SERENITY- By Sam Berlin
  
Serenity   
The little town of Serenity sits on a curve in the river. The crystal-clear water flows swiftly, smoothing the pebbles, pitching and bubbling as it does. A large rock, known locally as Beth’s stone, steps out into the flow. It is named in tribute to the wife of the original settler of the claim. A pool lies down-water in the lee of Beth’s stone, where the natural curvature of the rock has created a little sheltered spot. Paddlefish used to rest there during their migrations. That was before the dam. Now, it’s home to a school of sauger. 
The river talks, so say some of the older residents; although the dam has largely silenced her. The town has a new deli and diner called Mable’s, at the corner of First and Cedar. It’s the only thing to have changed in years. The few local stores still sell everything the home could need, often with second or even third generation owners. The nearest mall is over two hour’s drive away. In thirty years- time, a local town meeting will vote against Walmart building an edge of town store and bowling alley, by almost three-to-one.   
Serenity has survived the death of coal mining in the area, albeit not without consequences. However, the people are resilient and resourceful, and the mining company had the foresight to invest in hydro power when the coal started to run out. Now the dam, two miles upriver but hidden from view by the cliff, as well as the beautiful forest surrounding the valley, have become something of a tourist attraction.  

Deb  
A steel walkway is anchored to the top of the dam with large bolts. It sways whenever it is used. The bolts are rusted and sheering.   Deb has been safety officer for almost four months. She took over from Cory who had been there for over a decade. His knowledge would have been invaluable to her, but he left under a cloud just before she arrived. Deb has been given his locker, in which she found only a blank piece of lined paper torn from a nondescript notebook. This is her first safety officer job. When they phoned to tell her she was hired, she had almost fallen off her chair in surprise.   
Deb has been itching to get inside the dam. The paperwork for the last checks Cory would have undertaken has so far been unavailable to her. Something to do with the files being in the wrong format for the new system.  
She has decided to get in via the access hatch under the wobbly walkway. She reminds herself that she will need to send her report to her contact at FEMA, mainly to take her mind off the precipitous drop to her left.  There is something about the rust on the walkway and the way it moans and creaks that has set her on edge. When Deb was a kid, she was a bit of a daredevil and heights had never been an issue before now. 
She reaches the inspection hatch and takes a brief look downstream. The access roadway on the left bank is empty. The curve of the river and steep scree slope hides the town from view. The other side of the river is thick forest. The infinite shades of green must be partly due to the way light permeates the valley, picking out areas here and there, spotlighting where it hits. It reminds her of Giant Stadium under floodlights. She cannot wait for her first autumn in Serenity. 
An eagle cries overhead like it has lost something.  
The other side of the dam is still, dark and cold and stretches back for miles. The patient, deep waters push against the implacable concrete, not quite to the lip of the dam wall, but not far off. She thinks of the power of water in newton meters. A sign can be made out on the bank of the reservoir in the distance, reminding people not to swim in the frigid waters. A string of buoys dissect the lake, parallel to the dam wall, about thirty meters out, like a red-bead necklace.  Securing herself to the access ladder by her safety harness, she pulls at the locking wheel. It is stuck fast. She carefully removes her rucksack, taking a spray lubricant from the side pocket and giving the bearing a soaking. A good yank at the wheel does the rest. The hatch opens onto a dark well that leads down into the bowels of the dam. She smells damp. She knows that around thirty meters down, there is a passageway allowing access both left and right within the dam. Further passages then lead down to the lower levels. The smell reminds her of the caves in Juarez, Mexico she visited last year. The air’s stale and cold, refrigerated by the water to one side.  
Safety protocol usually requires there to be at least two people for inspections. She takes one last look downstream as if to fix a happy picture in her mind, sighs, and clips herself from the walkway onto the ladder guide rail. She sits on the edge of the void and puts on her hard hat, turning on the light above the brim. Looking into the hole, she sees mould on the walls, but the steps themselves seem to be secure enough, if a little rusty at the joins. She tests the first rung by stamping down on it until the ball of her foot hurts. There is no give. Carefully she lets the rung take her weight before taking her hands from the rim. Slowly and with her usual care, she takes the steps downward.   

Tom, Mazie, Tammy, Chuck and Mitch   
The annual Serenity parade takes place on the first Saturday of June. The rains that pepper the town in late May tend to have subsided, but the temperatures are not yet high enough for the midges to really begin to bite.   
Tom and Mazie are impressed that their kids are still keen to be involved. Tammy and Chuck are now old enough to have their own opinions on pretty much everything and they had expected a fight, especially from Chuck. Tom has dropped the three of them off in town where they are helping decorate the LGBTQ ‘Pride’ float. Mitch has been a friend of the family for years and they are proud to support him and his new partner.   
Tom met Mazie when she came to town as the state’s beauty queen and rode a float down Main Street in the parade. His whistle caught her attention and less than six months later she moved to Serenity and married him. Tom played basketball at high school but was not good enough to make the first team. He still plays every Saturday, apart from when the parade is on.  

Governor Lamar and Ted  
The State Governor sells himself as a man of the people. However, in a rural state like his, he has learned from his many years in office, first in small town politics, and finally up to the top position, that listening to the whiners and moaners gets nothing done. This is not Washington. The poor, he firmly believes, are poor because of their own failures. God, through pastor Thunes, has been very clear. Wealth is God’s gift and therefore the wealthy are blessed.   His appointments for the day include a long lunch meeting with his friend Ted. Ted’s interests are in mining for anything God has provided and illuminating their godly country with his fossil-fuelled power stations and modern hydroelectric power plant.  Their lunch will provide blessed relief from the drudgery of day-to-day politics. He is even willing to join his friend for Serenity’s town parade the following day as a kind of benevolent gesture for the many millions Ted has poured into his re- election campaigns over the years. In return, he has taken great delight in scything through the regulation that those idiots in Washington kept trying to impose. 
In three years-time his re-election campaign will be his most difficult. He will win by a narrow majority after he smears his Democrat opponent for having had two separate affairs with her staff members. The Democrat candidate is unmarried. One of the other women happens to be living with her partner at the time of their affair, however.  

Deb  
Deb’s feet find the concrete of the passageway. The air has cooled to such an extent that each breath catches in her lungs. There is an incessant drip somewhere close by that is metronomic. It is somewhat disconcerting. Her torchlight falls on a patch of green mould that she traces across the wall with her finger. It meanders and splits like gangrenous veins. Deb opens her backpack, unaware that the light passing through the orange fabric casts an ethereal glow. Either side of her, the tunnels stretch away into pitch blackness. The dripping extends distance; echoing, like mirrors reflecting mirrors.  
She takes out her infrared thermal camera and damp meter and starts testing the dam wall. The readings are outside of the tolerances she would have expected, but not by too much. The thermal imaging reveals disconcerting levels of moisture concentrated in pockets within the superstructure, reservoir-side. The bleeps from the meter synchronise briefly with the drips from the water.  It pleases her in the same way that a voice on the radio occasionally appears to be delivered by the presenter on her muted TV.  

Susan and Mike  
In a small apartment in downtown Serenity, Susan and Mike briefly fight. They administer the postal donations on behalf of Pastor Thunes, a well-known television personality, sending out flat-pack collection boxes to individuals for them to later return full of cash donations. They never argue about the morality of what they do. They certainly do not believe the Pastor’s preaching that the more an individual donates, the more they will be rewarded in this life as well as the next.   This argument is over whether the letter Mike has just read out loud is the saddest they have ever received. Susan argues that the writer is too dumb to be ranked amongst their top ten suckers. Mike reckons Joe, who hails from somewhere in the backwaters of Missouri, should be in the top three. He goes over the facts again, pausing between each one; using changes in cadence and delivery speed like the Pastor does on his TV channel to emphasise his points: One, he has sold his pickup, which, two, he needs to get to hospital, and then, three, he sends the proceeds to the pastor. He’s done this in the hope that the pastor will provide alms for his urgent surgery. He doesn’t have medical insurance but has been sending what little he has to the pastor for years, waiting for his salvation. This is, Joe is saying through Mike, the first time he has ever asked for anything back. Before now he has always believed the words of Pastor Thunes, that when most needed, God will repay him. Without that help, Joe knows, he will die a slow and painful death.   
Susan remains unmoved. In the end, they decide to ‘bin it’, not ‘pin it’. That’s the rule. Either they both agree it goes on the wall, otherwise like the others, it goes in the trash. The pastor has instructed them that he doesn’t want to see any letters.  The small but impeccably clean window in the room looks upstream toward the bend in the river and their favourite hiking trail they take most Sundays after their brunch at Mable’s. Susan looks out the window as Mike fakes a basketball shot with the crumpled-up letter. They forget Joe within five minutes.  
Unknown to them, Joe has sent copies of his letter to Governor Lamar, whose secretary doesn’t pass it on, and also to a friendly agent in the FBI who is, that morning, taking it to his boss as evidence of probably cause in relation to his nascent investigation into Pastor Sherrod Thunes.  Later in the year as the autumn leaves begin to fall, Joe will take his own life. He will go out into his beloved woodlands and shoot himself in the head with his RM01 12GA shotgun. His remains will not be found for two seasons.     
Mike takes time between opening envelopes to post a message on Twitter wishing a plague upon the gays taking over the Serenity town parade. God will be revenged, he portends. He gets twenty- four likes before he’s finished the ledger entry for the money in the next envelope he opens. One is from the pastor.  

Deb  
Deb makes her way east along the rotting passageway to the next ladder down. The drips, when they hit her exposed skin feel unnaturally viscous, as if the water has mixed with the slime. For the same reason she avoids touching the walls. On one occasion she is forced to do so to steady herself as she slips on a patch of what she can only hope is mould. She wants to get out, but has decided that now she is here, she will do the rest of the tests first. There is a room at the end of the passageway that leads to an elevator and steps up and out via the side of the dam. The sooner she is done, the better, she reckons. Deb thinks about the sweet-scented breeze that drifts down from the pines in the woods above, directly into her apartment on the edge of town. From the fake grass roof terrace on her building, she has an amazing view of Serenity.   She tests the rungs of the ladder with her foot until she is sure they will hold and clips herself onto the guide pole. The edge of the hole is covered in greasy slime, so she is forced to sit in it. She can feel the cold damp under her. Before she can get moving it has seeped through her clothes, like a cold clammy hand fondling her buttock.   
She begins the climb down. It’s a long way and every twenty rungs or so, she has to unclip the safety line and re-attach it to the next pole. The descent seems to go on forever. Her head-torch lights up the rusted steel plates with faded black numbers that tell her how many rungs down she has left to go. The typeface is the same used on the memorial of Stephane Grappelli she saw at Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris, although she does not make the connection. Fifty becomes forty, where she re-clips her safety cable again. Forty becomes twenty. Not far, and a final change of line.   
On rung sixteen, Deb slips. Whether the rung itself is particularly slippery or not, it doesn’t matter. Her grip gives way and her hands bang off each rung in turn. She braces for impact, which comes too soon, and she hears a snap as her legs crumple under her. For a moment, she lies like a sleeping cat on the floor, scared to move, before the pain explodes in her ankle, causing her to scream. It echoes off the walls, muted only by the mould. As the last vestiges die away in the dark, Deb sobs. She knows it’s broken. Only the boot she is wearing is holding her shattered ankle in place.   
Bile rises and she feels faint. She tries to move her other leg out from the damaged one and cries out as the stabbing pain assaults her whole being. She throws up onto the wet concrete next to her. The pervasive smell of mould refills her nostrils as she drags herself into a sitting position, back against the wall. She has forgotten all about the clamminess of her buttocks.   

Sherrod and Jeanne  
Jeanne takes time to point out to Sherrod the fresh shoots of wild garlic and baby tree saplings pushing through the verdant greenery. When she does, Sherrod likes to bend down and rub a leaf between forefinger and thumb before inhaling deeply and holding the scent for a few seconds. He then gives a long, loud sigh as if he’ll never experience something so lovely again. To this day this sound makes Jeanne a little excited inside, thinking about that time they made love in some distant pine forest when they were young and reckless. It’s the only time he sighed that way with her.  Every now and then, the trees to the right open-up and grant them a generous view of the steep slope down to the meandering river below. From their high vantage, the river hardly whispers. They hear a car horn in the distance somewhere behind them. The sound ricochets around the valley.
Sherrod stops to point out where in the town their rented apartment is. It was recommended by a friend back home in Maryland, an avid walker who found the place last fall. Jeanne comments that the dam looks imposing from where they are. Their vantage point on the river bend gives them a view of both. The dam occupies a pinch point in the river, where the rocks on either side sort of come together making the dam much narrower at the bottom than the top. Jeanne says it reminds her of the art deco vase Sherrod bought her back from New York that time. Sherrod laughs at the comparison and says he can’t see it. He is impressed by how it seems to be inserted into the rocks themselves. It’s the highest dam he has ever seen and he is looking forward to photographing the view from up there later in the day. He takes a couple of shots now using the long lens. He does not yet know that these photos will be pored over by engineers and investigators  
They hold hands as they walk on, soon losing sight of the river, then the town and lastly the dam to the thickening woods. Jeanne daydreams of them having sex when they get back to the apartment, straight after a shared bath. 

Deb  
Deb knows that she needs to get to the room at the end of the passage. There’s an emergency phone in there patched to the control room. She knows that she cannot let herself go to sleep, and but has to fight the urge to do so. She has a packet of sugar-free gum in her pocket and takes out two tabs, chewing intently. The menthol flavour is invigorating. It also gives her something to take her mind off what she knows she must do. She places her rucksack carefully on her lap, before shuffling around, back facing the way she needs to go. Carefully she shuffles back on her ass, using her hands as levers to drag herself backwards. The pain in her ankle has reduced to a dull and consistent throbbing that has a faster rhythm than the dripping.  After about twenty minutes painful shuffling, she thinks that she must be nearing the doorway, certainly she has lost the ladder back to the darkness. Her hands splash back into a puddle that has a bit of depth. Had she found this without having broken her ankle she would probably be more worried. Her breathing, which comes in short rasps from her exertions, hides from her the sound of trickling water alongside the steady drips. As it is, she pushes through, no longer worried about the cold wetness that soaks the bottom half of her legs and up to her wrists.   
Her back hits metal. Feeling across, she finds the edge. She wedges herself by the shoulder into the recessed frame and pulls herself up by the access wheel. Once more or less upright, she’s able brace herself with her left hand and turn the wheel with her right until the door opens inward a foot or so of its own volition before coming to a halt with a rusted groan. She tries to squeeze herself through the gap but gets stuck. She pushes violently at the door, which gives suddenly, and she falls into the room. She lands on her left arm. Her hard hat comes off and skids across the floor, spinning slowly to a halt, the light eventually points back toward her almost accusingly. She lies there momentarily, unable to think about anything but the sharp pain in her wrist. 

Ben and Otto  
Ben has lived in Serenity for twenty years, but never owned, or even rented property. He lives under the only vehicular bridge that crosses the river, one of two bridges, the other being for walkers only. He’s found a new tarp. Dragging it from the old car lot over the far side of town has taken him most of the morning, so he feels he’s justified in having a sip or two.   
Ben is known to everyone and is as well liked as can be expected for a town bum. One year, the town committee even offered him an old mining hut for the winter, but he prefers his spot by the river. It’s peaceful and dry. The ruminations of water on stone give him a sense of enormous well- being. He’s Serenity’s only homeless person and can be charming in sobriety.    His dog, Otto, laps from a little pool at the river’s edge. It’s been a long morning compared to their usual short stroll to in front of the store. Otto used to be owned by a long-distance truck driver who would beat him at the end of the day. He’s scared to death of enclosed spaces and sudden movements. Ben has been nothing but a fine companion.  

Deb  
Deb makes a final push for the phone, which she believes is across the room on the wall somewhere. She cannot see because of the light from her helmet blinding her. She reaches out and manages to knock her hat so the light spins, briefly giving her a view of the room. It’s small and made of plain concrete. The phone is mounted on the wall next to a steel door on the far side, complete with another flywheel. She knows this leads to the staircase and service elevator that will take her up to the top of the dam and eventually to the hydro plant control room. She’s not worried about that. She just wants to contact the control room and they can get the medics to come down and fetch her.    
She shuffles as best she can across the floor. It’s much drier in here than in the corridor. It’s also not so smelly. She reaches her helmet and pushes it down onto her head. Deb’s sense of hope that she’d lost somewhere in the passage is revived. A handy old broom is used as a crutch to get her upright. Her left wrist is not good for much now, so she wedges the head of the brush under her left armpit and steadies herself.  The phone is an old-style Bakelite affair. It has been wired to call the control room only. Deb takes the receiver down and taps the reset a couple of times. She sighs in relief as she hears the ring through the speaker.  
A noise from the passage makes her jump. She cannot place it. It’s a long low groaning that somehow sharpens into louder snaps and grunts. It’s almost feral. At first she wonders if a family of bears have managed to hibernate in the dam. The room shakes and the noise increases, loud crashes mix with a louder growl. She hears a voice at the end of the receiver but does not respond. She has dropped it. Her heart beats faster, increasing the pain in both her wrist and ankle. She wants to close the door to the room. Seal herself from whatever is happening on the other side. She hobbles as fast as she can go across the room. The air from the passage is gusting strangely, wafting an acrid, mushroom-like smell past her in strong currents. She reaches the door and tries to push it closed. It resists at first, but the ground shakes and this somehow gets it moving. Slowly she closes the door, locking it with a twist of the wheel. The rumbles from beyond, whilst quieter, are punctuated with cracks and bangs. She thinks she hears water flowing. The room is vibrating quite violently. Deb gives the wheel another two twists. Breathing heavily, she can still make out unsettling noises beyond, but the weight of steel and concrete deadens it. She hobbles back to the phone and lifts the receiver to her ear. The voice on the other end has gone. She hits the reset, but the receiver is dead. Deb swears into the void in frustration, sobbing as she takes the weight off her bad ankle. The shaking seems to be getting worse.  

Amy, Roger and Ed 
Amy, Roger and Ed have all come in this morning. It’s not often that they see each other anymore. Cut-backs have left no time for knowledge-sharing. All they can do is keep the place running. Cory used to like the team to get together regularly. He said the damn had mood swings. He wanted everyone to understand the dam when they came to work.  Since Cory disappeared without so much as a good-bye, the new safety officer, Deb, has been kept away from the crew. She reports to the Board and they manage Amy, Roger and Ed. The lack of time together means that they have taken to communicating with each other through their own WhatsApp group. 
They have agreed to all come in to discuss worrying data from the dam wall sensors that has come in over the last few days. Roger has brought coffee and Amy doughnuts for her and Ed. She has made Roger a lemon and raisin muffin. They exchange their old greetings, pretending that nothing has changed. Ed comments on Amy’s new highlights and she suggests Ed might not be hitting the Stairmaster like he used to. He laughs and agrees. They share stories about their kids and agree to meet at the parade tomorrow for a social drink. Roger invites them both to join him for Thanksgiving. Amy is taking her family out of town, so declines. Ed says he will bring pumpkin pie. The trial separation from his wife has not improved matters, so he doubts she will be joining him this year. Both Roger and Amy are genuinely sad to hear the news.  
Roger, who is a little older, suggests they crack on. He reminds them of the readings he saw on shift yesterday. Low level seismic activity within the dam motion sensors. They had spiked and then a short tail of shaking tailed off. Very small, not enough to feel in the control room, but unusual. Not enough on their own to worry about, however, Amy says she saw a something similar during her shift. Similar activity that continued for an unusual amount of time. They both confirm that it is the same sensor. Ed says he hasn’t checked that particular sensor’s readings since he stared his shift earlier this morning but there have been no alarms.   They all go and check the gauge, which shows no reading. Ed presses the reset, but the expected jump on the needle doesn’t follow. Roger looks at Amy whilst Ed taps the dial like he’s in an airplane cockpit.   
They all agree this needs to be reported. If what has caused the tremors also caused the sensor to fail, there could be serious problems.   As Roger goes to sit at the computer terminal, the phone rings. Ed puts his coffee down and answers with a tentative hello. As he does, a tremor hits the room, strong enough for Ed’s coffee cup to topple to the floor. The dam snarls. Ed gives Amy a worrying glance and Roger stands. A smaller tremor makes Ed drop the phone where the receiver swings like a pendulum. All three make for the door. Roger has the presence of mind to hit the warning siren on his way out. It will warn workers around the dam but it’s not set up to alert people in the town.   
Roger knows of the Manning Equation for calculating the average speed of fluids in open channels. He knows that if the dam bursts, the water will hit the town in a little under five minutes.  

Sherrod and Jeanne  
Sherrod and Jeanne have made the top of the ridge and have stopped to take in the view. Jeanne also wants to give Sherrod the time to catch his breath. He won’t admit it to her directly, but she knows he finds the hills increasingly difficult to climb. In two years-time, his doctor will recommend an experimental heart operation that will extend his life by more than twelve years.   They have a great view of the Dam, looking slightly down on it. The black water of the reservoir stretches away from its edge towards the distant hills. The water basks in the heat wave. To their right, the eastern edge of Serenity can just be made out, peaking from behind the scree and trees on the far-side of the river bend.   
A sound like a thunderclap erupts from the dam. Jeanne, stumbles as the ground shakes. She snaps round to face it. Sherrod grabs her arm. They watch as concrete gives way and the torrent flows through the rent. The roar arrives a few seconds later. As the water gathers pace, it tears down more of the dam with it. A wall of white scores the land and tears up the trees. The noise reverberates around the valley, Jeanne covers her ears. Even from their height, they feel a cool wind blow past, rustling the leaves like waves, as it races up from the valley floor.   
Sherrod fumbles with his lens-cap, before managing to shoot off a long burst of frames at various focal lengths. The automatic focus and stabilising devices in the camera prove to be very effective.  Jeanne gets her cell phone out and curses at the lack of signal. She has the number for the owner of their apartment in Serenity. She desperately waves her phone in the air, but there is nothing. She sobs as the wall of water, driving rocks and trees ahead of it, reaches the bend. The snapping of tree trunks sounds like a raging wildfire. Jeanne thinks only about the poor people in the town around the bend. Before she retired, she was a manager of a large team that built military satellites for the US Government. They had been as sad to see her go as she was to leave.  

Ben and Otto 
Ben hears it first, the sound amplified by the bridge. It wakes him briefly. He looks down. The river seems to be surging oddly, as if agitated by something.  It reminds him of the ripples that were created when he threw stones into the pond near his old house back in the City.   He rests his back against his pillow made of off cuts of material he has collected, his chin falling onto his chest as he returns to his drunken stupor. He doesn’t notice Otto taking off at a dead sprint.   

Mazie, Tammy, Chuck and Mitch  
Mazie, Tammy and Chuck have taken a break from decorating the float. They have put in a good solid few hours that morning and Mitch has promised them ice cream. They are walking together to the town’s only ice cream parlour. Chuck asks what the noise is. It sounds like a landslide, he says. They all look up at the slopes of trees behind the town but cannot see anything that way. They agree it must be something like that, but further away. The noise seems to be getting louder, they think, but the river valley does funny things to sound, Mitch says.  

Susan and Mike  
Susan and Mike have stopped for a morning coffee. The window is open to let in the sunshine, although Susan would rather have the air conditioning on. A gust of wind runs through the apartment. The cries of birds taking flight from the woods passes unnoticed. The approaching commotion is masked by the cacophony of sounds on a Jerry Springer re-run.    Mike turns from the TV at a flurry of screams from outside. He turns to the window hoping to see something interesting. From around the bend, he sees the rising river driving debris ahead of it in a swarm. Their apartment is on the second floor, but the wave seems to be higher than that. Mike closes the window and runs for the door into the corridor, not bothering to inform Susan, who is still making coffee. 

Ben  
The first wave rides through the streets, not more than a foot of water, at a pace that knocks people off their feet. The second wave strikes the town two stories up, throwing rocks and whole trees indiscriminately at buildings, cars and people. The footbridge is torn from its anchors and flung downriver. The steel and stone of the vehicle bridge lasts a little longer, but slowly disintegrates, adding to the debris. Ben never wakes up. He would have been happy to know that Otto was not with him. 
His shattered bones will be found over thirty miles away in a week’s time. All his clothes have been torn from him, except one boot, which he appears to have glued to his foot at some point in the past.  

Mazie, Tammy Chuck and Mitch  
Mazie, Tammy, Chuck and Mitch are almost at the ice cream parlour. It is built on a bluff up near the edge of town with the woods behind it. They hear screams and see downtown deluged. Mitch grabs Tammy, lifting her as Mazie grabs Chuck’s hand and they run uphill. The road twists away past the garage, Mitch taking the chance to look behind. The wave rises high above them, an angry mess of water and wood. They are not high enough and he knows that they cannot outrun it. He makes for an apartment block that marks the far end of town. It’s new; seven stories. He shouts to Mazie. They sprint as fast as Chuck’s legs allow. At the door, Mazie starts trying buzzers. Car alarms mingle with the crash of the wave as it razes the town behind them. He takes a rock from the manicured Japanese garden and hammers at the glass of the door. It shatters on the second blow. Mitch manipulates the lock and pushes the children and Mazie inside. As they make for the stairs, he tries to secure the door, but the water slams through the remaining glass, slicing the flesh on his cheek and hurling fragments into his eyes. The tumult drags him down into the churning wake. Mazie pushes the children through the small service door to the stairs. She shouts at Chuck to take his sister up the stairs with her. They are to stay in the stairwell at the very top until she comes for them. She sets herself to brace the door against the weight of the coming water.    

Deb   
Deb screams to try to shut out the noise. It’s so loud it feels solid. The room reverberates, concrete dust falling from the ceiling. She drags herself away from the dam-side door toward the door up to the operations room. She hesitates, not knowing whether it is safer to stay sealed into the room or to try to make it up and out of the dam. She has no means of knowing what has happened but her educated guess is pretty much on the money. For a fleeting moment, she wonders if it’s a terrorist attack, but she has seen the evidence herself and knows this is not the case. She wonders if her predecessor had also known that this was coming.  

Governor Lamar and Ted 
Governor Lamar and Ted are enjoying a long lunch, using the time to catch up on matters as diverse as the upcoming elections, locking up militant environmentalists and how steaks from Texas beef are better than the Japanese Wagyu they are currently being served. The Governor doesn’t drink, but Ted does. He’s into his third glass of very good Californian Zinfandel and his friend is positively encouraging him to have a fourth.  
Ted’s phone is on the table. It buzzes aggressively. He glances at it, sighing, before picking it up. He listens intently and the governor watches redness flush across Ted’s face. Ted says nothing to the speaker and hangs up. He tells his friend that the dam has burst. No further details yet. The Governor then asks a few questions, which Ted answers as best he can. The Governor suggests that Ted needs to throttle any possibility of recrimination at birth.  
Ted gets back on his phone, calling his PR agent. The governor gets onto Twitter asking god to save the lovely people of the town to whom he is sending his prayers. He sends a second tweet stating that if there’s any link to terrorism, he will hunt down the cowards himself. Privately, he’s more worried about the effect this will have on the upcoming election. He decides quickly that he will throw Ted under the bus if he has to.  
Governor Lamar will tell his deputy later that he doesn’t think terrorists would bother with a shithole town like Serenity, although he refuses to back down from his initial tweet in the face of hurt liberal sensibilities.  Ted excuses himself and the Governor nods. He wishes Ted good luck and asks to be kept in the loop.   

Deb  
The door dam-side is jammed by the lintel which has slipped, bringing down part of the roof. The room continues to shake violently. The noise numbs her. The effect of the shaking combined with the sound reminds her of standing by the speaker at a Marylin Manson gig with her then fiancé. She feels like her heart will burst from her chest.  Deb drags herself across the floor to the rear door. Her ankle is throbbing with her pulse. Her wrist is a livid purple and swollen. She cannot move her fingers on that hand.   
As she reaches the door the lintel snaps and water is driven through the new hole, pushing her against the door with its power. She knows that unless she opens the door now, the weight of water will prevent her from doing so. She pulls herself upright and puts her weight on her bad ankle. The pain shocks her awake, driving even more adrenalin through her. She grabs the wheel with her right hand and loops her left arm through it, using the crook of her elbow to pull. By small degrees, the door eases open and she is able to squeeze herself through the gap. The weight of water tries to push the door shut on her and Deb has to force herself through. The rough edge of the door draws blood where it tears through her overall and bra beneath. The water is now at ankle height and flashing past at pace. The cold is an aphrodisiac.  
She manages to squeeze her damaged arm and leg out and the door snaps shut. The water, however, continues to flow, but from a different direction and she realises that there must be other breaches flooding this part of the dam. The water reaches her knees. It has a strangely antiseptic smell and an oily sheen. She hopes that the plant room is not damaged.   The words of her former fiancé, ‘it’ll be good experience’ come back to her. At the time, she didn’t realise he was looking for an excuse for her to mover further away. That little secret only came out via a misdirected text a few days before the Christmas just gone. 
The water is now surging around her thighs.  

Amy, Roger and Ed   
The three friends find it difficult to look at each other. They are pretty sure that Deb is down in the lower coms room in the heart of the dam wall. At least she was. A colleague from maintenance reported he had seen her enter through the top hatch earlier. They assume it must have been her on the phone just as the dam broke. They are standing on the side of the dam, where the wall is thickened to meet the edge of the ridge on the eastern side. Most of the western half has gone, eaten by the voracious deluge that dissolved it like a sugar cube drowned in hot coffee. The water thunders through the rent like a canal lock, cascading down, gravity forcing it unknowingly to seek equilibrium. A rainbow haloes the falls where the sunlight hits the mist of droplets surrounding the waterfall. Ed wants to get further off the dam, although they now can only feel the vibration of the water. Roger and Amy think that they need to at least try to reach Deb. If there’s any chance of saving her, they must. Ed argues that they don’t know where she would be and even if they could get to her, they would be putting themselves into the jaws of death. Roger is wavering, but Amy is determined to at least get to the eastern exit and see what shape the steps are in before they give up. Their section of the wall, she argues, appears solid and the lower water level makes any further collapse less likely. Ed challenges her on what has led her to that conclusion. She cannot answer. She is adamant, nonetheless, that Deb is only there because of the cost cutting they have been part of. It is their moral duty to go back. Ed eventually relents and Roger and Ed agree that Amy needs to get off the wall and report, whilst the two of them go back and take a look. They give her no promises as to how far they will go.  

Mazie, Tammy, Chuck and the Man 
Mazie makes the base of the stairs just before the water crashes through the door. It was the cries of Tamie and Chuck that forced her to leave her post. The water had been forging under the door, which hadn’t been designed to be watertight, and she had resigned herself holding back the worst of the flood for as long as possible to give her kids the best chance to make the top of the building. The proximity of their voices convinced her they had disobeyed her orders and could only have hidden around the corner.  
She takes the steps two at a time, her shoulder hitting the corner of the staircase through momentum. They are there, as expected. She grabs Tammy by the shoulder and screams at Chuck to follow, aware of the noise below She hears the door give way and a distant scream she hopes is not coming from the apartments above. Tammy shouts she cannot keep up, but Mazie cannot think about it. She has to get her higher.  
A door slams open and shut on the landing and she briefly sees a corridor with water pouring from an elevator shaft between part open doors. The blood in the elevator scene from The Shining comes to her unbidden. She had secretly watched the movie as a twelve-year-old, defying a direct order from her pop to do so. Mazie had nightmares about it for months after. A man, someone she doesn’t know, is shouting at her to get up the stairs. She looks around and cannot see Chuck. She screams and tries to give Tammy to him so that she can go back. Water washes under the closed landing door and she can gear it lapping at the stairwell. The man pushes her and Tammy towards the stairs up before heading down. Mazie can hear splashing as she turns the corner. Her sobs mingle with Tammy’s cries. She runs on, numb, hardly able to make out the stairs for her tears. 

Ted and Kent 
Ted’s PR agent thinks he is a good man. He takes pride in his work and has overseen Ted’s PR needs for over two decades. He was responsible for selling the reduction in jobs at the mines to the stockholders. Likewise, when the shaft had caved in, trapping over thirty men, eventually killing ten of them, he had spearheaded the campaign to reassure everyone that cost cutting had nothing to do with the accident. He still held some of the papers Ted had given him in his safe. The truth, he says on a regular basis, is whatever the public are willing to buy. He is a good man, he thinks, because he is good at his job.  
They have been watching TV Reports saying that Serenity has been wiped out. The local news team have promised to have a chopper on the scene within thirty minutes. The office is shaken. One of their team, a junior copy writer, has an uncle who lives in the town. He was going to go to the parade to see him and his float tomorrow. Two of the interns are in the kitchen trying to console him. He has not been able to get through to his uncle by phone or social media.  
Ted is on the other end of a conference call. Kent has his assistant in the room, a keen young man, willing to work for minimum wage to get the exposure before he goes back to college next year. Kent’s fingers are steepled under his nose making his head look like it’s some kind of impossible balancing toy. He is contemplating Ted’s last sentence. This is nothing to do with the cuts, he said.
Kent is thinking about how he can ensure the massage is heard loud and clear. The conversation back-and-forths: is anyone likely to whistle-blow; where are the weak links; who will investigate.  Kent stands and begins to pace. Firstly, run with the terrorism thing put out by the Governor. Spread the word through social media and friendly trolls. Let the press run with it before they get any facts. The dead cat on the table. Next, ensure that whoever is appointed to investigate is sympathetic to Ted and his operations. The Governor will assist here. Next, a list of the employees working on the dam to be provided and each to be interviewed, starting with the safety inspectors and engineers.
Finally, Ted will need to give Kent a fighting fund to pay for various immediate costs and there would no doubt be other matters that will come up that will need quick thinking to resolve.   And in case the terrorism angle didn’t wash for as long as needed, Kent advises they need to sow an additional seed of doubt. They settle on Cory. He would no doubt be found by the press anyway, so discrediting him now was key. The word would be quietly put out that he was fired after he was found to have been failing his duties. Of course, management were going through his papers and would get to the bottom of what he should have known. No stone would be unturned in the upcoming investigation. To make this stick, they would need to get to Deb as soon as they could and brief her. That was Ted’s first job. Kent would brief his team and the gospel according to Kent would be sent forth. 

Deb 
Deb sobs. The elevator must be jammed. The door to the stairs is locked or broken or something. Whatever she does, she cannot get it to budge. She hammers against it until her good arm is exhausted. Water is now beginning to swirl around her waist. It’s ice cold. She cannot feel either her shattered ankle or her broken wrist.  
She decides that come what may, she must try to let the world know what she found. She retrieves her cell and begins typing out in staccato sentences what she has found: the state of the walls, the lack of reporting, and the potential cover-up. Around her, the walls continue to shake and the water rise.  She includes the density values for the concrete, the water saturation results from her earlier tests and some visual observations that she thinks will be important for the investigators.  
She manages to type out a short message on her cell and attach the longer document. She includes a plea for the information to go to the FBI and not the management of the dam. She signs off by saying she does not blame him for leaving her and that she still loves him deeply. She presses send as the water swirls around her breasts. It is flowing faster now. She takes the waterproof casing from her rucksack and seals the phone into it. The water reaches her neck and her buoyancy gently swings her feet out from under her.  
She kicks to keep her head and arm above the water for as long as she can.   At the ceiling, she twists her head to get the last of the air and holds her cell face first to the concrete ceiling. She prays the message gets out and her death won’t take long. 

Roger, Ed and Deb 
They carefully make their way down the steps into the lower dam. It’s unnervingly quiet, so much so, they can hear their own breathing. This is in stark contrast to the noise outside. The steps are dry and the concrete looks fine, as if it had been poured only this year. They fight the urge to turn around at every step, but eventually they reach the door at the bottom. It’s shut. Roger listens and confirms that he can hear something behind it. Not a person, water, he thinks. They debate whether they try to open it. Roger suggests they don’t. He hammers on the door and listens. Nothing. Ed is getting anxious that they get out of there. Roger hammers and listens; then one last time, the same. He thinks that he can no longer hear water moving. They decide the risk of opening the door is too great. Had there been a response, then they would have taken their chances. They start their way back up out of the dam, trying to push down their fear; knowing that if they start to pick up the pace, soon enough they will panic.  
Deb, just as her lungs fill with water, hears the banging from the other side of the door. With the cold, the loss of fight and calm acceptance of death, it’s almost an imposition.    

Mazie, Tammy and Tom 
At the top of the stairs, there is a small doorway that must, Mazie thinks, lead onto the flat roof. She looks to see if there is any sign of water. The steps are dry and she can see light under the door. She decides to risk it. The door gives and cool air flows through the opening. The world is full of noise, none of it sounds like Serenity. Tammy is sobbing quietly. Mazie feels guilty at forgetting her and pulls her close, all the while looking anxiously back down the stairs for any sounds. The doorway looks out onto a blue sky of a late spring morning and the whitewashed concrete edge of the building stabilises her view, anchoring it.   Gently, she pushes Tammy up the last few steps and out onto the roof ahead of her. The air is unnaturally cool. The sounds of the world are unnatural. The stillness is unnatural. The fake grass that has been laid on the flat roof seems perfectly normal in the circumstances.  The white line of the building edge and the blue sky are interrupted by the wooded hills behind Serenity that hove into view as she comes out of her little shell. They are something she can grasp onto. Mazie and Tom used to hold hands as they walked through these woods, dreaming of owning their own house, of marriage, of having kids and a life together forever in this little idyll.   
She sits on an air conditioning unit and pulls Tammy close to her. Things seem to be quietening down. The only real sound is from the birds expressing their anxiety at the sudden changes to their world.  
The birdsongs intermingle, forming a natural cadence and structure that reminds her of the bells at her wedding. She thinks of Tom. She thinks of Chuck and bursts into sobs that physically move her. Tammy cries. Mazie holds her closer. She won’t be able to let her go again. She needs her to stay here with her. The birds take up her lament. 
Mazie’s phone vibrates. It takes a while for her to work out what the hell it is before struggling to get it from her jacket pocket. Through the tears, she sees Tom’s name flashing and fumbles to answer before he rings off. Her heart leaps at the sound of his voice. Tammy senses her mother’s change, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.  
Tom begins to fire questions. She cannot answer. She knows he won’t forgive her. His questioning gets more desperate and focussed. She admits that Tammy is with her. She won’t answer his questions about Chuck.  

Chuck and the Man 
The door to the roof slowly opens and the man from the corridor is there. In his arms is Chuck. Water drips from the ends of his limp, wet limbs. Mazie moans in horror at the sight. Suddenly, Chuck coughs and turns. As soon as he sees Mazie, he struggles to get free. The man gently puts him on his feet, and he scampers over, pushing against Tammy to get to his mom. The three of them close in and warm each other.   The man, himself soaked from head to toe, walks over to the roof edge to survey Serenity. There is not much left. The flood is receding, but still covers the low-lying buildings nearest the river; what’s left of them. Elsewhere, debris, trees, cars, boulders and bodies form dams and blockages in the streets. Windows are shattered. Everything is covered in a silt. Probably for the best, he thinks.  
The population of five thousand, he will later learn, has been halved in around thirty minutes of destruction. He hears a helicopter in the distance. The thrum of the rotor is no comfort to him. He breathes deeply. He knows that shortly he will begin to feel guilty about being alive. For the moment, however, he is happy to recognise that guilt only affects the living.  He listens to Mazie trying to calm the kids and speak to Tom at the same time. He has never met the family before today. He would have been at the parade tomorrow, though, so might have seen them there. It would have been no more than a fleeting glance, however. He looks back over the town.
Amongst the debris, a rainbow flag drapes over a car bonnet and lamp post that has been driven through the windshield by the deluge. He wonders whether he should unlike the tweet he read earlier that day about the ungodliness of homosexuality. He has nothing against them personally, although he wouldn’t claim to have any gay friends; it’s just that his pastor has always told him that it was a sin against the word of God. Until now, that had been good enough for him.  

Serenity 
Beth’s stone is eventually found seven miles downriver. It is moved back to as close to its original position as possible. However, given the changes to the river’s flow, it is twenty feet further up the bank than it was before. On it is inscribed the names of all who perished that day.   In fifty year’s-time an observant amateur fisherman will notice a small school of Paddlefish using the pool behind the stone as a shelter from the current.  

THE END