Drowned

by Nichola Reilly

  He jabs it at Tiam’s chin. “Move out to formation.”

  Formation? “But the water—”

  Tiam knows better than to argue. He takes my hand and pulls me quickly down the stairs. Down to our doom. There is nowhere to go.

  “But what do we do?” I whisper, my voice hoarse. “There’s no way out there. And the scribblers...”

  When we arrive at the base of the tower staircase and splash into ankle-deep water, his expression is bleak. He’s surveying the walls, the markings above the doors, biting his lip, as if waiting for the elusive answer to appear.

  He has no answer.

  “I can’t believe she did that to us!” I shout as the water swells over my shins. There is no escape. We’re going to die.

  “It’s not her fault. The tower is swaying. And she doesn’t know,” he says calmly. “She has no idea how bad it is down here.”

  I bite my tongue, feeling stupid. How can he defend her like that? “You have to talk to her. You need to get her to come to her senses. Otherwise we’re—”

  “Do you know what these markings on the walls mean?” he asks suddenly. “You do, don’t you?”

  I stop. We’re not playing treasure hunt now. Annoyed, I say, “Yes. But we don’t...”

  “Tell me.”

  I sigh. “Some are just markings that tell what the room is for. Like outside the room where they serve the food, it says DINING. Others, I can’t understand.” I think back to the letters on the engraved panel across from my bathtub. “They might be...”

  And then it hits me. The panel beside my bathtub. The letters.

  I grab his wrist. “Come with me.”

  We race down the hallway, just as the tide rises high enough for the ocean to begin pouring through every window on the east side of the second floor. It smashes against the inside walls, swirling with foam. Waves boom around us, and black water immediately swirls up to our thighs...our waists...

  I pull Tiam into my quarters and grab the shovel from him. Oh, please, let me be right about this, I repeat to myself as I begin to pry away at the engraved panel on the wall. The water surges up to my chest. In another few breaths it will rise over our heads, and it will be too late. All I am really doing is making dents in the metal and scratches in the stone wall. Without asking questions, Tiam scuttles beside me, pulls the shovel from my hand and starts to work. The shovel makes a clanging noise, and with a final creak he bends the metal panel back. Stale air puffs forward. There is a dark hole there, maybe two of my feet wide, leading down into the unknown.

  We don’t have time to celebrate. Celebration would be premature, anyway. I have no idea where we’re going, or if this will work. Maybe this is just another way to die. “Go, go!” Tiam urges behind me as I climb to the edge of the tub and take a deep breath. I pray it’s not my last as I stuff my bag into the chute and dive headfirst into the narrow passage.

  Nine

  In Our Dry Cellar

  I pass in and out of consciousness in the dark, as if I’m in some horrible nightmare. It seems like an eternity later when I wake to a scrape-scrape-scraping sound very nearby. I’m in complete blackness, lying in something wet and sticky that I would think was blood if it weren’t bone-chillingly cold. I shiver as a spark flies in front of my face, and as I’m blinking twice to convince myself it was just my imagination, it happens again. Suddenly there is fire, burning bright above me, and beyond that, Tiam’s face glowing orange.

  “Can you find something to light?” he asks.

  I look around and luckily, the first thing I see in the small pool of light is something that looks like a torch, attached to the wall. I’ve seen these in my fairy-tale book—it’s called a candle. I lift it out of its metal bracket and bring it down. He drops the small piece of paper in his hands onto the end of it, instantly casting the enormous room in light. We both look around in stunned silence. The room seems to stretch on into the darkness, and the part of it I can see is about as large as our sleeping compartment. It’s piled to the ceiling with giant boxes. The walls are made of crumbling blocks, and there are what look like thick black pipes, staged at perfect intervals, attached to them, stretching from the ceiling to a metal spigot. “What is this place?” Tiam asks. “Is this the royal stores?”

  I nod. Well, that is what it was most recently. This is the place that meant so much to the people who came before us. This is the place that held mountains and mountains of food, for those who’d come to survive the floods. But that was a long time ago. The rumor now is that the rooms are empty of useful things, that everything that remains no longer has a purpose in our world.

  “How did you know that passage was there?” He’s grimacing, and it’s only then I realize he’s pressing his back against the wall. There’s a metal grate there, bulging, and I can hear the sound of something scraping against it.

  “Is that... Is that where we came through?”

  “Yeah. And there were scribblers and an ocean of water ready to follow us down here. It’s a good thing we got down here before the ocean rose any higher, or I’d never have been able to get the grate back into place.”

  “Oh!” I run over to him and crouch next to him, pressing my back against it. This is clearly going nowhere fast. Flustered, my words tumble out. “I really wasn’t thinking much when I... I mean, I couldn’t see any other way.”

  “Calm, Coe,” he whispers. “It was a good idea. You saved our lives. How did you know this passage was here?”

  “Oh. In here.” I hook my bag with my foot and draw it to me, then fumble around in it and pull out the damp hardbound book. To Tiam’s questioning look, I say, “It’s a book. A diary, actually.”

  “What is a diary?”

  “People used to use them to tell the stories of their own lives. Centuries of Kettlefishes have written in it. My father gave it to me. He taught me how to read with it.”

  He inspects it, amazed. “And it told you there was a hole in the wall up there?”

  “Well. Sort of.” I open the book to a page. I have a good deal of it memorized, though much of it doesn’t make sense to me. I read aloud: “Yesterday I threw my dirty clothes down a laundry chute to the basement and they were delivered up to me three hours later, clean and folded, but this morning someone came to seal up the chute.”

  “You did what?” He’s utterly bewildered.

  “Not me. She did.”

  “Who is she?”

  “The person who wrote this. Kimmie. One of my ancestors.” I show him the words, but he just shrugs, as it’s nothing but nonsense to him. “Do you want me to start from the beginning?”

  The sound of scraping on the grate behind us seems to intensify, and a muffled hiss follows. The scribblers sound angry. “It’s not like we have anywhere else to go,” he says.

  So I read him this entry:

  June 20, 2046

  This is the diary of Kimmie K. I am 13 and live in Otter Lake, Pennsylvania, for now. My mother says the floods are due to reach us soon and that we must go to a hotel far in the mountains to wait it out. She says it will be an adventure, and I am very excited. After dad died and mom had to sell our car, I thought we were kaput, but I think our luck is changing because she, my sister Fee and I were one of only three hundred families chosen. My mom says that over a million people put their names in. She said even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while! I’ll write more when I get to the hotel! XO

  I look up for a second, and he’s gazing at me with confusion. “You mean, that thing is from way back when the floods started?”

  “Yes. I guess. I know a lot of it makes no sense, but—”

  “You’ve had it all this time? How come you never read it to me?”

  I just stare at him, mouth open. Surely he must know I would have spent tide upon tide reading to him, anytime he
wished, if I had thought he’d been this interested. I motion to the book. “Can I continue?”

  “Yeah,” he says, so I keep reading:

  June 30, 2046

  We are here now, at the hotel. It’s not the first hotel I’ve stayed in but it’s probably the biggest and strangest. It’s really creepy. Agnes Willow, the old lady who owns it, is what my mom calls a Doomsday Prepper. Her husband was a U.S. senator, but since he died, she’s spent her entire fortune preparing for the end of the world. She wanted to make something that looked like a part of the mountain, so part of it is carved right into it, and there are supposedly rooms upon rooms, with secret spy passages and cool things like that! The whole place is surrounded by trees, so it’s really dark inside. All the floors are cold stone that echo when you walk on them, and most of the walls are, too. It’s like a fairy-tale castle. When I was growing up, the newspapers used to say she was out of her mind. Now they say she’s genius.

  I can’t imagine this hotel, on this mountaintop, being even partially underwater! But that is what they say might happen. They don’t think it will be for long, but I saw them bringing in truckloads of supplies through the back entrance when I was snooping yesterday. There are a lot of military vehicles, too, always coming up the mountain.

  Mom says we will be completely safe up here, but today on my walk outside I saw that they’re building a giant tower! I’ve heard Crazy Agnes built this place dozens of years ago, and yet she still isn’t finished—she keeps adding more and more to it, new wings, more floors. But they’re working really fast on this tower. This morning it was just a hole in the corridor, but now it’s climbing up into the trees. It makes you wonder....

  The room I share with mom and baby Fee is really small. It’s just a bed and a dresser and a TV that only gets local channels and a window. All times during the day and night I hear this weird, loud rumbling noise, like the mountain is alive and buzzing underneath me. It’s hard to think that it might get worse. Yesterday I threw my dirty clothes down a laundry chute to the basement and they were delivered up to me three hours later, clean and folded, but this morning someone came to seal up the chute. My mom isn’t even sure the electricity will hold out, so she has been pocketing candles wherever she can and hiding them under her bed!

  Mom is nervous. She doesn’t say it, but I can tell from the way her hands shake all the time. I worry about poor baby Fee. She is so tiny and helpless. I have to take care of her if anything happens to mom. She is my little sister, and it is my job to protect her.

  Other than that, there’s a cute boy across the hall, and I think his name is Jack, but when he said hi to me I was too shy to even smile at him. I am such a dorkus!

  I stop reading when I realize I’m blushing for this poor girl, or maybe because her shyness and awkwardness around boys show that she is so obviously one of my relations. I doubt she ever imagined a million tides ago that I would be reading her personal yearnings to another boy in the same palace where she had lived and died. I flip to another page and read:

  August 1, 2046

  The electricity flickered and went out again today, but this time it may be for good. At least until the flooding subsides, which may not be for several months! Or maybe even a year!

  I keep wondering how long everything else will hold out. Right now we are in the middle of a heat wave. It’s 110 degrees in the shade up here, and it’s never been this hot. Mom says it has something to do with the floods. But in the winter, who knows how cold it will get. Will we have heat? Will we have enough food? It’s hard to imagine we won’t have all those things I’ve come to take for granted. Today I watched mom feeding baby Fee her bottle and realized we are all so like her. Totally dependent upon others for food, shelter, everything. We are not survivors. I wouldn’t even know how to start a fire unless someone gave me the flame. If I had to catch and cook my own food, I’d starve. If I had to clothe myself, I’d be screwed because I don’t know how to sew. Without a 24-Hour Mini-Mart or a mall, most everybody I know is screwed. But the irony of it is, we created this. We went on to learn things that were “more important,” but we forgot the most important things of all. We called it progress, but maybe while we were busy building machines that could make it so much easier to access information like the average daily diet of the Northern Cuckoo, we were also building our own coffins.

  I know, I’ve been thinking about it way too much. But can you tell I’m scared?

  He doesn’t say anything, so I turn the page and read some more.

  August 20, 2046

  Today Jack and I went exploring outside, since he says it’ll be any day now when we can’t even go out at all.

  Jack showed me a giant steel door in the side of the mountain. He said that was where all the military vehicles went. He said that he’d come here before, and there were dozens of guards outside. But now, the door is closed, and the guards are gone. He says that Washington, D.C., is gone, and he thinks that the president of the United States took refuge in the mountain.

  Washington, D.C., is gone. I can’t believe those words, even as I write them. They’re just words. I didn’t ask Jack because I didn’t want to hear it, but I know what else that means. That most of the East Coast must be gone, too. Probably Otter Creek, too, my school, and my home. And all my neighbors... They were not as lucky as we were. I hope they got out in time. I hope they’re safe. But I heard an old man say the casualties are too numerous to estimate, so I know the odds are not good.

  Jack and I walked down a little path through the thickest part of the woods and came to something huge and mountainous, like a giant anthill, a hundred feet high. Jack said that he’d heard people talking at lunch, and this rich old man who owns a concrete company was having truckloads and truckloads of the stuff delivered every day for a year. That was the rumbling noise I’ve been hearing. He’s building his own mountain of concrete, a mountain on top of a mountain, and he plans to put his house at the very top.

  I laughed and said he’s crazy, but Jack just shrugged.

  Then Jack told me we should take off our sandals and run barefoot through the grass, so I did, even though it felt pretty silly. He said I need to remember that feeling. He said he isn’t sure that what they’re saying about the floods receding is true. He says they may just be trying to keep panic from setting in, but that he wishes he was in the mountain, too. It really started to freak me out, and I guess it was obvious on my face because that was when he kissed me....

  I stop. I can’t get my mouth to form the words anymore.

  Tiam nods, oblivious to the blood rushing to my face. “So we’re in that place... The place she calls a hotel. And this was a...a laundry chute. And now we’re in...the basement?”

  “I guess.”

  “The platform... That was the mountain on top of the mountain. So maybe the sleeping compartment and the craphouse were just buildings near the hotel, at one point. So what happened to that girl? You know her whole life story?”

  “Not really. She didn’t write in it all that much,” I lie, trembling as I think of her last entry.

  “Read more.”

  “I don’t really feel like it. It’s kind of dark here, and...well, my eyes are tired.”

  “Fair enough,” he says, and inwardly I breathe a sigh of relief. The fact was that she and Jack had had something that she called a “romance,” like something right out of my fairy-tale book. All those thoughts about Tiam that I am too scared to even have, she’d had the same feelings about Jack and written about them in here. Back then, people had those feelings freely, and it was a wonderful thing. I almost feel that if I’d been alive when she’d been, we would have been so alike. And while I can think of few things more embarrassing than having to read those out loud to Tiam, the real reason I don’t want to... The reason my eyes well up every time, and I have trouble breathing...is that eventually, she went mad, waiting
for the water to recede. Her cheerful, bubbly handwriting gradually diminished into almost inhuman scratches. The last dated entry was when she was only seventeen, and it was just a jumble of letters that didn’t make sense to me. The last entry, about a quarter of the way through the book, was undated:

  WE ARE NEVER GETTING OUT OF HERE

  I think she killed herself. The thought makes me shudder. People kill themselves all the time here, and I barely blink an eye, so I’m not sure why the thought of this girl ending her life makes me weak. Maybe because she was so hopeful, so filled with dreams of the future, dreams she shared with me almost as if she’d whispered them in my ear each night. She was so alive. So unlike us. The people of Tides are just hopeless, rotting skeletons, waiting for death. When I think of her, of how she once was, I almost think we deserve death. We’ve come this far, we might as well take the next small step.

  After a moment of silence, Tiam finally speaks. “What is on your mind?” he asks.

  I want to tell him about the girl in the book, about how it kills me that nobody on the island notices it but me because I have the written evidence and can see how far we’ve fallen. I want to tell him how scared it makes me to think that we don’t have souls anymore, we don’t have any of the good in us that makes living worthwhile. I want to tell him how I feel so alone, and ask him to hold me. But he’d look at me as if I have three heads if I did that. So instead I ask, “Do you think we can find a way out of here?”

  “I’m not sure I want out of here,” he says. “Do you realize that everyone on the island now thinks we’re dead?”

  “Is that supposed to be a happy thought?”

  “Well, yeah. Since that’s how they want me.”

  I shudder at the thought of my exchange in the craphouse with Finn. “I don’t think I’m much better off.”