“Run,” Jason urged. There was a huge pain in his chest, as if something inside had ripped away. There was a grating roar as another piece of the levee tore away, and then Muppet ran and launched himself across the fissure. He reached the other side, falling to hands and knees, then picked himself up and began to run. “Run,” Jason advised. He clutched at branches and tried to stand. His head spun. He was whooping for breath. The breach in the levee widened again, the river shifting ten tons of stone as if it were foam packing. The flood burst through, a wall of water twenty feet high, six-foot wavecrests foaming at its top.
Muppet looked over his shoulder at the oncoming wall, and his stride increased. And then the foaming wall overtook him—Jason caught a brief glimpse of tumbling puppet limbs, a green helmet flashing in the brown water—and then his friend was gone.
Jason reeled down the face of the mound, but he knew it was too late to save Muppet—to save anyone. The flood waters raced on, a mass almost solid in the weight of its onslaught… the wave front gave a glancing blow to the shattered house on the end of the row, and the roof came apart under the impact, the pieces floating onward, piling into the flaming wreck of the Huntley house. Batman the dog gave a last wail, and was silent. The Huntley house came apart as well, turning into a wall of burning wreckage that surged up against Jason’s house.
“No,” Jason said. His Nikes splashed into water and he kept going, wading out into the rising flood. He watched his house dissolve, mingle with the flaming wreckage carried in by the flood. There was a bang as something exploded, and the fires spread. Jason paused as a surge of water lapped to his waist and almost took him off his feet. Tears spilled down his face, blurred his vision. Water tugged at his knees, and more waters were clearly coming.
Jason turned and began to claw his way back up the mound, grabbing handfuls of turf and hauling himself by the branches. The flood surged up to his waist, lifted him upward, toward a fallen elm that lay athwart his path. Jason reached for it, pulled, got a foot over the bole of the tree, and rolled over the tree onto dry ground.
He wiped tears from his eyes, sat up, and turned to see a clump of burning wreckage, all that remained of the five houses on his road, being carried on the flood toward the highway. Very little of the wreckage was even recognizable as belonging to the house that Jason had lived in.
His mind whirled. It had only been a few brief minutes since he had been standing atop the mound, watching his mother in the kitchen through the telescope. Now the kitchen was gone, and the house, even the field in which the house had stood.
There was a weird singing in his heart, a wail of loss and grief and shock. He couldn’t think what to do. He didn’t know whether to allow himself the hope that his mother might be alive. Alive and where? In the burning ruins?
The elm tree below his feet shifted in the current. Jason looked at the breaches in the levee, saw them wider than ever before. The Mississippi didn’t seem to be an inch lower than it had been: there were six-foot waves in both the breaches, and flying white scud. Eubanks’s cop car was perched on an island that was getting smaller by the second.
Jason needed to move to higher ground. Wearily he turned and began to climb.
A shadow fell on him and he looked up. Though only moments ago the day had been perfectly sunny, now a low dark cloud nearly covered the sky.
Jason viewed this phenomenon with the same dull acceptance with which he accepted the need to climb. He was beyond thinking about things. He could only react.
He began to claw his way up the mound, bracing his feet against trees or broken stumps, digging in the turf for hand-holds or pulling himself up with branches. Twice, powerful aftershocks knocked him flat, belly to the damp earth, sent him clutching for anchors to keep from falling off the mound’s steep flank. Finally he dragged himself to the top-most level, the little clear area from which, a few moments ago, he’d viewed his world. The telescope sat there waiting for him, unbroken. Apparently its hard red plastic case was adequate for an earthquake. The lens cap lay where he left it.
Without thought he put the cap on the objective lens, then turned and gazed at the scene below him. The burning wreckage that once was his home had dispersed a bit, though it was still heading west with the flood. To the north, a dark, lowering cloud of smoke, its bottom marked by scarlet flame, hung above Cabells Mound. It seemed as if the whole town was burning. He could not see the water tower and assumed it had fallen. With no water pressure, he knew there was no way that Cabells Mound could fight the fires.
Not until the river water smothered them, anyway.
To the east, the two gaps in the levee were growing toward each other. As chunks of the levee tore away, Eubanks kept shuttling his police car back and forth, trying to remain in the exact center of his diminishing island. His car’s rack lights continued their mute flashing: Emergency! Emergency!
Within a few minutes, however, the island was not much bigger than the car, and Eubanks had nowhere to go.
Jason could see his dark silhouette moving inside the car. At first he wondered what Eubanks was trying to do, and then he realized that he was closing all the car’s windows, making it as watertight as possible. He was planning on floating away, then, as far as he could. Jason supposed it was as sensible a plan as any.
But Eubanks’s plan never had a chance. The levee did not tear away beneath his car, it was torn—a mass of laden metal rammed through the breach, trailing a nest of cables, a barge that had broken free from its tow. Perhaps it was one of the barges that Jason had just watched the Ruth Caldwell push upstream. It smashed the levee beneath the front half of Eubanks’s car, and as the barge swept past, the car pitched down nose-first into the gap, then toppled over onto its roof. Jason could hear the thud from where he sat, along with the sound of shattering glass. The car spun madly in the current for a few seconds, water pouring into the broken windows, and then the river swallowed it with the same fantastic speed with which it had swallowed everything else.
Jason watched with the same dull, mute acceptance with which he had viewed the rising waters, the burning of Cabells Mound. It was as if he’d already used up all his stock of emotion and there was nothing left.
A gust of cool wind blew across the mound, and Jason shivered in his wet clothes. He looked up into the dark, threatening sky.
And then, out of nowhere, the first lightning bolt rained down.
Has such a succession of Earthquakes as have happened within a few weeks been experienced in this country five years ago, they would have excited universal terror. The extent of territory which has been shaken, nearly at the same time, is astonishing—reaching on the Atlantic coast from Connecticut to Georgia and from the shores of the ocean inland to the State of Ohio. What power short of Omnipotence, could raise and shake such a vast portion of this globe? The period is portentous and alarming. We have within a few years seen the most wonderful eclipses, the year past has produced a magnificent comet, the earthquakes within the past two months have been almost without number—and in addition to the whole, we constantly ‘hear of wars and summons of wars.’ May not the same enquiry be made of us that was made by the hypocrites of old—“Can ye not discern the signs of the times.”