Free Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea by Jonathan David Kranz Page A

woods.
    But being in the basement by himself did not give Ethan a welcome sense of freedom. Instead, he felt a last-man-standing kind of anxiety, a lonely apprehension that there would be no one remaining above when he had completed his work below. He tried to shake off the feeling and concentrate on the tree, placing each part in the tall, narrow box that, when his father carried it upstairs, had always formally announced the beginning of the Christmas season in the Waters home.
    In keeping with his father’s instructions, Ethan stacked the ornament boxes in the far corner of the basement opposite the oil tank; they stood precariously, like an old man with a bit of a stoop. He steadied the large Christmas tree box on an overturned milk crate that would keep the tree above water should the basement flood. It never had, but neighbors on either side of the Waterses had gotten wet basements after unusually rainy springs. Dad had seen the pump hoses rolled out of their basement windows and then made it a rule to put anything important at least a foot above the basement floor. “Planning ahead,” he had said, “is what saves you in a disaster.”
    The coils of lights came next. “On the emergency shelves,” his father had said. On the east side of the basement, he had knocked together some scrap lumber from work to build a wide set of shelves that held items the family might need in an emergency — a hurricane, a winter storm, or an overloaded electric grid that had simply collapsed from exhaustion. Many of the provisions made sense — canned soups and raviolis, bottled water, a first-aid kit, a twelve-pack of toilet paper — but others seemed odd: What would they do with the bottle of hair gel on the shelf? Why the cans of frosting or the disposable razors? And the baseball bat — the last line of defense against unnamed what, zombies? Ethan picked it up, testing its heft. He made a few low, loose swings, semaphoring the bat by his knees. He pictured rising waters that might stream by his ankles then rise up his legs, the bat useless in his hands. He wondered, would it float? If Jason had found a bat like this bobbing in the water, would it have been something to cling to? Or just another thing he’d have brought down with him?
    After clearing the tree, Ethan scanned the floor for strays. Broken ornaments had left a sheen of silver that twinkled as Ethan moved around the basement searching for survivors. There were fragments everywhere, under the shelves, against the staircase footings, even under the oil tank.
    With a few minutes of stooping and pecking, Ethan — an anti-Santa — had gathered most of the largest pieces into a white trash bag. Just as he was about to twist up his bag, he saw a glint under the oil tank. Reluctantly, he lay on his stomach and looked underneath. A plastic angel was just within reach, and he grabbed it, but that wasn’t what gleamed. He probed farther, touching a flat edge he thought must be the wall. But it couldn’t be; it had an edge, a corner, beyond which a silver ornament shaped like a teardrop remained outside Ethan’s grasp, even when he shifted himself parallel to the tank to shoulder under it. To Ethan’s surprise, there was much more space behind the tank than it appeared.
    He got to his feet, brushed the dirt from his shirt, and approached the tank by its narrow side; a stack of boxes concealed the gap. He disassembled the stack from the top, careful not to trigger a cascade tumbling down on himself. Pulling aside the top box, the head, exposed nothing but black air. But after the second box, Ethan saw a chrome clamp light, like a photographer’s flood lamp, clipped to the rafters. Strange. With greater curiosity, he removed the third box and faced a steel folding chair. The last box on the floor he brushed aside with his foot.
    Ethan’s heart raced, as if he had just stumbled upon the evidence of an