“Pretty high,” she told G-Mom when she came back.
“Now, what in the world does that mean, girl? Pretty high? What if I told you I had a boy I wanted you to meet and I told you he was pretty cute? Would that satisfy you? Wouldn’t you have a few more questions you might like answered?”
“I don’t want to meet any boys, cute or otherwise.”
“Oh, you’re as stubborn as your mother was. But some boy will come along and that will be that. Now tell me, how deep was the water?”
“The dog house is floating.”
“That rickety old thing? Should have been dragged out of here years ago.”
“And the swings on the swing set. They’re floating.”
“ ’Cause they’re made of wood. See? Now I have a solid idea of how much water we’re dealing with.”
“Ten inches, maybe.”
“In back. In front maybe more like seven or eight, am I right?”
“You’re right, G-Mom.”
Before she could ask or say anything else, a siren went off. It was an old-sounding siren that went on and on and on. Something about the sound of it made Kuru feel lonely. She felt like the loneliest person in the world as long as the siren went on.
“That’s an alert,” G-Mom said. “You hear that, you stay alert.”
“Alert for what?”
“Just a guess,” G-Mom said, “but I’d say be alert for water.”
Carmen knocked gently on the bakery door. She knocked on the back door, where it connected to the center stairs, not the front door where it connected to the street. She kept her ear cocked to hear her baby brother, but so far he was being good. Her mother wouldn’t be happy with her, knowing she had left her brother upstairs while she came downstairs, but it was getting dark in the apartment and she felt nervous and scared and uncertain of what to do.
So she knocked. And pretty soon the door opened.
Kuru answered. “Hey,” she said, leaning her hip against the doorframe. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering if you knew what was going on….” Carmen asked.
When the words came out of her mouth, they suddenly sounded silly. She looked at Kuru. Kuru managed to look bored. She wore big rubber boots that made her appear ready for anything. In contrast, Carmen felt like a wimp.
“It’s flooding, I guess,” Kuru said. “Not really sure.”
“Is the whole town flooding?”
“My grandma thinks something broke. A levee or a lock or a dam or something. I guess it doesn’t really matter what it was. It’s water, that’s all we know.”
“I’ve just got my baby brother….”
“Oh, yeah,” Kuru said.
“It’s getting dark.”
Kuru looked at her. Kuru was no one to trifle with, Carmen thought. She didn’t take any nonsense from anyone, which was admirable, for sure. Carmen always felt soft around her, as if she had somehow let Kuru down. It was weird, really, because they were in the same class, but they ran in different crowds. Carmen was in student government; Kuru was a jock.
“Well, I just wanted to know if you knew anything,” Carmen said, turning to go.
“You want to come in?”
“I have my little brother….”
“You can get him and bring him down. We’ve got candles at least.”
“I don’t want to be a bother.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you if you were a bother,” Kuru said. “Besides, the bakery’s not going to get any more customers, I’m guessing, probably not for a couple days. We might as well close up and eat whatever isn’t sold. There’s plenty of food.”
“Well …”
Carmen wondered why she hesitated. Why did people hesitate when they wanted to do something, but worried about inconveniencing someone else? She didn’t want to be upstairs with the baby in the darkness, but she still hemmed and hawed about accepting the invitation. Her mother would have told her she was being a silly child and to take what fate had put under her nose.
“Okay, then,” Carmen forced herself to say. “Let me just run up and get him.”
“I’ll leave the door open here. Just come on in.”
“Thank you, Kuru. I was just getting …”
“No need to explain. This is a weird situation.”
Carmen nodded. Then she turned and started back up the stairs. She had made it halfway up when she realized it was dark. Truly dark. The staircase ran up the center of the house so no secondary light came in from a window. Without electricity, it was simply a dark tunnel of steps leading up into greater darkness. It was actually a little eerie, Carmen decided. By blinking her eyes she could make figures appear out of the darkness. Of course they weren’t real figures, just imaginary ones, and they had no more substance than creatures who lived under the bed, or in the closet, or in the bathtub.
The bathtub. Carmen didn’t like thinking about the bathtub. As she continued climbing the stairs, she pictured the claw-footed bathtub in the tiled bathroom, the orange shower curtain tucked into the rim of the tub. Why orange? she had asked her mother repeatedly. Why does it have to be orange?
Because orange was not opaque, and it was not transparent, either. It was translucent, and Carmen could not pass by the bathroom, or even use the facilities, without feeling as though someone hid inside the tub.
Someone horrible. Someone whose movements began slowly … then gently, quietly, began pulling back the shower curtain….
Carmen shook herself and forced herself to climb faster. It wasn’t good to leave her little brother unattended. The heck with the tub, she told herself. The heck with the orange shower curtain.
But the second-story landing was dark. Way dark. Impenetrably dark, she told herself, using an English vocab word. The thing was, she realized, her apartment was not a whole heck of a lot lighter. She had to go down a dark hallway, push into a dark apartment, then cross the dark apartment and grab her little brother.
And she had to go past the bathroom.
And the orange shower curtain that sometimes breathed when she listened carefully.
Day smelled water as soon as he opened the door to the basement. The basement, he knew, ran under the entire apartment building. The building had three stories, three apartments, one basement, one center staircase. The basement, though, was something special.
He glanced at Ellis. Ellis pulled a face, laughing that it smelled down there. The basement never smelled that great to begin with, but this was worse.
“That’s funky,” Ellis said.
Day nodded. He still carried the pool noodle in his hand. He shoved it down the staircase a little, tapping the walls. The basement wasn’t entirely dark. Some sort of emergency light had come on. Day couldn’t tell what it was, but he guessed it was probably a light for the furnace. Or for the oil tanks or something. Something so that service people could find what they needed to find, even in a power outage.
It gave the basement a dark, terrible light.
“I bet they’re out,” Ellis said.
“What’s out?”
“The snakes. They could probably swim right out of their cages with all the water.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Teddy said they could swim. He’s not lying. He said they could swim like demons. And the tops of those cages are just set there and they’re made of wood, so they’ll float up, I’m thinking.”
Pythons, Day thought. His brother was saying the pythons were out.
“You’re crazy,” he said again, because he didn’t think his brother was crazy. His brother was usually right about things like this. His brother listened to people, paid attention, made mental notes. His mother always read him the grocery list when they went food shopping, because he could commit that sort of thing to memory as easy as breathing.
“Let’s go down and see,” Ellis said. “We can just go halfway down and look.”
“There’s a lot of water down there.”
“I can’t see it.”
&n
bsp; “It’s up to my waist, I bet. Maybe more.”
“If it’s over the tables, then I guarantee the snakes are out. Either that or they’re dead.”
“You go first,” Day said, and snapped his brother with the pool noodle.
“You.”
“You got to go down and check it out.”
“We go together.”
Day didn’t like the setup, but he couldn’t chicken out now. Besides, maybe it was worth knowing about the snakes. If they were out, he needed to contact the authorities or someone who could do something about it. If they were out, Teddy, the doofy snake farmer and cousin or nephew to the building owner, would be no use. He would pretend he didn’t know a thing about them, even though he used the basement space to grow them and sell them on the black market. Burmese pythons, ball pythons, Day didn’t know what all. Snakes as big as his arm. Yellow snakes, some of them, that lay in the light of the heat lamps with the hindquarters of a mouse or rat slowly walking its way down the serpent’s throat.
“This is so bad,” Ellis said, taking a step down to look.
“There’s a lot of water.”
“It’s over the tables. Didn’t I tell you? Those snakes are out.”
He said “out” like OUT. Then he took a step back up toward the door.
“I am not going down there with those snakes floating around,” Ellis said. “No way.”
“Chicken much?”
“You go if you’re so brave.”
“Whoever goes down the most steps wins.”
“Wins what?”
“The other guy has to call him King for the rest of the day.”
“You’re nuts.”
Day took a step down. He turned and grinned at Ellis.
Ellis shrugged and took the same step down. “Big deal,” he said.
Day took another step down. He figured there were maybe twelve steps, six of them covered in water. By bending forward, he could see more now. The heat lamps on the snake tables were out. Ellis was right about the water. It filled the basement about halfway, the level going above the card tables Teddy used for the snakes.
The tops to the cages had all been popped. The water had lifted them, or the snakes, sensing they might drown, forced their way. Day couldn’t say for certain, but he was pretty sure the snakes were now swimming around in the basement, their noses up out of the water like speedboats.
“This is just nasty,” Ellis said. “We got to let someone know.”
“Who?”
“Teddy, for one.”
“There’s no way Teddy’s going to cop to this. He’ll pretend he doesn’t know a thing about it.”
“They could get out. Out, out, I mean. Out in the town.”
Day shrugged. He had thought the same thing himself.
Then, before they could do anything else, they saw a snake. It came through the water toward them, its body swirling the water in a serpentine wake. It was one of the yellow ones, the ones that looked like a dead man’s bones. Day shivered. He didn’t like the look of it in a cage and he liked it that much less in the water.
“That is screwed up,” Day said. “I mean, that’s really weird.”
“There’s probably a dozen of them down here.”
The snake came and lifted its body on one of the bottom steps, but it didn’t slow down. It kept going, undulating right over it and continuing into the back of the staircase. Day heard another splash coming from one of the dark corners. It was weird, way weird. The water was bad enough, but the snakes made it completely freaky.
“Let’s get out of here,” Day said. “This is whacked.”
“I told you they’d get out.”
Day couldn’t resist pushing the pool noodle down the last few steps and dunking the tip in the water. He waited, not sure what to expect. It only took a ten-count for a snake to slide by. It wasn’t a yellow snake, but one of the big, thick-headed Burmese pythons. It seemed to size up the pool noodle, then sunk under the water and swam away.
Day backed up the stairs and shut the door solidly behind him.
Carmen heard something yawn.
It wasn’t a person. It was the building. It made a long, low sound like a ship going under the waves. Like a movie ship, anyway, she thought. She had never been on a genuine ship, so she couldn’t say for certain what one sounded like, but it was the sound movie ships made when water finally came in and started to buckle the steel plate.
Like something needed to give. Like something had to give.
She heard the baby rustle in his sleep and he made a cooing sound as she stepped into the apartment. The cooing sound should have been soothing, a sign that all was well, except it was the sound he made sometimes when someone played with him.
When someone stood next to the crib.
No, no, no, no, she thought.
She started to tremble. She sent out a silent barb of annoyance toward her mom. Where is she? Obviously she had to work, but on a night like this, when things were going loopy, was it too much to ask that she drop everything and get home?
The yawn came again. So did the cooing sound.
“Juan?” she called into the darkness for her brother.
She waited in the doorway, listening. This is not happening, she thought. But it was. In the quiet she heard rain still hitting against the windows. It wasn’t letting up. Nothing was letting up. The water would keep rising, she knew, and it had now entered the building somehow and put it under strain. She wasn’t sure what kind of strain, but she doubted it was good. Maybe, she thought, the whole building could be knocked over. Didn’t that happen? She had seen pictures like that on the news. The news always seemed like something that happened to other people, but for the first time in her life she realized it was also something that could happen to her.
She held her hands up in front of her and walked forward slowly.
And it went okay. She knew the apartment, where everything stood inside it, so she faced no worries about tripping. She kept her hands out and shuffled her feet just in case, and she made pretty good progress. She felt proud of herself. It wasn’t the easiest thing she had ever done. She hummed a little song under her breath, trying to fill her head with sound, because the one thing she didn’t have an answer for was the …
… shower curtain.
I’m waiting, she imagined the shower curtain saying. I’m right here.
It was darker in the hallway. It was only a short hallway, fortunately, and her mother’s bedroom was at the end of it, but before she came to the crib she had to go past the bathroom. She had to go past the bathtub, the orange shower curtain waiting like a lung slightly inflated, and she had to snatch up her little brother and head down to the bakery.
Her brother made a gentle laughing sound.
Like someone tickled him. Like he found something someone did amusing.
She stopped for a second and listened again.
Wind hit the side of the building. Something on the roof — it sounded like the roof anyway — made a grinding sound. Then, slowly, just underneath the other sounds, she thought she heard the metal rings on the shower curtain begin to push back. They slid. It was an eerie, light sound, one that would have been easy to miss in all the storm noise. It meant that whatever was behind the curtain had grown tired of staying there.
She ran. It wasn’t the bravest thing that she had ever done, but being alone in a pitch-black apartment listening to the foreign noises of a storm can cause unnatural reactions. She ran forward and jumped like a deer past the bathroom door, and she did not turn her head left or right but kept it pointed forward. And because she was so intent on not giving in to her fear of the shower curtain, she forgot completely about the laundry basket alongside the wall near the entrance to her mother’s bedroom.
She launched into the air going top speed, and the next thing she felt was her head piling into the wall, her neck snapping a little, and bright lights flashing behind her eyes. She did not have time for any more thought. Her world w
ent shut and black, and the last thing she heard was Juan cooing from his crib and the leathery sound of the shower curtain fluttering in a breeze.
“You think they can get upstairs?” Ellis asked.
He was talking about the snakes. He couldn’t get the image of the snakes out of his head. He especially couldn’t get the image of the yellow snake down in the black waters of the basement out of his head.
“No, for the thousandth time, I don’t.”
“Teddy is going to go nuts when he finds out.”
“I told you, Teddy won’t claim the snakes. You won’t see Teddy anywhere around here when the water goes down.”
“How are they going to get them out of there?”
“How do I know? I’m no snake expert.”
“I mean, if there’s enough water, they can go anywhere. They could live through the summer, anyway.”
“It’s spring now, though. It’s probably too cold for them. Your move.”
Ellis tried to concentrate on the chessboard. It was hard to see the pieces in the candlelight. They had been playing chess a lot lately. Every day, maybe seven or eight games. Sometimes they played online against strangers when the Internet worked. Ellis was better at chess than his brother. Day played recklessly, while Ellis always played the percentages.
He moved his bishop to a spot where he could take his brother’s knight. His brother could counter and take his bishop, but it would leave his pawns stacked. He couldn’t move the knight without putting his king in check.
“I hate when you do that,” Day said.
“Then don’t leave your knight exposed.”
Day advanced the pawn that would have covered his knight. Ellis took the knight, then watched the pawn take his own bishop.
“We should probably tell someone about the snakes, though,” Ellis said.
The candle fluttered and sizzled. It gave off weird shadows.
“Who would we tell?” Day asked.
“I don’t know. Someone.”
“We can’t call out. I checked and nothing’s working. And I don’t think anyone’s coming by, do you?”
Flood Page 2
