Chapter 1 - The Abandonment in the Dark
The midnight air in Cedar Rapids felt heavy, thick with the metallic scent of approaching rain and the underlying, earthen dread of the Cedar River rising past its banks. For hours, the storm had battered our suburban neighborhood with relentless fury, turning the asphalt into black mirrors reflecting the violent flashes of lightning. None of us—least of all me—understood the sheer velocity of the disaster until Dad kicked open my bedroom door at 4:17 a.m., his face pale and slick with sweat.
“Get up. Now. River’s over the road,” he barked, his voice cracking with a panic I had never heard before.
I threw on the nearest pair of jeans and a dark hoodie, my heart hammering against my ribs as I followed him down the stairs. The reality of our situation hit me before my bare feet even touched the kitchen floor: muddy, churning water had already slipped beneath the back door, soaking the linoleum and carrying stray leaves and debris across the kitchen.
Mom was frantically stuffing pill bottles, insurance papers, and birth certificates into a plastic grocery bag. My younger sister, Emily, stood near the hallway, sobbing hysterically while dragging her massive golden retriever, Murphy, toward his heavy-duty plastic travel crate. Murphy was whining, picking up on the suffocating terror in the room.
Dad glanced at his watch, his eyes wild. “We have three minutes. The bridge on 16th is already compromised.”
His pickup truck—a lifted Ford F-150 that usually made me feel invincible—was parked on the highest part of our sloping concrete driveway. Outside, the rain was coming down in sheets, visibility reduced to barely ten feet. Mom climbed into the front passenger seat, slamming her door against the wind. Emily dragged the crate toward the rear door, heaved it half-in, and then froze, her face going completely blank.
She turned around, pointing a shaking finger at the interior. “There’s only one seat left.”
Dad rushed over, looking from me, standing shivering in the rising water at the edge of the driveway, to Murphy, who was now whimpering inside the cramped crate.
Emily hugged the metal framework of the back door, her voice rising to a frantic shriek. “I’m not leaving him behind! He’s family!”
“Emily,” I said, stepping forward as the cold water lapped against my shins, “he’s a dog. He can sit in the truck bed. Throw a tarp over him, he’ll be fine.”
“In this current? In this storm? Are you insane?” she screamed, tears cutting clean tracks through the soot and mud on her cheeks.
Dad swore under his breath—a foul, desperate curse. Without another word of hesitation, he grabbed the crate, shoved it violently onto the back seat, and slammed the door shut.
I stood there, waiting for him to open the tailgate, waiting for him to tell me to jump in the back. Instead, Mom rolled down her window just an inch, the rain whipping inside.
She looked me dead in the eye, her expression terrifyingly detached, as if performing triage on a battlefield. “You can find another way.”
For a full second, my brain refused to process the words. I thought it was some twisted joke, a nightmare I was about to wake up from. “What?” I stammered, my voice trembling.
“Go with a neighbor. Walk up to the high school shelter on the ridge. We’ll meet you there,” Mom said, her voice clipped and urgent.
The water was swirling violently now, pulling at the hems of my jeans, rising over my shoes with icy malice. “Mom, look around! Everyone’s already evacuated. The street is completely empty!”
Dad refused to meet my eyes, staring straight ahead through the fogged-up windshield, his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were ghostly white. “We’ll call you the second we get signal. Just move uphill.”
And then, with a deafening roar of the engine and a spray of muddy water that soaked me to the bone, they drove away.
I stood completely alone in the dark street, the rain running in blinding sheets down my face, watching the red taillights of my family’s truck vanish into the swirling gray abyss of the flood. They had chosen a dog over their own flesh and blood. The betrayal burned hotter and sharper than the freezing water gripping my ankles.
That was when a pair of blinding headlights cut through the torrential downpour, stopping right beside me. A gray sedan idled by the curb, the engine humming softly. The driver rolled down his window. He was a man in his forties, wearing a dark waterproof work jacket and a faded baseball cap pulled low over his forehead.
“You trying to get out of here?” he asked, his voice surprisingly calm against the howling wind.
I hesitated, looking back at our empty, flooding house. Behind me, with a loud, sickening crack, our wooden backyard fence tore free from its posts and vanished entirely into the dark, raging current.
“Yes,” I said, my voice cracking.
“Get in. I’m heading north toward the ridge,” the man said, pushing open the passenger-side door.
Without thinking twice, I scrambled inside, pulling the heavy door shut against the storm. His name, he told me as he accelerated away from our sinking neighborhood, was Daniel Mercer. He explained that he worked in facilities maintenance at St. Luke’s Hospital and had been desperately called in for an emergency shift because the regular staff couldn’t cross the flooded zones.
I pulled out my phone, pressing the power button repeatedly, but the screen remained stubbornly dead—no signal, no service, completely severed from the outside world.
We drove through a maze of flooded side streets, Daniel expertly turning around twice where deep water had completely submerged the pavement and swept away mailboxes. Daniel seemed unnervingly calm—almost too calm for a man driving through a natural disaster—but he clearly knew which roads were elevated and safe.
At 5:03 a.m., we reached the outskirts of town, pulling up behind an old, abandoned gas station near Highway 13. The structure was dark, surrounded by towering pines that whipped violently in the wind.
Suddenly, without warning, Daniel flicked off the headlights, killing the engine entirely. The car plunged into absolute, suffocating darkness.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my heart instantly rocketing back into my throat.
Daniel didn’t answer right away. He stared intently into the side rearview mirror, his jaw clenched tight.
Following his gaze, I looked back through the rain-streaked rear window. A large, black SUV with its lights completely off had just turned into the gas station driveway, rolling slowly to a stop fifty feet behind us.
Daniel turned to me, his eyes wide and glinting in the pale dashboard light, placing a heavy, calloused hand firmly on my shoulder.
“Listen to me very carefully,” he whispered, his voice deadly serious. “If that vehicle approaches us or flashes its high beams, get down on the floorboards right now and do exactly what I tell you to do. Do not make a sound.”
By sunrise, the nightmare had shifted into something far darker. I was no longer with Daniel, and my phone had miraculously reconnected to the cellular tower, flooding my screen with fifty-two frantic, unanswered missed calls.
May you like
At the very top of the notification list, glowing brightly against the dark screen, was a fresh text message from my father:
“Please tell me you didn’t get in that car.”
