“What is it?” Kapenda asked.
David didn’t answer. Instead, he spun it, watching as it caught the pallid light. Its surface was smooth, but Kapenda had the impression it was the smoothness of age and wear, that the ghosts of old marks still lay under its skin. Finally, David spoke, muttering under his breath, words that Kapenda didn’t catch.
“Do you know what it is?” asked Kapenda. He was starting to shiver, the shock and the cold catching him. He wanted to go back to the hotel and dry off, warm up.
“Yes,” said David. “I saw one once, as a child, and I hoped not to see one again so soon. Still, I suppose it explains a lot.” He rubbed one of the patches of dry skin on his neck slowly.
“The water’s coming, my friend,” he said, “and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Its time is here again. Well, if you’re sure you’re okay to drive, I’ll leave you be. Take my advice, stay out of the water.”
“I will,” said Kapenda, “and thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” said David and coughed again, his own private punctuation. He winked his sightless eye once more and then went and mounted his bike, wheeling it around to point back to Grovehill. Moments later all Kapenda could see of him was his back, hunched over the handlebars as he went down the road. Behind him, tiny waves spread out across the water and then broke apart.
It was only when Kapenda got back into the jeep that he remembered the bite—sure enough, his jacket was torn in two semicircles, to the front and rear of his shoulder, and the skin below bruised but not broken. He got back out of the jeep to try and see the cow but it must have floated off, and the only thing to see was the flood, ever restless and ever hungry.
* * *
The house collapsed just after lunch.
They were filming at the rope barrier again, this time framing the talent against a shot down the street to show how the water wasn’t retreating. “Forecasters say that, with the recent rainfall, the water levels aren’t expected to recede until at least tomorrow, and if more rain comes it could conceivably be several days or more,” Plumb intoned. “Great sections of the South-West are now underwater, economies ruined and livelihoods and lives destroyed. Even today, we’ve heard of two more deaths, a woman and child who drowned in their lounge in the village of Arnold, several miles from here. Questions are being asked of the defences that the government installed and why the Environment Agency wasn’t better prepared. Here, the people merely wait, and hope.”
Kapenda waited until Plumb had done his turn, letting him peer meaningfully down the flooded street, before lowering the camera. One of the other crews had found a flooded farm earlier that day and had proudly showed their footage to everyone, of the oilslick forming across the surface of the water in the barn and around it as the water worked its way into the abandoned vehicles and metal storage canisters, teasing out the oil and red diesel they contained. The rainbow patterns had been pocking and dancing in the rain, and the image had been oddly beautiful; Kapenda had been professionally impressed, and privately jealous.
“Was that good?” asked Plumb, and then stopped and listened as the air filled with a dense rumbling, grinding sound like something heavy being pushed over a stone floor.
“The building’s gone,” someone shouted, a runner with a phone clamped to his ear, “it’s completely collapsed. The flood’s surging!”
As the man spoke, a fresh wall of water appeared between the furthest buildings, higher than those that had come before it, driven by the tons of brick and wood and belongings that had suddenly crashed into the flow. The wave was a dirty red colour, curled over like a surfer’s dream. Somewhere, it had picked up trees and a car, a table, a bed and other unidentifiable shapes—all of these Kapenda saw even as he was raising the camera. In the viewfinder, he caught the things in the water as they hit the buildings, saw the car crash through the window of a chemist, saw the bed hurtle into and buckle a lamp-post, saw bricks bounce and dip like salmon on their way to spawning, and then the wave was upon them.
He moved back, never stopping filming, cursing under his breath that he’d missed the actual collapse. Things churned through the water, dark shadows darting back and forward under the surface, their edges occasionally breaking through to the air only to roll back, splash their way under again.
The water level rose rapidly, submerging the makeshift barriers and eating away at the bottom of the hill. As Kapenda and Needham and the talent moved swiftly back, jostling in amongst the other film crews, cars were lifted out of the side streets and began to jolt through the water. One of the lights exploded as the water reached the electric cables, and the others shorted in a series of rapid pops that left behind ghost spots in Kapenda’s eyes and an acrid smell of smoke in the air. Moments later, one of the generators made a series of groaning sounds from inside the community hall and black smoke breathed out from the windows as it, too, shorted out. The police pushed the crowd back, followed all the while by the water.
* * *
By nightfall, Grovehill was lost. The rains, which had continued to fall all day, had finally abated as the light faded but the floodwater had continued to rise, submerging most of the houses and shops up to their roofs. In the pub, the conversation was subdued, slightly awed. Most of the crews had worked on weather stories before; Kapenda himself had been at Boscastle in 2004, filming the aftermath of the flash flood, but this was worse—it showed no signs of receding.
Two cameramen had died when the building collapsed. One had been caught in the initial surge of water, swept away like so much flotsam. The other, further down the torrent, had been on the edge of the bank when something turning in the water, the branches of an uprooted tree, it was supposed, had reached out and snagged him, lifting him from his feet and carrying him off. His talent, a pretty blonde stringer for a local news programme, had been taken off in shock talking about how the water had eaten the man.
“I saw one of those in Russia,” said a voice from behind him.
It was one of the other cameramen—Rice, Kapenda thought he might be called. Rice nodded at the thing Kapenda had pulled from the hedge, sitting on the table by his glass of beer.
“Russia?” asked Kapenda
“I was in Krymsk in 2010 and in Krasnodar,” said Rice, “back in 2012, when the flash flood killed all those people. We found a few of those around the port in Krymsk and in the fields about Krasnodar. We did a segment about them, but it was never shown.” He picked up the figure and dangled it, much like David had done, eying it.
“It’s almost identical,” he said. “Strange.”
“What is it?”
“We never found out, not really. I always assumed it was some kind of peasant magic, some idol to keep the floods away. If that’s what it was, it didn’t work though, the damn things were always where the water was at its highest. I found one hanging from a light fitting in the upper room of a school that was almost completely submerged.” He put the thing back on Kapenda’s table.
“What happened to your segment?”
“Got archived, I suppose,” said Rice. “Pretty much what we expected. I didn’t mind, not really. Russia was a nightmare, and I had bigger things to worry about than whether the piece I filmed got shown.”
“Really?”
“Really. It was chaos, thousands of people made homeless, streets full of mud and water and corpses. In Krymsk, everything got washed into the Black Sea, and the harbour was blocked with debris for weeks after. The local sea-life was well fed, though.”
“Jesus,” said Kapenda.