“I mean, it doesn’t look like a boat,” Donnie said.

Peggy and Kelly brought Donnie through to the law firm’s breakroom, not so different from his own company’s room upstairs. A water cooler sat just inside the doorway, bubbling. Off to the side was a pantry that held cleaning supplies, some extra coffee and tea, and a few empty jugs for the water cooler. Peggy picked up one of the empty water cooler jugs and drummed at it with her manicured fingernails. It made a hollow noise. The small woman looked comical holding the big bottle even though it was empty and weighed next to nothing.

“No, but they will float,” Peggy said slowly, as if spelling something out to a child. “We leave the empty containers in here. The water company comes and picks them up, and leaves full ones. Attach these to some kind of raft, it will probably help it float I assume.”

“Right, of course,” Donnie said. “Thanks, that’s really smart. I’ll still need something to make the actual raft though.”

“I’ve got an idea for that as well,” Peggy said.

Peggy and Kellie took Donnie to an office belonging to one of their colleagues to show him a table they thought might work as a makeshift raft. It was a coffee table, low and stained walnut brown with four standard legs. The top of the table was long and shaped like an ironing board or a surfboard, pointed at one end and wide at the other. Donnie lifted it from one side. It seemed lightweight but was wide enough to support him, he hoped.

“Roberts won’t like us giving away his table,” Kellie said.

“I think there’s bigger problems out there at the moment, even Roberts can see that,” Peggy said.

“Thank you, I have no idea if this will work but I appreciate it,” Donnie said. “If I run into people I’ll let them know you’re here, in this building. And if you give me phone numbers or whatever, if I get to a working phone I’ll pass a message onto whoever you want.”

Donnie carried the table out to an open area outside the law firm’s conference rooms. Rain kept sleeting across the windows but they gave him some light to work with. He recovered the empty water cooler jugs from the break room as well, four of them, and found a roll of duct tape in a janitorial cabinet. Four jugs didn’t seem to be quite enough so he went upstairs and hunted around a few other offices. He didn’t find any more building residents but he did find another couple of empty jugs.

Over half an hour Donnie attached the empty water jugs to the top of the lightweight table, which would be the underside of his raft. He used the entire roll of duct tape, there didn’t seem to be any point in saving it and he was worried the water might make some of the stickiness wear off. The six jugs were practically mummified in tape and thick, grey bands of it crisscrossed the underside of the table. Even so, with no other reinforcement, the jugs were a bit wobbly. Their openings were all sealed. He hoped the half-dozen would be enough to keep him buoyant. This plan was insane, he kept telling himself. He knew how ridiculous and dangerous it was, but he couldn’t sit around and do nothing when the flood hadn’t gone down at all.

Donnie dragged the makeshift raft downstairs. Floodwater lapped against the stairwell leading into the second floor. It smelled like sea salt. Donnie set the table down and squatted on the damp carpet, squinting across the flooded level. It was another open plan office like Donnie’s firm. The water would have come halfway up Donnie’s midsection if he’d tried to walk across it. Several windows were broken and trash floated in the water as desks, chairs and toppled cubicles created reefs and islands. The raft floated high atop the empty water jugs.

Returning up the stairs, Donnie went back to the maintenance closet where he’d found the duct tape and checked it for anything else he could use. He found a broom with a large, bristly head he figured he could use as a paddle, and a plastic rain slicker. It was still raining outside and unavoidable that he was going to get wet but he might as well hold it off as much as possible.

Back in the stairwell, Donnie stripped off his jacket, shoes and socks, and rolled the legs of his pants up. The leather shoes and restrictive jacket were just too impractical. Seeing no better option, Donnie folded his jacket and placed it along with his shoes, socks stuffed inside, on the stairwell landing above the waterline. Donnie imagined coming back to this same spot in a few months, once the water had receded and recovery was underway, and finding his shoes and jacket there in the exact same spot, musty and ruined but undisturbed.

Carrying the broom, Donnie carefully stepped into the water and climbed onto the boat on his knees. He half-expected it to immediately wallow and sink. The table rocked dangerously from side to side, spilling more flood water over the edges, but Donnie found the centre on his knees and kept it upright. The cooler jugs disappeared almost entirely under the surface but were enough to keep Donnie and the raft from sinking. He gripped one of the table legs, sticking upright on the raft, to stay steady. The raft was already drifting into the flooded office, bumping against half-sunken objects. The ceiling was low enough that Donnie wouldn’t have been able to stand up straight on the raft even if he’d wanted to.

Awkwardly, Donnie negotiated the broom around to use as a paddle. Every movement, however, made the raft rock and flounder. He crashed into cubicle walls jutting out of the flood. Soggy papers and office detritus swirled around the table. Holding a table leg with one hand, Donnie tucked the handle of the broom under his other arm and dipped its bristles in the water, using it like a paddle so he could steer.

Paddling with the broom, he negotiated his way through the flooded office to the broken windows. It was harder than he’d anticipated. Outside, rain fell in sheets. Donnie wore the yellow rain slicker he’d taken from the maintenance closet though, and he tucked his chin to his chest. Ducking beneath the broken shards of the window, he pushed his way free of the building.

Donnie’s makeshift raft immediately started to pitch and twist as strange currents bullied it once it was out in the open. In spite of the buoyancy of the empty water jugs, he almost lost his balance and toppled overboard. Rain splattered his raincoat and got inside the collar and sleeves, chilling him. Donnie braced with his knees and paddled against the current to get some control. Even though the raft seesawed, he quickly gained some equilibrium and confidence. The water wasn’t draining back toward the ocean. It was almost like something was forcing it to stay in place, swirling, the original tide already unnatural and unexpected. Donnie pushed the raft around in a wide circle.

Looking down through the water created a weird sensation. Mostly it was too filthy to see the bottom but at times Donnie could see wrecked cars, streetlamps reaching up toward the surface like talons, traffic lights and rubble. It was like being on a magic carpet ride. First floors of all the surrounding buildings, including many stores and restaurants, were completely underwater. In some places, debris floated so thick you couldn’t see the surface. Bits of plastic and wood, plastic bottles and trash, furniture, pieces of cars, and bodies. Donnie saw his first corpse spreadeagled in the water, facedown. A cream jacket billowed around their shoulders. Donnie looked away quickly but then spotted a second and a third floating among an island of trash.

“Oh, God,” Donnie said. “Dead people, they’re probably everywhere. In the water, in the cars, the buildings. I’d better not go overboard.”

Donnie’s shoulders started to burn from the unfamiliar exercise. He glanced back at the Phipps building and to his dismay he realised he hadn’t gotten very far. The gleaming, rain slick windows of the building gazed down on him, empty. The broom was a lousy paddle and currents pushed and pulled him. Brushing some debris aside, he kept rowing. In spite of his yellow raincoat, his pants were soaked and he felt cold and wet, especially his bare feet.

Something rippled through the water, drawn to the meandering raft. Pale tan, and swimming faster than Donnie’s weak paddling. Claws hooked the lip of the upside down table and the creature pulled itself onto the raft. It crawled up the table leg behind Donnie’s yellow-clad back. With a pair of curving stingers, the creature’s tail arced up behind it. The same sort of crablike creature that had nearly stung Donnie in the parking garage, although he’d failed to spot it.

Donnie heard a clicking behind him, just over the sound of the rain hitting the roof of his coat. He turned carefully so as not to rock the boat. Confronted by the strange critter now clinging to the top of the table leg behind him, for a few moments all Donnie could do was stare. The crablike creature seemed to stare back, although Donnie struggled to tell if it even had eyes. Its pincers clicked and its strange tail, curved up behind its back, waved slightly.

“What the-, what the fuck?” Donnie said.

The creature scrabbled back down the table leg and darted forward. Donnie had never seen anything quite like it. It had a head like a horseshoe crab, a curved, halfmoon shape with tiny black eyes buried in folds in its carapace, but its body and tail were long and segmented like a lobster or a pill bug. Laid out flat, the crablike thing would have been almost a foot long. It scuttled after him on six spiny legs. Its claws were small but looked sharp, but the stingers on its tail was what really caught Donnie’s attention. Shaped like a horseshoe, two stingers branched off the sides of the thing’s segmented tail and met in the middle, clacking together in anticipation.

Donnie let out a yell of surprise, backing up into another one of the table legs. With the lack of distributed weight, the table wallowed dangerously. It was only the water jugs and the table’s surfboard shape that kept it from toppling over. The crab scuttled toward one of Donnie’s exposed feet with surprising speed. Acting on instinct, Donnie swept around with the wet broom and smacked it. The creature flipped off the raft, spiralling back into the water and landing with a splash.

“What the hell was that?” Donnie said.

Donnie peered over the edge of the raft where the animal had landed. He could see the pale shape righting itself through the dirty water. It was a kind of sandy tan in colour with purplish markings. A couple of hard-shelled flippers unfolded from where they’d been tucked under its tail and started paddling. It swam deeper and shot underneath the raft. Donnie’s table was spiralling now, and it crunched into a drift of floating garbage.

Donnie had never seen anything like the crablike creature. Even if it did seem like an amalgamation of several other sea creatures there was something alien about it. He supposed it must have washed in with the tsunami. Its sandy colouring would help it blend in shallow waters. It had been surprisingly fast out of water, however. And its aggression had taken him completely by surprise. He hadn’t even thought about smacking it with the broom, he’d just reacted. Now that he had a moment, Donnie thought about how weird it was that such a small thing would go out of its way to attack him. He wondered how dangerous that pair of stingers on its tail actually were.

Something clicked behind him again. Donnie spun around, back to the centre of the rocking raft. The crab was back, crawling over the garbage he’d crashed into and clicking its claws together. It hopscotched over the trash, bobbling in and out of the water, and scrabbled onto Donnie’s raft. Its stinger rose over its back, coiled and ready to lash out. Donnie shouted and swung around with the broom again, smacking the crab into one of the table legs but not knocking it off the raft.

More movement behind Donnie. A second crab had climbed onto the upturned table and darted at him. He had no idea how deadly their stings could be. That a single injection would be enough to cause his lungs and heart to seize, strangling him from the inside, but the threat they represented was obvious given their resemblance to oversized scorpions. He wasn’t about to test just how threatening. Before Donnie could react though, the second crab attacked his yellow raincoat. Its claws snipped easily through the tough plastic. Donnie pulled away and went to kick at the crab, but his foot was bare. The crab’s stinger lashed out and nearly caught him by the ankle. Still stunned at the animal’s aggressiveness, Donnie wedged the broom under the crab and yanked up, flipping it. It sailed back into the water, upside down, but righted itself and immediately started to return to the raft.

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Donnie spun on the first crab. The crab lanced forward with its stinger, the two halves snapping inches from Donnie’s wrist. Donnie drew back for a moment and then lunged, grabbing the crab by the tail. It was surprisingly heavy, its armour apparently dense, and it swung back and forth as he picked it up. The crab snapped its claws, trying to catch him. Its spiny legs wheeled in midair. Up close, Donnie could better make out the pale purple markings down the side of the crab’s tan shell. He couldn’t study them long, however. Before the crab got a hold on him, he threw it as far as he could.

“What are you things?” Donnie yelled.

Panicked, Donnie started stabbing his broom back in the water and paddling as hard as he could. The raft wheeled away from the floating garbage island into a clearer patch but Donnie wasn’t moving fast. The rain lightened but was still falling and slowing him down. Surrounded by office towers and other flooded buildings, he couldn’t see an obvious escape. The mall he’d been hoping to reach was more than a block away.

Footlong shapes moved through the water. Donnie spotted not two but three of them now, the crabs circling the raft with their flippers powering away. Donnie felt genuinely afraid. When he’d thought about the risks of braving the floodwaters before setting out, nothing like this had occurred to him. If he’d even considered animals a threat, it would have been maybe a displaced shark like in some bad movie, not these persistent little monsters. He paddled harder but couldn’t outrun them.

One of the crabs surfaced, pincers nipping at the empty water jugs that supported the table. Donnie raised the broom and brought it down on the crab, shoving it back below the surface. Another crab tried to climb the other side and Donnie did the same again. As if looking for an opening, every time they were pushed back the crabs kept circling. Donnie stabbed the broom down again and again and a strained laugh actually slipped out of his mouth. It was like he was playing some demented game of whack-a-mole. His raft was floundering, however, and not going anywhere while he fought them off. He couldn’t keep this up forever. Their numbers had already gone from one to three and maybe there could be more on the way, drawn by pheromones or some underwater clicking signal Donnie couldn’t hear, and they were so weirdly determined. Donnie’s thrusts into the water became more and more crazed as he feared what the crabs’ stingers could do and what they wanted with him.

As soon as Donnie saw an opportunity, he dropped the broom for a moment and grabbed one of the table legs. He wrestled with it, twisting. Clearly he needed a weapon besides the broom. A squeaking noise came from the base of the leg. Donnie kept twisting and quickly unscrewed the leg, stiff at first but easier as he kept turning. The crabs circled. Another one of the creatures came up behind Donnie and climbed the table. The table leg came free, leaving only a long screw jutting out of the surface where it had been.

“Go away! Get away!” Donnie said.

Donnie swung the table leg around like a small baseball bat. It cracked against one of the other table legs, just above the crab. The crab kept coming and Donnie swung again, hitting it and sending it spiralling into the flood. He thought he might have injured a couple of the creature’s legs.

A second crab came up behind Donnie, stinger raised. He threw himself backward before it could reach him. One end of the raft lifted out of the water and it tipped as if about to keel over. Donnie flailed to right it before he went overboard. If those stingers were dangerous as they looked and he ended up in the water, he realised he could be done for. The crabs were a lot faster than him in the water and he’d have a lot of trouble getting back on the raft wearing his raincoat. They would be able to stab and claw him repeatedly and if they were truly venomous, they would kill him. Fortunately, he managed to right the raft and it splashed back down in the dirty floodwater.

The second crab paused for a moment, clinging to the wood while the raft floundered. As the table righted the crab shot toward Donnie again. Tiny, black eyes glittered against its tan shell. Donnie was off balance but managed to bring the table leg down like a hammer. The makeshift club cracked the crab’s shell and flattened it against the wood. He hit it again, harder. It kept trying to get back up but he hammered at it until its shell cracked and splintered, spilling a bluish liquid. He caved in its head and seemingly killed it.

Donnie looked around him in the water again. The remaining two crabs circled. As he watched, the crabs dove deeper and swam away. They seemed to sense he was too much trouble.

“You’d better fucking run,” Donnie said.

The makeshift club was dripping. The smashed crab lay in the middle of the table, stingers flat behind it. Donnie prodded at the creature but it didn’t move. More blue blood pooled under the dead animal. Donnie took a few moments to study it but he’d already taken in most of its shape, its halfmoon head and hard-shelled body. His eyes were drawn to the markings he’d only glimpsed down the crab’s side. They were purple against the tan shell but very pale, more of a faded lilac. What got Donnie’s attention though was that they seemed oddly even and complex. They looked like letters out of another language, Japanese or Russian, stamped in a perfectly straight line like a serial number. They were definitely a part of the shell itself though, not drawn on top of it, and the thought that someone had marked the animals in some wholly alien language for identification of a kind was ridiculous.

With a sudden surge of disgust, Donnie swept his club around and pushed the crab off the side of the raft. It left a smear of blue blood on the wooden surface. Too late it occurred to him he might have wanted to keep the broken body as proof of the strange encounter. As soon as it hit the water it sank rapidly out of sight. Donnie took several deep breaths, calming himself until he could think straight again.

~~~

The sound of rain pounding their balcony was maddening. Alessa sat on the couch, fretting. She had the blinds for the living room open even though it meant she had to watch the omnipresent rain. There was still no power and the weak sunlight was all the light she had. The lamp she’d taken from the hall closet was on the coffee table but she had turned it off to save batteries.

Even though their apartment building was miles inland, the floodwaters were two or three metres deep down below and refusing to retreat. Their parking garage and the first floor of the building would be ruined. Alessa and anyone else around these parts would be stuck unless they had a boat or a helicopter to get them out. They needed to wait on a rescue, if rescue was coming.

All night Alessa had been hoping to hear from Donnie. Anxious, she could only pray he was staying safe at his office. Her back was aching, along with her feet and the rest of her joints, and she was exhausted. In spite of the disaster, Alessa had tried to go to sleep early the night before knowing there was nothing she could do to control things. Listening to the rain, staring at her silent phone, she’d slept only a couple of hours. Alessa had never felt so useless in her entire life. It was a feeling that, to a lesser extent, she’d been dealing with since having to go on maternity leave. She wasn’t built for sitting around at home doing nothing even if she knew, intellectually, it was the best thing for her and the baby right now. Alessa didn’t find satisfaction in being a housewife, cooking and cleaning. She was depressed. Donnie and her both wanted the baby, and had planned for it, but being pregnant was far harder than she’d imagined. It felt like she’d been reduced to nothing but an incubator, watching her body bloat and distort, this little miracle playing kickball with her organs and physically draining every bit of strength. The disaster had just highlighted emotions that were already there. Now, her apartment was literally an island, cut off from the rest of the world.

A knock came from the door. Alessa had been so deep in thought that for a few moments she hadn’t heard it, in fact she wasn’t sure if the knocking hadn’t been going on for a while now.

“Hey! Wait a minute, sorry, I’m coming!”

Holding her stomach, Alessa rocked to her feet. She wore a terry cloth bathrobe over her pyjamas, and padded through the apartment in thick, pink socks. She couldn’t move quickly and had to repeat herself as her visitor knocked again. Undoing the locks, Alessa opened the door.

“Oh,” Alessa said. “Sorry, I thought it might be-, I thought you might be my husband.”

The man in the hallway gave her an easy smile. Alessa recognised him from around the building, and thought he might have worked somewhere nearby. She would say hello and make conversation with him in the elevator sometimes but didn’t think they’d ever gone as far as an introduction.

“Hey, not a problem,” the man said. “Alessa, right? It’s Harvey, Harvey Morgan.”

“Right, of course,” Alessa said.

Alessa pulled her bathrobe across her chest. The man, Harvey, was tall and built well, brawny through the chest and arms with the look of someone who worked out in the fresh air. Handsome, he had a full head of hair and neatly trimmed beard. No one else was with him. The hallway was dark but he held a flashlight pointed at his feet.

“You’re here alone then?” Harvey said. “Some of us, well, we’ve got some people going through the building and checking on everyone, seeing that they’re okay. How are you, are you alright?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m alright. And yes, I’m here by myself. Donnie, my husband, he was stuck at the office last night when it happened.”

“Crazy, right? I mean, it’s insane,” Harvey said. “A tsunami? Were you watching the tv before it happened? And the power went out? Nobody knew it was going to happen, it’s just like all of a sudden, there it is, on top of this storm that’s still happening.”

“Crazy is right.”

Harvey’s eyes were drawn to Alessa’s protruding stomach. Alessa covered it protectively. Her back was already aching from standing up and she was self conscious about being in her pyjamas in the middle of an emergency. Self conscious that Donnie hadn’t come home to be with her last night.

“I’m sure some of this flooding is down to the rain too, like, we would have flooding anyway just not as bad, even without the tidal wave,” Harvey said. “Anyway, we were just checking if everyone was okay. Do you have food? Water? Is there anything else you need in your condition?”

“God, I don’t even know, really, with everything going on-,” Alessa said. “I hadn’t-, I mean, we’ve got food and water, a normal amount, I should be fine?”

“Taps aren’t working as well as electricity. You probably knew that.”

“Yes, I found that out last night.”

“People aren’t really prepared for something like this. How could anyone expect it, you know? So, the others and I, we were going to pool people’s resources, you know? Each according to his, or her, need? Doesn’t mean we’re going to start taking people’s stuff but if there’s anything you do need, food or whatever, I’m in apartment thirty-seven. Come downstairs and I’ll try to sort you out?”

“Thank you, I’m sure I’ll be-, well, actually, I don’t really know if it’s going to be alright or not. I appreciate that.”

Overwhelmed, Alessa felt tears pricking her eyes and went to brush them away. Stupid hormones, she cursed herself. Harvey reached out and put a comforting hand on her arm.

“Hey, it’s okay, don’t mention it,” the man said. “The elevators don’t work of course but we’re propping the emergency exit doors open on every floor so people can move around freely. Do you have a flashlight, too? Batteries?”

“Yes, I’ve got those, thank you,” Alessa said.

“No problems, we’re all in this together! Remember, apartment thirty-seven, anything you need.”

“Thank you, I really appreciate it.”

Harvey’s hand was still on her arm. Alessa gave the man a weak smile to assure him that she was okay. He nodded and moved back.

“Well, alright, I’ll check in with you later,” Harvey said. “Lots of people to see!”

Smiling, Alessa closed the door on Harvey as he moved on down the hallway. Returning across her apartment, she just wanted to get off her aching feet. Rain showered the balcony, endlessly.

Harvey definitely had a practicality to him, and Alessa supposed that would be a considerable advantage in a situation like this. Perhaps she wasn’t as alone as she’d thought. She and Donnie hardly knew any of their neighbours but it was times like that that caused people to come together. Instead of sitting down like she wanted to do, she tried to take some of Harvey’s practicality onboard. Heading into the kitchenette, Alessa took stock of what she actually had in terms of food and water.

Firstly, Alessa got a mixing bowl and put it under the kitchen tap. Turning the handle, the spout coughed and sputtered out what was left in the pipes to fill the bowl about halfway. Alessa put it aside as maybe something to wash up with, or an emergency backup. Next, she checked the fridge. She had been avoiding opening the fridge to keep the cold in until the power came back on. The fridge had milk, a little bit of juice, and a couple of bottles of water. For food, there was some leftovers, bread, eggs, a bit of salad and an old jar of pickles among some other assorted condiments. Of course, without power she couldn’t cook anything and could only eat what was available cold. Alessa started pulling things out of the cupboards and lining them up on the countertop. It wasn’t too bad, they had cereal, pasta, cans of tuna, and a few other things, some tinned fruit and a bunch of snack foods. Much of it didn’t need cooking. She would be okay for food but what she had to drink wouldn’t last as long. Now that he had offered, Alessa wondered if she should ask Harvey for some water. If he and his friends were truly practical, they might have come up with a way to start capturing the constant rain outside and making it safe to drink.

Alessa wanted to get off her swollen feet and spare her poor back. Before she did though, as if taking stock, she wandered back through the rest of the apartment. Rain hammered against the windows in their bedroom and the baby’s room. Boxes holding the baby furniture were piled in the middle of the room. A cheap, plastic toolbox that Donnie had bought to put the furniture together, with a hammer, screwdrivers and a wrench, sat precariously on top of some of the boxes. Alessa stroked her belly protectively.

“Just get home to me safely, Donnie,” Alessa said. “That’s all I care about, just be safe.”