by Scott Carson
“No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I don’t think he would have done that.”
“Then the sheriff, I suppose. He hadn’t been much of a help. And yesterday there was the chaos with his son. I didn’t understand that.”
“I don’t understand a damn thing you’re saying!”
If Phil’s shout bothered Fleming, the engineer didn’t show it. He just nodded, unruffled, and said, “It’s not the problem of the moment, is it? The structure is. What’s left of it can be saved. We’re going to need that helicopter. Can you do that for me? Can you call for a helicopter?”
Phil nodded. Against this ghastly tableau, Fleming’s calm demeanor was a reassurance.
“I’ll call for one.”
“Thank you. I’ll need to talk with them. To get a sense of how it all looks from above. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Phil said. He reached for his radio, brought it halfway to his lips, and then stopped. “Wait—what do I say about Arthur? And the sheriff?”
“You can say they’re dead. The rest doesn’t matter much right now, does it?”
“But… the sirens. You said that—”
“Don’t you think,” Mick Fleming said, sweeping a hand out to indicate the ugly brown sea that swept from the reservoir to the town, “it’s a bit late to worry about the sirens? There will be a time for that, and there will be a man for the job. But it’s not this time, and I’m not that man.”
His voice hadn’t risen in volume, but the tone had tightened as fast as a bolt hit with an air wrench, and his eyes were hot with anger.
Phil called it in.
DOWNSTREAM
52
Deshawn stood in his apartment, staring at the TV.
The images were all aerial; there were no camera crews on the ground in Torrance. Not yet. Every now and then the broadcast cut away to someone’s shaky cell phone video, but mostly they stuck to the helicopter shots.
Roads turned to rivers. Bass boats cruising through intersections. Houses submerged up to their chimneys. The domed roof of the courthouse reaching up out of the water like something from Atlantis.
A church floated through a high school football field. It was tipped onto its side and beginning to sink, but the steeple was still above water, like a desperate hand reaching for help.
The sun was now down in Torrance, and the water looked black and menacing, its surface reflecting the harsh lights of the helicopter spotlights or the colored flashers of emergency vehicles. Coast Guard and National Guard choppers circled. Stretchers were lowered on wavering ropes. Stretchers were hauled back up. Now and then you could see someone lift a hand, but it seemed like so often they were motionless.
The text crawl below the images said, Too early to estimate death toll.
Somewhere amid all that carnage was Deshawn’s daughter.
But alive, he thought. She is alive, and that’s all that matters.
He thought of that, and then of his daughter’s question: Is this my family’s fault?
Could it have been? For so long he’d have said no. Today, though… today he could not say that definitively. Couldn’t say anything definitively. Reality as he’d known it was gone.
He was late to leave. After begging off his second shift, claiming illness and earning skepticism, he’d intended to head directly for Torrance. Then came the call with Gillian. He’d slowed down a bit after that.
He left the TV and walked into a small bedroom that was filled with artifacts of failed ideas for the space: a treadmill, a dart board, a desk, all jammed in there together, monuments to the unsuccessful ways he’d tried to fill the emptiness of what had once been his daughter’s bedroom. He picked his way through the clutter, shoved an old recliner aside until he had enough space to open the closet door, and then squeezed inside. Found the pull chain, tugged it, and turned on the light. It was a bare bulb, painfully bright when you looked up. He squinted, stretched up on his toes, and fumbled on the highest shelf. His hand ran over an old computer, a set of speakers, and two stuffed animals. Past a stack of video game cartridges. All these relics of his daughter’s youth.
He found the sketchbook tucked in the far corner, under an old comforter, where she thought she’d hidden it from him. It had been years since he’d looked at it. He’d wanted to throw it away—no, burn it—but something deep within him had been afraid to do that.
He pulled the old sketchbook down, easing back to a flat-footed stance, and flipped open the cover. Stared impassively at the renderings of ancient faces looking back at him. Flipped through page after page, twenty-five drawings in all, skipping only the one he feared the most and remembered the best. He studied all the others and finally found what he was looking for.
It was a sketch of a man standing in ankle-deep water in a tunnel. He wore high rubber boots that reached his thighs, and above those a suit jacket and a vest. He had a small, closely cropped mustache that covered little more than the hollow above his upper lip.
A few hours earlier, the same man had stood before Deshawn and spoken to him.
But who was he?
Deshawn took the sketchbook with him when he left the apartment. It was time, as Gillian had said, to talk. He wasn’t sure what answers he’d be able to offer her, but he could try. He could do that much.
He’d never owned a car. When he needed one, he rented. He didn’t need one much. The subway was the only transportation he needed, and paying for parking in the city could cost half as much as rent. The subway didn’t run to Torrance, though.
He summoned an Uber, searching for the pricier versions that promised bigger vehicles. He found one driver in a Cadillac Escalade. Far too fancy, but four-wheel drive would be necessary. The app quoted the fare from his street corner to Torrance as slightly less than he made in a week. He touched the ACCEPT button with his thumb.
Two minutes later a black Escalade arrived at the curb. He climbed into the back, and a young Latina woman turned and looked at him with an arched eyebrow.
“You serious, or did you screw up the destination?”
“I’m serious.”
“That far upstate? It’s expensive.”
“That’s fine.”
“You hear what’s going on up there? I don’t even know how close I can get to the town.”
“I’ve heard,” Deshawn said. “Just get me as close as you can, as fast as you can.”
UPSTREAM
53
The water overflowed the road just a mile downhill from Aaron’s house. A half mile beyond that, it was so deep that he no longer trusted the truck. The road ahead had a current to it.
The road ahead was also three miles from the heart of town.
He got out of the truck and stood with his gear bag over his shoulder, unsure of what to do next. Wade in and walk as far as possible, then swim it? Possible, but also foolhardy. He wasn’t going to help anyone if he ended up needing to be rescued himself.
He was pondering driving all the way around the dam to come at the town from a different direction, when another truck appeared behind him. This one was towing a boat.
The truck came as far as Aaron and then stopped. The window rolled down, and he looked in at a gray-haired couple staring grimly back at him.
“Glad to see you,” the woman said. “What do you want us to do?”
Aaron realized that she was reacting to the uniform. She thought he had some authority. He started to explain but then decided the hell with it. Right now the problem was getting to town.
“What’s the draft on that boat?” he asked.
“Maybe ten inches,” she answered, and her husband nodded. He was a big man wearing a sweatshirt that featured a jumping bass with a lure in its lip.
“Just a johnboat,” he said. “Use it for duck hunting and fishing. It’s not much, but it’s something. We figured we’d try to help. Is that okay by you?”
Again the implied authority. Aaron nodded. “It sure is. You want to drive ahead maybe twenty feet and see i
f it’s deep enough to float her?”
They pulled forward. The water rose over their front tires. Plenty deep enough to get the boat off the trailer.
If that’s what it’s like here, Aaron thought, then what does it look like in town?
He waded over to the trailer hitch, unfastened the security straps between the boat and the truck, and then began paying out the winch. The johnboat slid down the trailer and floated cleanly in the center of the road. He caught it and held it in place while the couple climbed out of the truck and stood in the water, watching him.
“Let me shut off my truck and we’ll go see what we can do,” he said.
He tossed his gear bag into the boat, then killed the engine on his own truck, and returned. The older couple was already seated, the man holding on to the truck’s bumper to keep the boat from being pulled away. Aaron climbed in beside them, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. He had to push off using only his left foot. His right foot pulsed with pain, and he hoped his waterproof boots would keep the filthy water away from the wound.
“You want to run it, or want me to?” the man asked, nodding at the tiller. The boat had a twenty-five-horsepower Mercury outboard and a Minn Kota electric trolling motor.
“You can,” Aaron said. “It’s your boat. And I’m glad you’ve got the trolling motor as a backup, because I have no idea what your prop is going to be chewing through out there.”
“We’ll find out,” the man said, and started the outboard. “I’m Ned Kelly, and my wife is Carrie.”
Aaron shook their hands. “Aaron Ellsworth.”
He opened his gear bag, withdrew one of the flashlights, and moved to the bow, where he could navigate. The beam penetrated the darkness about a hundred feet ahead. It was all brown water and floating debris. Tree limbs, boards, a single plastic garbage can lid.
Ned Kelly twisted the throttle and the boat moved forward, past the truck, and on down the road. Aaron shined the light ahead, calling out obstacles. The little boat was nimble, and its low draft and stable bottom made it a good craft for rescue work.
They cruised along in a world that Aaron knew better than any other place on the planet but now hardly recognized. If they’d been driving, they’d have been going downhill at a steep pitch, but instead they floated level, which added to the disorientation. A garage door drifted by, and then a basketball. A Mets pennant chased two lawn chairs. Plastic storage bins floated like fishing bobbers. A shed roof with a weathervane rode alongside them briefly. Aaron called out the obstructions, but otherwise it was silent, the three of them staring at the damage in shock.
At the base of the hill was an intersection that now felt like just another bend in the river. The water was just below the stop signs, but you could still see them, and as they churned through, Aaron felt a ludicrous urge to tell Ned to stop, as if the rules of the road still mattered. Then his flashlight caught on the man in the water.
He was floating facedown, but his arms were outstretched, and for an instant Aaron thought that he might be swimming.
“We’re coming!” he shouted. “Hey, we’ve got you!”
Then he realized.
Ned slowed the boat without saying a word and brought them in close. Aaron reached over the gunwale and grabbed the drowned man by his jacket and hauled him aboard. He was maybe thirty years old. Thin, with a neatly trimmed beard that had something white and slick trapped in it. A French fry. He’d died eating dinner.
Aaron wiped the dead man’s face clean with the back of his glove and lowered him into the bottom of the boat.
“CPR?” Carrie asked. Her face looked as gray as her hair.
“Too late for that,” her husband said, and Aaron only nodded. He shifted the body gently to the side, trying to be as respectful with the dead man as he would be with an injured one, and then he moved back to the front of the boat, and shined his light across the black waters ahead as Ned motored forward.
Something threw strangely shaped shadows at the edge of the flashlight’s beam, and there was a sound like the creak of a rusty hinge. Aaron leaned forward, squinting. The light illuminated a child’s playset with two slides and a set of swings in the middle. Ned steered past it without a word, but Aaron turned to watch it go by and caught Carrie’s eye. She was crying without making a sound.
As they neared town, the debris field thickened, and Ned was soon having to carve elaborate S-curves around sunken cars, pieces of houses, and countless piles of unidentifiable, sodden garbage. The air stank of mud, like being in a freshly plowed field after a hard spring rain. The lights of town that should have greeted them were absent, replaced with red-and-blue flashers. Sirens wailed, and Aaron realized that he’d heard no siren at the house. The dam should have triggered a county-wide emergency siren system, but it hadn’t gone off.
What exactly had gone wrong up there? Beyond the obvious, what in the hell had happened?
That’s more than a warning, Mick Fleming had said in the darkness the previous night. That’s a sacrifice.
The roof of a flooded-out car reflected Aaron’s light. Ned steered past it. Overhead, a helicopter thumped through the air, painting them with a spotlight.
“Your people?” Ned asked, pointing at it.
“National Guard, I think,” Aaron said, not bothering to explain that he had no crew, no people. He signaled to the circling chopper with the flashlight, letting them know that the three in the boat weren’t in need of assistance. The chopper lifted and flew on.
They found five more corpses in the next block. These were all floating close together, their bodies thumping off one another in the soft, sloshing waves. Aaron looked back at Ned and Carrie, and he knew they were all thinking the same thing.
“We don’t have space,” she whispered. “Not that much.”
“No, we don’t.” Aaron shook his head. “Let’s save room for the living.”
Ned twisted the throttle and they pulled away from the drifting corpses and rode on with their one lonely dead man, understanding now just how much company he had in the water.
Nobody said a word for a long time after that.
54
Less than a mile away from Aaron Ellsworth, Gillian Mathers was also in a boat, floating just below the window of her third-floor walk-up apartment.
The Arlington Heights Inn, her beloved boardinghouse turned town houses, had somehow taken the flood’s best shot and stayed on its feet. The 105-year-old building was on the same block as the Hard Truth Brewery, and nothing remained of Hard Truth now save for a satellite dish that spun on the surface but remained inexplicably tethered by its cables. It floated like a marker buoy above the restaurant where Gillian had gathered on so many afternoons for a beer on the patio. The bar was gone now but the Arlington remained, shifting on its foundation but not collapsing.
Yet.
The structure was canting to the left, and every now and then a muffled boom would rumble up from below the water. On dry ground, the sound would be much louder—it was the sound of joists snapping.
On the third floor of the building, just down the hallway from her own apartment, a dozen people were gathered in the highest window they could find. Five children were among them.
A DEP service boat floated below, and Gillian was trying to run an aluminum extension ladder from the boat to the third-floor window. They’d called for a helicopter but none had arrived yet, and the sounds from underwater weren’t encouraging. The Arlington Heights Inn had taken the punch, but it was swaying on the ropes, and if it went, it was going to bury a dozen people in a cascade of broken brick.
The top of the extension ladder scraped along the wall, shifting with the rocking boat. The sound of the aluminum rasping across the brick blended with human screams and a baby’s sobbing.
Gillian had never been a big fan of ladders, and she sure as hell didn’t like climbing one that was resting on a floating boat, but when she saw the face of an eight-year-old girl who lived just down the hall from her peeri
ng down, she volunteered to be the one who went up.
“You sure?” Brett Roget asked. He was one of three of them in the boat, all DEP police, colleagues who had sat in countless meetings discussing dam security and never imagined it would actually lead them here. The town was filled with boats, some with official badging—National Guard and Coast Guard, state police and county police, EMS, game wardens—and many without. Volunteers and professionals were hard to sort out. The rain had started to fall again, and now everyone was in rain gear, faces hooded or shielded by hats. The dark-water world was lit by flashing lights and scored by shouts.
And by the wailing of one baby in a room above Gillian, where a young girl looked out a window in terror.
“I’m sure,” Gillian told Brett, and started up the ladder. Almost immediately another boat went by, and the resulting wake made the ladder sway and tremble. Gillian closed her eyes and swore under her breath, then opened them and looked with outrage at the offending craft, ready to shout at them to pay some attention. Who was roaring by that fast?
It was another DEP boat. The tactical team. More of her colleagues, headed somewhere in a hurry.
She was still staring after them when a flash of light burst just up the road. A single, bright glare. Somewhere up there, a man in the water was raging and raving, shouting threats to the heavens, bellowing at an unseen enemy. He seemed to be looking for a place to direct his rage, because who was there to be angry at for a flood?
Plenty of people, actually. The furious man just didn’t know them by name yet.
“Gillian?” Brett called.
“Yeah. Going up.”
Another flash. This time she saw the source: it was a camera. In the momentary illumination, she saw a man with a dark beard perched on a slab of broken limestone, shooting down at the enraged man in the water.
Haupring. She knew it, although she’d never seen him. He’d come back—or never left?—and now the old camera was flashing again, or maybe it was a new camera, or maybe it was his charcoal pencil. But he was there, documenting, and that was not good.