A hand was on his shoulder.

“Travis, where are you going?”

The voice was one he hadn’t heard in a while, a drinking buddy from midtown days.

“Corrina and Darren,” Travis managed.

“Travis, listen to me.”

The hand held him more firmly then or he would have fallen over.

“Get cross-town to the piers. They’re bringing in every goddamn ship on the sea to get people out. I just spoke with someone at Grand Central and it's no use. They’ll be running trains out till we’re under water and they won’t get all those people out. But I got my cell phone, I was able to get on the Internet. The bridges and tunnels are jammed. People have started abandoning their cars, and they’re blocking everything. The president has mobilized the Navy, private ships, everything, and they’re all going to the piers. That’s the last hope, Travis. I gotta go.”

Travis’s head was down by his knees. He reached into his pocket although he knew he wouldn’t find his inhaler. His fingers dug into the palm of his hand as his chest burned with each asthma-constricted breath. How many minutes was he wasting? He forced himself upright and blinked his eyes clear. He put one leg in front of the other and began jogging again. After a few hundred yards he crossed 2nd. The security door of the building was broken, the lobby was quiet.

Both elevators waited on the ground floor. He pressed the button and got in.

In the elevator, the quiet scared him. He wondered if the doors would open, and everyone outside would be dead. Finally the elevator stopped and opened. He ran down the hall and banged the door of 1115.

“Jesus, it’s you,” a tall, thin man said, opening the door.

Travis pushed through him.

“Where’s Darren?”

“Dad!”

The boy swept into his arms and Travis closed his eyes, forgetting about the man standing over him, as he held his son so tight he knew he was hurting him but he couldn’t stop. He tried to slow his breathing down and heard his own heartbeat in his head. He released his son and stood up.

Corrina Adamson stared at him from the bedroom door.

Travis looked from her to the man and said, “I tried to call but the network was overloaded.”

“We’ve been trying to get a line too, trying to find a way out,” the man said.

His name was Gerry Adamson. He stood half a foot taller than stocky Travis. “The highways are jammed. I was able to get a text to my cousin and he’s been stuck for two hours on the Turnpike. But now I can’t get anything else, the Internet connection keeps going out. We were about to get the car and take the Tappan Zee.”

“The West side piers,” Travis said. “I ran into someone coming up here, he told me the only option left is by sea. They’re evacuating from the West side.”

“By sea?” Corrina said. “How can we escape a tsunami by sea?”

“I don’t know, Corrina, but if the president is ordering ships to pick up refugees, I would think they know what they’re doing.”

Gerry rejected the idea. They had a car. They didn’t have to risk everything on a desperation play.

“We don’t have time to argue,” Travis said. “You should be gone. Obviously you didn’t like any of your options too much. The bridges are a mess, people are leaving their cars. Let’s get the Hell out of here.  If the piers plan doesn’t work out, we can find a way to Jersey from there.”

“I think we should go to the piers,” Darren said.

The three adults stopped and looked down at him. At six years old, he held his face in an aping of serious adult concentration.

“Okay, let’s go," Corrina said.

“What if there’s no way out from there?” Gerry asked.

“It’s just a few blocks,” Corrina said. “We can go there and still have time to try something else.”

She smiled at Darren, and he smiled.

Travis picked up his son’s backpack, a cartoon design covering the back of it. “Is this all your luggage, Darren?”

“Yeah,” Darren said.

“Let’s go.”

He picked up his boy. Corrina and Gerry each grabbed a large travel bag from a matching set.

By the elevator they waited, Travis glancing at Corrina and Gerry clutching their wheeled luggage by the extended handles. Travis had nothing save the jeans and sneakers, the sweat-soaked long-sleeved t-shirt and his light jacket. He didn’t think of that, though.  He thought only that he had Darren, which was then the only thing he cared to keep in this world.

4

November 19, Manhattan’s citizens gave up their hold on the levers of the earth. The stock exchanges, the banks, the boardrooms and media centers, all were empty. The action was on the street, and in the homes. The flood was an event that cut across all life stories. Everyone was doing something when it came.

The current in the streets flowed west, to the ships. To the last way out. There were faces looking out windows above them all, resigned to their fate, or skeptical of the gravity of the situation, or who just hadn’t heard and didn’t know how to ask and didn’t get what was going on at all.

Jogging straight up 51st St., Travis felt disembodied looking up and seeing the faces above. Another day, he might have been throwing himself through fire to rescue those people. Today, he hurried past, leaving them to death. For a reason he wasn’t sure of, he was leaving them now.

He had worked abroad as a paramedic with the Red Cross in Sudan and Haiti. He’d faced massive damage to the population and had worked knowing he could only save a few of the many, but he’d worked to save that few. Why not here? His son was on his back as they jogged. That was why. He was no hero. When it was expected of him in his work to help, he did so. When fleeing was called for, he fled.

All he had in his understanding of what was behind all this was the one word spoken by President Crawford: tsunami. Millions of New Yorkers fleeing their city, and he imagined few had even taken the time to discuss what was happening, how this could be possible, whether it were all somehow a mistake.

He was aware of keeping together with Gerry and Corrina as they ran, their talk clipped by expressions of disbelief, but Travis’s mind followed the buildings and street corners he passed, cutting across the heart of town past Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan’s studded body of concrete and steel, ancient masonry and mirrored glass.

As he voiced assurances to Darren, he thought that the stage his life had been played on might be destroyed forever. His would be the last generation to inherit four hundred years of Manhattan. Scenes of his New York life passed through his head. The Park. The school on Delancey and dad’s shop just down the street, the bar on Bleecker, the University, the hospitals, the rugby pitches, the nights out, Woody Allen and the Godfather movies, and Sasha’s party in Little Italy where the most beautiful girl in New York gave him her number. On this stage, his son’s life had begun, too. The set designers had something new in mind for this next generation.

At 11th Ave, the crowds were dense, blocking the view of the Hudson River a block away, but the concrete canopy of the Manhattan Cruise Terminal could be seen framed by the sky. Travis spotted several National Guardsmen watching with hands on rifles, doing their jobs while he fled without even his pager. The crowds were moving forward, pouring into the terminal buildings by the thousands. There were cruise ships visible beyond the terminals. Looking south, Travis saw a mismatched array of large and small craft docking and disembarking from Pier 86.

It was like this at the dozens of piers down the West Side, around New York, down the East Coast. Many ships were freightliners, and the crews were frantically removing the massive cargo containers to make space while armed Guardsmen held the crowds back. The White House had learned from hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and had mobilized as aggressively as the most powerful nation on earth could. From New Jersey’s naval station Earle came the AOE supply ships that were now filling their holds with New Yorkers – the USS Arctic, USS Supply, and USS Seattle.