by Scott Carson
“Told you so,” Mick said softly, and laughed. Then he turned his attention back to the lake.
He glassed over the water that was still held back by the dam and tried to calculate how much of the reservoir had been released downstream. It was impossible to make an accurate guess, but he put it at no more than fifty percent. The dam was 235 feet high, and the V-shaped gash in its face extended perhaps 100 feet down. Wider at the top, of course, which had allowed for the initial surge of staggering power.
So much more remained, though.
“This was enough,” Mick said. “They didn’t want more blood than they needed, is that the idea?”
Beside him, Anders Wallace shifted and leaned his forearms on his knees and said, “Just watch, sir. Just continue to watch.”
So they did. It wasn’t long before the Galesburg crew emerged.
They came up out of the wreckage where once the gatehouse had been. They climbed carefully to the top of what remained of the dam, using their picks and shovels to gain purchase on the treacherous slope. Just as they reached the crest, a helicopter flew in low.
The crew didn’t seem distressed by the helicopter. The updraft whipped a woman’s dress around her legs, and one of the men shielded his eyes and gave a curious glance, but there was no real concern. Mick’s grandfather, the once-famous Jeremiah Fleming, never even looked at the sky. He was staring downstream. Studying the results of his labors. How many years had he been working toward this moment? Mick hoped he was pleased.
Jeremiah Fleming didn’t look downstream for long. If he found the flood damage impressive, he didn’t show it. He simply lifted his pick and walked across the rest of the dam. The others followed. They didn’t attempt to leave the dam but merely started down the opposite side, heading toward what remained of the reservoir. Mick studied them with confusion.
“What’s happening?”
Anders Wallace didn’t answer.
“Why are they going back to the water? They’re free to go now. Wasn’t that the point? To release them?”
Anders Wallace said, “Perhaps not, sir.”
As Mick watched the Galesburg crew walk down the side of the dam facing the reservoir, he saw the ancient concrete structures that they were heading toward: the intake chambers. Unused and largely forgotten now, the intake chambers were entrances to miles of meaningless tunnels. They were usually well beneath the surface, but the dam failure had lowered the water and redistributed it, draining it away from the intake chambers until their doors became visible. They’d been sealed with concrete decades ago and so they were now nothing more than indentations with high stone arches, cosmetic but not functional, a forgotten relic of antiquated ambitions.
Suddenly—and finally—Mick understood.
“They’re going to open the tunnels.”
Anders Wallace didn’t confirm or deny. He didn’t need to.
Mick panned his binoculars from the intake chambers to the wounded dam and back across the surface of the reservoir. Still plenty of water in there.
I had the goal wrong, he realized. They don’t want to stop the job. They want to finish it.
Galesburg had been drowned and forgotten. There were grievances to address, and the responsible parties were not in Torrance.
They were in New York.
“I get it,” he said, and he found himself smiling again. “Anders, I get it.”
Anders Wallace didn’t say a word. He just nodded. But he was smiling, too.
49
Gillian was on her way back to Torrance from Kingston when her radio blazed to life with the reports.
There were many voices, some controlled, some hysterical, and their words flowed over and around one another, but one description remained.
The dam has failed. The dam has failed. The dam at the Chilewaukee has failed.
She pulled over. Sat with her head back against the headrest, staring at the fading crimson band of sunset, listening to reports come in.
All units were needed. Substantial loss of life expected. Catastrophic damage. Repeat, all units needed.
A truck with white flashers roared by, headed toward Torrance. A volunteer firefighter. She watched him speed toward the disaster scene and forced herself to reach for the gearshift. She had her hand wrapped around it but hadn’t yet gotten it out of park when her phone rang. She registered the sound numbly, looking over and expecting to see DISPATCH.
It was her father.
She punched the button on the steering wheel to accept the call.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m alive.”
“What?” her father said.
“I was above it.”
A pause. She could hear the sounds of the city around him. Voices and horns, a street vendor, someone shouting in Spanish, the blare of a siren.
“I was above the dam,” she said. “I was driving back from Kingston, so I wasn’t anywhere near the floodplain.”
“What are you talking…” He let his words trail off, and when he spoke again his voice was as soft and reverent as if he were offering a prayer. “It broke? At the Chilewaukee?”
“Yes. Isn’t that why you were calling?” She shook her head. “No. You’re calling me back because of the message I left.”
“Actually, neither. I’m calling to tell you I’m coming up there. I need to… I think I need to be up there. But… you say it already broke?”
Gillian frowned, staring at the steering wheel as if her father could see her. “Already?”
“I thought I was…” He stopped, cleared his throat, and then said, “It’s been a strange day down here.”
“Strange up here, too.”
“Yeah.”
“I need to go,” she said. “I need to go help.”
“Me too. Be safe, hon. I’ll be there soon. We’ll talk then.”
“You don’t need to be here, Dad. You shouldn’t be.”
“I think you’re wrong about that,” he said. “I’m on my way.”
She didn’t want him here, in the danger zone, but she didn’t want to tell him not to come, either. Because he was right. For some reason she did not fully understand, he needed to be here.
“Did you know?” she asked. “Did you know that it was going to break?”
“No. But…” He hesitated, then repeated, “It has been a strange day.”
“Right.” She wet her lips. “They pulled grandma’s body out of the water this morning.”
“I got your message.”
Another vehicle roared by her. This one was a civilian car, an SUV running with hazard lights flashing. It was towing a bass boat. At first she thought that was foolish, some guy forgetting to unhitch his trailer before he went tear-assing toward trouble, and then she realized it was no mistake. It is going to be that bad, isn’t it? We will need boats.
“I really have to go,” she said. “I’ve got to go do my job.”
“Be safe,” her father said. “I love you, Gillian.”
“I love you, too,” she said. Then she blurted the question she didn’t dare consider, the crazy question: “Dad, is this my family’s fault? Were all of the things I learned real?”
He didn’t respond right away. Finally he said, “I’m not sure.”
It was a better answer than if he’d issued a flat denial or told her not to talk like that, think like that. At least he was admitting that he could consider the truth in all those old stories. All those years of silence were rupturing.
Too bad the dam had gone first.
“Good luck, baby,” he said. “I love you. I’ll see you soon.”
“Drive safe,” Gillian said. “Love you, too.”
She disconnected the call, turned the siren on, and pulled onto the road, headed for Torrance. Or whatever was left of it.
50
Aaron woke to the sound of rattling glass. He was still on his bed, boots still on. He was facing the nightstand, and an empty glass on it was rattling. No, more than the glass. The nightstand was, too
. The whole house.
He swung his feet down. As soon as he was upright, the rattling and shaking stopped. But there was still a sound… some dull, distant roar, like a train.
He looked out the window. The rain had stopped. There was a pale pink glow from the last of the sun. The puddles in the yard sparkled. A peaceful scene.
Except for that sound.
“Dad?” he called.
No answer.
He left the bedroom and walked downstairs. Outside, the strange rumbling persisted. No trains ran through Torrance County except for an old tourist line in the summer, eight miles of a slow-chugging locomotive while a tour guide offered local history and bad puns over a loudspeaker. That train was shut down after Labor Day.
What the hell am I hearing, then?
He walked onto the porch. There he could pinpoint the source of the noise better. It was to his right, down in the valley. Down closer to…
“No,” he said aloud.
The churning sound continued, as if to mock him. Yes, it said, yes, yes, yes.
The dam had broken.
He didn’t want to believe it, but he knew better. It was the reason they lived here, no matter what excuses his father offered for being so far out of town. Steve Ellsworth, like his father and like his grandfather, had always wanted to live above the Chilewaukee Dam.
There was a police scanner on the kitchen counter. It was an old thing that had been in the house for as long as Aaron could remember, and while it couldn’t pick up the more secure bands, it would pick up emergency alerts. He went back inside, pressed the power button, and let the radio scan.
It didn’t take long to find confirmation. The dam had broken.
He listened with a sense of inevitability rather than surprise. It all felt right, somehow. His swim, the madness with Mick Fleming, the corpse in the Dead Waters that had turned out to be Gillian’s grandmother—all of it seemed to fit naturally together with this news. All of it seemed part of a story that had been in motion long before Aaron came along. The rain belonged with the story, too. The idea that it was interconnected sounded impossible, but Aaron Ellsworth was long past the point of believing anything was impossible.
Each CB band was urging for help in the disaster zone from anyone who was physically able to assist.
Then go help.
It was that simple, and yet he was scared of what he’d see, what he’d be asked to do, and whether he could do it.
He called his father first. Straight to voicemail again. The sheriff’s direct dispatch line was busy. Overloaded. For the first time he felt uneasy about his dad. So much of the day had passed without contact. But this wasn’t the sort of situation where Steve Ellsworth would pause to take a phone call, either.
I’ll go help, and I’ll run into him down there. I’ll run into him, and he’ll see me doing the right thing. That will mean something to him on an awful day.
He grabbed his jacket from the peg on the kitchen wall, then hesitated and hung it back up. He didn’t have his Coast Guard active duty status anymore, but he still had his equipment.
He went upstairs and opened his closet. His waterproof duffel bag lay on the floor. His old uniforms hung above it: dress uniform and the flight suit, one designed for formality, the other for function, for real work. He pulled the bag out. Unzipped it and checked the contents, thinking, Be meticulous, because that was part of the drill when you were an emergency operator. Rescue swimmers were gearheads. They took good care of their equipment, and they double-checked it. They didn’t forget anything. A meticulous rescue swimmer saved lives. An adrenaline jockey who forgot to check his gear before rolling out might get people killed.
Inside the bag was all the equipment he’d once expected to use in the harsh oceans that pounded the coasts of Alaska or Maine. An abrasion-resistant dry suit, helmet, mask, fins, snorkel. A throw bag and throw rope. An emergency satellite beacon. Gloves. Chemical lights and a strobe light and a headlamp. A J-hook knife and a scabbard knife. Smoke flares. Waterproof radio. GPS.
He’d spent hours with this gear, in and out of the water. Cleaning it, lubricating it, checking every seam, every blade edge. Waiting for training to become reality, the only questions being when it would happen, and where.
Listen to the water.
He removed the radio, clipped that onto his belt, then zipped the bag and slung it over his shoulder. He was ready to leave, but something felt wrong. Off. He looked at the rescue swimmer’s radio clipped to his belt. Looked at his jeans and flannel shirt. Then looked in the closet again.
You don’t deserve it, he thought, and it’s probably a crime to put it on.
Maybe it was, but the flight suit was the right thing for this moment, a Gore-Tex and Nomex blend of water and abrasion resistance. Only an idiot would go down to a cold-water flood zone wearing jeans and flannel.
He undressed quickly and pulled on the synthetic base layer that hung beside the flight suit. Then he pulled the lightweight olive-colored uniform on over it. He zipped it up, picked up his gear bag, and left the house.
51
The first official to arrive at the Chill was a dam operator named Phil Peden. He’d worked at the Ashokan Reservoir for a decade but had only been at the Chill for two years, working as second-in-command to Arthur Brady, and targeted as Arthur’s eventual replacement.
He’d been alerted to the disaster by his cell phone. Not a call, but a long, blaring tone. It was an alert courtesy of a free weather app, and the dire message was delivered almost nonchalantly.
All residents in the floodplain of the Chilewaukee Reservoir in Torrance, NY, are to evacuate immediately.
Phil hadn’t believed it.
Then his radio began to go off. Desperate calls, panicked voices. He ran to his truck with his phone still in hand, the bleating tone telling him there was trouble, and once outdoors he thought he could hear the trouble, the far-off sound of something mighty moving, like a beast in the woods.
What he didn’t hear, though, bothered him more.
He should have been hearing sirens. Up and down the Cresap Creek valley, emergency sirens should sound if there was even the threat of a structural failure. The dam was equipped with sensors, the sensors were linked to the sirens, and all of this existed to give people time to flee. Phil had overseen the siren system test himself just two months before. The system worked. The sensors read stress load, and they triggered the alarms. Why hadn’t they gone off?
By the time he was on the road, there were sirens, but still not the right ones. These belonged to police cars and ambulances, and they were all headed down the valley, toward town.
He drove in the opposite direction. He lived above the dam. He didn’t know anyone who worked at the dam and lived below it. Phil had gone through too many emergency planning meetings to sleep untroubled in the valley below the Chill.
The meetings served him well now, though, because he remembered the winding route that led to the dam without taking him through the floodplain. It was usually an extra ten minutes but he made it in five, coming in with smoking tires on the eastern side of the reservoir, facing the dam.
Or what should have been the dam.
The worst damage was to the spillway, the very part of the structure that was designed to ensure its survival. The beautiful old stone was ripped open as if by some incredible lightning strike, a blackened tear, water streaming out like blood.
This, he realized, was nothing compared to what it would have looked like in the moment of the breach. The real wave was gone from here, running somewhere down the valley, through the town, and still going. Chasing gravity.
He stepped out. His eyes were fixated on the spillway and his mind was still on the problem of the sirens.
They would have gone off. They must have gone off.
“Can you call for a helicopter?”
The voice startled him, and he whirled to find himself facing a thin man in a DEP rain jacket.
“We’re going to need a h
elicopter,” the man said.
“Who are you?”
“Mick Fleming. I was…” He stopped, looked from Phil to the dam, and then waved an exhausted hand, as if that should explain it all. “I was here.”
Fleming. The engineer. He was the point man for inspections. Phil had heard the name but hadn’t met him, or at least didn’t remember him if he had. He was a forgettable sort of man, though. Nondescript, easy to look past.
“You worked with Brady?” Fleming asked, and Phil nodded.
“Yeah.”
“I think he’s dead.” Fleming stared at the place where once the gatehouse had stood. The place where Phil had reported for every working shift of his life in the past two years. The imposing stone tower was gone, obliterated. There was no sign that it had ever existed. “Did you know him well?”
Phil stared at him. It was a strange question, and the wrong time for it. The dam was collapsing before their eyes, and Fleming wanted to make small talk?
Shock, Phil thought, and that made sense, because he was feeling a good bit of shock, himself.
“Yes,” he said, although that wasn’t exactly true. Arthur kept to himself.
The answer seemed to mean something to Fleming, though. He nodded thoughtfully, as if considering a problem, then said, “I think it was the sheriff.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“There were no sirens. Didn’t you notice that?”
“Yes. Of course, I noticed that, but…” His words had gotten out in front of his understanding, and he stammered to a stop. “What do you mean, the sheriff?”
“Someone disabled the sensors. The sirens. The two of them were in there together. You said you knew Brady well. You don’t think he’d have done that?”
Phil could hardly process what was being said. Someone had intentionally disabled the alarm? He looked away from Fleming and out across the flooded valley, into the carnage.