He saw the rooftops of submerged houses, like he and Marianne had seen earlier in the day. The water would be deeper. But maybe he could find shelter until the sun came up.

He was chest-deep when he saw the eyes on the waterline, reflecting his shape back at him in the moonlight.

He panicked.

He swam, a spaz-stroke wanting to be freestyle, splashing enough to wake up every creature anywhere near that water. But it worked. He had never swum that fast in his life, but soon he was pulling himself up on the shingles of what must have been a very nice home before the world started to drown.

He scrambled up to the top, to the chimney. He grabbed onto the chimney like the mast of a sinking ship, panting, spewing swamp scum from his mouth and nose.

And then the gators came up to follow him. Three of them that Donny could see. Maybe more that he couldn’t.

First they circled around. There was a couple of feet between the roof edge and the waterline. Too far for an alligator to climb up.

Or so he would’ve liked to think. Because then the first one did just that, with its snout and those stubby little legs.

The teeth that hang outside the mouth, and the claws at the end of the toes that look like meat hooks.

Donny screamed, a banshee scream, a scream to scare off dragons and summon forgotten angels of protection.

It didn’t work. It looked like the gator was smiling. Those fucking jaws.

Donny looked down the chimney.

46

When Donny was a kid, before his parents split up, his family belonged to a country club. Dad liked to play golf, and Mom liked to play tennis. Donny liked to hang out at the pool, lie in the sun, and read books.

When he took a break and got in the water, one of the things Donny liked to do was see how long he could hold his breath at the bottom of the deep end. He got so good at it that he would freak out the lifeguards, to say nothing of the moms.

The lung capacity he developed from this weird, dorky pastime proved handy when he got to high school and college, long after he learned the only way he could get back in the club was as a caddy, which he did a few summers. His capacity for sucking down long bong hits became legend in certain circles. People were not as impressed with that particular talent when Donny got to law school.

A girl who actually kind of liked him once taped one of his answers to the professor in a second-year civil procedure class, and it became almost as famous, especially for the digressions about imaginary rules Donny invented as if that would make up for his inability to remember the real ones through the fog.