As Dusty crossed another intersection, he peered around again for street signs, but they all seemed to be absent, or turned away at unreadable angles. He didn’t think he could be far from 85th, but the area was not that familiar to him, and in this weather it was hard to tell. When his phone rang, he answered without looking at the dash-display. “Hi. You there already?”

“Where?”

“Oh! Thom?”

“Yeah. Who were you expecting?”

“I thought you were Colleen. Sorry. We’re dealing with some unexpected detours.”

“I bet. Have you been listening to the news by any chance?”

“No, why?”

“Don’t know where you guys are now, but stay clear of the Saddle. Some west-end flood walls just collapsed, and they say that whole area’s filling up with water—fast.”

“Fuck!—I’ll call you back.”

He shoved the wheel button to disconnect and grabbed his phone off the pile of junk on his passenger seat as he pulled to the curb and punched Colleen’s number. By the third ring, he was cussing under his breath. Then it went to voicemail. “Why aren’t you answering?” he growled into the phone. “Don’t go to 85th! Thom just called. The whole Saddle’s flooding. Call me when you get this and we’ll re-route. Okay? Call me. Please.”

He hung up and looked around, trying to think. Why hadn’t she answered? …Did he want to know?

There seemed no point in continuing down Montrene. If the Saddle was flooding… Jesus. The whole fucking Saddle? They’d spent too long looking for that damn letter.

He figured his best chance of finding her now would be somewhere back on Chapman. If she’d gotten to 85th and found it flooding, she’d certainly have called him, so she must still be on her way there. He cranked his wheel and pulled away from the curb in as tight a U-turn as Thom’s truck allowed, already thumbing up his map app for the fastest route back from where he was. That done, he opened Recent Calls and punched Thom’s number.

Thom picked up on the first ring. “Hi. What’s going on?”

“We got separated. Last time we talked, she was on Chapman, heading for 85th. I’m on Montrene. We were gonna meet up on the Avenue.”

There was a pause before Thom asked, “Have you called her back?”

“She didn’t answer. I don’t know why. I’m headed back to Chapman now.”

“Okay… You know what?” Thom said, not quite managing to sound ‘nonchalant.’ “I’m gonna come meet you—just in case this gets more complicated.”

“What? No! It’s hell out here, and you’re…an hour away—at best.”

“Then the sooner I leave the better. Tell me you left your truck keys here somewhere.”

“On my bed, but what if I find her before you even—”

“Then call me, and I’ll turn around, okay? If I wait here until we know there’s a bigger problem, I’d just get there even later. So hang up and drive. I’ll be in touch.”

Thom ended the call before Dusty could reply.

“Well,” he murmured tensely, “if that was supposed to reassure me…” Thom had never been one to overreact. If he was coming right out in this, he must really be concerned.

Dusty thumbed farther down ‘Recents,’ and touched his last try to Colleen, only to get her voicemail again. “Damn it, Colleen!” he exclaimed, ending the call, and throwing the phone back onto the piled passenger seat. “You’re killing me!”

~O~

As her car slid further sideways in the muddy churn, Colleen briefly considered pushing her door open and risking the current. But her mind seemed frozen, and before she could decide whether her chances would be better or worse outside, the car came even more unmoored and began to pick up speed. There seemed nothing left to do but brace herself as best she could, rigid and mute with fear, as she was swept in fits and starts down 83rd, playing bumper cars with various obstructions along the way, including other cars. All wisely empty, observed some remote fragment of her rational mind. The car hung up briefly on some submerged obstacle, only to be tugged free again before she could react.

With each new collision, windows cracked, fenders, exterior panels, and doors bent and buckled. Whatever waterproofing the car might once have had began to fail. As sloshing pools accumulated in her floor wells, she wondered if the car might sink or overturn with her inside it. But even this fear was instantly eclipsed by the sight of a center median light pole racing straight toward her. Ten feet from impact, her tires hit something—causing the car to twist around and careen sideways against the pole with a bone-jarring crash, the sound of shattering glass, and a deafening roar of water, as both of her passenger-side windows vanished into the cataract. Hung up there, half bent around the pole, her car swayed and shook, but held its place.

Miraculously, the driver’s-side windows were still intact, but current backed into a mound on that side now threatened to break them too, and swamp the vehicle. Only the deep trough created on the car’s far side, as rushing water fled around it and the pole, kept it from filling even faster.

Colleen vaguely registered the abrupt sound of her ring tone—coming from a breast pocket under her raincoat. But she had no bandwidth for that now. Terrified of being trapped inside the filling car, she managed, somehow, to scramble over and through all the things piled on her passenger seat, and had already squeezed halfway through the smashed-out window before staring down into the churning trough, and wondering where there was for her to go.

Only one option remained. Twisting around, she reached up to grab the rack rail edging her roof, pried herself further out into a sitting position on the empty window sill, then pulled herself up to lie spread-eagled on the car roof, arms stretched to clutch the rails on both sides now. Beneath her, she heard the driver’s-side windows give way at last.

As water started pouring through the car, rather than around it, its shaking and swaying diminished noticeably. Though it felt more firmly anchored as its remaining buoyancy was lost, Colleen shied from guessing how much longer this perch might last.

She was cold. Very cold. And dazed. How long would she have the strength to cling here? Above her, violet lightning flickered through the clouds, any accompanying thunder lost in the flood roar. If the car should come loose again and start to spin downstream, she doubted she’d be able to hang on up here for long. God, what had she done? To herself, to Dusty and her parents. To everyone.

The phone pressed between her chest and the car roof began to ring again, but she was too afraid to take a hand from the rails to pull it out. Had Dusty figured out she was in trouble yet? Was that him calling?

Her clamped hands began to ache. She knew she couldn’t just keep holding on like this for long, much less all night. She had to call for help—which meant using one of her hands. No way around it. She loosened her downstream grip, just a little, and began to see that her perch was, for the moment, not really as precarious as fear made it seem. She released the rail completely, and found further confirmation that she was in less immediate danger of being dislodged than she’d feared. She had to set the fear down now, and get some real help. She took deeper breaths, unclenching her body a few muscles at a time, and brought her free hand closer, between her torso and the roof, into her coat and its pocket, to grasp the phone. She pulled it out slowly, carefully sliding it up before her face. She was relieved to see its screen light up when she pressed the button. She opened the keypad with her thumb, dialed 911, and brought the phone to her ear.

“911. Where is your emergency?” asked a calm, female voice.

“I’m…on 83rd Avenue! I don’t know where!”

“What’s happening?”

“My car’s been swept away!” Colleen choked back a sob. “I’m on a light pole in the middle of a flood.”

“You’re hanging on to a light pole, ma’am?”

“My car’s bent around the pole. I’m on top of it! On the car!”

“Can you tell me anything at all about where on 83rd you might be?”

“I was…on Chapman. I’ve been washed…a few blocks east, I think?” She raised her head just enough to peer around. “I see a grocery store—a UniMart. And a big restaurant. Chinese, I think, but I can’t read the name.”

“Help is coming, ma’am. They’ll track your phone, and find you if you can stay where you are. Is this Colleen Fischer?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel able to stay there for a while, Ms. Fischer?”

“How long?”

“Emergency services are receiving lots of calls tonight. It may take a bit longer than normal, but they’re coming, and they’ll be there. Can you stay where you are?”

“My car seems…pretty stuck here.”

“Would you like me to stay on the line with you for a while?”

A blinding flash lit the sky, followed instantly by an earsplitting crack of thunder as all the street and store lights around Colleen went dark.

“Oh God,” Colleen croaked, struggling not to cry again. “Yes. Could you? The power’s just gone out here. I can’t see anything.”

There was no response.

“Hello?”

She looked at her phone, and saw the word ‘searching’ where there had been three bars seconds earlier. “God damn it!” she sobbed, shoving the suddenly useless phone back underneath her as the rain turned to hail. The roar of floodwater seemed louder in the dark as well. Her fearful imagination? Or was this really getting even worse? Would the car break loose again? Had they located her phone yet? Would she still be here when they came? How long might that take on such a night? Why had she ever thought the crap in her apartment mattered enough to risk going out in this at all? Had she always been a moron and just never known it until now? The last thing she’d said to her mother had been a lie. She’d pretended that it wasn’t, but it was. She’d been lying to her mom all day—however passively. Would she ever have the chance to apologize—to anyone?

Once asked, her stubborn mind refused to veer away from the awful question, or to spare her lurid visions of her mother’s face when the call came. All that grief, woven through with the discovery that her daughter hadn’t even trusted her to know. With her dad still in Toronto, they wouldn’t even be together when they heard.

The blare of her ringtone made her whole body flinch. She yanked the phone back out to see service bars again, and frantically thumbed the call open. “Hello? Hello?”

“Jesus—thank god!” Dusty exclaimed. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Dusty! I’m so sorry!” She no longer tried to fight the tears. “It looked so shallow. I didn’t…” She was crying almost too hard to talk now. “I’m so sorry!”

~O~

As her words and her sobbing registered, everything inside him went still and cold. “What’s happened?” Dusty asked, finding just enough breath to get the words out. “Where are you, Collie?”

“On 83rd,” she sobbed. “On top of my car.”

“On… Why are…?” But he already knew. All feeling seemed to leave him, shrunken down and pressed into an airless, fiercely focused little ball of stillness just beneath his lungs. “Where on 83rd?” he asked, aware of how calm he sounded, knowing that would change—but not ’til later. It had been a long, long time since he’d had cause to visit this airless little space. But deeply buried things didn’t spoil as fast as things up on the surface did. This long-forgotten and utterly familiar altered state felt as fresh as if he’d never even left it.

“I don’t know…” she said. “A few blocks down from Chapman. By a Uni—Oh! They’re calling back! I have to go!”

“Who? Collie? Who’s—” But the call went dead.

Dusty was already back on Chapman now—moving way too fast, he realized, backing off the gas. But Chapman would no longer take him anywhere he needed to be, not if her car had been carried east. Stupidly, he needed to be back on Montrene, unless some closer street east of here went all the way to 83rd. How many blocks had she been taken? How had she ended up in the water at all? Why hadn’t she called him? What the fuck had happened? Somewhere in the back of his mind, an answer stirred; one he didn’t want to hear right now. He pushed all such thoughts away, picked up his phone, and called Thom back.

“You find her?” Thom asked, dispensing with ‘hello.’

“Sort of,” Dusty said. “She just called.”

He heard Thom exhale. “Well, that’s a relief.”

“No it’s not,” said Dusty. “She’s somewhere on 83rd, in the water, on top of…” His clear, fierce little space faltered, sending a concussive flash of heat through his lungs and face and suddenly swelling eyes. But he shoved all that back where it had come from, punching down hard to seal it off with every ounce of anger he had ever locked inside. “—of her car,” he finished, his voice devoid of any tone at all now.

There was a lengthy pause on Thom’s end. “She’s called 911, right?”

“I don’t know. She said someone else was calling her back, and hung up before I could ask. Maybe the other call was 911. I hope so.” Why didn’t she call me before driving into a flood? “She did say she was somewhere a few blocks…east, I guess, of Chapman, so I’m headed back to Montrene now, to go down and see if I can find her.”

“Don’t do anything reckless, Dusty. Both of you in the drink won’t help anyone. Have you called 911?”

“Not yet.” Why not, idiot? “I…wanted you to know. I’ll do it now.”

“Good. I’m not more than forty minutes away, with any luck. …I’ll try coming down from the other side, so we’re on both sides of 83rd, in case that matters when we find her. Coming in from that side will be faster too. We’ll just coordinate by phone from there.”

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll call you when I find her. I’m gonna dial 911 now. See you soon.”

“I know how hard this must be, Dusty, but be careful. I’m not kidding.”

“I know.” He ended the call and dialed 911.

To his deep relief, they said Colleen had already called them. The 911 operator assured him that help was on its way, and advised him not to place himself in danger by attempting to rescue her. As Dusty picked up speed toward Montrene, she reminded him of how overtaxed emergency services were tonight, and how many other lives misguided heroism might place in jeopardy. He wasted no breath arguing with her, just hung up and muttered, “Right, lady. Like to see you just sit on your hands if it was your life on a car roof down there.”

He went back to ‘Recents’ and thumbed Colleen’s last call, hoping to resume their conversation, but it went straight to voicemail without ringing at all this time. Which meant what? That she was still on with 911? That her battery had died? That her phone had gotten too wet to work anymore? Who the fuck knew?

The 911 operator had just said it herself; they were overbooked right now. Collie might be left hanging there all night. …

As he reached Montrene, and turned back down toward the Saddle, Dusty thought gratefully of the winch mounted on Thom’s truck, and of all the heavy wired rope neatly spooled behind its seats—not to mention the high clearance, heavy suspension, and four-wheel drive Thom had so wisely pressed on them at the beginning of this ill-fated journey. Thom never seemed to miss a trick. Dusty stepped harder on the gas, giving fuck about speeding tickets. If anything, landing a patrolman right now would be a major win.

Despite all the extra speed he dared in such weather, every block of Montrene just seemed longer than the last. How long could this goddamn street be? He glanced up at his rearview mirror. Sadly, still no cops. …In fact, he saw no other traffic behind him at all. We’re the only ones stupid enough to be out here still, he thought. A mixed blessing, he supposed, recalling all that gridlocked traffic just a couple hours before. At least there’d be nothing to hold him up now.

When he and Thom found Colleen—which they would—and got a look at her situation, they’d figure out how to get her free, and lighten emergency services’ load a little. That was how this would end. Dusty had no interest in negotiating—with 911, or with the universe.

Colleen’s call had thrown him—pretty badly. Of course it had. But he had himself back in line now, and this was war, not therapy theater. Plenty of time for second thoughts, messy emotions, and uncomfortable questions when the war was won. Right now, it was time for…

“Hoooly…shit…” he breathed, coming over a rise and getting his first look at the flooded thoroughfares below. The power was clearly out down there. Not a light to be seen for miles eastward. But the racing ceiling of clouds bounced more than enough light from still-lit areas just westward to reveal the appalling maelstrom of mud and foam that the Saddle had become.

He slowed down, then stopped altogether, bringing a hand to his mouth in disbelief, as he truly understood what had just happened.

The city’s center lay upon a high outcrop of hills rising from an otherwise flat plain. For centuries, the river had curved around that outcrop in a wide, snaking loop along the city’s southern edge. North of that outcrop lay a broad belt of lower land that locals had referred to for years beyond memory as the Saddle. Once rich alluvial floodplain, huge levies had been built to guard it from the river’s infrequent rise, for use as prized farmland. But in time the city had spread north to cover the Saddle as well, and the levies had been replaced with flood walls to free up valuable urban real estate. Until tonight.

After centuries of quiescence, the swollen river had just shoved those flood walls down to flow in a straight line, north of the higher city center. The Saddle’s broad avenues had just become the new river bed. And somewhere in the middle of that vast juggernaut, Colleen was clinging to the roof of her car. But where? …This…could have taken her anywhere. Might keep right on moving her.

All Dusty’s willfully manufactured certainties crumbled at the impossible sight. This was not a small disaster. It was a catastrophe of historic proportions; the end of the city they’d known. How many thousands of people would be displaced? How many were drowning down there right now, he wondered in terrified awe. How would any number of emergency responders get to all of them—or any of them—in time? Would anyone ever come to help Colleen in that? If he did not?

He switched to high beams, touched the gas, and started downhill again. “Hold on Collie,” he whispered. “Please hold on. …I’m coming.”