by Scott Carson
“Not yet,” the pale man told him.
Down the tunnel, the Mole started up again. The sound of it was enormous, but Deshawn didn’t even glance in that direction.
“I don’t want to go with you,” Deshawn told him. He glanced up at the men on the timbers. Some sitting, others standing. All of them staring down at Deshawn.
“I don’t want you to go with me, either, Mr. Ryan. Where you’re needed, I can’t go. Not like you can.”
“Where?” Deshawn whispered.
“You know where.”
And he did, too. Somehow he’d always known. The past didn’t forget, and it didn’t forgive. Eventually the past came calling.
“The Chilewaukee,” he said, his whisper scarcely audible against the roar of the Mole’s chiseling blades.
“They need help in Galesburg. Someone who can still move aboveground. Someone like you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you believe. We don’t have many like you. People who remember and believe.”
Deshawn parted his lips to deny that, but he couldn’t. Again, the man was right. Deshawn had been scared of the place because he believed what he’d been told about it.
“I go to the lake? What then?”
“Not the lake. The tunnels.”
Deshawn was confused. The tunnels at the Chilewaukee had never been finished. They’d been abandoned during World War II. Abandoned, Kelly Mathers had once told him, after the schoolhouse fire and the murders.
“There are no tunnels,” Deshawn said. “They gave up on them. Generations ago.”
The pale man leaned closer still. So close that Deshawn could feel his breath when he spoke again. It was cold air and came without any power, like a gust of winter wind seeping through an uninsulated wall.
“Not everyone gave up on them,” he said. “You know that.”
Up near the Mole, someone shouted Deshawn’s name. Deshawn didn’t look. The pale man was watching, and Deshawn didn’t feel that it was safe to turn away.
“Yes,” Deshawn said softly. “I know that. But what do I do?”
“You go to where the tunnels were supposed to emerge. Where the ruins wait for completion. You know the spot.”
He did. His daughter’s mother had taken him there once. There was a discharge chamber at the base of a mountain and just above a cold-water creek, built with the expectation of siphoning millions of gallons of water out of the tunnels and down that creek, into the Ashokan, and then into the city. The never-used chamber was dry except for the rainwater it trapped, and the stacked stone walls were cracked and crumbling, with ivy growing through the crevices. It had seemed like an eerie archaeological mystery by the time Deshawn saw it.
Kelly had taken him there. My special place, she called it. They brought a picnic lunch and a bottle of champagne. They skipped stones across flat pools of trapped water. The sun went down early, blocked by the peak of Maiden Mountain. On the other side of the mountain, out of sight, the Chill sat in all of its untapped majesty.
Deshawn hadn’t liked the feel of that spot. The vines shifted in the breeze and made him think of snakes and the light faded too soon and the place seemed forgotten in not just a sad way but a dangerous way. As if it hadn’t been abandoned by intent but by mistake.
“I don’t understand,” Deshawn whispered. “I can find the spot, but then what? It’s useless. It’s a forgotten and useless place.”
The pale man looked troubled, as if he’d misjudged Deshawn.
“They can make use of it,” he said. “You know that. You believe that.”
Old stories drifting back. Kelly’s voice in his ear. Deshawn closing his eyes because he couldn’t close his ears, and he didn’t want to see her face while she whispered her sincere beliefs in a ludicrous legend, a campfire story gone terribly wrong. Kelly thought she could pass through the mountain once she was back in Galesburg. Kelly thought almost anything at all was possible down there.
“You think I’ll see them?” Deshawn asked, his throat dry, voice cracking.
“If you do, you’ve got to stop them. You know that. You’ve got to stop them from breaking through. If that group makes it downstream, we all have to work. Do you remember? We will have no choice, then. They’ll carry a different force with them, and it won’t be one we can resist. Not in that water. Not with them.”
“Deshawn! Yo, Ryan! Wake up, brother!”
Footsteps coming. Reality closing in. Time running out. Deshawn asked, “Down here… are we safe? Is the city safe?”
“That’s up to you,” the pale man said, and then he straightened and stepped back. “But you’d best hurry, Mr. Ryan. I’m sure of that.”
UPSTREAM
46
The rain stopped just before sunset.
It had fallen almost without pause since daybreak and had fallen every day for two weeks. Thirty minutes before the night claimed Torrance County, gray clouds lifted in the west, and a red-tinted band pushed up as if sent forth from the mountains themselves. As the clouds thinned, the band widened, the glow deepening, as if the sun were rising rather than setting. The wind swung from north to northwest, and its knife-edge gusts dulled into a mild, fresh breath scented with fallen leaves and clean water.
In town, people seemed hesitant to trust it. Umbrellas were closed but not left behind. Rain jackets were unzipped and hoods lowered, but the jackets remained on.
The gray clouds kept thinning, and the crimson glow kept spreading. In the first minutes after the rain stopped, the earth steamed, a fine mist rising from saturated ground. Then the strengthening wind blew it aside, the red sunlight brightened, and everything was left looking cleaner, as if freshly rinsed.
At the courthouse on the square in downtown Torrance, a weary judge named Gena Lane finished a day of custody dispute hearings and walked out of the building with her head down, hurrying toward her car. The sunset stopped her. Gena stood and admired it, then moved to one of the benches on the lawn beside the Revolutionary-era cannon, brushed water off the wood, and sat down to breathe in the beauty of her town for a few minutes before going home.
At the Hard Truth Brewery just two blocks away, a bar manager named Jenn Strawn stepped outside to take a selfie. She uploaded it to Instagram with the caption OMG THAT’S THE SUN, I FORGOT IT EXISTED, #HARDTRUTH, and then turned to go back inside. Two regulars stepped out, Mike and Christine, and they laughed over the photo with her and told her that it was actually supposed to warm up overnight, a welcome burst of Indian summer.
“Could be porch weather,” Mike said.
Mike had always had a knack for reading the weather, having been a boat captain at one point, so soon Jenn was wiping down the iron tables on the patio and a busboy was bringing out chairs. If Hard Truth could get one last porch night in this season, it would be a gift.
* * *
One block west of the brewery, a barber named Eric Dullmeyer flipped his sign from OPEN to CLOSED, used his scissors to cut a cigar, and then stepped onto the sidewalk to smoke it. He waved at a woman named Chelsea who jogged by, dodging puddles.
“Can’t waste this weather,” she said, and he smiled and agreed and then watched her run past. He sighed. What a beautiful sight it was, watching Chelsea jog. She was too fast, though, and gone too soon.
Eric lit the cigar, still smiling.
* * *
On the divided highway just outside of town, Tyler Riggins cracked his window as he drove in pursuit of happy-hour drink prices and boneless buffalo wings. After feeling the warming air, he put the window all the way down and hung his over-muscled arm out of the truck. He cranked the stereo louder. Shooter Jennings howled with delight.
At the Buffalo Wild Wings, a DEP maintenance worker named Dave Green was already ahead of Tyler, halfway through a plate of wings and a Genesee Cream Ale. Dave saw the sun but he didn’t care. The day had already been a gift for him. He’d expected to be at work, but that morning Arthur Brady called to tell him he didn’t have to come in. There was some inspe
ctor down from Albany, and Arthur always wanted to deal with the inspections himself.
That was just fine. Dave wanted to deal with the chicken wings.
* * *
Two miles northwest, in the Pleasant Ridge subdivision in the hills outside of town, a trio of thirteen-year-old boys watching Stranger Things for the third time in two weeks, turned the TV off, and hauled their bikes out. There wasn’t much time left before darkness and dinner, and they didn’t want to waste any of it. Too many daylight hours had been washed out by rain lately.
* * *
At a house on an isolated ten-acre parcel northwest of them, a man named Jeff Stone eyed the dry skies from his bathroom window while he stood beside his shower, waiting for the water heater to warm up. He shut off the water, dressed again, and went outside to split firewood. It had been days since he’d had the chance without rain.
* * *
One mile northwest of Jeff Stone’s house, Ed Cochran pulled into the parking lot below the Chilewaukee Reservoir dam, exhausted from the drive but grateful for the sudden cessation of the rain. From the time he left the city until the time he crossed the Torrance County line, the downpour hadn’t stopped. Now, finally, a reprieve.
He pulled in beside a Ford Explorer with police lights and a sheriff’s decal. This, Ed thought, was a good sign. The sheriff was here, which meant the situation at the dam was being taken seriously. Between that and the dry skies, he felt hopeful. All he needed was a little time to sort this out.
Ed paused beside his car and stared at the spillway. Water was surging over it, roaring down the old stone face, but he’d seen deteriorating spillways before, and he’d seen them fixed before. And this one was at the Chilewaukee, a surplus reservoir, not technically part of his city’s sacred supply. All things told, the situation could be one hell of a lot worse.
He was halfway up the steps to the gatehouse when he heard the dam groan.
He stopped with his hand on the railing and cocked his head. There was a rumbling sound, like falling rocks, and he instinctively looked back toward the spillway.
The water flowed over it, and there was no sign of any loose rock.
Then the groan came again—came from somewhere just below his feet but deep, deep within the earth. It sounded like a heavy old door being pushed open against protesting hinges.
He took three more steps before the earth shuddered. The force was enough to make him grasp the railing again. The railing was shaking, too.
He was there, standing on the steps outside of the gatehouse, when the Chilewaukee Dam burst.
He was the first to die, and when the water took him, he was still clutching the railing.
47
Jeff Stone was the next to die. He was running his hydraulic log splitter when he heard a rumble, and at first he thought it was from the equipment. He stepped back and cocked his head and looked down at the trusty Champion splitter, which had never failed him before, and which brought twenty-seven tons of hydraulic power to its task. He assumed the sound was coming from the machinery. Then the rumble turned to a roar, and Jeff turned away from the splitter and faced the twelve million tons of hydraulic pressure headed his way from the Chilewaukee.
He heard the water long before he saw it, and he never moved. He was frozen in place, staring uphill, watching as the old-growth trees along either side of Cresap Creek swung back and forth and then vanished like so many blades of grass ahead of a mower. His first thought was of a tornado; his last thought, as the roar closed in with what seemed like the snarl of some living thing, was of a monster.
Then his house exploded, the massive trusses snapping like dry kindling, and Jeff was under the water.
* * *
The Stranger Things fanboys were still on their bikes when the water reached Pleasant Ridge. One of them heard the roar and thought of the Demogorgon, the fantastical creature who terrified Hawkins, Indiana, in the show. I was not wrong, he thought, listening to the rising growl and watching the trees and telephone poles snap. It was real after all.
Then Pleasant Ridge was gone.
* * *
Inside Buffalo Wild Wings, Dave Green paused with his Genesee at his lips and stayed on his barstool while others rushed to the window to see what was happening. There was shouting and screaming and he heard the word tornado.
“Not a tornado,” Dave said. “That’s the dam.”
No one heard him.
He still had his beer in hand when he went.
* * *
One block away, Tyler Riggins was driving with the windows down and Shooter Jennings singing. Tyler saw the wall of debris coming straight down the county highway at him, like land scoured by a bulldozer and pushed ahead.
The sheared telephone pole that punctured first his windshield and then his chest was still dry.
The water came behind it.
* * *
There were two overpasses above the highway just outside of town. They caught much of the debris driven ahead of the water. The first overpass collapsed, but it tumbled into the second, and the pile of stone and the logjam of trees, utility poles, houses, and corpses served to form a temporary, impromptu dam.
The water didn’t care, though. The water rushed alongside, beneath, and over the obstruction. The water churned on downhill, as gravity demanded it must.
Then the water came to Torrance.
* * *
Eric Dullmeyer was still outside his barbershop, relighting his cigar, when he heard the oncoming sound, low and forceful as a jet engine, and felt the ground tremble beneath his feet. He turned toward the noise with absolute confidence and certainty that he knew the source.
“Earthquake!” he shouted.
Then he saw the deluge.
For a moment it was incomprehensible; it simply didn’t fit the landscape. This was a wave, a great arcing wave that belonged to an ocean, not a mountain. The top of the wave was above the three-story house with the high turrets that stood across from his shop. So much water, coming so fast.
He wondered if Chelsea could outrun it.
Then he disappeared into it.
* * *
At the Hard Truth Brewery, Jenn Strawn carried a tray of Hurricane Lagers to the three diners outside. When she heard the roar of water, she thought it must be another rainstorm blowing in. Captain Mike is an idiot, she thought; this isn’t porch weather at all.
The four on the porch died first, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d remained indoors: the brick building collapsed on the crowd inside.
* * *
Judge Gena Lane was still on the courthouse lawn, seated on the bench, facing the sunset. She turned to the north when the sound came. Her attention fixed on the roof of a barn, and the woman riding it like a raft. The roof still had its framing intact, the classic New England pitch of it evident even as it rode the water, but whatever walls had once supported it were long gone.
The woman was on a barn roof, but there was no barn, and she was floating down Main Street. It was real and impossible, both at the same time.
The woman was screaming. Gena could see that but not hear it. The roar of the flood was too loud.
Gena never rose. She just sat there and watched the woman on the floating roof screaming those silent screams. Watched in awe as the water swept toward her and then over her.
The Torrance town square was under water then, waves lapping against the courthouse roof.
48
The most remarkable part of the event, Mick Fleming decided as he panned the scene with binoculars stolen from Arthur Brady, was how much of the dam actually held.
He’d expected a total failure. He’d expected the thing to burst, for the lake to empty in a single ferocious surge.
But the breach, when it happened, didn’t trigger a complete collapse.
Oh, it certainly looked like that at first—looked like it and felt like it and sounded like it. The destruction was both breathtakingly savage and remarkably small against the landscape
. It was as if the mountains had released a single snarl and snap that barely hinted at the real power of nature, and now all that remained of the evidence was the curled lip of a sleeping dog.
Downstream, though, it would not feel that way. Downstream, no one would look up into the mountains and think it had been only a warning snarl. The Chilewaukee Reservoir had surged down the floodplain and into Torrance, emptied into the streets, into living rooms, into gasping mouths searching for a last breath that would never come.
They had no idea that it had been only a taste.
Mick was sitting on a high bluff behind the lake, well out of reach of the devastation. He could see the swath of downed trees and overturned soil, which made the valley look as if it had been freshly tilled. And, he supposed, that’s exactly what had happened.
The shock was how much water remained behind the dam.
The force of the water didn’t burst the dam but split it, pushing it to each side. The earthen portions squeezed against the mountain, seeming almost to tighten on those sides. Because so much of the structure held, the water kept storming out through the initial split, carving the dam open in a V-shaped wound, but gradually the V cut tapered to an end, and the dam held the rest back. It had been a catastrophic failure but not a total collapse.
Fascinating.
Granted, the creek bed below the lake was different now. It actually looked more like a sea than a creek, with whitecaps churning on coffee-colored water. Mick could only guess what the initial surge had looked like when it swept into Torrance. The waves might have been twenty feet high. Roads turned to rivers. Houses obliterated. It would look a good deal like Houston or New Orleans after their record floods, or the way much of the Midwest had looked for the better part of a spring, but it would have happened so much faster than any of those.