Hundred-Year Flood

by C. Matthew Smith

About the Author: C. Matthew Smith is an Atlanta-based attorney and writer whose fiction previously has appeared online for Mystery Tribune. He is currently polishing up his first novel.

Excerpt

The rain fell in dense sheets for three days. On the third night, the swollen lake breached the dam, burying everything downstream beneath feet of water. The following morning, caskets floated down Main Street—an armada of the withered dead sailing on a clay-orange sea.

The first to spot this invasion were the shop owners who came on fishing boats to survey the damage to their premises. They tied their vessels to columns rising from the water and stared down at submerged ground-floor windows. They spoke to each other of lost inventory and buckling floorboards.

Until the first lacquered hull bobbed by.

“What the hell?” Davey Grant, owner of the downtown hardware store, leaned forward in his boat and pointed. “Is that a …”

As though to assure them all that it was, three more caskets followed. One nudged sideways when it bumped against a column supporting a second-story balcony. A wave of two came after that, and then a wave of five, and so on. By the time Sheriff Everett Dorsey arrived in his flat bottom row-boat, with his newest deputy at the oars, fully two dozen coffins had passed through the commercial center and were headed west. Still more approached from the east, the next floats in a grim parade.

“It’s Judgment Day, Sheriff,” Deputy Bobby Johnson said, his eyes wide and white.

“Or just a hundred-year flood. You know, like the weather man said.” Irritation tinted the sheriff’s voice, though the deputy seemed too horrified by the scene to notice.

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