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by Lew Ayres, unable to endure the constant bombardment any longer got up and ran across the bunker floor headed for the door which led out into the trench. Corporal Katczinsky, played by Louis Wolheim, caught him, spun him around, and knocked him
cold as a wedge. But I figured no one in the room knew the script, and even if they did, they would run off and leave me laid out
when the water came.
1 eased up through the knot of bodies to a point where I could big eye the door sill. 1 figured we would be getting the double first '}usin of that radio station wave off Back Bay any minute. I gripped ..■y rifle in one hand and pack straps with the other. The L.A.R.C. operator slipped out to get the machine ready. The rest of us wanted to stay in the office until the last possible second because so much stuff was ricocheting around in the big room. Actually the garbage truck offered the best protection, but the idea of riding out the night up to my ears in tomato peelings and pole beans was not appealing.
The initial wave was only two feet high, and it came from the wrong direction. It came in the north door, rolled through the big room, took a hard left into the office, picked up the Coleman lantern and smashed it into the door I was watching. I was the first one out of the knot, but I was stunned by the suddenness and direction of the wave and disoriented in the darkness. I aimed for where 1 thought the door was, hit the facing instead with my left shoulder, and spun out into the big room which was now illuminated )y the standing column of the L.A.R.C. spotlight. I sloshed through the water toward that big silver dinosaur. Halting at the base of the ladder to hurl my pack up, I froze as I saw in the glare of the spotlight a ten foot wall of water struggling to stuff itself in the back door of the barn. I dropped the pack and grabbed the ladder as the L.A.R.C. rose up and clanged into the peaked ceiling. The operator threw a rope over a steel beam to anchor the L.A.R.C. in place. The guys behind me were climbing up on tractors and deuce-and-a-halves to escape the rising water. Some climbed on the garbage truck which began to float butt-up and thrash about crashing into the walls and other vehicles until it filled up and sank, disgorging its rank cargo into the room.
I had a death grip on the ladder but something was trying to tug me off by the rifle sling. I felt something large, slick, and round
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under the water. The headline Hashed into my fevered brain, ‘‘Shark Gobbles Guardsman in Barn. ” For some reason I would not let go of that rifle. I slid my hand down the sling and felt a headlight. My rifle sling was caught on the bumper of the VW I had seen parked
outside earlier in the day. I freed the rifle and pushed the VW away with my boot. It swirled away, did a partial belly-up, and went down like the Titanic lashed to the Lusitania spouting water out its cute little twin tailpipes. I climbed aboard the L.A.R.C. The water had come in the wrong door because the hurricane pushed the Back Bay water up creeks and sloughs and piled up a mountain of it in the swamps north of town. When the weight of the mountain of water grew stronger than the wind speed, it had crept back overland toward the bay.
The L.A.R.C. operator and I threw lines to the men trapped out in the room. I leaned over to pull one in and saw something long, black and slimy slither by his head. I dropped him and yelled “snake!” The guy on the rope behind him thrashed at it with his rifle butt, stopped, snatched it out of the water, and threw it at me. It was a multi-curved stick.
Soon we recreated a sopping version of the dry knot we had built on the floor of the command post. We were piled up in the cargo space of the L A.R.C under the roof of the barn with no way to get out of the building, since the prow of the machine was above the big door.
Gradually another roar louder than the constant one could be heard. The crescendo rose till we felt our eardrums would burst. The tin roof suffered an asthma attack. In the spotlight beam I saw a green filament swirling down out of the hurricane’s black maw. They had run in a tornado on us. A 450 m.p.h. tornado inside a 230++ m.p.h. hurricane. “Why me, Lord?” The water in the building began flowing toward the vortex as the tornado passed over a pine as big as a small sequoia, instantly stripped its limbs and thocked it out of the ground like a champagne cork. I figured that 100 foot water tower was going to fall through the roof any second. The tornado wavered and then moved away to the northeast.
I burrowed down into the pile and made another appeal to the Lord. I reminded Him that even though I knew well nigh everything already, I had left a U-haul parked and pointed at Ole Miss to go
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