The Flooded Park

Two miles to the gate, and everything on the trail has decided that tonight is the night.

The rain is easing. That sounds like mercy and is not. All night the weather has been the only thing keeping the animal visible, drowning its camouflage panels, betraying it in flickering pieces - and now, as the storm goes out of the sky, the panels are coming back. What they have been able to see for hours is going quiet again, one segment at a time.

Vympel have stopped being patient. The water has stopped rising. And the crew - groundskeeper, fireman, guard, keeper, feed-show man - have started to run out of the one thing they never had much of to begin with: people they can afford to lose.

They said they would not leave anybody. Every one of them meant it when they said it. Every one of them was hired cheap by an operation that was never going to spend a dollar making that promise possible.

By morning the rain will have stopped, and the water will have gone down, and the road will be passable again, and somebody will walk out of the preserve carrying nothing at all.

One of them.

The concluding volume of PROJECT ADIRONDACK.