The flow was faster and deeper than anyone had seen in at least 150 years. Dozens of dams on the Ohio and its tributaries had toppled. A cold early fall was drenching the Appalachians. The Allegheny basin’s forests, dying from fallout, were releasing their grip on thousands of mountain slopes, and the water they once slowed and absorbed poured unimpeded over bare earth, freighted with dead black mud.
Lashed together with hemp line, the empty drums made an awkward raft. They tied their packs on top of two closely bound drums, hoping something, somewhere, might stay sort of dry. Not wanting to lose the last of the daylight, they grabbed handholds on the lashing ropes and walked into the river, beginning to kick with their feet, at Samson’s direction, when it became too deep to wade.
Roger clamped his jaw and pressed his lips together; he’d drown before he let himself swallow what was in the river. How many unburied bodies must there be upstream? Pathogen soup, that’s what it is.
Roger kicked when told to, hung on otherwise, and did his best to keep his head out of the filth. Twice something, a tree branch perhaps, bumped at him; once a floating rag, perhaps a diaper or T-shirt, wrapped over his wrist, and he flung it away in a near panic.
After what felt like a century of cold misery, Samson said, “I’m kicking dirt. Don’t try to stand yet, but kick harder.”
A moment later, Roger felt bottom too, as they passed over a sandbar sheltering the inside of a bend. They entered a slow, steady-flowing channel, kicking the drum raft out of the current upstream of a sloping gravel bank. When they planted their feet and stood up, the water was only waist deep, and they walked their raft aground easily.
They cut their packs free, held them over their heads, and bore them ashore, mostly dry. Samson waded back in, and pushed the empty raft out past the bar. Holding on with one hand, chest-deep in the filthy water, he slashed the lashings with his knife, detaching the drums and setting them bobbing along in the current. Two minutes later, on a narrow gravel road just above the river, Debbie said, “Shit.”
“What?”
“Eaahh, I hate being wrong. Looks like we’ll only be traveling 103 miles since you asked me, including the river. Off by four. Damn, damn, damn.” She muttered about it off and on, until, an hour later, they made camp for the night, not completely out of danger, but safer than they had been in a long time.
2 DAYS LATER. SOUTH OF THE RUINS OF THE FORMER CELINA, OHIO (NEW STATE OF WABASH). 4:30 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025.
“The way Earth’s curvature works,” Larry said, “the horizon on flat ground or water is usually less than five miles off. So all we can say for sure is that it’s mud at least that far out.” From the burned and crumbled docks at Celina, a plain of drying mud, once Grand Lake St. Marys, stretched to the eastern horizon.
They’d been able to shake the fitful and sporadic pursuit within a mile or two each time. Apparently word was out that three men traveling together were supposed to be caught, but without Castle Earthstone soldiers standing over them, most tribes didn’t see it as a high priority, especially not if it involved going into centers of larger towns, where the tribes seemed to fear disease, feral dog packs, or perhaps ghosts.
“So,” Chris said, “on the map, anyway, the short way around the lake from here is the north shore. Shall we keep going that way? I’d rather camp here than run into a tribe close to dark.”
Larry said, “Let’s see if we can break into that lighthouse and get a long view.”
The sign in front said ROTARY LIGHT HOUSE. “But I don’t see how it could rotate,” Jason said.
Larry laughed. “There used to be a service club—sort of like a fraternity for grownups that did good things—called the Rotary Club, and my old man was in it. God, I wish I had him here to hear you say that.”
Someone had been there before them; the broken door lay on the pavement. From the top of the tower, about three storeys high, they could see that mud stretched to the eastern horizon, broken up by ponds where the water had been deeper. Grass was coming in around the edge, and big flocks of ducks and geese were on the ponds.
In the open country south of the drained lake, leaves were the thousands of colors of an eastern forest in fall; brush was spreading out of the small woods, fencerows, and creek bottoms into the long grass. Jason said, “This is sort of what we Daybreak people were trying for. The fields are back to meadows, really, already, and there’s going to be prairie grass, and bushes, and then the trees will grow tall enough to choke out the undergrowth, and you’ll have the old forest back.”
“It would look real pretty,” Chris observed, “if we didn’t know it was a graveyard for tens of millions of people.”
They walked around to the southwest side of the tower, and saw a great ravine where the maps had shown none, stretching to the horizon.
“Well,” Larry said, “that certainly explains where the water went. I guess we should be good scientistificalable explorers and all, and go take a look.”
“Scientistificalable?” Jason asked.
“Add more syllables, gain more authority. First rule of bureaucratic prose.”
ABOUT 20 MINUTES LATER. A MILE SOUTH, NEAR THE FORMER OUTLET TO BEAVER CREEK, ALONG US 127. 5:45 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025.
“You know, they could have done this with one big bomb on Daybreak day,” Chris said. “Just loaded it into a pleasure boat, sunk it next to the dam, blown it off. Nobody would have been searching or stopping them.”
“This accomplished more of what they were trying to do,” Larry said. “Look how they did it—a tunnel five or ten feet below the lake bottom, so that the water running through would erode the embankment and cut a really deep hole in a hurry. All those graves. Four whipping posts. Shovels and picks just left here when they were done. The point of it was to work a few hundred people to death, besides making it much harder to restore that lake, which means nobody can reopen this canal for a long, long time.”
“Was the canal open before?” Jason asked.
“No. But we’re back to 1800s tech, and that’s what this was. Now if we want the canal, we’ll have to do all that pick and shovel work all over again.” Larry looked over the field where so many bodies had already come to the surface from their shallow graves. “Part of making sure the Lost Quarter stays lost.”
“But why?” Jason asked. “I mean, couldn’t they do the same thing with half the killing?”
“Once you’ve beaten starving people to make them dig a tunnel they’ll drown in, you’re committed.” Chris looked out to the west, across the field of human bones and the muddy gouge through the flat land, to the setting sun, huge and bloody with the soot of so many burned cities. “It’s just the small, personal version of the big picture. Anyway, it’ll be dark soon. We’d better camp for the night, and I’d rather not do it here.”
“Let’s head back to the lighthouse,” Larry said. “It has a roof and it’s easy to defend. But when you’re doing sentry duty and have to look this way, no brooding, okay? Keep telling yourself it’s just mud in the moonlight, and that’s all it is.”
6 HOURS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. 11:30 PM PST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025.
It was so good to be home and running things again. Allison Sok Banh loved the feel of her familiar desk chair, loved the idea that she was working late at night, loved it all. Tonight it had been easy for her to tuck Graham in and avoid his perpetually attempted conversation about the relationship. He’d passed out at the moment of mattress touchdown.