* * * * *
"Watch out!" Mrs. Goudeket yelled at Dick McCue. "Watch out!" The white
posts that marked the sharp left curve loomed big, too big, in front of
them. McCue twisted the wheel and stepped on the brake pedal hard and
fast. It was nightmarish to feel the rear of the car swivel around; it
was uncanny to see the road passing in front of him, defying all his
experience of perhaps a hundred thousand miles in a driver's seat. The
white center line flashed across his vision and then headlights glared
into his eyes; it was the truck that had been following them. The skid
continued for an interminable few seconds more; Sharon Froman was
screaming in the back seat. The rear of the car jolted down and McCue
and Mrs. Goudeket were thrown back against the seat as the front of
the car nosed up; metal crunched behind them. Then it all seemed to be
over. McCue took a deep breath, turned off the ignition and waited for
Mrs. Goudeket to skin him alive verbally.
She said, panting with relief: "I'm sorry I yelled at you, Dick. It
must have made you nervous so that happened."
He could have kissed her, hairy mole and all.
"If I'd been driving--" Sharon began coolly from the back.
"If your aunt had you-know-whats she'd be your uncle," said Mrs.
Goudeket tartly. "No remarks are required from you, Miss Elegant
Loafer." Sharon laughed.
"Both wheels in the drainage ditch," McCue diagnosed, "and we seem to
be hung up on the transmission."
"Can you get us out?" Mrs. Goudeket asked.
"No. But that truck's stopped. I guess we can get a ride."
Sam Zehedi laid his truck alongside the ditched sedan and got out.
"Anybody hurt?" he called.
"We're okay, thank God," Mrs. Goudeket told him shakily. "But my driver
tells me the car is through. Could you maybe give us a lift into
Hebertown? We'll be okay from there."
Mickey Groff got out--soaked again!--and surveyed them. "You two ladies
can fit in the cab with Mr. Zehedi here. The gentleman and I will ride
in the back."
"Will you take these, please?" Sharon said, opening the rear door. "Put
them in the back. Careful, that's a typewriter. And _very_ careful with
that one--it's manuscript. And these two are just clothes."
Groff wrenched open the double rear doors of the truck and put the
four pieces of luggage inside. In the darkness there were crates and
cartons. At least they'd be able to sit up instead of crouching on
a metal floor. As the driver of the ditched car passed before the
headlights he saw he was surprisingly young and obviously shaken by the
accident. "Get in," he said. "It might be worse."
Mrs. Goudeket, puffing, pulled herself up the high running board of the
truck and slid in beside Zehedi. Sharon followed, and slammed the door.
The truck moved cautiously off.
In the dark rear of the truck Groff and McCue had found milk crates to
sit on. "You all right?" Groff asked the young man. "Didn't bump your
head or anything?"
"It wasn't that kind of stop," McCue said. He began to laugh. "I'm from
Springfield, Ohio," he said between chuckles.
"Damned if I see the joke, fella."
"Well, mister, in Springfield, Ohio, damn near every spring, the little
old Springfield river that runs through town begins to rise and rise.
After a week of this it spills over the banks and the sandbags they
put up every time at the last minute and downtown Springfield is a
lake. Then everybody swears and gets the canoes and rowboats out of the
garage and goes boating glumly around until the water subsides. Well,
mister, I came east to college because I was tired of Springfield and
its foolish floods, and I run into this mess!"
Through the windows of the double door Groff saw they were passing a
small frame building with gas pumps in front. It was dark. "Cigarette?"
Groff asked steadily. He didn't want to encourage the kid's
near-hysteria.
"No, thanks. But the difference is, in Springfield it's slow and steady
and this is happening fast. And when it happens fast, sooner or later
a crest comes along and then it isn't one of those years when you just
go boating around; it's one of the years when you head for the goddam
hills, and fast."
"Then you think we're going to have a flood crest?"
"Hell, yes. Thirty, forty feet of water smashing down through the
valley. And when it comes, mister, we'd better not be there. Because
those things don't leave much behind."
They were stopping. "Now what the hell," said Mickey Groff.
There was a scratching at the double doors, and one of the women from
the ditched car climbed in. "Grand Central," she called. "Change for
the downtown local. Follow the green lights for the shuttle to Times
Square."
"You're cheerful enough, Sharon," the kid told her. "What's the matter?"
"Why, it's nothing at all. We're just out of gas, nothing else." She
turned to Mickey Groff. "Mr. Zehedi's compliments, sir, and would you
like to help him scout up some petrol?"
* * * * *
They found the blacked-out gas station after squelching for a couple of
interminable minutes through the sopping night.
"I thought I had plenty of gas. How'd I know we'd be driving all over
the valley? You said just a quarter of a mile down the road and--"
"Shut up and let's see if we can get in," Groff ordered. Zehedi's
whining was getting on his nerves.
There wasn't a soul in the station. Not even a night light. Probably
no power, Groff thought. That meant no burglar alarms in case they
couldn't find an unlocked window--though hell, he thought wryly,
wouldn't it be nice if a State Police car did come screeching up?
"Up you go," he told Zehedi, clasping his hands to receive the toe of
Zehedi's foot.
"Locked," reported Zehedi after a moment.
"Break it open. With your elbow. Try not to cut an artery. Then when
you get inside see if--" He jerked his head aside as glass tinkled
around him.
"Sorry," apologized Zehedi.
Groff heaved and got him through the window and went back to the front
door to wait. He hoped to God Zehedi would be able to unlock something
from the inside. They would never get the women through that upper
window, and he didn't want to have to break the front door. They would
need every bit of shelter they could get.
Zehedi appeared, tried the front door from the inside (you idiot,
didn't you see the padlock? Groff thought sourly), and made shadowy
gestures toward the rear. He was yelling something, but you couldn't
hear a gunshot in the crashing rain. Groff got the general idea in any
case, and stumbled around to the back. Zehedi let him in.
The grocer was all keyed up. "That looks like a fuse box," he
chattered. "Didn't see a switch for the pump motors, but it ought to be
right around there someplace, wouldn't you say? And there're some soda
bottles in case we can't find a gallon jug. All we have to do--"
"Go get the others, Sam," Groff ordered. He took his fingers off the
light switch he had been trying, though he had known what the results
would be ahead of time. "No electricity, you see? So the gas will just
have to stay in the pumps for a while."
He closed the door behind the grocer and looked over their refuge.
It wasn't much of a filling station--a couple of pumps out in front,
an ice chest full of soft-drink bottles and a little serving counter
inside. They had come in through a sort of storeroom, and there was the
chance that there might be something useful in there, but it had looked
like nothing more promising than the usual collection of old newspapers
and three-legged chairs. There was a rickety stair to, presumably, a
couple more storerooms.
Groff made thrifty inventory of what was on and behind the serving
counter. A coffeemaker--no good. No power, though a cup of good hot
coffee would have helped a lot. Easily a dozen cardboard boxes which,
opened, proved to contain peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers and
Orioles. Candy bars and bags of peanuts beyond their utmost powers of
consumption--they might get rickets, but they wouldn't starve. But
water, though--the place didn't seem to have any.
Scratch water. They could get by on the soft drinks, or if worse came
to worst, there certainly was much more water than they needed right
outside.
A telephone! He looked through all his pockets without coming up with
anything smaller than a quarter; he slipped the quarter into the slot
and there was a mellow bong to acknowledge it. There was nothing else.
He held the receiver to his ears for a good two minutes, but the line
was dead.
And then he found the greatest treasure of all, a box of stubby
short candles, under the serving counter. Evidently power failures
were not unheard of around here--something, Groff reminded himself
automatically, to keep in mind when he talked to the burgess tomorrow.
_If_ he talked to the burgess tomorrow. There was something there that
would need thinking about, too, but the thing to do right now was
locate some matches. His own, of course, were more than merely wet--the
striking surface had soaked right off them. But there was a cigarette
machine, and fortunately a mechanical, not an electrically operated,
one.
By the time Sam got back with the others Groff was busy by candlelight,
trying to brace a Coca-Cola easel display to cover the window they had
broken. Sharon Froman was hugging the briefcase full of manuscript.
* * * * *
You don't last thirty years in the resort business unless you know how
to take your mind off your troubles. Mrs. Goudeket, sipping delicately
from a quart bottle of black cherry soda, chattered gaily: "Soda pop!
Three years I haven't had a drop of soda pop. Now don't tell on me,
Dick. If Dr. Postal ever finds out, he'll kill me next time he comes to
the hotel--" She choked on a swallow of the soda.
Dick McCue sat on one of the counter stools, sneering at the spectacle
Sharon Froman was making of herself over that Mickey Groff. All the
same, he admitted to himself, it was a real championship performance.
She hadn't had two minutes alone with him, but McCue was willing to
bet she could tell to a nickel how much a transistor manufacturer, in
process of expansion from forty employees to a hundred, was likely to
have in the bank. And there wasn't a chance in the world that this
Groff knew what she was doing. This was the no-nonsense Sharon, the
hard-working first-week-of-the-season Sharon, who was right by Groff's
side when he needed a hand, who didn't ask foolish questions, who kept
calm and ready. And to think that as late as Monday night, sneaking
back to his own room, he had begun to think--
Sharon and the manufacturer came in from the storeroom with another
load of newspapers and dumped them. "All right," said Groff, "I guess
that's all we'll need. They won't be very comfortable, but maybe
somebody'll come by before morning."
"I don't expect to sleep much anyhow," said Sharon cheerfully. She
tapped Zehedi on the shoulder. "Move your feet a little, will you, Sam?"
The grocer started. He picked his feet up so she could spread the
newspapers, and when she was through she had to remind him he could put
them down again. Five years down the drain. Five more years of hot dogs
and that muddy water they call coffee. I'll be thirty-five years old,
and still three or four years to go--
Everybody felt it at once.
"The wind?" ventured Mrs. Goudeket. They stared at each other; the
building seemed to be vibrating slightly.
Dick McCue, suddenly white, stumbled across the floor and pressed his
face to the door.
"Take a look!" he yelled. "That ain't wind!"
Even in the blackness, they could see the river that had been a road
outside, the comb of current around the gas pumps, the surging water
that lapped at the door.