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“Thanks,” I said, handing a little fellow maybe three or four years old to a man I assumed was his father—but the man shook his head.

“Not mine,” he said.

“Whose? Who does this one belong to?” He was a red-haired imp with dirty freckles and a nose serving as a snot-faucet. He howled in my face as I held him up. “Who does this one belong to?”

Nobody answered, and everybody shrugged impatiently, because the elevator wasn’t rising and everyone wanted to get up, out above the water. The man I’d tried to pass the kid off on changed his mind and said, “Forget it, I’ll take him. I’ll keep him upstairs if I need to. Come here, little dude. ”

The little dude screamed, but I foisted him off anyway. Next. Next. Whoever’s next. Get on board. Room for one more, no, not the wheelchair—not that much room. You’re first on next round, though, I swear to God.

“Ma’am?” Harry addressed the petulant-looking, ancient woman in the chair. “How about you and I take the long way around. It’ll be fast, and you’ll have to hang on, but I can push you up the ramps. ”

“Up the ramps,” she repeated, and something about her eyes, and her reaction time, implied that maybe she wasn’t all there anymore. An Alzheimer’s patient? “But I just had a baby!”

“Not in the last sixty years she hasn’t,” somebody mumbled, but if the woman heard him, she didn’t argue with him.

“I’ll be careful,” Harry promised, then checked her all over to make sure she was all inside and not on the verge of toppling out at high foot-speed. Satisfied that she wouldn’t spill out at the first bump, he took hold of the rubber handles and began a hurried retreat towards the coiling car ramp.

I thought I heard her complaining, but then as he rounded the first turn her echoing, weedy voice dribbled down to the elevators. “Wheeee!”

Ping.

Elevator number two was open again. People began loading.

Nick appeared, with another parentless small child. “Someone said the parking garage, and oh, of course—it’s you. ”

“You have any better ideas?”

“Not at the moment, no. Not any more good ideas, anyway. Hey, does this little girl belong to anyone here? She’s asking for Mommy and I can’t find anyone matching that description. ”

“Bless her heart!” One of the grandmothers with three charges already put out her hands and took her. “Not one of mine, but if no one else claims her, she can ride with us. ”

“Excellent,” he said as he handed her off.

“What did you mean by not any more good ideas?” I asked, holding the doors open with my leg and my butt. “You said that like you’d already cashed one in. ”

“I did. Got on a cop’s cell phone to the TV station. The traffic reporter has his own chopper, and he’s on his way out here. The hospital only has the one, the cops don’t have any, and the feds haven’t yet figured out that they need more of them, that they need to start moving people instead of personnel. ”

“You kick ass, man. ”

“Tell me about it. He’ll be plucking people from the roof in ten or twenty minutes, tops. Probably less, if I know him. ”

“Doesn’t he need some kind of FFA permissions?”

“Probably. That won’t stop him, though. ”

A fresh pattering stomp of running feet and hollered orders went charging past the open area where the parking garage dumped onto Broad Street, and we all knew we were running out of time. On the upshot, we were running out of people, too.

On the downshot, the creatures were so close that I could hear them breathing again. I could hear them walking in that splashing shuffle, which slowed as it reached the edges of the water, but by this point the edges of the water were all around us and all over our feet, even there inside the garage.

And there was a crack of lightning followed almost immediately by an answering thunderclap.

“More fucking water” Nick swore, and nobody chastised him for saying it in front of old ladies and little kids.

And we were out of time, just like that.

The elevator numbers were sinking, and freezing, stopping and starting, but there were too many floors and we had maybe a dozen people left, huddled there. Together, we huddled, all of us and all of them—there was nothing else to do. The rest of them were hearing it too, the gagging, gasping, forced crush of air in the crumbled chests.

Not all of them knew what it was, though. Thank God.