Free Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page B

whipped in the wind and current. 
    There were people in the street, men and women standing about like simple idiots in the downpour, shouting, some running, but not back indoors.
    And then heard it, the rumbling thunder growl past thunder, past even the terrible whirl and roar from his waterspout nightmare. The earth trembled earth beneath his feet, the floorboards and walls and window panes of the depot resonating with sympathetic tremors.
    Run, Thomas, run away.
    One, two quickened heartbeats, and it rolled into view, very close, fifty feet high and filling in the valley from side to side, an advancing mountain of foam and churning rubbish. Every stump and living tree and fence post between the town and the dam, ripped free, oak and birch and pinewood teeth set in soil-frothy mad-dog gums, chewing up the world as it came. 
    Run, Thomas, run fast. She’s coming.
    But there was no looking away, even as he heard footsteps and someone grabbed him and tugged roughly at his shoulder, even as he pissed himself and felt the warmth spreading at his crotch. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a barn roof thrown high on the crest before it toppled over and was crushed to splinters underneath.
    Too late. She’s here, Tom. She’s here.
    And then Lake Conemaugh and everything it had gathered in its rush down to South Fork slammed into the town, and in the last moment before the waters reached Railroad Street and the depot, Tom Givens shut his eyes.
     
    Beneath the red sky, he has no precise memory of the long walk down to this particular hell, slippery cantos blurred with shock and wet, does not even remember walking out onto the bridge. There’s only the dimmest recollection of lying on the depot floor, face down on window shards as the building pitched and yawed, moored by telegraph-cable stitches; window shards and the live coals spilling from the fallen stove – steaming, sizzling in the dirty water, a grey-black soot shower from the dangling pendulum stove pipe; dimmer memories of the pell-mell stumble through the pitchy dark, leaf-dripping, hemlock slap and claw of needled branches, and at some point his left arm has stopped hurting, and hangs useless and numb at his side; he recalls fall ing again and falling again, and unseen dogs howling like paid mourners. A nigger boy, sobbing and naked and painted with blood the sticky-slick color of melted tar, the two of them staring down together at the scrubbed raw gash where Mineral Point should have been,
    “Where is it?, asked Tom Givens. “Tell me where it’s gone.” 
    “Mister,” the nigger boy replied, “the water just came and washed it right off to perdition.”
    and his eyes followed the boy’s finger and howling dogs like mourners and 
    “Mister, your arm is broke, ain’t it? Sure looks broke to me.”
    There is nothing else, simply nothing more Tom Givens can remember. Above him the sky is furnace red, and he sits alone on the bridge. Sandstone and mortar arches clogged with the shattered bones of the newly dead, South Fork and Mineral Point, Woodvale and Franklin, Johnstown proper, the flood’s jumbled vomit piled higher than the bridge itself. Boxcars and trees, hundreds of houses swept neatly off foundations and jammed together here, telegraph poles and furniture. Impossible miles of glinting barbed wire from the demolished Gautier wireworks, vicious garland strung with the corpses of cows and horses and human beings.
    And the cries of the living trapped inside. 
    And everything burns.
    Tar-black roil, oily exhalation from the flames, breathed crackling into the sky, choking breath that reeks of wood smoke and frying flesh. Embers spiral up into the night, scalding orange and yellow white, and vanish overhead, spreading the fire like sparkling demon seeds. 
    Around him, men and women move, bodies bend and strain to wrestle the dead and dying and the barely bruised from the wreckage. And if anyone notices that he makes no move to help, no one stops to ask