And now those days had come again.
Just two nights ago, a huge section of the cement wall that contained the Black River had utterly collapsed, sending a huge wave of water into River Town that had washed away houses and Hillside Cemetery to boot. That was ugly business. Some thirty people were missing over there. Drowned, sunk in the mud, who really knew? But the real unpleasant part of that was that when Hillside went, some three hundred graves were swept into the city…along with what they contained.
And that was bad. Just horrible.
But it was none of these things that fed the rumors cycling through the city like cold germs making the rounds. It was something else. On the opposite side of the valley, tucked away in a heavily-forested hollow, was the Fort Providence Army Reservation. It had housed a cavalry battalion in World War I, been transformed into a POW camp for captured German soldiers in WWII, passed to the Army National Guard in the 1960’s, and then around ’78 or ’79 been absorbed into the Army Medical Command and became a high-security installation that the Army claimed was involved in “advanced battlefield medical research.” To locals that meant everything from germ warfare to genetic engineering to alien autopsies, depending on who you asked and how much they’d had to drink. No one really knew what went on there. You couldn’t get with a quarter mile of the fence without MPs all over you.
The third day of the rains there had been a tremendous explosion at the base. The boom was heard and felt in nearby Witcham where it was said the impact actually knocked people out of their chairs and birds right out of the sky, if you could believe that. Mitch’s Barron’s next door neighbor-a pensioner and all-round fussy prick named Arland Mattson-claimed that the explosion felt like God himself had picked up the valley and shook it out like a dusty rug. But Mattson did have the gift of exaggeration.
Mitch himself had felt it roll right through his house and rattle his windows. But he wasn’t about to give the explosion more than that.
The Army claimed a fuel tank had exploded out at the base and there was no need for concern, as it was being handled by the base fire brigade. The blaze was under control within an hour, end of story. The explosion made the local and state news, was even briefly mentioned on CNN.
Right after the explosion, Mitch stepped outside in the pouring rain like everyone else and even in the gray haze of the storm he had seen an odd yellow-green cloud hanging over the direction of Providence. Some people said it sparkled like wet quartz, though Mitch had not seen that. The rain had dissipated it almost immediately. But one thing was for sure, an acrid and sulfurous stink had blown through the town for hours afterward. And Mitch had told Lily that it had not smelled like fuel oil, but the world’s largest rotten egg fart.
And here, then, the rumors and wild tales got their footing.
The explosion was not from a fuel oil tank, but a mishandled tactical nuke and that yellow-green cloud had been a mushroom cloud seething with radioactive fallout. When mention was made of that awful stink, the story changed. It wasn’t a nuke, but a tank of lethal weapons-grade chemical agents that had gone up, maybe phosgene or chlorine gas. And that really got people going in Witcham. They claimed to see rains coming down that were either red or luminously yellow directly after the explosion. Mitch hadn’t seen any of that either, but he had noticed a peculiar almost ochre tint to the sky for several hours afterward.
The night following the explosion, Mitch tramped out to the alley through the spreading puddles with a couple bags of garbage and Arland Mattson had been standing in his garage.
“C’mere, Mitch,” he said. “Got something you’re gonna wanna see.”
He was standing there in hip waders and a red-and-black checked hunting coat, an old green cap with ear flaps on his narrow head making him look like a yak herder. Sitting on the concrete slab around him were dozens of mason jars full of water. Mitch was figuring he didn’t want to know anything about it, because since his wife’s death, Arland had gone from being casually annoying to a full-blown eccentric.
“You see what I got here? In all these goddamn jars?”
Mitch swallowed, shaking rain off himself, hoping it wasn’t urine. “No…what do you got?”
“Water,” Arland said. “Goddamn rainwater what fell from the sky.”
“Oh,” Mitch said, not wanting to follow that particular thread because Arland was the world’s oldest conspiracy theorist. He said there were holes in the ozone because NASA kept shooting rockets through it and that the neighborhood cats ritually broke into his locked garage and pissed all over the tires of his Buick Century just to spite him. Mitch never did ask him how those pussycats handled the lockpicks.
Arland was proud of his jars of rainwater. “Full of contaminates, Mitch. Stuff from those secret experiments at that goddamned Army base. See, I got it from a reliable source that the Army is using Witcham as a guinea pig, spraying us down with chemical warfare stuff to see what happens to us.”
Arland wouldn’t say who his reliable source was. He only pressed a finger to his lips so Mitch would know it was all strictly hush-hush and that you never knew who might be listening. Arland said that a tank of that goo had exploded and that was why it was raining so much. Mitch didn’t bother pointing out to him that it had been raining for like three days before the explosion.
“They been working that goddamned shit into our water drop by drop, spraying us down with it. That explosion was an accident, you know, but it plays right into my hands. Now the air is saturated with that shit and it’s coming down in the rain. I’m going to take these jars to a guy I know, then we’re gonna sue the goddamn government.”
Mitch believed that part because Arland was always trying to sue somebody. He’d tried to sue Mitch twice. Once because Mitch’s leaves were blowing into his yard and another time because the limb of the big oak out front was overhanging his yard and dropping acorns all over his freshly-cut lawn.
“No sense in running away,” Arland said. “We’re all contaminated now. Every one of us.” He proceeded to open his shirt and expose his sunken, white-haired chest which was set with a half-dozen blotchy looking sores. “See them? That’s contamination. At night…at night, them bumps, they move. And when I took a shit this morning, I saw things crawling in my turds. They were like…hey, where the hell you going, Mitch?”
But Mitch was already vaulting through his yard, the rain finding him and drenching him. Arland called out to him that it wasn’t too late to get in on the class-action suit, but Mitch decided he’d pass.
So, those were a sampling of the rumors making the rounds. Some weren’t that crazy and others were considerably more so, but in general they formed the absurd folkloric tapestry of the city as the rain continued to fall and fall.
3
Mitch toured the city in his Jeep Cherokee, taking in the wreckage.
The wreckage of his hometown which was considerable.
Witcham was a mill town of about 80,000 people, a good chunk of those not there for the industry but because of the campus of North-Central U downtown. It was split into some five neighborhoods?East Genessee, Crandon, Elmwood Hills, Bethany, and River Town. The latter two which occupied the lowest tracts of land abutting the river and were now flooded. Mitch lived over in Crandon, about four or five blocks from the house he’d grown up in. Crandon was up high, but given that the entire city lay in the Black River Valley, it was probably only a matter of time before even the high ground was underwater.
He went from neighborhood to neighborhood, the rain coming down so hard at times he had to pull over. Even when it wasn’t hammering down, it still fell in sheets of gray mist. A lot of streets were now blocked off by orange-striped sawhorses with attendant flashing battery lights and even old flickering smudgepots in some locations. And these streets invariably led down into the lower lying areas of the city where the standing water came right up to the tops of porches and sometimes even windows, the roofs of cars and cabs of abandoned trucks poking from the murky pools which were clotted with leaves and branches and all manner of debris.
Mitch paused at a few of these streets-Cobb and Huron and Ripley-and actually climbed out into the rain to view the flooding firsthand. It was amazing. You could hear about it and read about, but until you actually saw it you could not appreciate what had happened to Witcham. If he hadn’t known the city was flooding, he would have thought it was sinking. Standing behind the sawhorses that blocked off the entrance to Cobb Street, he followed the pavement with his eyes downhill until it was lost in a filthy lagoon of water. Down there, it looked dark and dirty
