“Are we far enough away?” George asked.
“For the moment,” Alan said. “I just want to be sure that…”
He trailed off as one of the columns shifted. The current was being forced through a small gap in and the pressure of it was taking its toll on the structure.
“Maybe one more tree,” George said. “To really put a nail in the coffin.”
“No need,” Ricky said.
The rising water liberated the tree that George had just cut down. It took another few minutes, but eventually it was pulled downstream and it joined the pile. When it hit, the water immediately rose to the lap against the side of the mill. The surface flattened out, disguising all the chaos underneath.
“It won’t be long,” Alan said. “All that flow is going to undermine everything.”
“Like the West Road,” George said. He sounded almost like a kid when he said it.
They watched in silence. They could only guess as to what was happening beneath. The river didn’t seem to be rising anymore. Amber concentrated on the bricks, watching the mortar lines like they were a graph of the depth. The river sometimes swelled and ebbed, but it wasn’t getting deeper.
“The mirrors try to eat my eyes,” she said.
“What?” Ricky asked.
She looked at him, confused. “Huh?”
“What did you say about mirrors?”
It took her a second to figure out what he was talking about. The words had slipped from her like someone else had spoken them through her lips.
“The mirrors try to eat my eyes,” she said. “It’s something I read in the mill.”
She turned to Alan. “There was graffiti. We just didn’t see it last time, but I saw it when I was in there, tying the rope. That was written on one of the walls. The mirrors try to eat my eyes. It was present tense, like something that’s still happening.”
“What a strange thing to write,” Alan said.
“Here we go,” George said. “It’s going to go.”
Amber looked at him and then back to the mill. It all looked completely solid to her. It was like when he was cutting down the tree. Somehow he was sensing some movement that was totally invisible to her. And he was right. The lines of mortar began to sag in a way that didn’t seem possible. She would have bet anything that nothing could bend a brick wall like that. It didn’t take long for the bonds to snap. Suddenly, a crack raced through the wall and chunks of it were tumbling into the water below. The extra debris only exacerbated the problem. The water rose fast, precipitating even more decay. When one of the columns crumbled, an entire second of floor was exposed and upended.
Ricky cheered.
Amber reached behind herself until her hand found the spear. She pulled it into her lap.
The hole that was opened in the side of the mill showed her the second-to-lowest floor. The creatures were even deeper. They saw the hole get bigger and then the sunlight probed into the structure when part of the roof collapsed.
Amber watched the lower floor begin to collapse.
“They’re beneath that,” Alan said, pointing.
The water spilled over the bottom of the wall, into the deepest parts of the mill. The left wall started to fold over. When it crashed down, it took out another big section of floor.
“I can’t believe this worked,” George said.
“Maybe,” Alan said.
George turned to face Alan. “Is that your favorite word?”
Alan’s stoic expression didn’t change.
“Maybe.”
# # #
They climbed up and found a better vantage point from just east of the mill. The water had found another way around the base, so it didn’t look like any more significant erosion would happen. The flood was already receding.
“You should go back to the car,” Alan said to Ricky. “Just in case.”
Ricky didn’t answer.
“I should have brought Joe’s drone,” Alan said. “It has a camera. I could have flown it in close to see.”
“We don’t do drones,” George said without any further explanation.
Amber studied the wreckage, trying to line it up with the mental map she had of the place. The ground floor—where they had gone in through the hole in the wall—was definitely destroyed. The walls had tumbled, taking large sections of the roof, and a big part of it had collapsed downstream where the water rolled over it. Part of their rope was visible. It was tangled up in the branches. The stumps were submerged by the flood. There was very little evidence of their vandalism except for the tracks in the snow, and those would be melted away soon enough.
What she couldn’t see was whether or not the destruction had been successful. The bottom floor had to be flooded. Or, at least, it was flooded at one point. When Amber and Alan had explored those depths, the water had been up to their ankles. Since then, the level of the river had to have risen at least ten feet, if only temporarily. She couldn’t imagine anything surviving that.
“Are we done here?” Ricky asked.
“I would prefer to know that the whole lower room is exposed before we leave,” Alan said.
“Why? What are we going to do about it?” Ricky asked.
“I suppose we would know if we had to come back and think of another possible solution,” Alan said.
“The longer we stay here, the more we risk that someone catches us here. We’re not going to do anything more today, right? I say we leave and possibly check back tomorrow to see the condition of everything. We can brainstorm on other solutions anywhere.”
Amber stared at the mill. She wanted to stay, but understood Ricky’s point. They didn’t have another move.
“Yeah,” Alan said. “What you’re saying makes sense. I guess I hoped for a conclusion.”
“We weren’t going to get one either way,” Amber said. “There are stragglers.”
“True,” Alan said.
George was already retracing their steps, lugging the chainsaw back towards the cars.
“The scope of this problem is unknowable,” Alan said. “I hate that.”
“How so?” Ricky asked.
“We found one straggler, and one colony. There could be more of each.
