“Damn… Sunliner Drive never floods.”
“I know.”
Sarah took a deep breath and released it, her cheeks puffing out.
“It’s the sewers,” Minton went on. “They just can’t handle this volume.”
“All right, how about Pembroke Boulevard? That one’s way up there.”
“Yeah, that’ll stay dry. But it’ll add an extra mile to the trip in and out of town, and in this weather that could mean another ten minutes for the response vehicles.”
“If you know of a better route, I’m listening.”
Minton groaned. “No, nothing’s coming to mind. Of course, at my age…”
“Fullerton’s shorter but dips through the lowlands,” Sarah said, “so that should flood soon.”
“Yep.”
“The same with Beaumont. Jordan’s Crossing is probably already underwater.”
“It is.”
“What about Preston Street? Doesn’t it—”
The first explosion was so startling that her body jerked violently and she knocked her coffee over, spilling it everywhere.
“Did you hear something?” Minton asked almost casually. “It sounded like a—”
The second blast was exponentially louder and more powerful than the first, and the whole room began shaking. Sarah grabbed the desk and held tight while framed photos and certificates fell from the walls, books spilled out of their shelves, cabinets and drawers slid open… It lasted no more than five seconds but felt eternal.
“My God,” Sarah said, gasping. “What just happened? That wasn’t an actual earthquake, was it?”
“I think there’s been—” Minton began. Then the line went dead, launching Sarah’s already-blossoming panic into the stratosphere. Moving quickly, she went to the window and raised the blind but could see nothing through the heavy rain but the courtyard and the adjacent facade of southern Main Street.
“Uh… what was that?” someone asked. Sarah turned and found Barbara Magnus in her doorway. Gone was the snaggle-toothed Cerberus who protected the office of the mayor. The person who stood there now was, judging by her expression, little more than a frightened child.
Sarah turned and headed in her direction, and Magnus stepped aside.
“I’m not sure,” Sarah said, leaving her office. “I can’t see anything from here.”
In the secretarial antechamber, Lorraine Harris was getting out of her chair with the aid of her cane.
“Sarah, what on earth was that?” Harris asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know… It came from the west, but I can’t see anything from here. I’m going to try one of the windows upstairs. Call Don”—Harrington, Silver Lake’s Chief of Police—“and see if he knows anything.”
“I’m on it.”
The town’s offices had a broad marble staircase that zigzagged up two more floors. The corridor on the fifth was cool and dark, the only illumination a diffused glow from the semicircular windows at either end.
As she reached the top step, she froze. Oh, no… the WEST, she thought, and broke into a run.
Just as she reached the last office on the western side of the building — and the only one without a nameplate — she slid on the polished floor and went down. Her kneecap took most of the impact, the pain blooming in all directions, but she ignored it and scrambled to her feet.
The office beyond the door had plain white walls and gray Berber carpeting. The only furnishings were a desk and a filing cabinet, both cheapos from Staples.
Limping quickly past the desk, Sarah went to the window but couldn’t see through the rain spatter.
“Screw it,” she said and reached for the window latch. At first it wouldn’t budge, so she put both hands to it, cursing like a millworker, and it gradually gave way. The minute she opened the window, the sound of the rainfall escalated and the dampness rushed in. Riding along the latter was the acrid scent of spent electrical charges and a putrid, earthy odor. Sarah kept shoving the window frame until it was nearly all the way up.
Her new, higher vantage point afforded a much-improved view of the community. Rooftops of all shapes and sizes held firm between the wind-driven trees. Phone poles stood unevenly here and there, and the cellphone tower that Verizon had erected four years earlier blinked serenely up top. Surprisingly few residents had protested its construction, which not only improved reception in the area but also resulted in a handsome payout from the mammoth company as well as decent tax breaks, both state and federal.
At first she saw nothing unusual. Then another blast echoed in the distance, and when she looked in the direction of the sound she saw a growing plume of smoke accented by repeated flashes of pinkish light. Several smaller explosions followed like a fireworks show, only there was nothing even remotely festive about it.
For a time Sarah could only stare while her mind struggled to make sense of what she was seeing and, even more onerous, what was really happening.
It can’t be. Not here… not here. This last thought became a chant in the back of her mind—not here… not here… This wasn’t television, it wasn’t CNN, and it wasn’t some place on the other side of the world. This was tiny Silver Lake, Pennsylvania, a town of about one square mile and just over ten thousand people, where kids still played in the streets and very few people locked their doors at night. Things like this don’t happen in places like this.
But try as she might to deny it, she knew what she was seeing was absolutely real. In the back of her mind, she had always feared this possibility. Regardless of how much reassurance she had been given, by many people on many fronts, she’d always thought this might happen someday.
“Oh, shit,” she said, between clenched teeth. She shut the window again, then turned and ran from the room.
Halfway down the staircase, the sounds from the office began drifting up to her. There were phones ringing and cabinets being opened and keyboards chattering.
And there was someone screaming.
As Corwin burst through the east door of the control building, and into the open compound, Marla stayed hot on his heels. Then they both came to a halt, paralyzed by the unfolding spectacle.
A chain-link fence a dozen or so yards in front of them separated the control center from a collection of reinforced concrete structures of varying shapes and sizes. The most prominent were the hyperboloid cooling tower to the south, and the dome-topped containment building, which looked like a shorter, fatter version of the bullet-shaped grain silos common to farms the world over. Under normal circumstances, a thick white plume would be billowing sluggishly out of the tower, while nothing came from the containment building. Now it was the other way around.
Workers were running every which way, some in white lab coats and yellow hard hats. There was yelling and screaming, and Marla spotted a smallish Latina woman who was sobbing while one of her colleagues nudged her to keep moving. Emergency lights swirled and alerts blared from an eight-horned siren.
Chaos, Marla thought as her heart boomed. Pure pandemonium. She’d stopped under the door’s awning and was therefore out of the downpour, while Corwin had taken another step or two. He seemed unaware that he was getting soaked. He stood, staring at the destruction like an astonished little boy, eyes wide and mouth agape. Fresh metal shavings, was Marla’s next observation, that’s what it smells like. And the laser-y odor of copying machines. Just like inside — only much stronger.