right, Teddy, and there’s an even bigger worm somewhere out there, then how do we fight it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I reckon we ought to start planning for it now. The Bible says Leviathan was big enough to swallow Jonah whole, and from what you’ve told us, I’d say that’s so. Just like the worm that swallowed Salty and Earl today. But as huge as that thing was, there’s bound to be something bigger on the way. And I don’t want to be here when it shows up. The problem is, I don’t know where we can go. We’re on top of the mountain. Everything below us is flooded. Only place higher than here is the ranger station up on Bald Knob, and we don’t know what the situation is there. It could be worse than here. Those worms could be all over the place—or worse than the ones here.”
The others didn’t have any ideas, either. Carl picked his teeth, Sarah looked at her broken nails, and Kevin stared at the coffee mug in his hands, the one with world’s greatest grandpa emblazoned on it, that the kids had gotten me for Father’s Day five years ago.
After a moment, I asked Sarah to continue with her story, if only to take our minds off the present situation for a little while.
“Well, like I said, we drifted on the raft for two days. None of us slept very much, and the salt in the air started to blister our skin and lips. We were cold and wet and miserable, and we didn’t have anything to keep the rain off of us except for our raincoats, and all three of us got sick. Salty developed a really nasty cough, deep down inside his chest. Kevin and I started to worry that it might be pneumonia. He started running a fever. Became delirious, babbling about Krakens and sea gods and something he called the soul cages. He said they existed at the bottom of the sea, and held the souls of sailors who’d died. He begged us not to let him end up in one. Then, on the third day, Cornwell found us.”
“That’s the fella who was piloting the chopper?” I asked, remembering how the seatbelt had cut him into three pieces.
“Yeah. He was a traffic reporter for a television station in Pittsburgh. He’d been flying from place to place, wherever he could find fuel and dry land, mostly. Most helicopters need to refuel every two hours, but his was specially equipped to stay in the air during media emergencies. It held enough fuel for a five-hour flight, and he had maps of every fueling station along the East Coast.”
“Is there much dry land left?” Carl asked.
“Mountaintop islands like this,” Sarah said. “But that’s about it.”
I tried picturing our mountain as an island, seen from above, and found that I couldn’t.
Sarah continued. “Cornwell’s brother, Simon, was with him. They were looking for fuel when they spotted us in the water. By then, we’d drifted far from any recognizable landmark, but there were still occasional rooftops or antennae sticking up from the ocean. We paddled over to a water tower and climbed on top, and they managed to get the helicopter in close enough to pick us up.”
Kevin grinned. “Remember how Salty was scared of the rotors? He thought they’d cut our heads off.”
“He crouched down as low as he could go,” Sarah smiled, remembering, “and scrambled onboard. Turns out he was afraid of flying. I think he would have been happier to stay on the raft. But him and Cornwell hit it off, and pretty soon he got over it. We wasted a lot of fuel, just flying around and looking for survivors, but Cornwell had the luck of the devil, because he kept finding refueling stations that were still above water. Eventually, we decided to try for Norfolk, Virginia. Obviously, the city wasn’t there anymore. It’s gone, along with the rest of the coastline. But Salty figured that all of those ships docked in Norfolk and Little Creek and Yorktown would have to go out to sea when the water started rising. Otherwise, they’d have been bashed against the piers. Now that the wave threat was over, he thought they’d still be in the area. Salty said that if we could find an LPD or an LPH that was still seaworthy, we could land on their flight deck. Maybe even a big carrier, like the
“That’s where the Greenbank Observatory is,” Carl said. “We’ve gone hunting up there a few times. Teddy’s from there, originally.”
Sarah arched her eyebrows in surprise. “Really?”
“I was born in Greenbank,” I told them. “Lived there all my childhood, in a little Jenny Lynd type house with a lean-to kitchen. Of course, it’s not there anymore. The old home place burned down years ago, and Greenbank’s a lot bigger place these days. But it’s nice to know that the town survived the flood and is still there.”
Sarah scowled. “No offense to your birthplace, but I wish it wasn’t there. We got stuck at the observatory for two weeks. There’s this weird cult that has taken over there. They call themselves the B’nai Elohim. I think that means ‘divine beings’ in Hebrew. At least, that’s what their leader said. I thought we’d left the crazies behind us, but I was wrong. They’re everywhere these days. The B’nai Elohim weren’t like the Satanists back in Baltimore. They didn’t worship sea monsters. But they were just as crazy.”
“How so?” Carl asked.
“They believed that an alien race of superintelligent geneticists from outer space created humans by fooling around with primate DNA. And they insisted that flying saucers were going to land at Greenbank and rescue them and that we could go along for the ride. They said that this had happened on earth once before and that an alien named Noah rescued everybody in his spaceship.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“They didn’t try to hurt us,” Sarah continued. “Not at first, anyway. We knew they were whacked, crazy I mean, but we needed food and fuel and they had it and were willing to share. There was awful stuff going on. Incest and possibly child abuse, though we couldn’t confirm it. But we stayed, desperate circumstances and all that. Then three of the men tried to…”
She sighed, clasping Rose’s sweater around her.
I tried to soothe her. “Listen, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s okay.” She took a deep breath. “Three of them tried to rape me. They came into my room in the middle of the night, and when I woke up, they were leaning over me. They had my arms and legs pinned to the bed and all three of them were naked. I don’t remember their faces, but I can still hear their voices.” She paused. “Their voices are burned into my mind. One of them had a really hairy back and he had a tattoo of a snake. A king cobra. Isn’t it weird? I don’t remember what they looked like, but I remember that. I managed to get loose and I broke one of their noses and fractured the arm of another. But they had guns and mine was sitting in the corner of the room, out of reach. It might as well have been back in Baltimore. And I screamed for help. Simon and Kevin came to help me.”
“Simon?” Carl asked.
“Cornwell’s brother,” she reminded him. “They busted into the room, and the men shot Simon while Kevin got me away from them. There was nothing we could do. They shot him in the stomach, and the blood was pouring out. He put his hands over the wound, and the blood started bubbling between the cracks of his fingers.”
She shuddered with the memory.
“Simon told us to go on—that he’d hold them off. But then he was dead, just like that, and the men were jumping over his body. Kevin killed all three of them as they were chasing us. We found Salty and Cornwell, and made it to the chopper, but just barely. Salty shot one of the guards, and we took off.”
Carl asked, “While ya’ll were on Cass Mountain, you didn’t see anything like those worms outside?”
“Not at all,” Kevin said. “That’s why I thought maybe all the weirdness was just confined to the ocean. Obviously, it’s not.”
“We left the observatory,” Sarah continued. “We didn’t have much fuel, but Cornwell had been studying a tourist map during our stay. He figured we could land at some place called Bald Knob, if it was still above water, hole up in the Ranger tower, and figure out what to do next. But right before we reached Bald Knob, we crashed in your backyard instead.”
“Courtesy of crazy old Earl Harper,” I muttered. “May he rot in pieces.”
“Rose wouldn’t want you to speak ill of the dead,” Carl said, “but then again, she didn’t have no love for Earl, either.”
“Who was he, anyway?” Kevin asked.
“Earl?” I whistled through my false teeth, leaned back in the chair, and drained my coffee. “Earl was a local. What you’d call a good old boy, except that there wasn’t anything good about him. He lived over yonder in that shack his whole life, except for a brief stint in the Marines. He got kicked out about two months after boot camp.
