“But there would have been some kind of fossil record,” Sarah said. “Something to let us know they were here.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. But they’re here now. And I don’t even reckon we’ve seen the really big ones yet.”
Carl stiffened, his soup spoon hovering halfway to his mouth. “What do you mean, Teddy? That thing at the crash site was big as a bus.”
“You saw that mess out there on my carport. All those night crawlers? At first, I assumed the rain had driven them to the surface like that. Now, I think it might have been their big brothers that forced them topside instead. Animals behave strangely before an earthquake or a tsunami. Maybe this is something like that. Maybe they were fleeing the larger ones. And if those big worms we encountered today pushed the little worms above ground, then what do you suppose is forcing the bigger ones up now?”
“Something like Leviathan?” Kevin asked.
I nodded. “Exactly. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Sarah looked surprised. “I didn’t take you for a Shakespeare fan, Teddy. You’ve read Hamlet?”
“Only three times. I prefer The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, myself. I was always partial to Puck. He was a funny one.”
“Damn nonsense,” Carl said. He sat his spoon down and stared at his half-full bowl of stew. “So, if you’re 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 Coral Sea or the Ronald Reagan. I guess Cornwell wasn’t the best navigator, because we ended up way off course. Instead of being over Maryland and Virginia, we ended up in West Virginia. We were almost out of fuel and supplies when we found a dry spot on top of Cass Mountain.”
“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…”