stubborn, stupid, bullheaded old man. The truck spun. The front bumper slammed into the tree, and the rear crumpled the guardrail. I closed my eyes, holding my breath and waiting for the truck to topple over the side. My heart pounded, and I felt a stab of pain in my chest. This was a stupid way to die, and I expected Rose would be waiting on the other side, shaking her head the way she used to when she thought I was doing something foolish. But I didn’t crash through the guardrail and roll down the mountainside. Instead, the truck stalled out on me. I opened my eyes to find myself looking back in the direction I came.
I clutched my chest, trying to get my breathing under control. My pills were back at the house. If I had a heart attack out here, nobody would be around to help me. I imagined I could hear Rose scolding me from on high.
“I know,” I said out loud. “You told me so, dear. I’m just being foolish.”
Eventually, the pains in my chest disappeared. I got out of the truck to check on the damage, praying I didn’t have a flat tire. The damage wasn’t bad; just some dents and scraped paint. If I’d been going any faster, it would have been a lot worse. I was pretty sure the truck would start again, and was actually glad it didn’t have airbags, since a deployed one would have made it impossible to drive back home. I was a realist. At my age, there was no way I’d be able to walk back up the mountain in the rain. I’d be dead before I made it two miles.
Death. At my age, I was used to the idea. It was imminent. Some mornings, I’d wake up and be surprised I was still here. But when I thought back on my life, I wondered what it was all about. Was it worth it, all the joys and heartaches? What was the point of it all, if it only led to this—an old man drowning alone in a flooded world?
Standing there in the downpour, I heard a flock of geese passing somewhere overhead. I craned my neck skyward, but I couldn’t see them. They were lost behind the permanent white haze that covered the earth. The fog bank started just above the treetops and continued into the heavens, blocking out the moon and stars. The disembodied honking sounded eerie and made me feel lonelier than ever. I wondered where they were going, and wished them luck on their journey.
Satisfied that the truck was still operational, I surveyed my surroundings. A few scraggly trees were still standing here and there on the slope, and I looked down on Renick through a break in the tops of them. Or maybe I should say I looked down at where Renick used to be, because the town was gone.
The Greenbrier River had swallowed up the entire valley. There was an ocean in the place where Renick had once been.
Renick had stood at the base of the mountain, nestled in the valley. Beyond it was the state road to Lewisburg (that was a
You would have then entered Punkin’ Center, which consisted of nothing more than seven houses, the combination post office and feed store (run by my good friend Carl Seaton), and then several farms. Keep on going and you’d pass a few hunting cabins, Dave and Nancy Simmons’ place, crazy Earl Harper’s shanty, the lane that went back to my place, and then miles of West Virginia state forestland. At that point, the road narrowed to a dirt track leading up to Bald Knob. It ended at the lookout tower the rangers used to watch for forest fires in the summer, and their station underneath it.
All of this was deserted and washed out when I made my trek down the mountain. The National Guard had cleared everybody out of Punkin’ Center a few weeks before. I stayed behind, though, even when they insisted that I leave. Oh, I guess they could have made me leave if they’d tried hard enough. It isn’t too hard to force an old man out of his home. But they didn’t. Maybe it was something in my eyes or the tone of my voice, but those young troops backed down quick. This is where I’ve lived for the last thirty years and I wasn’t leaving on account of the weather.
I looked back down on Renick. The town was attainable from our side of the mountain only by means of a steel and concrete bridge that spanned the Greenbrier. On one side of the bridge was the road on which I was stranded. The town lay on the other side. That morning, on Day Thirty, the bridge was gone.
It wasn’t just destroyed, mind you. The bridge was
That was when the full impact of what had happened hit me. There’d be no State Fair down in Lewisburg this year and no cornbread and bean suppers at the American Legion. The rickety yellow school bus wouldn’t be making its trip up the mountain to pick up the few kids in Punkin’ Center and old Fred Laudermilk wouldn’t be bringing in the hay this fall. Ditto for Daniel Ortel’s wacky weed crop (we all knew he grew it, but nobody said anything) and Clive Clendenon’s corn. My crazy neighbor, Earl Harper, wouldn’t have to concern himself anymore about the government conspiracy of the week, and I wouldn’t have to worry about poachers on my land this coming deer season.
They always said this would happen because of a hole in the ozone layer. They said that greenhouse gases would melt the polar ice caps, flooding the world. But that’s not what happened at all.
One day, a day like any other day, it just started raining and didn’t stop. It’s as simple as that. We certainly didn’t expect it. It was a rainy day, but tomorrow would bring sunshine again. But tomorrow never came. The next day, it was still raining. And the day after that. Every day brought the same forecast; rain, no matter where you lived. Except that there aren’t really days anymore—just differing shades of gray and black. I haven’t seen the sun or the moon for a long time. They’ve been reduced to silhouettes, hiding behind the clouds like muted silver dollars.
Everybody had theories. The meteorologists threw around a lot of techno-babble, and the politicians argued, and then the world leaders started pointing fingers at each other.
Here in the United States, the coastal areas went first, along with their cities. Places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlantic City, New York City, Miami, and Norfolk. Florida’s panhandle and the entire Gulf Coast were instantly wiped out as ten-story waves crashed over them, driven ashore by a massive storm swell and winds of over two hundred miles per hour. Towns like Grand Isle, New Orleans, Apalachicola, and Pensacola were gone in the blink of an eye, submerged along with the two million people living there who never got the chance to evacuate. Interstate Sixty-five, near the coast of Alabama, had been snarled in gridlock when it happened. All of those people died beneath the rushing waters, trapped inside their cars. Tornadoes ripped through the non-coastal areas, leveling trees and buildings, and then those places were flooded, too, relentlessly battered by the rains.
One time, I watched a television program about hurricanes. They said that weather researchers classified hurricanes into different categories, with a category one being just above a tropical storm and a category five being the absolute worst. Well, let me tell you, the super-storm that erupted across the planet was beyond categorization. It would have been a ten. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was unequipped to deal with the disaster, but I reckon no amount of preparation could have saved us even if they had anticipated it.
Within the space of seven days, all of the coastal cities in the United States were obliterated, and the rest of the country started flooding. And that was just the beginning. Then it got worse. The rain kept falling. Some nut in Indiana started building an ark, just like the one Noah had used, and there was a rumor that several governments had done the same, shifting their elite and powerful onto battleships and luxury liners, along with animals and plant life.
The National Guard started evacuating people before the rest of the cities farther inland disappeared beneath the waves, but there was really nowhere to go. The whole damn country was flooding. Then the waters rushed over the rest, as far as Arizona in the West, and up to the Ohio River Valley in the East. It may have gone even farther, but that was when the satellite television stopped working. Last thing I saw on the air was footage of a lake where the Mississippi River used to be. The Potomac flooded over its banks, too, and took out the nation’s capitol. The Rockies, the Appalachians, the Smokies, and a few other remote locations were supposedly still above water, just like my own mountain, but I can’t imagine life was too pleasant in those places. I wondered if there was another old man like me, trapped on his mountaintop in Colorado, waiting for the waters to rise up and swallow him.
The good old U.S. of A. was a disaster area of biblical proportions, and the rest of the world didn’t fare much
