Description: Dad turned all around, sheets of water coursing off his head and shoulders. I wanted to scream that it was pointless, that we needed to keep running, but then there was another crack and a flash of lightning, and for a second it seemed like there might be a ridge of some kind out ahead of us. Dad grabbed my elbow and pulled us toward it. "Come on! Maybe there's shelter!" By then, the ground had turned to a slurry of mud and rocks and wrecked grass. Every few steps my feet would sink deep into it and I'd have to pull myself out one foot at a time, terrified that I'd lose sight of Dad and be lost out in that gray nothing, alone forever. As we ran, the ridge ahead of us became more and more solid, a great looming black wall. I prayed for a cave, but even a good notch in the rock wall would have been enough to get us out of the rain and hide until morning. We were only fifty feet or so from it when Dad came to an abrupt halt. "Why are we stopping?!" Dad didn't say anything, he simply pointed. Between us and the ridge there was an immense gash in the earth, a gorge some thirty feet across and another thirty deep, with steep, muddy walls on our side and the ridge on the opposite. A boiling mess of muddy water, tree stumps, and trash raged at the bottom. Dad searched left and right for a crossing, but there wasn't any. His shoulders slumped. Even through the curtain of rain I could see the sunken hollow of his eyes, deep red-lined pits that sat in skin as gray as the air around us. "I'm sorry, Stephen. I swear to God, I'm so sorry." I reached out for his arm, to tell him it was going to be okay, but before my fingers could even graze his soaked flannel shirt, the ground beneath his feet disappeared. What was solid ground turned to mud in a second and he went flailing, flying backward. He fell, arms pin-wheeling, his mouth open in a shocked O. There was nothing at his back but thirty feet of open air and, beyond that, the bared fangs of a raging river. When the lightning subsided, he was gone.

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