I grabbed the red iron wheel with both hands, braced my work boots against the lip of the concrete pit, and hauled backward with everything I had.
The steel shaft pulled free by two inches. I threw my weight clockwise.
The hydraulic lines beneath the apron groaned with a shuddering, violent clatter that rattled my teeth. From the seams of the steel bulkhead hatch, high-pressure air and brown, stagnant river foam hissed out into the night, releasing the internal vacuum that held the door shut against the frame.
The four hydraulic dogging bolts slammed back into their housings with the sound of rifle shots.
The heavy steel hatch popped open three inches, spilling a thick cloud of damp, rust-scented vapor and the deafening sound of rushing water onto the apron.
David threw Vance aside onto the wet gravel and scrambled to the hatch, throwing his hands under the steel rim. Together, we hauled the two-hundred-pound door upward until the safety catch clicked into its locked upright position.
Looking down into the black square of the hatchway, the flashlight beam from my phone cut through the rising steam.
The iron rung ladder dropped twelve feet into the lower mechanical pit. At the bottom, standing in three feet of swirling, foamy river water that was rising inches by the second, was a man in a torn denim work shirt and rubber hip waders. He had an eighteen-inch pipe wrench gripped in his right hand, his face pale and smeared with black grease, his chest heaving as he stared up into the light.
"David?" the man gasped, coughing against the spray of the intake valves.
"Climb, Mark!" David yelled, reaching his arm as far down the hatchway as his shoulder would reach. "Climb the ladder right now!"
Mark dropped the wrench into the swirling water, grabbed the first iron rung with his bare hands, and began to pull himself up out of the flood.
Behind us on the apron, Harold Vance scrambled to his feet. He wasn't reaching for his radio now, and he wasn't looking at the open hatch.
He lunged for the open driver’s door of Fleet Unit 12, his hand slamming down on the gear selector, throwing the heavy transit van into reverse as the headlights swept across our faces.
CHAPTER 4: What The River Kept
The utility van did not clear the concrete apron. When Harold Vance threw Fleet Unit 12 into reverse, the rear tires caught the loose shale along the drainage ditch, spitting stones into the dark before the chassis bottomed out against the iron footings of the catwalk. The transmission locked with a dull metallic slam. Vance kicked the driver’s door wide, dropped his boots into twelve inches of churning river silt, and ran toward the service culvert beneath the Route 462 bridge, his yellow slicker trailing behind him like a torn shroud.
Nobody ran after him. Mark Miller was still hanging from the twelfth iron rung of the maintenance ladder, his wrists trembling against the cold steel, river foam boiling through the open grate four inches beneath the heels of his waders.
David dropped to his stomach on the wet concrete. He caught his brother under the armpits, his face drawn tight as the split vinyl band on his wrist cut deep into his own skin. I set my boots against the hatch lip, took Mark’s left arm by the canvas coat sleeve, and hauled upward until his knees cleared the steel sill.
Mark collapsed onto the poured pad, coughing gray river vapor onto the concrete. His skin was pale under the halogen work lamps, his graying hair plastered to his forehead with grease and sediment. He did not ask how we had reached the river station. He rolled onto his side, his hands clawing at the front of his torn denim shirt, and pointed through the open bulkhead toward the vibration shaking the entire foundation of Pumping Station 4B.