Hating him, his wife and himself, hating the car and the water, Arthur Chesbro opened the door; more water swirled in, seat-high. "Let's go," he said gruffly. "Five minutes and we'll be in that filling station, grocery, whatever it was."
He gingerly lowered himself into the water; it came to his waist and chilled the bone. "I'll lead," he said. "Come on."
Surprisingly there was a strong current; he had thought it would be a sort of pond. Instead it was a temporary catch basin for the living water that was thundering down from the heavens on its way to the river and finally the sea. They were simply in a low spot where water was detained for a while before rushing on. The same cubic yard of water could wash out a power line running along a high ridge, wash out a dirt road lower down on the hill, pour through a farmhouse lower down smashing the windows and depositing stinking mud on the floor, short his battery here, trapping the three of them, and still rage on with a long career of ruin before it. It was the secret of the flood's destructiveness.
Chesbro inched his way forward, taking care to keep the current abeam of him, feeling for the hardtop with his feet. The burgess and his wife held the skirt of his raincoat, one to a side.
He stepped on something slippery and crashed face-forward into the muddy water; it was the burgess who, with unexpected wiry strength hauled him upright again while he floundered.
"Fish or something," he sputtered.
They trudged forward, dead-tired after fifty feet of it, the current and the sullen resistance of the water itself, but the level was dropping about them as they climbed the rim of the basin in the land.
In ten minutes they kicked through inch-deep water to the road surface, wet only with the pelting rain. Silently they splashed along the road.
"Wait," the burgess said abruptly. They stopped. He still had Chesbro's lighter; he crouched and snapped it alight. "The water's still rising," he said. "Following right along behind us." As they stood there it lapped at the soles of their shoes.
Ten more interminable minutes—hard walking, their weight increased fifty per cent by their sodden clothes—and Mrs. Chesbro said: "There's the light."