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By Root 966 0

Piedmont region surrounding Chesapeake Bay was inundated. Except for immediate acts of a lifesaving nature, nothing could be done except to endure. All transport was drowned. The phones remained down, and power losses left hundreds of thousands without electricity. Escapes from drowning took precedence even over journalism (almost), and even though reporters from all over the world were converging on the capital to report on this most spectacular story—the capital of the hyperpower, drowned and smashed—most of them could only get as close as the edges of the storm, or the flood; inside that it was an ongoing state of emergency, and everyone was involved with rescues, relocations, and escapes of various kinds. The National Guard was out, all helicopters were enlisted into the effort; the video and digital imagery generated for the world to see was still incidental to other things; that in itself meant ordinary law had been suspended, and there was pressure to bring things back to all-spectacle all-the-time. Part of the National Guard found itself posted on the roads outside the region, to keep people from flooding the area as the water had.

Very early on the second morning it became evident that while most areas had seen high water already, the flooding of Rock Creek had not yet crested. That night its headwaters had received the brunt of one of the hardest downpours of the storm, and the already saturated land could only shed this new rainfall into the streambed. The creek’s drop to the Tidal Basin was precipitous in some places, and for most of its length the creek ran at the bottom of a narrow gorge carved into the higher ground of Northwest District. There was nowhere to hold an excess flow.

All this meant big trouble for the National Zoo, which was located on a sort of peninsula created by three turns in Rock Creek, and therefore directly overlooking the gorge. After the hard downpour in the night, the staff of the zoo congregated in the main offices to discuss the situation.

They had some visiting dignitaries on hand, who had been forced to spend the previous night there; several members of the embassy of the nation of Khembalung had come to the zoo the morning before, to take part in a ceremony welcoming two Bengal tigers brought from their country to the zoo. The storm had made it impossible for them to return to Virginia, but they had seemed happy to spend the night at the zoo, concerned as they were about their tigers, and the other animals as well.

Now they all watched together as one of the office’s computers showed images of Rock Creek’s gorge walls being torn away and washed downstream. Floating trees were catching in drifts against bridges over the creek, forming temporary impediments that forced water out into the flanking neighborhoods, until the bridges blew like failed dams, and powerful low walls of debris-laden water tore down the gorge harder than ever, ripping it away even more brutally. The eastern border of the zoo made it obvious how this endangered them: the light brown torrent was ripping around the park, just a few feet below the lowest levels of the zoo grounds. That plus the images on their computers made it ever more clear that the zoo was very likely to be overwhelmed, and soon. It looked like it was going to turn into something like a reversal of Noah’s flood, becoming one in which the people mostly survived, but two of every species were drowned.

The Khembali legation urged the National Park staffers to evacuate the zoo as quickly as possible. The time and vehicles necessary for a proper evacuation were completely lacking, of course, as the superintendent quickly pointed out, but the Khembalis replied that by evacuation they meant opening all the cages and letting the animals escape. The zookeepers were skeptical, but the Khembalis turned out to be experts in flood response, well-acquainted with the routines required in such situations. They quickly called up photos of the zookeepers of Prague, weeping by the bodies of their drowned elephants, to show what could happen if drastic measures