Free The Perseid Collapse by Steven Konkoly

thought, the top of a young maple tree shook and dropped out of sight beyond his backyard neighbor’s six-foot privacy fence. By the time the sound of the tree’s death reached Ed’s ears, he had figured out what they were up against.
    “Get upstairs right now!” he barked at his wife, who reacted immediately, dashing past him for the center hallway.
    Charlie glanced at him with a seriously puzzled look. Beyond Charlie, Ed saw the wooden privacy fence disappear, replaced by a solid wall of water. He didn’t stick around long enough to see Charlie’s reaction, but based on the steady stream of profanities catching up to him in the hallway, he figured that his friend had never moved faster.
    Ed caught the banister and swung himself onto the stairway, making room for Charlie, who had closed the gap quicker than Ed had thought possible. Both of them paused to look over the railing just as the wall of water hammered the back of Ed’s house, snapping the railings on his deck and exploding through the screen door.
    “Get out of there!” said Charlie, pulling him by the arm up the stairs.
    A powerful torrent of muddy, debris-filled water slammed against the front door and quickly filled the foyer in a swirling eddy of dirty foam that lapped against the bottom stairs. The volume and speed of the water terrified Ed. In the next five seconds, he watched the water rise halfway up the door, showing no signs of slowing down. Two of his kitchen chairs rushed down the hallway half-submerged, piling up against the door momentarily before breaking loose and spilling through the foyer. The rest of his kitchen furniture had already streamed past in the initial onslaught. Somewhere below, he heard glass shatter over the incredible roar of the unending flood plowing through his house. His wife appeared from his son Daniel’s bedroom next to the stairs.
    “You have to see this!” she said, with a look of sheer disbelief.
    Ed hesitated, not wanting to take his eyes off the rising water below him. Half of the staircase was submerged.
    “Dad! The whole neighborhood is flooded!” yelled Daniel from the same room.
    Ed stood up, feeling slightly unsteady. “I’m sure Linda and the twins are fine,” he said to Charlie.
    Charlie continued to stare at the floodwaters below. “They were still sleeping when I left,” he replied, nodding absently.
    Ed joined his wife and two children at the rightmost, front window of his son’s room, nearly falling to his knees again. A surging mass of murky brown water covered the ground as far as he could see, carrying large branches, pieces of fencing, plastic garbage bins—anything that had crossed its path since striking the shoreline. The maple tree that normally blocked his view of the Sheppards’ house had been knocked into the street, providing his only direct view of the tsunami’s effects.
    The Sheppards’ front door had been blown inward by the force of the wave. Water poured into the previously shattered front windows, likely creating the same effect he’d seen inside his own home. A quick, nearly inescapable flood. Water continued to push up against the house, creating incredible pressure along fifty feet of solid frontage, but he didn’t detect any obvious signs of structural failure. He estimated the tsunami’s height to be between five and six feet.
    Over a mile and a half inland, the initial wave had retained enough energy to topple young trees and pound open doors, but lacked the punch to collapse homes—so far. Water continued to rush through the neighborhood at an alarming rate, and Ed remembered reading that tsunami waves rarely traveled alone, and the first wave wasn’t always the largest.
    “What do you think?” asked Samantha.
    “I think we’re lucky we don’t live on the water. I can’t imagine what happened to Higgins Beach,” said Ed.
    “Good God,” she mumbled.
    “Is my house still there?” asked Charlie from the bedroom doorway.
    “I can still see the roof.