Flood

by Joseph Monninger

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PART ONE: FIRST AID

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  PART TWO: SNAKES

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART THREE: OINK

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART FOUR: H2O

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  PREVIEW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  SURVIVAL TIP #1

  * * *

  Unfortunately, many modern homes fail to have on hand a useful first aid kit. The basic home first aid kit is the initial line of defense in any catastrophe. Although the practical benefits of a small medical supply kit (including a variety of bandages, tape, tweezers, scissors, hydrogen peroxide, and anything else one might find in a typical home medicine cabinet) are obvious to everyone, a well-stocked first aid kit should also contain several flashlights, a mirror, fire-making ingredients, water purification tablets, and a compass. These additional items take up little space, but they reward their inclusion by multiples of ten. Instead of thinking of a first aid kit as a “kit,” think instead of a first aid, or disaster, backpack. Keep it fully stocked and hang it in a handy place. One grab should be all it takes for any member of the family to meet the basic demands of an emergency.

  Kuru Elcock, 13, stuck her head in the back room of the Lincoln Bakery on River Street in Marseilles, Illinois, and waited for her eyes to adjust. It took a moment to make out her grandmother. G-Mom had the television on and the lights down low, the way she liked it when she watched her “stories.” Even in the middle of the day, she preferred a dark room. Lucky for her, today she didn’t need to worry about sunlight. It had been raining for three days already and Kuru expected more.

  “G-Mom?” she called into the room. “You awake, G-Mom?”

  G-Mom didn’t answer. It was always a fifty-fifty guess if G-Mom heard her or not. G-Mom was seventy-two years old, half blind, half deaf, all rattlesnake. She lived in her chair and watched her stories, and the last thing Kuru wanted to do was to put herself in the middle of that combination.

  But she had to tell her what was happening in the bakery.

  “G-Mom, there’s water coming in,” Kuru said.

  No answer.

  “G-Mom? You hearing me? There’s water coming under the door. You can see it coming right down the road.”

  “What water?” G-Mom asked, only half her attention, Kuru knew, swiveling to the problem. “Call the man.”

  “What man?”

  “Mr. Perkins, that man. Don’t let a little water fluster you, Kuru. We didn’t raise you up to be flustered that way….”

  Then she went back to her stories.

  Kuru had no earthly idea who the “man” was. Mr. Perkins, the landord? Taking a half step back, she wondered if G-Mom meant Mr. Pollywog, the lopsided man who went around town wearing overalls and the biggest pair of work boots anyone had ever seen. Was that the man? Were Mr. Pollywog and Mr. Perkins the same man? That didn’t seem possible. She turned and looked at the water again. It had come under the lip of the door and puddled there. Out in the road, she knew, more water had come loose from somewhere.

  She stuck her head back in the television room.

  “You mean that man who wears the overalls?” she asked G-Mom.

  “Yes, that’s who I mean. He’s the one who fixed the roof before, isn’t he?”

  “But it’s not the roof, G-Mom. It’s water coming under the door. Something’s flooding.”

  The volume on the television went down to a tolerable level. Kuru leaned through the doorway, keeping her hands against the doorjamb so she could disappear if she needed to.

  “Now tell me this again,” G-Mom said. “I’m right in the middle of my story.”

  “I know, G-Mom, but there’s water coming under the door.”

  Kuru pronounced the words like someone solving a clue on a television game show. All big, slow sounds so there could be no mistake.

  “Under the door?” G-Mom asked. “I thought you said the roof.”

  “I never said the roof. You said the roof.”

  “I’m pretty sure Mr. Perkins fixed it last time.”

  “It’s not the roof!” Kuru said, a little too loudly, she admitted, but she wished to heaven her grandmother would turn off the television and pay attention. “It’s coming through the door is what I’m saying.”

  “That door is not going to let any water in,” G-Mom said, pushing the button on the chair that slowly lifted her up into a standing position.

  It took forever, as usual. Kuru waited and didn’t say anything.

  Finally, her grandmother stood on her own two feet.

  “Show me,” she said.

  Kuru walked out into the bakery. It was afternoon, nearly dark with all the clouds. She didn’t know how many inches of rain they had gotten, but it was plenty. When her mom left earlier in the day, she had commented on it. At that point it had just been an inconvenience. Now, though, Kuru suspected it was something else.

  “Well now, look at that,” G-Mom said, finally shuffling into the bakery. “It’s flooding, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

  G-Mom nodded and kept shuffling straight across the room. She went to the front window and looked out. Kuru almost laughed to see her. G-Mom looked like an old turtle, or a chicken, turning her head this way and that, trying to get her eyes zoomed in on the water.

  “Something must have broke,” G-Mom said finally, pulling back as though nothing had been determined until she had witnessed the water herself.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  More water had come under the door even in the last few minutes, Kuru saw. She grabbed the broom from behind the cookie counter and tried to sweep the water out. But it did no good. If anything, more water followed the sweeps back inside.

  “Give your mama a call and see what she says,” G-Mom said. “I’ll turn to the news.”

  “And miss your stories?” Kuru said, teasing her grandmother.

  “That Illinois River is famous for flooding. You mark my word, that’s what’s happening.”

  “I’ll call her …” Kuru said, then stopped when the electricity cut out.

  It went out in one large humppphhhh. Then something made a loud cracking sound, the lights flashed for a second, and finally everything cut out again.

  G-Mom turned slowly.

  “Get the candles,” she said when she had inched her way around.

  Water, Kuru observed as she went behind the counter to search for the candles, had crossed the room almost as fast as her grandmother.

  In the apartment above the bakery, Carmen Garcia, 12, rocked her baby brother to sleep. She sat next to the stove. Her baby brother had a habit of getting chest colds, and their mother, Eloise Clemente Garcia, had passed along this little trick. With the rain falling and the dampness in the air, the stove made sense. Her brother, Juan, took in the heat like a little sponge.

  She didn’t mind rocking her brother. Not really. Sometimes it was nice to sit quietly and do nothing except rock. It gave her an excuse to sit by the stove, and the truth was her brother generated heat like a hunk of lava. Or pumice. Or whatever the stones were that came out of a volcano. Anyway, he felt good in her arms.

  She also liked watching her brother’s eyes as they grew increasingly sleepy. It was like a game to make them shut and stay shut. Little by little, his brown eyes would close, t
hen open, then close again. His breathing became quieter and his hands, usually moving to grab something, finally subsided. It wasn’t fun in a big, enormous way, but it was still fun. Despite the objections she registered with her mother — He’s not my kid, Mama, he’s yours. I don’t see why I have to watch him — she actually enjoyed the moments with him.

  But when the electricity cut out she felt a little flutter in her gut. The red heat coils inside the stove slowly stopped glowing quite as red. The light over the stove switched off and something higher in the apartment building went out with a loud pop. She didn’t move. For one thing, she didn’t want to wake the baby who had finally dropped off to sleep. For another thing, she figured the electricity would jolt back on any second. It usually did.

  So she kept rocking. After five minutes, when the baby was solidly asleep and the lights didn’t return, she carried him slowly to the windows overlooking the street. It was nearly dark out and hard to see, but when she looked down she had a strange moment of dislocation.

  Water in the street reflected the sky. Everything was upside down. The buildings, the street lamps, everything. She saw the moon sitting in the middle of the road.

  Naturally, it wasn’t the moon, not really, just a reflection, but it still threw her off. Strange, she thought. Yes, it had been raining and her mother had commented about a dam or something being under strain according to the news, but she had never seen the road outside the apartment building covered by water. Never. As she stood and looked out, she realized it wasn’t just a skim of water, either.

  It was a good six inches, if she could judge it from where she stood. It had already gone over the curb and ran along the sidewalks. She looked a little longer, then carried her baby brother to his crib and dipped him down into it. She kissed his forehead and tiptoed away.

  She picked up her cell phone and called her mother. It took a dozen rings for her mother to answer.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” her mother said. “Everything okay?”

  “The electricity went out, Mama.”

  “I worried it might. Parts of town are flooding. I heard it on the news.”

  “Are we going to be flooded?”

  “We’re closest to the river. How’s the baby?”

  “He’s fine. I just put him down.”

  “It’s early to put him down. Now he’ll be awake when I get home.”

  He’s your kid, Carmen wanted to say, but she choked it back.

  “When are you going to be home, anyway?”

  “Not for a couple hours, sweetheart. Sorry. I’m helping Mrs. Oldack with her group.”

  “Her book group?”

  “Her other group. The knitters.”

  Her mother did maid work and sometimes cooked for rich ladies. Mrs. Oldack was one of her regular employers.

  “Okay. I’ve got homework to do.”

  “I doubt there will be school tomorrow, sweetie. This is a bad storm. They said it could get cold, too. The weather’s gone crazy.”

  Carmen listened to someone running on the ceiling above her.

  “The angels are bowling,” Carmen said, which was a little code between them that meant the loud, obnoxious boys who lived above them were roughhousing again.

  “Sorry, sweetie. Now I should go. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Mrs. Oldack mentioned she might let me go early, but then she didn’t come back to it.”

  “You should leave,” Carmen said, then thought: Because you have a baby.

  “We’ll see….”

  Then her mother’s voice shut off and the cell phone went dead and her little brother, as if on cue, decided that moment to wake up and start crying.

  In Apartment 3 at the top of the building — the building was only three stories tall — Day Johnson moved his body slowly around the corner of the kitchen, a green foam pool noodle in his right hand. He tried to spot his brother, Ellis, who had used the hundred-count to hide. The deal was simple: Ellis was a zombie, and Day was a hunter, and if Ellis could put his hands or mouth on his big brother before Day chopped off his head with the pool noodle, zombies won. Then Day had to become the zombie, and Ellis got to be the hunter — it was better to be the hunter, because you could smack the stuffing out of the zombie with the pool noodle — and the situations reversed. Day didn’t like hiding as much as stalking. It didn’t fit his personality, but, he admitted, hiding fit Ellis’s personality like a glove. The kid was good at hiding. He was one sneaky zombie.

  “You out here, zombie man?” Day asked.

  He kept his back to the wall. He swiveled his head back and forth. Ellis could come out of anywhere, he was that good. And that quiet.

  “Zombie want some brains?” Day asked, the pool noodle held up high so he could bring it down in a slash if he needed to use it. The rule was, if the zombie got hit by the noodle, he had to fall right away. Same went for the zombie attack: One touch of teeth and you had to lie on the floor and froth.

  Day heard a pitter-patter of little zombie feet. He couldn’t detect the direction, though. As he listened, he kept moving and his shoulder hit a colander suspended on the kitchen pegboard. The colander fell off and clattered to the floor.

  “Zombie like? Zombie like noise?”

  The thing was, Ellis was patient. Really patient. Day knew he himself rushed when he was a zombie, preferring the bold attack to sneaking. It made him nervous to be the hunter, but even more nervous to be the zombie.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are, zombie man,” Day called into the apartment.

  Then two things happened.

  First the lights went. They simply blinked away. Day glanced at the street-side windows and he saw rain still falling, still blistering the panes. He opened his mouth to say something to his brother, but at that moment the second thing happened.

  Ellis attacked. He rose up from under the kitchen table — How had he hidden? Day wondered — and came at him like crazed zombie. Starting so low, Ellis was toast. Day snapped the pool noodle down on his brother’s neck, chopping off his head. To his brother’s credit, he did a good job of dying. He fell to the floor and cockroached with his hands up, laughing as he did so. Usually Day would have lopped him again with the noodle, but the lights being out, the rain at the window, pulled his attention away.

  “Hey,” he said, “it’s really raining.”

  “So?” Ellis asked, rising up to his knees.

  “I’m just saying,” Day said. “It’s just kind of weird.”

  “This apartment is too small. There’s nowhere to hide. Let’s go down to the basement.”

  “Mom said stay here.”

  Ellis looked at him and raised his eyebrows. They didn’t always do what their mom said.

  “I’ll be zombie,” Ellis said. “You can still be the hunter.”

  “You just want to see the snakes,” Day said.

  “Of course I do,” Ellis said, already starting for the door. “Let’s go.”

  Kuru dropped the second five-pound bag of flour next to the door crack and then shoved it around with her feet until it connected to the first bag. The white sackcloth around the bag turned dark with moisture immediately. She supposed the flour did work in its way, but it wasn’t going to work for long. That was clear.

  “See?” G-Mom asked behind her.

  “G-Mom —” Kuru started to point out how saturated the first bag had already become, and that the water still worked around it, then she closed her mouth.

  Sometimes it was easier not to argue. She backed away from the door and went to stand beside G-Mom, who had taken up a position near the cash register.

  “Is the water still climbing?” G-Mom asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Isn’t this something?”

  “I’ll watch the store if you want to go back …”

  Kuru was going to say go back and watch your stories, but there was no electricity, therefore no stories. Duh, she told herself. It was easy to forget that simple fact.

  “I bet someth
ing broke,” G-Mom said, musing, her age-spotted hands resting like a pile of leaves on the glass cookie counter. “I bet some sort of dam or levee or holding place for water popped right open. It just stands to reason. Rain can’t make this much of a difference in such a short time.”

  “It’s been raining a long time, G-Mom.”

  “The police should come by. Or someone. Someone in authority to tell us what’s what. I wish I had a transistor.”

  “What’s a transistor, G-Mom?”

  G-Mom slowly turned to examine her. She shook her head and used her tongue to wet her lips, as if they would need moisture to impart such learning.

  “You don’t know what a transistor is? Heaven, that’s the limit. A transistor is a little radio, that’s all. Least that’s what we called them when we were girls. The smaller the transistor the better. They came from Japan, mostly. Oh, you weren’t anyone unless you had a little transistor along with you.”

  “You mean radios?”

  “Didn’t I just say as much? Yes, transistor radios. Oh, gosh, they could be shaped like flowers or dogs…. My sister had one that was a sunflower face. It was the cutest thing.”

  “If you say so, G-Mom.”

  “And we only got AM on it. No FM in those days. Everyone listened to AM and you only got a few stations. Late at night sometimes you could get stations from far away. That was always exciting.”

  G-Mom didn’t say anything else for a while after that. Then, as if settling on a plan, she said they should collect whatever candles they had around the place. Look for flashlights, too. Kuru looked in all the usual places: the junk drawer near the back door, the shelf above the bread box. She found a dozen candles, big ones, and two packets of birthday candles. She guessed there were more around, but it would take some looking to find them. She put them in front of G-Mom at the cash register.

  “We’ll save them until we need them,” G-Mom said. “What’s it look like out back?”

  “Flooded.”

  “How flooded, though? That’s why I asked.”

  Kuru shrugged, then walked to the back door and looked out. It was deep; deeper, probably, than the street out front. She wasn’t great with directions, but the back of the house was closer to the river. Whatever was flooding probably came from that direction.