Members of the Cisco family comfort each other during a break from searching through debris Wednesday after deadly flooding in Flat Gap, Ky. Searches and cleanup continue today after flash floods in northern Johnson County outside of Paintsville destroyed homes and vehicles and residents were reported missing.

FLAT GAP, Ky. — They roam the banks of the swollen creek, looking for those who were lost when a flash flood ravaged this rural eastern Kentucky community. They battle swarming mosquitoes and snake-infested creeks, piles of rubble 10 feet tall and mud so thick it sucks the shoes off their feet.

For two days, rescue crews have trudged door-to-door across this rugged Appalachian terrain, painting orange x’s on each structure they search. Hope is fading for the families who are watching them work.

“You talk to them and they say, ‘Right there is where my house used to be,”’ said Randall Mulkey, a firefighter from a nearby county who volunteered to help with the search.

He’s seen homes splintered into rubble, others split in half and cars strewn in places he never could have imagined. Tromping through the mud is exhausting, he said. It breaks his heart to see people’s belongings — clothes, toys, photographs — among the wreckage and know they lost everything.

Three are confirmed dead and another man is still missing. The fates of four more remain uncertain. Families reported them missing, but they may have escaped safety or could be stranded in their homes, without power or phone service, police say.

Kevin Johnson believes his 34-year-old son, Scott, is dead, but his body has not yet been found.

Scott Johnson was last seen wading through rushing floodwater with his 74-year-old grandmother on his back.

He had already guided his father, uncle and sister from the raging flood that inundated their cluster of trailers. He turned back one last time to save his grandmother, whom he called Nana, and a 13-year-old family friend.

“We told him, ‘You can’t make it,”’ his father recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to get her out of that trailer.”

Standing in a cemetery on a hill overlooking the creek that had swallowed his son, Kevin Johnson was so overcome with grief he sometimes struggled to speak. He had watched his son push the boy to safety in the branches of a catalpa tree and hoist his Nana onto his back, only to be swept away.

“Scott wouldn’t turn her loose, that’s why he died,” said Veronica Marcum, Scott Johnson’s sister. Her brother had been a musician. He went by the stage name Scott Free, started his own hip hop record label and released an album in 2013 called “Welcome to Hollerwood.” He wrote on his website he tried in his music to capture the Appalachian spirit and the struggle to survive amid the grinding poverty and drug addiction that has long tormented his native state.