Story code: ST-000238
Part 2: The Toxic Basin
The sledgehammer felt like it weighed fifty pounds as Mateo dragged it through the submerged living room. He waded toward the side window facing Vargas’s house. The water outside was visibly higher in the alley, pressing heavy and dark against the glass. Breaking it meant letting the flood fully inside his own home. The muffled screams from Vargas’s basement grew more frantic, vibrating through the murky water. Mateo tightened his grip on the steel handle and braced his boots against the slippery floorboards.
He swung the hammer. The glass shattered outward, but the immense pressure of the trapped water in the alley instantly surged back through the frame. The force of the breach threw Mateo backward, slamming his shoulders into the floating hallway door. Vile, iridescent sludge poured through the shattered window, instantly raising the living room tide from his waist to his chest. He went under, accidentally swallowing a mouthful of the foul liquid. It tasted of battery acid and raw copper, searing a violent path down his esophagus.
He breached the surface, gagging, his eyes burning fiercely. The chemical film coated his face, stinging his skin like a swarm of wasps. He squeezed his eyes shut, ignoring the fiery itch spreading rapidly across his neck and arms. He pushed against the incoming current, climbed clumsily over the jagged glass remaining in the window frame, and dropped down into the narrow alleyway.
Out here, the water was much deeper, cresting just below his collarbones. The alley was a graveyard of floating trash, submerged lawnmowers, and overturned garbage cans leaking rotten food into the chemical stew. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, baking the chemical fumes into a heavy, suffocating smog. Mateo waded forward, using the sledgehammer as a counterbalance against the heavy drag of the toxic tide, his skin blistering under the iridescent film.
The frantic pounding from Vargas’s house was growing weaker, the intervals between the watery thuds stretching longer. Mateo reached the split-level brick home. The basement windows were entirely submerged beneath the black, oily surface. Mateo pressed his bare hand against the submerged brickwork, trying to gauge the location of the glass. He felt the faint, desperate vibrations of a fist striking a pane from the inside.
Mateo had no choice. He took a deep breath of the tainted surface air, closed his eyes tight against the burning fumes, and plunged his head beneath the toxic sludge. The cold was shocking, but the fiery sensation in his eyes and nose was worse. The water seeped into his ears, carrying the overwhelming stench of raw industrial solvent. Blind, he felt his way down the brick wall until his knuckles brushed against the smooth, slippery surface of the basement window.
He positioned the sledgehammer, fighting the intense buoyancy and the dense resistance of the liquid. He swung clumsily, the heavy steel head glancing off the glass. His lungs screamed for air, but he felt another weak thump against his fingers. He gripped the handle with both hands, planted his heavy work boots on the submerged window ledge, and thrust the hammer forward with all his remaining strength.
The glass gave way with a muted, underwater crunch. Instantly, the immense weight of the alley’s floodwater rushed into the dry basement. The powerful suction yanked Mateo forward, dragging his head and shoulders through the jagged window frame. The rough edges tore through his soaked shirt, scraping his ribs. He kicked wildly, wedging his boot against the exterior brick to keep from being sucked entirely into the dark, flooding room.
He reached his free hand into the swirling vortex, sweeping the darkness. His fingers caught on soggy fabric. He gripped it tight, feeling the thin, frail arm of Mr. Vargas underneath. Mateo planted his feet against the wall and pulled backward, fighting the heavy suction of the rushing water. He hauled the old man out through the broken window, dragging his limp body upward into the blinding sunlight.
They breached the surface together, gasping and sputtering. Vargas was convulsing, coughing up thick streams of black water and iridescent foam. Mateo dragged him toward the floating roof of a submerged wooden garden shed, pushing the old man onto the relatively dry asphalt shingles. Mateo clung to the edge, his chest heaving, his forearms turning an angry, blistering red from the prolonged chemical exposure.
“They opened it,” Vargas wheezed, his voice a ragged, agonizing croak. He pointed a trembling, slime-coated finger toward the far end of the neighborhood. “The plant… the gates…”
Mateo turned his head, blinking away the stinging sludge. He looked past the drowned roofs of Las Palmas, toward the massive concrete retaining wall that separated the residential grid from the Apex Chemical facility. Through a gap between the houses, he finally saw the source of their misery. This was not stagnant backwater. A thick, green-black waterfall was violently cascading from a massive, deliberately opened floodgate in the industrial wall. Apex wasn’t flooded; they were flushing their overwhelmed containment tanks directly into the neighborhood, using Las Palmas as a toxic dumping basin to save their own infrastructure.
A mechanical whine echoed over the sloshing water. Mateo squinted against the glare of the sun. Atop the concrete ridge of the retaining wall, three figures in pristine white hazmat suits were operating a heavy motorized winch. They weren’t trying to stop the flow. Mateo watched in horror as the winch lowered a massive steel plate over the neighborhood’s main storm drain outfall. They were sealing the basin. They were ensuring the toxic runoff stayed trapped in the residential streets, protecting the nearby downtown district at the expense of everyone trapped on this side of the tracks.
The water in the alley surged, creeping up Mateo’s neck. The structural groans of Vargas’s house echoed loudly as the basement filled entirely, the foundations beginning to buckle under the weight. The chemical burn on Mateo’s skin was intensifying into a deep, agonizing fire. He could pull himself onto the shed roof with Vargas and wait for Hector’s boat to return, hoping the fumes didn’t kill them first. Or he could stop the flush.
Mateo looked at the heavy sledgehammer still gripped firmly in his right hand. The metal handle was slick with the iridescent poison. He glanced at Vargas, who was curled into a tight, coughing ball on the shingles. Mateo pushed off the shed, letting the toxic water swallow him up to his chest once again. Ignoring the searing pain blistering his skin, he turned his back on his ruined home and began wading directly into the heavy current, marching straight toward the white suits and the roaring black waterfall.