning sandwich again I will endure this hardship until summer rolls back around, and we can set our own schedule.

 

 

Picture of the flood: By Walter Siegmund (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons