Chapter 6: Crossing the Drowned Jersey Flats

The raft was four highway billboard panels lashed together with climbing rope and Mira's categorical refusal to explain where she'd gotten the anchor spikes. It sat about three inches above the waterline when everyone was aboard, which Ash had decided was close enough to functional that he wasn't going to say anything about it.

They'd spent the morning hours of it building the thing on the Jersey side, in what used to be a parking structure in Secaucus. The structure still had its painted level markers — P3, P4 — visible on the concrete columns, which meant the water was sitting at roughly sixteen feet above the old ground surface. The Jersey Flats had been swallowing themselves since Year One, when the ocean-surge came three days after the last god went silent and the thing that held the Atlantic in place stopped holding. Now it was a flat gray lake that ran from what used to be Newark to what used to be the coast of Staten Island, interrupted by rooftops and billboard frames and the occasional overpass pillar standing up out of the water like a grave marker that had forgotten what it was marking.

It smelled like brine and old concrete and something underneath both — something biological, wrong, the particular smell of ecosystems that had stopped following their own rules.