Part 1: The Ocean Screamed Like a Freight Train
At 6:42 AM, Walter Briggs watched his tractor float past the porch — and realized it wasn’t the worst thing he’d see that day.
Walter Briggs had lived on the same stretch of land outside Gold Beach, Oregon, for seventy-two years. The house was older than most folks alive, sagging in places, patched in others, but solid where it mattered. Just like Walter.
He always rose before the sun. Fed the chickens, cursed the pump for its sluggishness, then stood on the porch sipping instant coffee from a chipped mug that read: “Korea, 1953 – I Came Back.”
But that morning — July 28, 2027 — the air felt off.
Too quiet.
Even the crows were gone.
Walter heard it before he saw it. A low, rising growl — not thunder, not wind — something deeper. It reminded him of the sound tanks made on frozen dirt. A sound that promised something terrible was coming.
Then the ground gave a little shake. Just enough to rattle the nails in the siding.
He switched on the old Motorola radio out of habit. Static. Then a voice broke through, stammering something about a possible wave event from the Pacific — a rare underwater quake, tied to volcanic activity in eastern Russia.
His hand froze.
Russia?
He turned to look west. The horizon beyond his cornfields shimmered like heat on asphalt. Then it bulged. Not up — but forward.
He blinked.
The sea was moving inland.
Not waves.
A wall.
“God help us,” he muttered.
Then his John Deere tractor — the one he’d just repaired last week — floated past the porch sideways like a rubber duck.
That’s when he ran.
Walter’s neighbor, Sheryl Martinez, was already screaming. Her little girl, Annie, stood frozen by the mailbox in her princess pajamas, gripping a stuffed raccoon. Water surged across the road like a freight train, slamming into her SUV.
Walter sprinted. His knees weren’t what they used to be, but adrenaline had its own religion.
He reached Annie just as the current tried to take her. One arm around her belly, he hoisted her up like a sack of feed and threw both of them into the bed of his rusted pickup, now drifting like a boat in a stream.
“Sheryl!” he shouted.
She was climbing onto her porch roof, chest-deep in water.
“I’ll find you!” he yelled, unsure if she heard him.
The old truck spun gently in the current. Walter grabbed the steering wheel out of instinct. Useless. The keys were still in the house.
They bumped into something solid — the barn. He used the moment to shove Annie onto the barn roof, then hauled himself up.
Rain began falling, though the sky was clear.
For a minute, they just sat there, panting.
Annie’s small hand crept into his. She didn’t cry. Just stared out over the water swallowing their world.
That’s when Walter noticed it — the figure in the loft of his house.
The upper window.
A face.
He squinted.
The kid was pale, thin, maybe twenty. Unconscious or asleep. Walter couldn’t tell. The attic window was cracked open, water rising fast.
Who the hell—?
He jumped.
Into the water.
Every bone screamed in protest. The cold was a thousand knives. But he swam. He had to.
Inside the house, the floor was flooded, but the stairs held. He pulled himself up one step at a time, legs shaking, until he reached the attic hatch.
He shoved it open.
The boy was there — curled beside a broken duffel bag and an old box of Walter’s war medals.
Walter froze.
He knew that face.
Nathan Briggs.
His grandson.
The one he hadn’t spoken to in ten years.
Nathan was barely breathing.
Walter dragged him down, step by step, until the stairs gave out and they tumbled into three feet of cold water.
He waded out the front door, cradling the boy like he had when Nathan was just a baby, when his son and that girl from Fresno still came around.
He hoisted him onto the porch roof, where Annie sat blinking at the rising sun like nothing had happened.
Then the radio in the kitchen, the one by the window, crackled.
That old Motorola shouldn’t have worked — the power had gone out — but it sparked to life with a voice so strange and calm it made Walter’s skin crawl.
“Walter Briggs… this is your second chance.”
Then silence.
He stared at the radio. Then up at the ocean.
The second wave was coming.
Taller.
Faster.
He had maybe four minutes.
“Walter?” Annie asked. “Are we gonna die?”
He didn’t answer.
He pulled Nathan close, took off his coat, and wrapped it around both kids.
He stood up on the roof, eyes to the horizon.
There was no warning system.
No FEMA trucks.
No sirens.
Just a farmer, a little girl, and a boy who used to hate him, standing against a wall of water that never should’ve come.
He raised his voice, not in panic, but command — the voice that once calmed a platoon in the Korean snow.
“You hear me?” he shouted into the wind.
“You don’t get to take them. You took my son. You took the land. You don’t take these two.”
And the water came.
Next: “Voices from the Water” — Walter learns that some ghosts don’t knock before they return.
Part 2: Voices from the Water
The second wave didn’t come all at once.
It crept — like it was thinking. Like it wanted to take its time.
Walter Briggs stood on the porch roof, arms tight around Nathan and little Annie. The barn was gone. So was the road. All that remained was a muddy sea, broken fences, and silence.
Then came the wind.
Then the screaming.
It wasn’t human.
The sound rolled across the water like a voice wrapped in metal — high-pitched, hollow, and endless. The way a dog might cry if it knew it was about to drown.
Annie clutched his arm. “Grandpa Walter,” she whispered — the first time she’d called him that.
He didn’t correct her.
He just said, “Stay down,” and crouched low to shield them both with his body.
The wave struck the edge of the ridge first — a curl of black water, taller than any barn he’d ever seen. It carried a propane tank, two tree trunks, and a piece of a roof with a satellite dish still spinning on top.
Walter braced.
The roof buckled beneath them but didn’t break.
Water surged over them like claws made of ice. He held his breath. So did the kids.
Then… nothing.
Just water dripping.
And the sound of Annie crying softly into Nathan’s soaked hoodie.
Walter lifted his head.
They were alive.
But the house wasn’t.
The entire front of it had been ripped away. His kitchen, the old fridge covered in magnets from county fairs, the photo of his late wife Lillian — gone.
Only the back wall remained, jagged and exposed like a broken tooth.
Nathan stirred.
His lips were blue.
“Help me,” Walter whispered to the sky. “Just this once.”
The three of them lay there a long time. Until the sky turned a sick shade of pink and the flies started coming.
That’s when Walter knew it wasn’t over.
He built a raft.
Not a real one — just a busted door tied to a piece of porch rail with jump cables. He’d seen worse in ‘Nam.
He wrapped Nathan in a tarp and placed Annie on top of a feed sack.
“Hold on tight,” he told her. “Don’t let go no matter what.”
She nodded, serious as a preacher.
He tied the raft to his waist and started walking — chest-deep through brown water, stepping over broken mailboxes and floating lawn chairs.
The voice came again.
But not from the radio.
From the water.
“You left him behind, Walter… you always do.”
He froze.
The voice sounded like his son. David Briggs. Gone twelve years now.
Shot himself after returning from Afghanistan. Left behind a five-year-old boy and a letter Walter never opened.
Nathan.
“You’re not real,” Walter growled. “You’re just memory.”
But the voice followed him anyway.
“You taught me to shoot before I could read. You told me to ‘get over it’ when I cried. You told me real men don’t talk about pain.”
“I didn’t know how to come home, Dad. And neither did you.”
The raft bumped into a telephone pole.
Walter blinked hard and kept moving.
They reached the high hill by Old Mill Road just before sunset. The water hadn’t reached there yet. A few other survivors had gathered — three teenagers, a retired nurse named Melinda, and an old logger with one eye and a half-dead dog.
They stared at Walter like he was a ghost.
He looked back, just as unsure.
Then Annie spoke.
“My grandpa saved us.”
The group made space without a word.
They built a fire out of driftwood and broken porch chairs.
Walter sat down beside Nathan, who now lay wrapped in a wool blanket beside the dog. The boy’s chest rose and fell like a flag in soft wind — weak, but steady.
Melinda brought a tin cup of water. “That your grandson?”
Walter hesitated. Then nodded.
“We used to be close,” he said. “Then… I don’t know. I was too proud. Too angry.”
Melinda shrugged. “You’re here now.”
He looked at the fire.
“I didn’t even know he was back in Oregon.”
“Funny how they find us,” she said. “Even when we don’t deserve it.”
The kids slept in the shell of an overturned boat.
Walter stayed up.
He listened.
Not just to the wind.
But to the stories.
Each person around the fire had lost something. Some had lost everything. One boy had watched his grandmother float away, clutching her Bible. The logger had shot three looters who tried to take his truck.
America wasn’t on TV anymore.
It was here, on this hill, around this fire, in boots soaked with saltwater and eyes hollowed out by grief.
And still, they sat together.
That meant something.
Then came the noise.
Distant.
Rhythmic.
Not water.
Engines.
Walter stood, shielding his eyes from the dying sun.
From the far side of the hill, two black trucks rolled toward them — unmarked, military-grade. No flags, no decals. Just matte paint and tinted windows.
They stopped twenty feet away.
Men stepped out.
Not in uniform.
One held a clipboard. Another had a gun.
“We’re with Coastal Contingency Unit Four,” one said. “We’re doing population assessment.”
“Are you rescue?” Melinda asked.
The man didn’t answer.
Just looked down his list. “We need names. Ages. Any injuries. Anyone noncompliant will be left behind.”
“Left behind?” Walter asked. “Left for what?”
The man raised a brow. “We’ve been given limited resources. Not everyone can be prioritized.”
Walter stepped forward.
“Listen, son, I’ve fought in wars where we treated chickens better than this.”
The man smiled.
“Well, sir. This isn’t war. It’s policy.”
They took photos of each person. Asked if they were vaccinated. Asked who they voted for in the last election.
Walter refused to answer.
They skipped him.
Melinda whispered, “They’ll come back. Maybe with guns next time.”
Walter nodded.
Then glanced at Nathan, still sleeping. The boy had a scar on his jaw Walter hadn’t seen before.
A long, thin mark that looked older than the tsunami.
That night, as Walter lay beside the fire, the wind carried voices again.
Only this time, they were real.
A radio crackled in one of the trucks — forgotten, left on.
“New wave forming. East trajectory. ETA twelve hours. Gold Beach corridor.”
Another wave.
Coming inland.
Again.
And no one was going to warn them.
Walter stared up at the stars.
He thought of Lillian’s garden. The way she used to press rosemary between the pages of her Bible.
He thought of David’s last phone call. The way his voice broke when he said, “I tried, Dad. I really did.”
He thought of Nathan’s hand, limp in his, and Annie’s faith.
He stood up.
Tired, soaked, sore.
But standing.
“We move at first light,” he said. “Anyone who can’t walk, I’ll carry.”
Melinda looked up. “Where?”
“To the school up on Crooked Pine Ridge,” he said. “It’s stone-built. High ground. Plenty of space.”
“That’s ten miles.”
Walter nodded. “Then we better start early.”
Next up: “The Things We Lost” — Walter faces what he left behind, and what he still has to protect.
