As he tried to focus on the basement door, he could hear more water coming in over the front door’s threshold. It wasn’t going to get any better, so he needed to move fast. He hoped they hadn’t already drowned. He quietly begged Jesus to let his family survive this reckoning.
He went to work on the boards, sweating, (sweating? He was actually sweating.) and toiling with the edges of the door frame. Luckily, he hadn’t done a very good job of it. The boards came off with ease. He was suddenly thankful for his over consumption of liquor the night before. If he’d done it sober, he might never have gotten the boards off.
Edgar kicked at the door and it swung open, with one board still dangling from the frame. He called down to his family, but found his voice echoing back to him from the completely submerged basement. “Come on up, you two, and stop foolin’ around like a buncha fuckin’ idiots. Somethin’ done changed. I think Jesus gon’ be here. He gon’ be here real soon!”
Silence.
“Get off yer asses!”
Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were sleeping. Several feet of water filled the bottom of the stairwell. He certainly hoped they weren’t drowning down there, as that would spell doom for settling in and settling up. Scampering down the wet stairs, he continued to call out to them, “Get up, get up, get the fuck up!” He went sloshing around the corner of the stairwell, the water looming near his perspiring chin. Light. Across the basement’s flooded expanse, he found daylight poking through. The bulkhead door was flung open. Water was flushing down the cement steps. The floodgates had been opened. Within minutes, the water would be up to the ceiling. The only reason it wasn’t already completely submerged was because of the restrictive bottleneck of the bulkhead’s width.
Shit on a stick.
It was the bitch. Craftier than she looked. Jezebel had opened the door and tried to escape. This was a family, goddammit. Families stuck together. Didn’t they know that? Jezebel was out of her freakin’ mind. Jezebel needed to be taught a lesson, just like he’d done with the kid.
Edgar ran back up the stairs, careful not to slip. He wasn’t accustomed to the sneakers he’d taken from Christian’s closet. He needed those boots back from Jimmy. More so than getting his family back, he needed those fancy wanderin’ boots. If he was gonna meet Jesus in person, then he intended to dress to impress. Only the boots would suffice. He regretted the moment of weakness, wherein, he put the boots by the kid’s bed. How could he have been so limp in the head?
“You fuckers,” he mumbled, sloshing into the living room where the water was entering as a matter of its own will power now—through the edges around the windows, beneath the cracks of the front and back doors, and any other nook or cranny it managed to come through. It was up to his waist now, and even higher outside the house. Looking to the window, out into the “aquarium,” he found that the dead-as-a-doornail mailman was gone now. Good riddance, he thought.
Jesus had flipped the switch and things would never be the same again.
The water was a mean son of bitch. Noah wouldn’t have put up with this shit. His animals stayed where they were supposed to, in the fuckin’ boat. Edgar’s animals had escaped out the back door, as if they didn’t love him. As if they didn’t even like him.
As he pulled open the front door once again, he felt his lower half fighting back against the flowing torrent that encircled him.
Edgar pondered: if Jesus was indeed coming, the fellow best bring a flotation device.
Edgar wasn’t the best swimmer. No swimmer at all, in reality. More of a sinker than a swimmer. The last time he’d been in the water, he nearly drowned. His uncle tried to teach some silly shit called the breaststroke during the summer after his pop left home, but it hadn’t stuck. It hadn’t made any sense. What was the point of swimming, anyway? It was for morons.
Edgar opened the front door and accepted the whooshing flood that came into the house, and that moment, the rear sliding glass doors popped open, almost like a gunshot ringing through his ears, rushing the water at him from both sides simultaneously. Before the water overtook him, crushing him like a bug, he begged, “Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me float to my family.”
And Jesus answered, with a flopping, sloshy wave that hurtled him through the front door, violently spinning his body in a cyclone of icy confusion. As he swept by, he held on to the steel light post just beyond the front steps, digging his fingers into it the best he could, crying out for mercy to anybody that might hear it. “Where you at, Jesus? Where the hell you at?”
Chapter Eight
The screeching sound came from the front of the house, the unmistakable sound of pure terror elevating above the sloshy din of the world melting all about them. The voice was unrecognizable to Annie, but she could see Paulie’s face change at the sound. “Eggah,” the boy said, half-smiling.
Even with all that Edgar had put the kid through, he still looked up to him. The boy hadn’t witnessed Edgar’s attack on Annie, nor had he witnessed his father’s demise. When they’d first escaped the house, the first thing that Annie noticed was the oversized boots on Paulie’s feet. She hadn’t time to pull them off, nor did she have any alternative for his feet, so she left the subject unaddressed. The boots hadn’t belonged to Christian, so she could only assume that they were Edgar’s. The fact that Paulie still wore them made her stomach numb.
What had happened between them? The thought made her want to scream. She could only imagine. Someday, when the end of the world was in their rearview mirror, if ever, they would discuss his time with Edgar. Probably with a therapist in the room.
Paulie reached out, away from the steady branches of the tree, reaching out as they watched Edgar drift on down the driveway, emitting a terrible cry. Not only was the water washing him away, but the dummy hadn’t a clue how to swim. Annie knew this by the desperate flailing of his arms. She’d worked two summers as a lifeguard during college, so she could pinpoint that desperate brand of fear from a mile away.
Good, she thought. She hoped the delusional madman was in for a boatload of suffering.
Now he was gripping to a smaller tree on the side of the garage, just beneath them. He called up to them, his eyes growing large and moony, “Help me, Timmy! Don’t let Daddy die!”
The psychotic monster didn’t even know the kid’s name.
“Eggah,” Paulie said again, fighting against his mother, pushing away from her.
“Stop it,” she said, clutching tight to her son’s forearm. What the hell was he thinking? She knew that he was in pain, presumably from something Edgar had done to him, but still he had some connection to the man that wouldn’t allow him to sit still. Paulie hadn’t a clue about the evils of the world, rife with innocence and seeing only the best in people. After all, he was only four years old, so he wasn’t capable of the hate that Edgar so deserved.
“Eggah, swim, swim!” the boy cried. Paulie was motivating the murderer, who would surely kill them both if he had another chance. And as the sicko grabbed on to the trunk of their safe haven of a tree, she realized that was a possibility that may come to fruition.
“Please… no,” she said, looking down at the desperate man with the wild grin, pulling himself up the tree, grappling his legs and digging his fingers into the knots of the oak. He’d nearly drowned, but now he was saved by some higher form of fate. He couldn’t swim, but he’d been spared drowning for a bit longer.