“Wasn’t there a boat over by the park?” Ellis asked. “Wasn’t there one up on sawhorses?”
“It was a sailboat,” Day said, still poking along. “It was pretty big.”
“Wonder if we could get to that.”
“It looked pretty beat up. It looked like one of those things people put in their backyards and then forget about.”
“But at least it might float. It would be someplace to aim for,” Kuru chimed in. “I know where you mean. It was painted a weird shade of blue, right?”
“Right,” Ellis said. “Sky blue, kind of.”
“This is so gross,” Day said. “It stinks.”
“You’re almost there,” Kuru said. “Keep going.”
“Not sure what I’m supposed to see once I get on the street.”
“We won’t know until we know,” Ellis said.
Day reached the bakery door. It was locked when he tried to pull it.
“Turn the thumb lock to the right,” Kuru said. “It should work.”
He turned it. He heard a solid click to indicate it had released. He reached down for the doorknob and turned it. Then he felt with his feet for the flour bags. He found them easily, but it took a long time to shove them aside. Finally, the door came back slowly, floating, it felt like, and he stepped back to give it room. The opening permitted more water to flow in, but it wasn’t a tidal wave. It merely allowed a sigh of water to settle inside.
“Ta-da,” he said.
“Now go out and look around,” Ellis said. “Maybe you should make some noise to alert anyone who might be in the other buildings around here.”
“What kind of noise?”
“Just anything, really. Just bang on stuff or yell.”
“Let me look for a second to see what’s going on.”
Day stepped outside. Waded outside, he thought. Rain fell on his head and shoulders, but it nevertheless felt good to be out of the building. To be free of it. He took a few more steps out onto the sidewalk. It was easy to forget a world existed beyond the building, he reflected. He took a deep breath and slowly looked up and down the street. Everything was flooded, obviously, but it took a little while for him to absorb what that meant. Water covered the cars, for one thing, and their roofs lingered just at the surface of the water like seals or whales swimming by. The traffic light on Halston Street had toppled over and stared like a dead eye at him. Mrs. DuMont’s flower boxes, her pride and joy, his mother always said, floated next to the next building’s side. They had come loose and bobbled in the water like sugar cubes or playing dice.
“So?” Ellis called. “What’s it like?”
“It’s flooded.”
“Duh,” Ellis said. “How bad?”
“What do you mean, how bad? Real bad. Crazy bad,” Day said, still looking around.
“Is it dangerous?” Kuru called. “Is the water running fast or anything like that?”
“Not too bad,” Day answered, judging the water’s force against his body. It did not really try to push him one way or the other.
“So should we come out and join you?” Ellis asked.
Day turned around and shrugged.
“You guys,” he said, “it depends if we want to try to make it out. Or try to make it over to that boat near the park. Coming out here hasn’t really changed anything. G-Mom and Carmen can’t walk through this. Neither can Zebby. And we can’t leave them alone, can we?”
“Probably not,” Ellis said.
“Not with the snakes and everything,” Kuru agreed. “Is there another building that might be better? Can you see anyplace that might give us better security?”
“Not really. I could probably make it over to the parking garage, but that would be cold at night and dark. It wouldn’t be much of a camp.”
“Could we make it to Jenson’s Market?” Ellis asked, mentioning the corner store they used. That had been part of the reason for coming out in the first place and they had all but forgotten it. “For batteries or something?”
“I can’t tell for sure. We could make a try.”
“Old Man Jenson won’t be happy if people go into his store,” Kuru said.
“Maybe he’s not around,” Day said. “Hold on. I’m wading back to you.”
He passed through the bakery faster going back. When he climbed onto the stairs, Ellis stepped away.
“You reek!” Ellis said.
“Sorry,” Day said. “That water’s not exactly French perfume, you know.”
“It’s ripe,” Kuru agreed.
“So what do we want to do?” Day asked, conscious of his smell and the water oozing off his body. “We could probably make it down to Jenson’s Market. That’s on the corner, so once we reached it we could look down a cross street. Or we could try to make it to that boat near the park, or we could just stay where we are.”
“I think we should try for the market. One way or the other, that will help us figure out what’s what,” Ellis said.
“The boat doesn’t make any sense, because we don’t even know if it’s still there,” Kuru said, her hand to her face, Day understood, to block his odor. “It might have floated away, if it floated. And like you said, or someone said, G-Mom isn’t going anywhere.”
“But if the building keeps sliding down,” Ellis said, “we’re done for.”
“Let’s go down to the store,” Day said. “If we do it fast, we can be down and back before anyone needs us. It shouldn’t take long.”
“I don’t want to run into Mr. Jenson,” Kuru said. “He’s not in a good mood on a regular day. This flooding won’t have helped.”
“Well, whatever,” Ellis said. “He may have some stuff we need. He may not even be around. We can try it and turn back.”
Day nodded and stepped back into the water.
“Come on,” he said over his shoulder.
“I can’t believe I’m going in that water,” Kuru said. “And no showers afterward. Nothing.”
“It won’t be so bad,” Ellis said, stepping in with Day. “You can stay if you want and we’ll go.”
“I’m coming,” Kuru said, and splashed as she stepped into the water.
Day waded toward the road just as he had done a few minutes before. The other two followed.
Alice heard something in the storage room. She wasn’t one hundred percent positive it was the storage room, the place where they had put the snake that had hurt Zebby, but it seemed to be the likeliest place. She stood for a long time looking at the door to the closet.
She wasn’t supposed to be alone. That was policy; they had all agreed on it. But she had ducked out of the apartment to check on the scouting party, curious where they had gone, if they had come back, and so forth, and she had found herself standing at the top of the stairs, the storage closet immediately to her left. The ridiculous door even said STORAGE, although the writing had long since lost its hold on the door and she had to read the empty places where the letters used to be.
It read: TO AG. The S and R and E had faded away.
It was afternoon. Early afternoon. She didn’t like how long Kuru and Day and Ellis had been away. They had all agreed that they wouldn’t take off on any long-term mission unless they informed the apartment people of their intentions, but maybe they had gotten caught in something. Alice didn’t know and neither did G-Mom or Carmen, so they had all become increasingly worried until Alice consented to go out and look.
Just to the top of the landing, you hear me? G-Mom had said emphatically. No farther. You come right back here.
That’s exactly what she intended to do, so that when she reached the top of the landing and stared down the damp staircase at the flooded first floor below, she had every intention of hustling back to the apartment to report her findings.
No sign of them, she imagined herself saying. Weird, huh?
That’s when something went bump in the storage closet.
It was a good, solid sound. It wasn’t anything she could mistake. It didn’t come from
the building shifting, or from the mops and brooms inside suddenly deciding to slide sideways. No, this was an animate sound. Animate was a good vocab word, one that meant verb: to bring to life, or adjective: alive or having life, and the word certainly fit the noise behind the door.
Something was moving around in there. And she was fascinated.
Not that she was going to open the door. Never that. But the thought of the snake looped over the shelves inside, waiting, its backward-pointing teeth glinting, made her surprisingly …
Intrigued. It was a little like a nightmare you have as you’re waking on a soft summer morning, and you think of the horrid elements of the dream contrasted to the gentleness of the waking, and you are the tiniest bit intrigued. You allow yourself to stay asleep, even when you know you could wake up and be done with it, because something about the nightmare is, well, intriguing. It just is. And if you’re lucky, she thought, you hang on the edge of dream and waking, indulging in the frightening images, exploring while simultaneously appalled by what you might see.
That’s what the snake in the storage room meant to her. Just that.
She put her ear to the door. She heard something slow and stealthy moving behind the wooden barrier.
“I hear you,” she whispered to it. “You can’t fool me.”
She put her hand on the doorknob.
“Want me to let you out?” she whispered. “Want to come out and play?”
And that was nuts, she knew. She shuddered at the thought of the snake slipping out of the closet, its wedge-shaped head leading the pile of spine. She wiggled the doorknob, just to have sound, and then put her ear to the door again to see if the snake reacted. No noise came from inside.
Clever, she thought. It’s very clever.
She let the doorknob rest and turned away from the door. She must be crazy, she told herself. She flexed her knees and looked once more down the stairway to the first floor. Water caught the dull sunshine and turned the reflection milky. No sign of them. Nothing to report.
“What did you see?” G-Mom asked when she came back into the apartment.
“No sign of them,” Alice said, moving over to pet Zebby.
“You were gone a long time,” Carmen said. “What were you doing out there?”
“Nothing. Just listening to see if I could hear anything.”
“And did you?” Carmen asked.
Alice shook her head. The baby started crying then. Alice felt glad to have the noise. She didn’t like thinking about her hand on the doorknob of the storage closet, or of the sound of the snake moving behind the door. It sounded like a mop head splashing quietly on the floor, like water releasing and being drawn back to its source.
Kuru followed through the water, staying directly in line with the two boys. She hated wading through water, hated not being able to see her feet, hated not being sure what she stepped on at any given moment. The street outside the bakery looked otherworldly. Rain kept falling and everything in the world had shifted or moved, it seemed, and you could not depend on anything being where you expected it to be.
Day led. Ellis took the middle and she brought up the rear. On a normal day, under normal circumstances, it would have taken less than a minute or two to walk to Jenson’s Market. But not today. Not anytime in the near future, she imagined.
“Do you shop at Jenson’s Market?” Ellis asked.
“Prices are too high,” she said, still wading. “And Old Man Jenson is a nasty thing. He was mean to G-Mom once.”
“He’s pretty gross,” Day agreed. “But it’s convenient.”
“We do our shopping at the BJ’s. We buy in bulk.”
“Old Man Jenson performed a citizen’s arrest on Kyle Ellison,” Day said. “He has a samurai sword he keeps on hooks by the register and he held it right to Kyle’s neck. He said Kyle had shoplifted something, but Kyle swears he didn’t.”
“I’ve never seen the sword,” Ellis said.
“Well, he has one,” Day assured him. “It was his dad’s from World War Two. His dad got it off a dead Japanese soldier.”
“A samurai sword? He’s too fat to use a samurai sword,” Kuru said.
“That guy eats,” Day said. “I mean, he packs it down. He always has a bag of something open and his fingers are always oily.”
“Some samurai,” Kuru said.
“No one said he was a samurai,” Ellis said. “We said he has a samurai sword, that’s all.”
Kuru watched the boys step up on something, then lower back into the water. At least the water didn’t deepen. It stayed at chest level, grosser than gross, but it was manageable. Of course, it also depended on whether you stepped into a hole, or into anything deeper. Then you would have trouble. Plus, the water was cold, bone cold, and she didn’t think you could wade in it for long. Pretty soon it would leach the warmth right out of your body. The whole thing was a mess.
“Here we go,” Day said, finally arriving at Jenson’s Market. “The security gate is down. There’s no one there.”
“Knock and see,” Ellis said.
Day knocked. He yelled, “Helllloooooo?” too, but no one answered. Kuru watched him turn away and shrug. At the same time Old Man Jenson opened the door to the store. He wore a pair of fishing waders and carried the samurai sword in his hand. The samurai sword had a braided tassel dangling from the handgrip. It looked sharp and deadly.
“What do you want?” he asked.
For the first time Kuru realized Old Man Jenson was not that old. He merely looked old. His hair was thin on top, and grayish red, but his fat face was younger than she recollected. He had a huge discoloration on the back of his right hand. Maybe it was a rash, or maybe it was a birthmark, but it drew her eye. He acted old, though, grumpy and out of sorts. Funny how people got their nicknames.
“We wanted to get some batteries for a flashlight,” Day said.
“A hundred bucks,” Old Man Jenson said, his voice flat and breathy.
“What?” Ellis asked.
“I said a hundred bucks.”
“Are you crazy?” Day said.
“You don’t want them, it’s okay with me. We’re in flood conditions, in case you didn’t notice.”
“You want a hundred bucks for a couple batteries?” Ellis asked. “You must be crazy.”
“You see anybody else selling batteries around here? It’s what’s called a seller’s market. Batteries are rare right now. You’re welcome to go to another store.”
“You know we can’t do that,” Kuru said. “Why do you want to be like that?”
Old Man Jenson didn’t say anything. He simply regarded them through the crosshatch of the security gate.
“Are you hearing any reports?” Ellis asked. “About when someone’s going to get in here? Or when the water is going down?”
“Nope. No reports.”
“You haven’t heard them, or you won’t tell us?” Day asked.
“You want the batteries or not?” Jenson asked.
“Wow, you are one greedy man,” Kuru said. “Won’t even help out neighbors.”
“You’re not my neighbors. You’re just flies landing on a cube of sugar.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Kuru said.
“Fifty dollars,” Jenson said. “Take it or leave it.”
“We’ll leave it,” Ellis said. “Have a nice day, Jenson.”
Jenson shrugged and shut the door. Kuru looked at the other two.
“I cannot believe what just happened,” she said.
“So much for neighbor helping neighbor,” Day said. “That guy is warped.”
“He had the samurai sword,” Ellis said. “That thing looked pretty cool.”
“Lethal,” Kuru agreed. “Now what?”
“Let’s just look down the cross street and see what we can see. Is there any other store nearby?” Day asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Ellis said. “We can visit the boat if that still makes sense.”
“The boat’s too far,” Ku
ru said. “We should head back after we check the cross street.”
“She’s right,” Day said. “We’re just going to have to wait it out.”
“With Big Monte,” Ellis said.
“Yes, with Big Monte,” Day said.
Kuru took the lead and circled the opening of Jenson’s Market so she could look down the cross street. There wasn’t much to see. Water spread everywhere, all the way down to the river, from what she could tell. She spotted a few distinguishing landmarks — a sizeable oak tree she liked, a swing set behind a crumbled old house, an oil tank on metal legs — but otherwise things were submerged. Nothing really had changed, yet everything had changed. It was peculiar.
The rain refused to let up as they turned around for the apartment house. It made a gentle patter on the surface of the floodwater. Suddenly, Kuru heard a beating sound. It came fast, gaining in volume, and it took her a moment to realize it was a helicopter. It came quickly and passed almost directly over them. Kuru saw a soldier sitting in the doorway. He waved. Or maybe it was a woman, she couldn’t tell, because whoever it was wore a uniform.
“They know we’re here,” Ellis said. “At least we know that now.”
“How do we know that?” Day asked.
“Because they didn’t stop. If we had been a big surprise to them, they would have circled around and come back to tell us something. But they know we’re here. I guarantee it.”
“Glad you can guarantee it,” Kuru said. “I’m not so sure.”
“They probably had to get people in more critical conditions. They’ll get us tomorrow. We just have to make it through one more night.”
Kuru regarded Ellis. The kid was pretty shrewd. The whole chess-playing thing worked for him. It seemed to influence every part of his life.
“He’s probably right,” Day said. “He usually is about stuff like this.”
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