Chapter 241: Flooded West.
The Flooded West
We walked.
Rain came down on both of us in a steady continuous sheet, soaking through my jacket within the first minute and not letting up after that.
My shoes were wet. My hair was wet. The collar of my shirt was wet in the way where it stuck flat against the back of my neck and stayed there. Everything is FUCKING WET!!!!
And somehow— weirdly, inexplicable— it was calming.... A plubopile something... I think I have that... yea...
I looked at Jisoo, she looked back.
I sighed and kept walking.
The western city looked like the rest of it at first— overgrown, cracked, the usual combination of nature reclaiming what people had abandoned.
Vines climbed the building faces the same way they had in the north, threading through empty window frames, pulling at cornices — (an ornamental molding around the wall of a room just below the ceiling...hardtoexplain.)
The rain turned everything into a deeper version of its own color, dark then darker... yea.
Green vines then more green, the sky above the clouds pressing low and heavy. I kept my eyes on the street ahead and let the rain keep coming and didn’t think about anything specific for a while.
Jisoo walked on my right, hands tucked into her uniform pockets, occasionally looking at something I wasn’t looking at.
Jisoo moved through the world with a kind of open attention— taking in things without already knowing what she was going to do with the information, which was different from the abusive version who was always three steps ahead of what she was observing.
I’d started noticing the difference in how they scanned the same space. Abusive Jisoo plans. 50/50 Jisoo just looked.
Then she stopped.
I stopped beside her.
In the street ahead, in the shallow puddle that had formed in a dip of the pavement, there was a fish.
Not a small one— maybe 60cm something, how would I know? Well, it was silver-scaled, moving with a lazy drift of something that had found a good enough deep water and wasn’t concerned with much else.
Normal, except for the part where it turned toward us and its eyes were wrong... Too large. Set at a human angle instead of the wide-spaced fish angle.
Dark irises, distinct pupils, tracking us the way eyes tracked things when something behind them was processing information...
Like... is this guy smart?
We looked at it for a moment.
It looked at us.
Then it jumped— full clear of the puddle, fins spread— and I caught a flash of the fin edges before we both moved, and what I saw there I made a decision not to think too hard about.
The fins were bleeding.
Not from an injury... it was from whatever the fins had become, dark at the tips, leaking something thin and dark into the air as it came back down.
We walked in the other direction without discussing it.
"Okay," I said, after we’d put half a block between us and the puddle.
"Okay," Jisoo agreed.
We did not address it further.
There was a silent mutual understanding that some things in this world were worth investigating and some things were worth walking away from, and a fish with human eyes and bleeding fins in a puddle fell cleanly into the NO FUCKING WORTH IT.
The water showed up properly about twenty minutes later.
First as a thin sheet across the pavement— barely worth mentioning, a kind of surface water that happened in any downpour.
Then suddenly, what the fuck... it’s DEEPER, filling the gaps in the cracked road first, then the lower sections between lanes, then the whole width of the street to a consistent ankle depth that we waded through without really taking it as a change until I noticed my feet were heavier than they should be.
Knee-deep came on gradually over the next few blocks.
The buildings around us were still mostly intact, still showing their lower floors, but the doorways were submerged to their middle sections and whatever had been at street level was gone under the surface.
I could see shapes through the murk— furniture, the corner of a desk, things that had floated and then settled as the water reached some spot and stopped rising.
Except it hadn’t stopped. It was still rising.... Yea, I’m fucking with you.
We were waist-deep before I called it.
"Rooftops," I said.
Jisoo was already looking up at the nearest building’s facade, staring, intensely. "agree agree... you’re right Hon."
"Or should I say Tight?"
"ಠᴥಠ What the fuck.?"
We climbed. Vines helped— thick enough to hold weight in this section, more established than they’d been further north, which made me think the flooding had been here long enough for the plant life to adapt to it.
I went first and pulled Jisoo up after, went inside the building and we found the rooftop access door and went through it and came out on top.
I walked to the western edge and looked out.
For a moment I didn’t say anything.
The city to the west was gone.
Or— not gone.
Still there, technically. But the ground floor was gone, and the second floor was gone, and in some places the third floor was gone, and what was left was the tops of things poking up from a flat grey expanse of water that stretched to the horizon and disappeared into the fog.
Rooftops in rows, some still square and intact, some at angles where the building had settled into the flooded ground unevenly.
Street signs with only their topmost section visible, the word underwater, just the pole and a few inches of sign blade above the surface.
Cars floating upside down, belly-up, some still in the positions they’d been parked when the water came, now just dark shapes barely breaking the surface.
Buildings with their lower eight or ten floors swallowed, only the upper section remaining above, windows still reflecting the grey sky, the architectural details of something that was still mostly structurally just very, very wet.... Woah...
Fog moved through all of it in slow layers, swallowing and releasing sections of the submerged city in slow slow...
"What the fuck," I said.