one cinder block wall. The fissure ran the entire length of the wall, floor to ceiling. The floor was cracked, too, and the washing machine leaned to one side. I noticed that the concrete had begun to sink beneath it.
Sarah chuckled. “I hope you have flood insurance.”
“Reckon they’ll pay up?” I tried to play along, though my heart wasn’t in it. The damage was new, and hadn’t been here the day before. With the amount of water that was seeping in, I’d have my very own indoor swimming pool within a matter of days. The loss of some of the personal items that had been stored downstairs was hard to take as well—boxes of toys from when the kids were young, old photo albums, and holiday decorations. All of it was waterlogged and damaged. The word processor that the kids had given me was still safe, but the particle-board desk it sat on was starting to puff up. That fake wood stuff soaks up water like a sponge.
“You okay, Teddy?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. Just makes me mad, is all. Some of this stuff was junk, but a lot of it was irreplaceable. Wish we’d had an attic here, rather than a basement.”
Other than the cracks in the floor and the water, I didn’t see any damage. The basement still seemed relatively sturdy. We made our way over to the root cellar, which was separated from the rest of the cellar by plywood and panel walls and a sturdy wooden door. The floor inside the root cellar was just dirt and I had a bad moment as we opened the door. I was expecting to shine the light on an earthworm, sticking up from a hole in the floor. But it was clear, and we stepped inside.
“What do we need, anyway?” Sarah asked.
“There’s a can of chicory coffee down here. I just wanted to grab that. It’s got more caffeine in it than the stuff we’ve been drinking.”
“You needed me to help you carry a can of coffee?”
“No,” I admitted, lowering my voice. “I needed you to come along because I’m a scared old man who wasn’t sure what he’d find down here.”
Sarah smiled and gave my hand a squeeze. “That’s okay, Teddy. Don’t be embarrassed. I’m scared too.”
“It wasn’t just that. You make for a lot prettier company than Carl or Kevin do. So I let you come along.”
She laughed, and the basement seemed to brighten with the sound. “I like you, Teddy. You remind me of my grandfather.”
I smiled. “Then he must have been a marvelous man. And like I said already, you remind me a lot of my granddaughter. She’d have liked you.”
“It feels good to be here. After all Kevin and I have seen, this feels…normal.”
“Well, I’m awfully glad you folks are here, too. I mean, I’m sorry about the circumstances, and about what happened to your friends. But you don’t know how grateful I am to be around people again. I was so lonely. Thought I might be the last man on earth.”
I cleared my throat before she could reply, and tried to change the subject. I shined the flashlight beam over the rows and rows of jars. Rose had canned every autumn since we’d been married, and during the Y2K craze, she’d canned even more, convinced that civilization was going to collapse and we’d run short on food.
“Your wife’s handiwork?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, yes. Rose loved to can. I always had to have a garden, just so she could can vegetables every fall. Reckon we might as well take some food back up with us.”
I grabbed mason jars full of green beans, beets, strawberries, peas, collard greens, corn, and squash, all grown in our garden, and applesauce made from the fruit grown on the tree in our backyard—the tree that the rains had now uprooted. The cans I’d taken from Dave and Nancy Simmons’s place were still upstairs, and I figured these would supplement them well. I found the coffee and chicory, too, and put everything in a cardboard box. Sarah reached down into the potato bin and pulled out a few big ones that hadn’t rotted yet and then grabbed a jar off the shelf and looked at me in a mixture of puzzlement and disgust.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“Deer meat.” I nodded. “From a six-point buck I got last year. You should have seen how long it took Carl and me to drag it out of the woods. Don’t know if you noticed, but we’re not exactly spring chickens.”
“I’ll bet you were tired,” she said, and as if to stress her point, she yawned.
“You can go on back upstairs if you want. I’ll finish things down here.”
“I don’t mind. I can wait.”
I grabbed a few more items, and then we waded through the ankle deep water and made our way back up the stairs. The flashlight beam started to falter, and I reminded myself to change the batteries. Wouldn’t do to be without light if those things attacked us during the night.
How did you protect yourself against something like that? The answer was that you didn’t. There was no way.
So I tried to put it out of my mind.
When Sarah and I got back to the kitchen, Carl had assumed watch duties again and was telling Kevin about how he’d gotten poison ivy over every inch of his body after he lay down in a patch of it with Beverly Thompson back when we were teenagers. Both of them were laughing, and Kevin had tears streaming down his face as he clutched his stomach. The sound of it chased my fears away.
I fashioned a crude filtering system out of paper towels and used it to brew the chicory. It was nasty stuff, sort of like drinking hot tar mixed with cat piss, but Kevin and Sarah seemed to enjoy it. Carl took one sip, made a face, and left his mug untouched.
We agreed that it was pretty much pointless to stand at the window and keep watch. The darkness outside was overwhelming, and we couldn’t see more than a few feet beyond the carport. The little worms were still there and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw their growing numbers. They were two feet deep in most places now, the pile so high that the ones on the edges of the carport spilled out into the wet grass. The ones around my truck came up over the tires, and were working on covering the bumper.
“If things ever get back to normal,” I laughed, “I’m going to gather those things up and open a bait and tackle shop down by the river.”
“Not me,” Carl said. “After what we saw today, I’m never baiting a hook again.”
I wondered again where they were all coming from and what could be chasing them to the top. Was I right in my hypothesis? Was it something worse than what we’d already seen?
We moved into the living room and talked for a bit more, but the yawns were contagious and soon we were all rubbing our eyes. Exhausted, we agreed that we seemed to be relatively safe for the moment and decided to discuss our escape plans in detail in the morning, and try to come up with some other options. Then we all retired for the night. Carl took one bedroom and Sarah took the other. Kevin sprawled out on the couch and I fixed him up comfy with some extra blankets and pillows. We posted a watch, just in case.
Carl drew the first shift, which was uneventful. I relieved him at midnight. I didn’t want to disturb Kevin, so I sat in the kitchen doing my crossword puzzle in the soft light of the kerosene lantern. I was still stuck on a three- letter word for peccadillo, something with an “i” in the middle, when I heard the soft whisper of flannel behind me.
“Sin,” Sarah said over my shoulder. “S-I-N. Three letter word for peccadillo.”
“Well I’ll be,” I whispered, grinning in the lantern’s glow. “I would have never figured that out for myself. Been trying for days. I’m mighty glad you folks dropped in.”
We both laughed quietly, and then a troubled shadow passed over her face. She stared out the window, in the direction of the crash site. We couldn’t see the wreckage. It was too dark. But it was there, just the same.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a bad joke. I didn’t mean ‘dropped’ of course.”
“No, don’t apologize. It’s okay.”
In the living room, Kevin stirred uneasily on the couch. He called out for Lori and then turned his head and went back to sleep.
“Poor guy,” I muttered. “He’ll live with that for the rest of his life.”
