Credit: Thank you to Jaimi-Sam for allowing me to use Ruth as Grandma Tracy's first name (first appearing in her story 'Secrets and Lies') and for the encouragement to finish this tale!
Author's Note: While Jaimi-Sam did read the early drafts of the first few chapters, the edits I've done and the bulk of this story are completely unbeta'd. Ergo, if you hate it or there are horrendous errors, it's all on me. Grin.
DELUGE
Chapter One
It was raining as she stepped out onto the dimly lit street. That fact was no surprise; it had been raining for weeks. Pulling her jean jacket more tightly around her thin body, she hunched forward as her feet began the journey to her destination. No other souls were out; most didn't dare to leave the arguable safety of their homes. No one knew when the flood wall would burst. It was better, they all thought, to be inside rather than out when that happened. And it would happen. It was only a matter of time.
Every step she took splashed four inches of water up her shins. Ten inches of it filled the street, nearly ready to overflow the curbs. The drains were all clogged; the supermarket had long since been emptied. The town's one gas station had run dry four days ago, and the only access to this out-of-the-way speck of dust in the middle of the nondescript Midwest – a bridge spanning the very river which now threatened their entire existence – had washed out more than a week before that.
But her mother was in desperate need of help, and with Jeannie gone, Jan was the only one left to help her. Grasping her necklace's silver Christian cross charm tightly in her hand, for it had always given her strength in her darkest moments, on she sloshed through the slowly rising water. On and on and on until at last she reached the intersection of the tiny town's crossroads. She looked up to find the only four real stores they had on the four corners of Main Street and Canfield Road looking abandoned. Foreboding.
Dead.
Fern Thompson had closed the post office once news of the washed-out bridge came from old Davey Kitkowski, after he'd tried making it to his son's farm three miles out of town. The tiny postal hub shared space with Chaplin's Rx which had its own entrance. Only a thin wall separated one from the other.
Sav-Mor Grocery stood dark and looming, while the only signs of life at Troy's Gas & Auto Repair were in the echoes of the four junked cars parked in its lot. Jan's eyes at last came to rest on Cammie's Clothes 4 Less, owned by her best friend Denise DeLong's mother.
Jan hadn't seen Denise in over two weeks. As soon as the rains had started, Denise's dad had insisted his family leave town. Jan didn't know why; she hadn't even been able to say good-bye. She felt like crying when she thought of the girl she'd known since they were toddlers, but the only tears she could make anymore came from rain drops rolling down her cheeks.
Looking both ways more out of habit than necessity, Jan kept her head low, the rain drumming endlessly upon her long strawberry blonde hair as she turned and crossed Canfield Road. The water reached a third of the way up her shins, splashing to her knees in the wake caused by each step she took. As she made to step up to the sidewalk, the water in the road breached the confines of the street and followed her to the pharmacy's front door.
Slowly the hand that had been tucked under the jean jacket pulled away. She looked at the small hatchet she held; never before in her life had she done something like this. Not even the night her father had died when the tanker truck had overturned four houses down. She closed her eyes, letting the rain weep for her as she remembered standing on the sidewalk watching him climb the side of the big blue overturned tractor-trailer cab. He was the only one who'd had the courage to go after the injured driver. And after pulling that man to safety, he was the only one still too close to the fuel-carrying semi when it exploded.
It had been raining that night, too.
Opening her eyes, she raised the hatchet. The sound of shattering glass barely penetrated the steady deluge from the sky. Jan cleared away shards of glass from the old wooden frame of the door and stepped into a completely empty store. The air smelled stale. Moldy. Utter darkness made her shiver more than the chill of being soaked through. From the left pocket of her jacket she produced a small palm-length flashlight. She clicked it on and shone it toward the back of the store, where the pharmacist's counter was. Jan made her way along the aisle that had once held over-the-counter cold medication and painkillers. Only dust and the remnants of a few torn packages remained.
Her mom had known for some time that she was dying. At first she'd ignored the various aches and pains that had been plaguing her, but then at Jan's insistence she'd finally gone to the nearest big town forty miles distant to see a doctor. The diagnosis one month later had been Stage Four breast cancer. Four months of treatment had followed, making her mom too ill to attend Jan's college graduation one hundred miles away.
Rather than moving on to law school, Jan had put her future on hold to return home and care for her mother in whatever time she had left. Merely two weeks before the bridge washed out, Leeann Jenkins had checked out of the hospital for the last time.
Sam, the pharmacist, had locked both the roll-down security shutters over the high counter and the small access door to its left before vacating his store a week earlier. Jan moved to the access door, lifted the hatchet, and began whacking at the knob in earnest. The grunt she emitted with each blow the hatchet delivered echoed in the still, damp air.
When the door finally gave, Jan dropped the hatchet to the floor, arms unable to so much as hold it anymore. She lifted her leg to take the high step into a place forbidden to all but Sam for as long as she could remember.
A strange and eerie sound stopped her leg mid-movement. She turned to look toward the front of the store. Security blinds were drawn over the bay windows on either side of the door, giving her only the window she'd smashed to see through.
Her heart stopped in her chest. Because while nothing looked any different out that small four-feet-tall by two-feet-wide glimpse at the street, the sound coming to her ears even over the beating of the rain itself, was unmistakable.
The flood wall had burst.