Ellis still heard rain against the windows. It had stopped for a while, then started up again. It was a steady drone, not amounting to much; but added to the rain that had already fallen, it counted for a lot. He had never thought of rain, or water, as being powerful before. For him, rain had merely been a nuisance, something you had to avoid. Occasionally it canceled a soccer match, or a baseball game, but that was about the extent of it. The rain the past few days made him think his earlier belief in the world had been slightly naive.
It would be better in the daylight, he decided. Everything would be easier then.
“Maybe,” he said, following the line of his thoughts, “we ought to just go to bed and wait for the morning. We’re not going to die of starvation tonight. We can get around better tomorrow when there’s daylight.”
“That makes sense,” G-Mom said. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“We could risk getting hurt moving around in the darkness,” Ellis continued. “Plus, I don’t know, but there could be electric stuff.”
“What do you mean, ‘electric stuff’?” Kuru asked.
“If the water gets on the wires, it might not be good.”
“He’s right,” Day said. “We should just sit tight.”
“What about Carmen?” Kuru asked. “We let her just sit, too?”
“If you’ve got some sort of plan, I’ll listen,” Day said. “Otherwise, I vote we camp for the night and pick things up in the morning.”
“We can go back up and sleep in our own beds,” Ellis said. “We’re on the top floor, so we shouldn’t have a problem.”
Ellis slid his hand forward and grabbed another doughnut.
And that’s when he heard people calling for help.
“Do you hear that?” Kuru asked.
Because she heard it. Voices. People calling. The sounds mixed with the rain patter and it took a second or two to tease the sound out, but eventually she locked on to it.
“It’s the wind,” G-Mom said, turning her head to track the sound.
Kuru ignored her. G-Mom couldn’t hear anything anyway.
“Maybe it’s the police or a rescue team,” Day said, standing. “Maybe it’s help.”
Kuru had a bad feeling. She wasn’t sure why. It should have been a good thing to hear other people, but something about the noise filled her with dread. It was hard to say where the noise came from, for one thing. It swirled around and bent whenever it came close to her ears. She turned her head to try to follow it.
“Where’s it coming from?” Ellis asked. “I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”
“Me neither,” Kuru said. “Everyone be quiet for a second.”
She held up her hand to get them to be quiet, but just then the baby started fussing. Juan was hungry, Kuru knew. She stood and went to the refrigerator and looked inside for a bottle. She saw half a dozen lined up on the refrigerator door. That was another thing, she realized, as she plucked one out and carried it back to the table. The baby was going to need food. They might be able to eat stale doughnuts, but the baby couldn’t.
“Here,” she said, and handed G-Mom the bottle. “Try to keep him quiet.”
“The baby needs the bottle warmed,” G-Mom said, but then she seemed to remember herself. The apartments had electric stoves.
Day sat back down. So did Kuru.
It felt like a séance, she reflected. It felt creepy and scary, with the white noise of the rain covering everything, and the distant calls echoing like sounds you would hear in a gym. The candles flickered and danced, and everyone’s face looked a little carved. She felt if she could pinpoint the direction of the sounds, it would feel less creepy. But for the moment the voices might have been angels or devils, either one, calling to them all.
“I think it’s upstairs,” Day said finally. “It sounds like it’s coming from the roof. You can hear it echoing down the staircase and through the heating vents.”
“I agree,” Ellis said.
“Is this building …?” Kuru started to ask.
She was going to ask if this building was connected to the building next to it, but she knew that answer. It shared a roof with the Old French building. The Old French building was an abandoned factory building where The French Company made shoe polish back in the day. Kuru could see it now in her mind’s eye. Yes, someone had come across the roof.
“Let’s go,” Kuru said. “G-Mom, you have the baby.”
“Of course I do,” G-Mom answered. “And I’ll watch the girl.”
“Carmen,” Ellis said.
“Carmen,” G-Mom agreed, tilting the bottle higher for Juan.
Kuru picked up the flashlight. It blinked when she turned it on. She slapped it down on her open palm.
“You guys have batteries upstairs?” she asked, inspecting the beam. It had grown softer, she saw.
“We might,” Day said. “Mom hates buying batteries. She says it’s like buying trash.”
“She’s right about that,” G-Mom said. “Plastic bottles of water, too.”
“You may be grateful for plastic bottles of water before this is over,” Kuru said, bending to kiss her grandmother. “We’ll be back as fast as we can, G-Mom.”
“Just be careful,” G-Mom said. “And just because someone wants to come in doesn’t mean you have to let them in, you understand me?”
“Understood.”
At least, Kuru thought as she led the boys out of the apartment, they were going away from the snakes. That was an improvement. In the hallway the sounds became more distinct. Definitely up rather than down, she decided.
“Up?” she asked the boys, just to include them in the decision.
Day nodded. Ellis grunted yes.
They went down the hallway and started up the stairs. The flashlight continued to blink and grow softer. She tapped it lightly on her palm, but that didn’t improve things. It was going. Without the flashlight, it was going to be dark as anything.
“Yes or no on the batteries?” she asked the boys.
“Day?” Ellis asked.
“I don’t know where we could find them. There could be some in the junk drawer. What size?”
“D-cells.”
“Doubt it,” Ellis said. “Doubt we have D-cells lying around.”
“We’re going to need light. Do you guys even know how to get up on the roof?”
“I know where the door is,” Ellis said. “We’d have to hit an emergency bar.”
“That’s not going to ring,” Day said.
“Sometimes they have backup batteries,” Ellis said. “Like there should be lights in this staircase. There should be lights for an emergency.”
“Everything is shorted out,” Kuru said.
As she said it the flashlight died. The boys stopped on the stairs behind her. She tapped the flashlight on her palm three times, but nothing came of it.
Carmen regained consciousness in dreamlike bursts. For a while she believed she was sleeping and dreaming, but it made no sense that she was on the couch. She knew she was on the couch, that much was clear, but nothing else fit into place. She felt a roaring pain in her neck and shoulders, a pain so large that it made her blink during the few times she managed to open her eyes fully. Her tongue felt fat in her mouth, as if it had swollen or had turned into a toad.
“Water, please,” she whispered.
At least she thought she whispered. It was hard to know if the air that passed over her lips contained a word. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. She said it again: “Water, please.” This time she heard something move, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She couldn’t really see anything anyway, because it was dark in the room and everything smelled of moisture and candles.
“You coming to?” G-Mom, Kuru’s grandmother, asked, her face suddenly appearing like a cartoon moon upside down and above her. “Can you hear me?”
Carmen tried to nod, but that hurt at a whole different level.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“That�
�s good. That’s real good, just stay now where you are. Don’t try to move or do anything. You’ve suffered a fall. Looks like you twisted your neck somehow.”
“Baby …?” Carmen asked.
“The baby’s fine, just fine. A sweet little boy. We’ve got everything under control, just relax. Just rest.”
Carmen felt herself fade away then. When she woke again G-Mom had a bottle of water in her hand. She tilted it forward and Carmen drank. She had to think to swallow. It didn’t come naturally. Her neck made a grinding sensation almost constantly. It felt like a model train she had once played with at her Uncle Danny’s. When the train came off the track, and you only reset it onto three good wheels, the same thing happened. That was the image that came into her mind.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
G-Mom gave her more water. Then she pulled the bottle back. The woman looked strange, Carmen thought. Her gray hair stuck out every which way and the light from the candles made her seem even older than she was in reality. If G-Mom had turned around and revealed an enormous turtle shell on her back, Carmen wouldn’t have been surprised. G-Mom was a turtle, tall as a woman, walking on her hind legs.
“We heard some calling from upstairs,” G-Mom said. “Seems maybe someone crossed over on the factory roof.”
“The Old French place?”
“That’s right. That’s it exactly. The old shoe polish place. It’s dilapidated, but maybe someone came up through it. Got chased up by the water.”
“Is there a lot of water?”
“Halfway up the first floor by now.”
Then Carmen flaked away. She jerked a little as she fell asleep and that woke her quickly, then she settled back into the cushions. She still felt mad at her mom. Her mom should have been here, she reflected. She should have made her excuses and come home. Anyone could see it was an emergency. It was irresponsible on her part to remain at work under the circumstances.
But the rest of the thoughts fled from her and didn’t reappear until she woke again. This time she woke to the sensation of something moving across her legs. It was a rough, scratchy feeling, like someone dragging a pine branch over her ankles. It passed quickly and when she opened her eyes she couldn’t exactly make out what it had been. It looked like a snake, she thought, but that didn’t make sense. They were in a second-story apartment in Illinois, not far from Interstate 80. Snakes didn’t live in apartment buildings. Not big snakes like the one she saw anyway.
The next she knew, she heard people walking above her. It was faint and far away. Like the sound of reindeer, she thought, and smiled at the idea of it. Then she heard the feet coming down the stairs and she tried to keep herself awake, tried to stay conscious, but her eyes felt too heavy. She closed them and felt something sizzle inside her neck, but sleep conquered everything — rock, paper, sleep.
Day stood beside the door to the roof. He hadn’t even known the door existed a few minutes before. He supposed if he thought about it, the idea of a door made sense. Maintenance people had to have a way to get out on the roof for repairs and so on, but he didn’t have it fully in mind. Ellis did, though. Ellis knew the building better than anyone. His little brother was funny that way.
The door didn’t have an emergency bar, though. That was unusual, Day figured. You needed an emergency bar for, well, emergencies. This door apparently wasn’t up to code. It looked like a heavy door, but not the kind that should have been in place.
“Hello?” Kuru called, her hand cupping the candle that, luckily, Ellis had in his pocket when the flashlight went out. “We’re trying to figure out how to open the door. It’s locked.”
“Hurry,” a girl’s voice came back. “Please hurry.”
Day watched the candlelight move over the door, his eyes searching for a key or anything that might help open the door. With the flashlight they might have been able to find the key, but now that they were reduced to candlelight it was hard to see anything except the dull glow of light. He heard rain hitting against the roof. The candle glow passed over a fire ax. Day plucked it off the wall.
“I can open it this way,” Day said. “I can chop through the door.”
“Awesome,” Ellis said.
“You boys are crazy.”
“How else are we going to do it?”
Day watched Kuru think about it, then shrug.
“I guess a door more or less won’t matter in this flood,” she said, then raised her voice to call to the girl on the other side. “Stand back. We’re going to chop the door down.”
“Go ahead. Hurry, please,” the girl’s voice came back.
Kuru and Ellis stepped away. Day gripped the ax and squared himself in front of the door. Suddenly, the whole idea of chopping down the door seemed harder than he had considered. In the movies characters simply swung an ax and bang, the door splintered and broke apart. But now, standing in front of a real door with an ax in his hands, the door appeared much more substantial. He wasn’t even sure it was wood, for one thing, and he wasn’t sure he had much room to swing the ax. He didn’t want to be a wimp in front of Kuru, but he suddenly felt shy.
He took a swing anyway. The ax made a terrifically loud sound but did little damage. He swung again. This time the ax head stuck in the door at eye level. It took him a second to wiggle it free. He swung again. The door sent out a couple chunks of wood. He swung again and felt sweat start to form on his chest and along his arms. It was work to chop down a door, he realized. Hard work.
He took six more swings, then handed the ax to Ellis.
“Be careful,” he said. “Let the ax do the work.”
“I’m a lumberjack,” Ellis said, goofing around. “Timber!”
He only took three swings before he handed the ax to Kuru and took the candle from her. She did better. She worked smart. She swung the ax in a more precise arc, getting the head to hit into the door at about the same spot each time.
“Chop down at the bottom,” the voice came from the other side. “We can crawl through.”
Day took the ax back. It made sense to chop at the bottom. What was a hole at head level going to do? He stepped to the right and swung the ax like a hockey stick at the door. It was harder to get speed that way, but it was safer, too. He took a dozen swings, then handed it off to Ellis. Ellis was better with this method, but Kuru, when she took over, was by far the best. She chopped a small hole, then continued expanding it. Fresh air started moving into the stairwell. Rainwater came through, too.
Day made the final, explosive hit. A part of the door shattered and gradually it became easier to use his hands to yank out pieces of wood. Kuru worked beside him. In no time they had a hole the size of a steering wheel smashed through the door.
“That’s big enough,” the girl said from the other side. “Hold on. We’ll come through.”
Day stepped back, the ax at his side. Kuru lowered the candle so they would have light. A girl, a blonde, stuck her head through the door. She was maybe sixteen or seventeen and thin as a broom handle. She wore high black storm-trooper boots with the tops of her jeans tucked into them, and a black jacket with studs in the shape of stars punched into the fabric. As soon as she made it through she turned around and helped the creature after her. She didn’t even look up or say anything.
The second creature was a pig. Day peered forward, trying to see clearly what he thought he saw. His mind didn’t quite accept the evidence of his sight.
“It’s a pig!” Ellis said, obviously delighted.
“What in the …?” Kuru said.
The girl gradually pulled the pig through the door opening. The pig wasn’t huge; it wore a rhinestone collar attached to a rhinestone leash. It was the size of a medium poodle, but much, much stockier. It made a snuffling sound as it squeezed through the opening. The girl held out her hand and the pig put its muzzle in her palm, snorting around for food.
“His full name is Zebra Moonface,” the girl said, glancing up to look at them all, her voice high and thin and sli
ghtly southern, “and he’s a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. I call him Zebby.”
SURVIVAL TIP #3
* * *
Canoeists — or anyone living near a river — should remember that the river they canoe today is connected to hundreds of streams and water sources above them. The river where you make your camp can be flooded within hours — or even minutes — by rains falling on streams and lakes many miles away. It is a mistake to see a river as anything but a snapshot of a moment in time, one that can be changed or altered by undetectable forces a day’s journey upstream. Rivers borrow from all the waters above them and pass their cargo on to other water bodies below them.
Kuru held the light closer to the girl’s face.
“How did you end up on the roof?” she asked.
“And with a pig,” Ellis inquired. “With Zebby.”
The girl remained squatting next to the pig.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “A really long story.”
“Let’s take her downstairs,” Day said, the ax still in his hands. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m starving.”
“What’s your name?” Kuru asked.
“Alice Wentworth.”
“I’m Kuru. This is Day and Ellis. We’re on the second floor.”
“How high is it?” the girl asked.
“How high is what?”
“The second floor. The water’s going higher. You can’t believe how high the water is going to get.”
“How do you know?” Day asked.
“Because I was out in it for one thing. The radio said it was going to be epic. They said anyone in the Illinois River valley needed to get to high ground.”
“It’s not going to go higher than a story,” Ellis said. “It can’t go higher than that.”
“How tall is a story?” the girl — Alice, Kuru reminded herself — asked. “Ten, maybe twelve feet? It could go higher than that.”
Nobody said anything after that. Ellis squatted next to Zebby.
Flood Page 5
