by Scott Carson
Lori. He hadn’t thought of her in hours. She seemed vague and distant, a woman imagined rather than a wife of a decade. She felt far less real than Anders Wallace, certainly, who was standing at Mick’s side.
The mayor was waiting, and so Mick refocused and explained. He reminded them of what had originally been envisioned at the Chill, and of what had been abandoned. He explained that the tunnels here hadn’t been completed but that they still remained beneath the mountains, open and dry.
“We turn that mountain into a temporary dam, essentially,” he said. “I can assure you, that mountain isn’t going anywhere.”
But the water will. Because, boys and girls, work has never stopped in Galesburg.
“It will bleed the reservoir down,” Quirk said thoughtfully. “It will definitely do that much. And that reduces pressure on what’s left of the dam.”
“Exactly,” Mick said, wanting to play off Quirk’s expertise. “As a pressure release, it’s guaranteed. What I don’t know is whether we can achieve it quickly enough. Just getting the grading equipment in here tonight is going to be a big ask, and then I’m not sure they can work fast enough.”
He knew all of the ways in which this fear could be avoided, but he wanted Quirk to come up with the answer, not him. The plan needed to be a group endeavor.
“We don’t need to grade it at all,” Quirk said. “We’ll blast it. Blast those old intake doors open, and then we’ve essentially got a holding basin under the mountain. The water will do the rest. We’ve got gravity on our side up here.”
“It’s the same thing we’re spending hundreds of millions on at the Schoharie right now,” said one of the men Mick didn’t know, someone who’d come up with the mayor, a lean-faced Hispanic man with keen eyes who looked at everyone when they talked in the way a chess master watched the board. “The new release tunnels.”
Mick was embarrassed that he hadn’t thought to make the comparison himself. It was perfect.
“That’s exactly right,” Mick said. “We’re in the process of boring a new release tunnel into the bottom of the Schoharie Reservoir to bleed it down so maintenance can be performed on the dam and the intake chambers. Thanks to the debacles that stopped this project back in the forties, the Chill already has a release tunnel. Three of them, in fact. They just need to be opened.”
“And the tunnels don’t connect to anything?” the mayor asked. “They just… dead-end down there?”
“Yes,” Sandy Clemmons said, “they dead-end under the mountains, and they’ll work like outlet valves, if we use them right.”
“It’s enough to give up on the EMP we have in place?” This question came from one of the mayor’s deputies. Mick remembered her from a meeting last spring. She’d been concerned about the age of the city’s functioning tunnels. He’d liked that about her.
“You can stick to the EMP,” he said. “Make the downstream evacuations and shut down everything you need to shut down. Hold to the plan, but pray we don’t need it.” He took a deep breath, one that he hoped seemed just nervous enough, and said, “We can’t fix that dam overnight. We can’t even assess it in a night. But we can take some pressure off it. In fact, thanks to those old tunnels, we can take a lot of pressure off it.”
The mayor studied Mick, then turned to Sandy Clemmons. “Is he right?”
“I think so,” she said. “It certainly can’t hurt, and it can be done fast.”
Sandy looked down to where the intake chamber doors loomed white in the emergency spotlights.
“I think we’re awfully lucky that it happened up here,” the mayor said. “It almost feels like the place was built for this.”
“Doesn’t it?” Mick said.
56
Deshawn’s Uber driver was forced to give up four miles outside of Torrance, where the roadblocks started.
Just beyond them, water ran over the asphalt like a glittering brook.
It had taken them the whole night to make it this far. Long ago, his driver had gone from dubious to determined. When the highway was closed to anyone except emergency personnel, she navigated the back roads. When the back roads were flooded, she reversed course and found new roads. She drove up into the mountains and then back down out of them. Off of pavement and onto one-lane gravel lanes and then back onto pavement.
They’d gotten to know each other by then. Her name was Rochelle, and she had a daughter named Gloria. Gloria was five and she wanted to build robots. Or, more accurately, to be a robot, but Rochelle had talked her through the challenges of that particular approach.
It had been a talkative start to the journey, but then Rochelle turned the radio on to see if there were updates from Torrance. There were: an emergency evacuation of survivors, the threat of a total dam failure, and an early estimated death toll of one thousand people.
Deshawn had asked Rochelle to turn the radio off and tell him more about her daughter then. He was happier listening to the stories of the Girl-Who-Would-Be-Robot than thinking about his own daughter, up there among the dead in the flood.
At one point he’d glanced at his phone, hoping for any word from Gillian, saw the Uber app, and realized that Rochelle had ended his fare payment long ago. She was still driving him, but not for money. She was still driving because he had a daughter lost somewhere out there in the night and she had Gloria back at home in bed.
Four miles outside of Torrance, though, even the indefatigable Rochelle had been forced to admit defeat. There were only so many roads into the town, and they were all closed now, either restricted to emergency personnel or flooded out.
“I think this is it,” she said, sorrowful.
“You got me right to the doorstep. I’ll go find her now.”
“Hang on.” She reached over to the passenger seat, picked up her purse, and turned it upside down. The contents cascaded over the seat.
“There are water bottles in the backseat,” she said. “Four of them, I think. Give me those.”
“I don’t need—”
“I don’t care if you don’t need it; someone up there will.”
She turned and met his eyes in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. He wasn’t about to argue. He thanked her and passed the bottles forward. She put them into her purse, then she rummaged through the contents on the seat, dropping a few more items into the bag. Popped open the center console, withdrew a small cylinder, and added that.
“Four waters, two granola bars, two packs of gummy bears,” she said. “Mom’s reserves, right there. I’ve always got something. Oh, and one can of pepper spray.” She shrugged. “Hope you won’t need that, but I’m not putting you out in the dark without it.”
“You keep that. I’m not going to—”
She pivoted back to him again, braids whipping across her face. Fixed him with that stare.
“Did you not hear me when I said I wasn’t going to put you out in the dark without it?”
She waited as if daring him to object, and when he did not, she handed him the purse. It was a big black leather bag with a line of shimmering stones stitched into one side. She watched him sling it onto his shoulder, gave an appraising glance, and said, “Yeah, you might need the pepper spray.”
They both laughed then. Quietly, but enough to matter. Enough to make the darkness ahead not seem quite so endless and lonely.
“Thank you,” Deshawn said, and put out his hand. She took it and squeezed.
“Go find your baby,” she said.
“I will. Thank you.”
“Stop thanking me, dude. Just make real sure I get my five stars outta this one.”
He smiled, released her hand, and opened the door. His boot splashed into shallow water. He took Rochelle’s purse and walked past the roadblocks and ahead toward Torrance.
57
Even after the water began to recede, chaos reigned in Torrance. No chain of command was clear, and even the idea of authority seemed irrelevant. Civilians and National Guardsmen and paramedics and police blurred and b
lended on shared missions to evacuate able-bodied survivors, then find the wounded and the trapped.
There were many of them.
As the hours wore on, the water level continued to drop, the flood surge dissipating into the lowlands and then on down to the Mohawk River. More searches wound to a close. By dawn, Torrance was giving up more of its dead.
Aaron had worked through the night. He’d left the boat that he’d come in on and joined another, and then a third, and then he’d been on the ground, stacking sandbags and helping with stretchers. Between the hours of two a.m. and four a.m., he’d done little but move corpses to higher ground to be counted and disposed of.
In theory they’d be disposed of. Nobody seemed to have a plan for that just yet. Instead, the bodies were piled in a fashion not dissimilar to the sandbags.
He’d counted them at first. Sometime after the number reached double digits, though, he stopped that and tried to numb his brain to the task. He succeeded in losing track of the number, but in the end he’d have happily traded the number for the memories that replaced it. One girl’s butterfly-shaped barrette came off in his hand. An elderly man’s watch slipped up and over his frail wrist and sank into the depths as Aaron and another volunteer tried to pull him loose from the wreckage that had pinned him. The vacant eyes of a waitress who had served Aaron and his family countless platters of pancakes at the Spoon Diner seemed to track him as he carried her, as if a cry for help was locked just out of reach within her.
He’d dimmed his headlamp whenever possible and tried to work in the shadows. It made no difference. The faces of the dead couldn’t be avoided, and wouldn’t be forgotten.
Not ever.
Already he knew this.
By dawn he’d been moved from corpse retrieval back to sandbag installation. He shifted from one to the other as if it were natural. The tasks presented themselves, and he accepted them and worked on without any thought of the day to come. Thoughts of his father were flickers on the periphery. He knew that somewhere the sheriff was at work. He knew that at some time they would encounter each other. Until then, there were lives to save and bodies to stack.
The first light of day was breaking on the postapocalyptic-looking town square, when he found himself face-to-face with Sarah Burroughs, his father’s chief deputy. She was instructing a group of volunteers in the removal of a collapsing pile of sandbags, but when she saw Aaron, she stopped talking and stared. Then she said, “Was he home? Do you know? Tell me he was home.”
It was then, in the pale predawn half-light on the flooded streets of his hometown, that Aaron learned his father was among the missing.
“No,” he said. “He wasn’t at home.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Water burbled through the sandbags and ran around Aaron’s knees. Someone shouted a question at Sarah but she didn’t turn from Aaron.
“He hasn’t checked in?” Aaron asked, and his voice seemed to be coming from some place far away. “No radio contact or calls or…”
She was shaking her head.
He looked up the road—or what had once been the road—and squinted as if he might spot his dad out there on the fringes and point and say, There he is, Sarah; he’s right there, just busy. He’s working.
“He will make contact,” she said finally. “I know that. It’ll be easier in daylight. So many people are out of touch. Not missing, necessarily, just out of communication.”
“Right,” he said.
“Maybe he’s with the group at the dam,” Sarah said.
“What group?”
“The mayor of New York, the governor, and the Army, for starters. They’re all working with the engineers to keep the rest of it from going. They might have grabbed him. They’d need someone from the county, right?”
She seemed to be talking herself into the idea, but Aaron’s mind had snagged on a single phrase.
“ ‘Keep the rest of it’? The dam’s still there?”
She nodded. “It was only a partial breach. All of this”—she swept her hand out over the ravaged town—“could be just the first round.”
“Who are the engineers?” he said.
“I have no idea. I just know that they’re trying to keep the rest of it from going.” She looked numbly across the town square. “They’d better be able to get it done, too. Because if we get another flood surge…”
She didn’t finish the thought. Didn’t need to.
Aaron said, “Can you find out if Mick Fleming is there?”
Sarah blinked at him. “Who?”
“Mick Fleming. He’s the dam inspector. Could you find that out?”
“That’s not my role,” she said. “And it sure isn’t yours.”
“Please. It matters, Sarah. I promise you, it matters.”
She looked at him warily but unclipped her radio. Keyed the mike and spoke.
“Two-Three-Two, I’ve got a quick question for you. Is there a Mick Fleming up there? He’s an engineer, I’m told. Handles dam inspections.”
Silence. Then a crackle and a male voice: “Affirmative. You need him? I can try, but it looks like he’s running the show, so it better be important.”
Sarah looked questioningly at Aaron. He shook his head and she put the radio back to her lips.
“No need to interrupt him,” she said. “Just wanted to confirm. Thanks. Any word from Steve yet?”
Pause. Crackle. “Negative.”
Aaron looked away from her and up at the road that had turned to river. In the north, the jagged crest of Maiden Mountain was beginning to show itself in the dawn sky. He spoke without turning back. “I need contact with Gillian Mathers of the DEP. She’s a detective sergeant, I think.”
“What’s going on, Aaron?” Sarah asked.
He was still staring at the mountain.
“It’s urgent,” he said, “and it’s not about me or even my dad. Mathers knows what it is about. She’s got jurisdiction up there and she’s got an active case. She will want to speak with me. I’m sure of it.”
He finally looked back, and while he was expecting skepticism, he wasn’t ready for the personal doubt in her eyes. He saw in her eyes the reality of his reputation, all the credibility he’d lost.
Credibility his father hadn’t lost, though. Dead or alive.
“The sheriff,” Aaron said, “would be demanding Gillian Mathers at the dam right now if he had access to a radio. I promise you that. Evidently, he doesn’t have a radio. Right?”
Still, she hesitated.
“I’ve got no authority,” Aaron said, “and no credibility, either. I get it. But he did, right? Sarah? Didn’t my dad have that much with you?”
“He does,” Sarah said. “And when I hear from him, I will—”
“Stop it,” Aaron said, and his voice broke.
She looked away from him, took a breath, and said, “If Mathers has a radio, I’ll tell her you want to see her at the dam. She’ll know why?”
“She’ll know,” Aaron said. “Thank you, Sarah. My dad would thank you, too. For a lot of things. This would be just one of them.”
“He’s going to turn up,” she said.
Aaron nodded. Then he waded into what had once been Main Street and headed out of town.
58
Gillian wasn’t sure whether the cell phone towers had been destroyed or if they were simply overloaded. The reason didn’t matter; the result was that she had no cell contact, only radio. She thought of her father often as the night wore on, but she had no way to reach him. The radio crackled to life constantly with news, but not much of it was from downstream. There was flooding in the towns below Torrance, but it was minor. The surge of water was settling into the Mohawk River now, bleeding south. The rain had stopped with the dam break as if they’d been coconspirators.
The worst was done, she thought as daylight seeped through the night sky. Torrance had taken a beating, yes—Torrance had taken the kind of catastrophic beating that would be remembered for generations—but
it was done now. Search-and-rescue operations would turn into rebuilding and recovery. She had a vague sense of what the days ahead held: FEMA camps and Red Cross shelters, rising death tolls and rabid media reports. They would seek a reason for the disaster, and they would find it in the long-neglected dam, but they wouldn’t ask the questions that mattered, because no one was left to do that except for Gillian.
No one will ask about Galesburg, she thought as she sipped a bottle of Gatorade that a volunteer had handed her. She was both dizzy and numb, a disorienting sensation. Maybe everyone was dizzy and numb now, though.
She remembered, suddenly, the baby she’d carried down the ladder. She thought of the child’s hot breath on her neck and the way the ladder had swayed beneath them in the blackness and how those joists in the old building had snapped like shotgun blasts, and her legs began to tremble. She dropped the Gatorade and leaned against the remains of a brick wall that had once been a hair salon, trying to use the ruins to steady herself. The roof and most of the interior had been swept away, but one barber chair remained, a strange artifact of a town that was no more. She wondered who’d been in the chair when the water came. She wondered if she’d handled the victim’s body.
As if in response to the thought, her radio buzzed with static and a woman’s voice came across, asking for Gillian. It was Sarah Burroughs, the chief deputy of the sheriff’s department. Someone else answered—it sounded like Brett—saying that he’d seen her but didn’t know where she was. He asked what was needed.
“I need to locate her,” Sarah Burroughs said, and Gillian finally spoke.
“This is Sergeant Mathers.”
“I’ve been asked to tell you that Aaron Ellsworth—that’s the sheriff’s son—wants to speak with you. Something about an active investigation. I don’t know what he was talking about, but he claimed you would.”