Chapter One

Gideon Freeman slipped out of the shadows like a big cat and the fat man never seen him coming.

He come up behind the guy real quiet and slid a blade into his back slick as greased gorilla snot. Grabbed his rifle and the ammunition he was carrying and shoved him off into the river without making so much as a peep of noise. The body’d be washed downstream, would float by right below Cricket Bottom. Not that it mattered. If them Zion Village folks was right, the whole world was gonna be under water tomorrow and wouldn’t be anybody interested in figuring out what happened to the man who’d had the poor judgement to step out to the edge of the dock by the elevator to relieve himself. Gideon caught him in mid-piss.

Gideon had lived inside Matheson Caverns for going on seven years. It was his place, he owned it way more than them Mathesons did, by virtue of squatter’s rights. He lived here. Well, so did Taylor Matheson.

Gideon smiled.

And Gideon was glad of that, yes, he was for a fact because Kelly Jo sure knew how to grow tomatoes! Gideon had nicked some fat, juicy tomatoes off her plants a couple of days ago and they was fine indeed. He hadn’t never tried none of that hydroponics stuff his own self. Didn’t have to if other people near you did and then didn’t keep a proper eye on the crops they raised.

Gideon had moved in the winter after Astral Day. Being a poor man of simple means, he hadn’t had anything as fancy as solar panels to provide electricity for his home. When the power failed, the grids or whatever the hell they were crashed, he was outa juice. And the winters in Kentucky, as he’d learned in his previous fifty-six years, were cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. So he’d figured to stay in the cave for the winter, where the temperature, once you got far enough away from the entrance, was a uniform fifty-eight degrees year round. He had planned only to stay that first winter, until he got his feet under him and figured out how to make it outside. But he found he actually liked living in the cave. It was peaceful and quiet in there, that was for sure, and if there was one thing Gideon Freeman valued in this life it was peace and quiet. And the part he thought he’d hate, that would drive him nuts, being closed-up like that … Why shoot, he got used to that in no time, didn’t mind at all. Now, he did need to get out every now and then, more in the beginning than now, but still he needed to see the sun and the sky, look at the stars, smell the flowers, hear the birds, that sort of thing. But his necessary forays out to get supplies nowadays provided all the outside time he needed.

Once he decided to stay permanent, he figured to make a nice place for himself. And he certainly had plenty of real estate to choose from! Matheson Caverns consisted of more than 250 miles of explored tunnels — probably twice that many nobody’d ever seen yet. The tunnels wasn’t stretched out straight, like you could drive a train straight through or nothing like that. They was all twisted up like spaghetti, circling and looping and dead ends. The caves was on five different levels. Thinking of it like it was a big skyscraper, he had himself a penthouse apartment in the top floor.

Pretty fancy, and he’d made a nice place for himself about three miles in from the Joppa Ridge natural entrance. He’d picked a spot in the cavern where the roof was only about ten feet high, like a house sort of, and about the dimensions of the place he’d had on the ridge, built with his own two hands, with the help of his boys of, course. When they were still coming around, before Gertie died. He made a separate place for a privy, of course, even brought in a toilet seat and sat it over the space in the rock where he could do his business, then cover it up with lime, of course. He hauled in water from the river up the elevator, which was a mile farther down the cavern in the opposite direction, which meant once he got the barrels loaded, he had to put them on donkeys to haul them back to his spread as he liked to call it. He had a herd of donkeys, and some sheep, chickens and a goat — had a goat in the beginning but it died, like it just sort of wasted away, like it couldn’t live without the sun. The other animals didn’t seem to mind.

He didn’t usually go out any other way than down the elevator to the river. After awhile, there was other folks moved in, too, most of them on the lower levels, and he’d seen them sometimes at the boat dock where the Three Forks River flowed through Level Five of the Caverns. But most of them had come for the same reasons he had, and they were private people, too, kept to themselves. Over time, the most people settled in by the Cricket Bottom entrance, had themselves a regular little community down there eventually.

Fact was, he didn’t even know the Bickett boys had settled in the opening of the natural entrance on Joppa Ridge, drove out the folks who’d been there first, and set up their drug operation there. He stumbled upon it accidental, and backed away into the shadows so they didn’t never even know he was there. He watched long enough to know they were making Methatrexidone and any fool knew how dangerous it was to make that shit outside a lab, so he got away from them quick as he could, but they blocked his natural way out, so he had to go down the tube a thousand feet to the river.

He knew when that lab blew. Even though it was three miles away, the sound of it liked to have deafened him. The concussion roaring down the cave hit him like a fist, flung him up against the wall, knocked over chairs and furniture, stuff off the shelves. He waited two days before he ventured out toward the entrance, and that musta been some blast. The cave was collapsed for half a mile. Even took out the Double Cellars Sinkhole, that had provided light and a nice breeze. All that shit was blocked up tight.

He even thought then about moving, down into Level Four, maybe, so he’d be close to the river. But wasn’t no sense in that and it was a lot of trouble. He’d hauled a shit ton of stuff in here over the years before them boys blew themselves and half a mile of cavern down on top of them. Some of it was shit you couldn’t even have fit in the elevator. And besides, the elevator — there was four of them — was run off them batteries connected to solar panels outside. Way up in the trees, musta been a bunch of them. It would keep running long as there was power. And if it stopped running, well, there was other ways to get down to the lower levels from his home, climbing down, through caverns maybe nobody but him knew about, maybe not even the Mathesons. Them chimney things, like hollow pillars going up through solid rock. He knew where all them was and he bet wasn’t nobody else on the planet did.

Had a place where he had meat salted down, and had a VegiPac that vacuum sealed vegetables and fruit he grew in the little garden in a meadow near the cave entrance. One of the folks who lived on Level Two had a full-bore hydroponics lab, grew all kinda stuff, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, shoot even had an apple under them lights. They were techie kinda folks, one had hooked up solar panels to batteries and used them to power the hydroponics lab. He figured it was lot easier just to keep himself a garden, if he could keep the danged deer out of it, coming in there, eating the tops off his carrots and munching on his pole beans.

Yeah, life was treating him real good, considering the rest of the world was out there dealing with them white things and the lizard-bugs with all the teeth. He’d been fine until a couple weeks ago, when all kinda hell broke loose that ruined his whole way of life.

Some little Indian girl he hadn’t never met had painted a picture on the gym floor in Zion Village. He’d been there years ago when it was an academy for deaf kids, and before that as a little boy with his daddy when it wasn’t nothing but Gethsemane Monastery with monks making wine and cheese and stuff.

After Astral Day, most of the folks from Jessup had moved out to the academy, turned it into Zion Village, and a little girl there had a vision. That’s what he was told and he was okay with that, his granny Elberta had visions sometimes, knew when it was gonna storm or somebody was gonna die sudden. This little girl painted a huge picture on the gym floor of some big black spaceship melting the polar ice caps and flooding the earth. And they said the flood was gonna happen in six days.

And damned if all them people didn’t decide to live through the flood in Matheson Caverns!

Why there musta been three, maybe four thousand people already in here and more still out there loading up stuff. Looked like every mother’s child of them picked up stakes and floated on rafts here, hauling everything they owned to the caves to live on.

Gideon was by nature a scavenger. He’d amassed just about everything he owned by finding and using the cast-off belongings of others, and any other belongings they hadn’t cast off yet but wasn’t keeping a proper eye on. He’d not had the most highly respected job in the world before the white spots by Jupiter. He’d been the man who drove the garbage truck for TMI, the big company that provided garbage removal to small towns. Come Astral Day and wasn’t nobody putting their garbage out by the curb on Wednesday nights no more.

In just a few days his whole world turned upside down. Them people from Zion Village invaded his home. The cave was his home, dammit. He’d come here when didn’t nobody else want to live like a bat in the dark, made it his own special place and they didn’t have no right to come trespassing in it like they done. So he figured they was fair game, he’d give as good as he got. He’d take from them whatever he could scavenge, and not just their leftovers neither. He’d take whatever they had that he wanted and if he was required to use violence to that end, he was down with that. Move into a man’s house and take it over, you deserved whatever you got.

He’d hid out in the shadows out from the dock, and anytime he seen something he could use — supplies like ammunition was golden — he’d wait until nobody was looking and appropriate it for himself. He’d made a nice little stash of provisions, at the expense of three missing persons either nobody’d noticed was gone yet or nobody cared about enough to come check. He’d got it figured where he was gonna wait for the next big load of squatters. This here was Day Five and there was a whole twenty-four hours left before the Astrals did their thing. They was something like five thousand people in Zion Village so there’d be a lot more people coming. He’d just mingle in with them and go up in the elevator to Level One. And all them supplies he’d took, how would these folks know they wasn’t his?

But didn’t no more refugees arrive. Some kid on a jet ski showed up and talked with his hands — the deaf-person talk Gideon didn’t understand — and all the people working on the dock got in the elevators and run them up to the other levels. And didn’t send them back down! Dammit. He didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t have no choice but to get one of them rafts, load up his stuff and float it downriver through the cave to the other end where there were stairs and an old fashioned wench-and-pulley system to use for hauling stuff up. He wouldn’t get it all, but he’d get as much as he could on one load, up through Level Four to Level Three, offload it, and hide it somewhere to come back for later.

He had a raft loaded in a few minutes, pushed off, and was less than a mile from where the river exited the cave below the Cricket Bottom entrance when the impossible happened.

The water quit flowing downstream and started flowing back the other way. Squirting like from a fire hose, flowing in!

And the water level was going up faster than an elevator. You don’t suppose … Holy shit. The flood. Water was flowing in, pushing the river back. It wasn’t supposed to happen until tomorrow. But it was happening right now. He had to get off that raft, onto the river’s edge and down to them stairs before the water—

But it was too late, the current upended his raft and dumped him in the water and he had to scramble to keep from drowning, barely managed to get his hands on a flashlight before all his provisions was gone. Washed him back upstream before he scrambled out … on the wrong side of the river from where the stairs had been built up into Level Four. He knew another way, though, a chimney he could climb that would drop him out in Level Three, not Four. If the water was flowing in through the river, it was flowing in up there in Four, too, and trying to climb them stairs would be like trying to climb up a spigot with the water turned on.

He was almost to the chimney when a hand grabbed his leg and yanked him off his feet and he liked to died right on the spot from fright. Then he found himself looking at a stranger whose black eyes were as cold and as vicious as the beady eyes of a wild boar.

The man had a knife at Gideon’s throat he never even saw the man draw.

“You know a way out of here, old man?”

The stranger was shouting, roaring, the sound thundering in Gideon’s head so loud he thought his eardrums might explode from the pressure, though he could have sworn the man’s lips never moved.

“Hell, yeah! But ain’t neither one of us got time for me to draw you a map, so you best let me go.”

“Show me!”

The words thundered in Gideon’s head and he was obeying before he ever even willed his limbs to respond, hurrying irrespective of the water and the danger, rushing just to do what the man said, desperate to follow his orders, whatever they might be.

“This way,” he cried, and took out running in water that was up to his knees now, had overflowed the riverbanks and was flooding the cavern.

He got to the crack in the rock and started climbing, only then glancing back. The black-eyed stranger was right behind him.