“Boy,” Sarah said, “did they miss the call on that one or what?”
“They sure did.” Carl nodded. “Earl got away with talking crazy like that, but I have to fill out a damn stack of forms and wait three days every time I buy a new hunting rifle for deer season. There’s no justice in this world.”
I grinned at Sarah and Kevin. “Don’t mind Carl. He’s just mad because they wouldn’t renew his hunting license last year, on account of his eyesight.”
“That’s because they’re a pack of idiots.” He frowned. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my eyes, and I can see fine to shoot.”
“I hope so,” I said. “Because something tells me there’ll be plenty of shooting before this thing is done.”
Carl’s face grew sullen and grim. I’d never seen him look older than he did at that moment. Or more frightened.
The conversation was sporadic after that, and we remained on topics other than the weather and what the rains had brought with them. I needed a dip bad, and I had to fight to stay awake. I was exhausted, that type of weariness that creeps into your bones and makes your eyes itch. The coffee wasn’t doing anything to help me, either. My daughter, Tracy, had given me some coffee and chicory that she picked up while on vacation in New Orleans. I hadn’t touched the stuff, because it made me jittery, and the doctor had told me to stay off of it. But I seemed to recall that it had more caffeine than regular instant coffee did, and wondered if I could rig up some way to brew it on top of the heater. Doctor’s orders be damned. And I was already jittery. The can was down in the cellar’s pantry.
I grabbed the halogen flashlight, clicked it on, and opened the door that led downstairs to the cellar. Darkness greeted me, along with a familiar smell. That wet, fishy stench was in my basement now, although more muted than it had been outside.
I swallowed and suddenly Sarah was there behind me with the pistol in hand.
“Need any help?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, a bit too eagerly. “But let’s be careful. You smell it too, don’t you?”
She nodded. “You think they’re inside the house?”
“Not yet. But I reckon they’re close.”
We started down, and my joints creaked along with the old wooden stairs.
An inch of water covered the concrete floor, and pretty much everything that hadn’t been sitting up on pallets was now ruined. Forgetting that Sarah was with me, I cursed, and then blushed when she giggled.
I walked around, shining the light into corners and surveying the damage. A three-inch crack had appeared in 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.