Jerry Tilghman had never seen anything close to the likes of Hurricane Camilla. The thunder boomed, shaking the tiny building. A storm of this magnitude was off the charts. Forget the charts, and the calculations and models and the software he’d spent years perfecting. There were only the windows now if he wanted to see what this storm looked like. He could barely even see anything through those windows, either. It had been over three hours since the state of Maryland had ordered the evacuation of Matthew’s Island. Jerry knew most of the people from the island were gone, but not all of them. Lifelong watermen and their families didn’t leave the island—first, because they were faithful people who didn’t believe anything truly bad would ever happen to the island, and secondly, because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. These were their homes, and they couldn’t afford to leave them or their boats behind. They also had an unfortunate tendency to believe that weather reports, even if anyone had ever paid any attention to them, which most of the island folks didn’t, were overrated.

He’d already heard one distress call from a boat on the radio, the Lady Sandy, and heard from the Coast Guard there had been two casualties, Rachel Tisler and Tyler Smith, who’d apparently tried to flee the island on a small waterman’s boat. The boat was found, capsized, but the occupants, who drowned, hadn’t even been wearing lifejackets and were only found because it was earlier on in the storm. There had also been several cars washed out trying to get to the island from the mainland—no telling when those cars would be found. Jerry’s emergency radio had stopped working about an hour ago.

“This is going to get a helluva lot worse before it gets better,” Jerry muttered to himself as lightning lit the entire sky again and rain sheeted against the window. Jerry saw the small leak on the one corner of the building start—the one that only leaked when the rain came in straight sideways. The bridge tender’s house was running on a small generator, having lost power. The drawbridge itself could still be raised and lowered at the moment, though it only had about six hours of power in it before that went out also. His plan was to stay at his post. He figured he couldn’t leave anyway. The road was flooded out on both sides.

Jerry didn’t like to think of himself as being trapped. He preferred to think he was in the best spot there was, the high ground. The storm could only last for so long, and there wasn’t a higher place to be on the island—except for maybe up at the Sharps Island Inn. Those folks should be safe, Jerry figured, though they had problems of their own. When their road washed out like it had, they became their own little island up there. Sure, the founding family of Matthew’s Island built its first house out there for a reason—because it was the highest ground. But to get to it, you had to take the only main road there was on this island. And just before you reached the driveway to the inn, that road got very narrow. In fact, at one point on the road, if you stopped your car, you could turn your head to the left and see the Talbot River, and turn your head to the right and see the Chesapeake Bay, just like Jerry could do right here at the Choptank Narrows.

What that meant in a hurricane was that when the water rose, and especially when it rose at high tide, those two bodies of water, well, they got together. Jerry scratched his head now, imagining what the island would look like at the moment if he was in an airplane. The piece of land where Sharps Island Inn was perched would appear to be a little island all to itself. And what was it that fella had said? A wedding. Jerry wondered if those folks even knew the spot they were in. No boats could get in there to get to them now during this storm, and no cars, either. He’d tried to get them to evacuate when he could, when the state had first started giving the warnings, before their road had gone out.

Drip, drip-drip, drip, went that leak from the corner of the roof, and finally Jerry grabbed a bucket from the small closet beside the door and stuck it under the leaky roof.

From that airplane view, the center part of the island would be its own island. No one could come or go from it right now, and boats would be seen swarming all around it, torn from their moorings and floating around like those loose plastic ducks in a kiddie swimming pool at the county fair—the ones with numbers on the bottom that swirl around and around; the kids pick them up to win a prize. Jerry was cut right off from all of that, too, at the moment. He and his bridge would just appear from the sky almost like their own little odd-shaped vessel unto themselves: a man and his bridge.

“I hope those folks at Matthew’s Island Inn and Sharps Island Inn are all right,” said Jerry to himself. He had long ago developed the habit of talking to himself, especially in terrible storms. He didn’t even know he was doing it. Nervous habit. “’Course they don’t even really know what they’re in for, they couldn’t leave now even if they wanted to. They’re all just hunkered down at both those places at this point, waiting the whole thing out. Probably for the best.”

He paced around the room, because that was really all the bridge tender’s house amounted to, besides the bathroom. He wondered how high the water was. He knew from the tide chart that high tide was about an hour away. That was good, it meant eventually the tide would be going back down, and if this hellcat of a storm could just turn back, maybe things could just settle down a bit around here. He sat back down in his spinning office-style chair, deciding he’d try the radio again.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” Jerry said once again into Channel 16 of his battery-powered VHF radio. “This is the Choptank Narrows bridge tender, Choptank Narrows bridge tender, Choptank Narrows bridge tender.” He used the Coast Guard standard policy of repeating everything in threes, but yet again there was no response at the other end of the line, though he heard crackling, so he hoped again that it was someone trying to respond. He didn’t know if the channel was overwhelmed with emergencies right now, or whether his messages weren’t getting through. He’d heard the radio cackle to life a few times on its own, but nothing clear had come through. Each time, he’d dashed over to the radio to signal his presence, with no luck. He changed the batteries on the radio, just to be sure any messages could get through, figuring he’d try again to radio for help in a bit and let the Coast Guard know he was stranded. All cell service, not great in the first place, was of course out to the island. He had literally no way of communicating with anyone at this point. Thing was, the state had told him to evacuate, and he hadn’t done it, so he felt bad calling for rescue and making himself someone else’s problem in the middle of a hurricane.

Jerry thought of Helen now, looking at the small, framed photo he kept at the corner of the cluttered work area, covered as it was now with maps, printed storm model forecasts, and data. Normally his work area was tidy and organized, but he’d tried so hard to make some logical sense of this storm, to use his lifelong meteorological experience to “science away” the cold, hard facts of the storm. He hadn’t been able to save Helen from the cancer. He hoped somehow he’d be able to help the people of the island to survive this storm. He’d called every house he knew, trying to convince the islanders he knew wouldn’t listen to the evacuation warnings to leave. He knew none of them had listened, because he would have been able to watch them cross the bridge. Newcomers to the island had—the folks who had retired here from other places. They had kids and grandkids on the mainland and weren’t about to risk not being able to see them again. They’d packed up a few days’ worth of clothes quick as could be and headed over that bridge as soon as they’d heard “possible category four hurricane” on the news and long before that.

The “come-here’s” they called them. They called us, Jerry thought, with a smile, thinking back to the time he and Helen had moved to the island, all those years ago. Among other things. “Chicken-neckers,” “weekenders,” “up-the-roaders”—there were any number of nicknames for folks who weren’t born and bred on the island, and lived in the Matthews-on-Talbot community of new houses overlooking the river. Everyone got along all right, Jerry supposed, for the most part. Sure, there was some bickering. Some of the watermen didn’t like their lifestyle being turned into museums right in front of them while they were still living it, others appreciated the fact that the new folks brought money and ideas and rip-rap that saved the island from being washed out years before.

Not all the people who were new to the island had the best ideas, either. Some were selfish and greedy, and didn’t give a lick about the history or the environment. They’d wreck the shoreline and build two-million-dollar houses like the whole island was a game of Monopoly. If you were up in that airplane watching now, those cookie cutter monstrosity tax write-offs would be the first ones to blow right into the drink in Hurricane Camilla, just like the old Three Little Pigs story used to say. Money had been wasted on environmental studies and “shoreline protection” that had flattened the coastline and invited the full fury of the Chesapeake Bay right up the middle of the island, cutting it in half during Hurricane Camilla. Huffin and puffin indeed, thought Jerry.

Around the island now, most folks were on the second floors of their houses, photographs and albums from the first floors had been quickly thrown into boxes and brought to safety. Those who lived in one-story houses were on the second floors of their neighbors’ houses. No one knew how high the water would rise.

In the photo on the desk, Helen was looking up from her knitting, smiling at him, an almost half-smirk on her face as if to say get this damn photo over with! “Oh come now, Helen,” he’d said, “I just need a photo for the bridge tender’s house, something to remind me of you on all those twelve-hour shifts!” And he smiled back at her now.

The mass exodus across the drawbridge had been a steady pace as those up-the-roader folks made their way right quickly up the road to safety and to their loved ones. But for the lifelong islanders (and oddly, Jerry thought, just for that crew over at the Sharps Island Inn, who seemed to be digging in their heels up there), there was no telling them to get out. They were staying put. Just like Jerry. A one-man island. In between the hardest downpours now Jerry didn’t like to look out the window. He knew there was no place to put the black paint line underneath the bridge to measure that flood line now. The high tide had made it just about to the top of the road now. Jerry knew if he opened the front door, he’d be able to see that it wouldn’t be long before water would start pouring right on in.

The radio cackled to life again and Jerry turned the volume all the way up.

“… Coast Guard…. raise … bridge immediate…. Repeat… … …dge imme…tely…. Barge… loose… moorings …. Direct.… narrows…. you copy? …. peat…. raise brid….”

Jerry’s heart froze, but he got enough of the message to do as he was told. He immediately slammed his hand down on the green button to raise the drawbridge. He knew there was barely enough power left in the generator to raise the bridge. In his decades working there, he’d never once been called by the Coast Guard and been told to raise the bridge. A loose barge? Was that possible? It had happened at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, at the C&D Canal, but never here. Anything was possible in a hurricane.

Jerry breathed a sigh of relief as he heard the familiar sounds of the warning bells: the drawbridge was rising.

Clank-clank-clank.

Dimly, reflected through the sheeting rain against the windowpanes, he could see that the red and green lights on the bridge were working, not that there was any street traffic to stop out there.

But Jerry was a numbers guy, and as the bridge went up, he did the math. Those massive barges that drifted by on the Chesapeake Bay never came near the tiny Choptank Narrows, much less had one ever tried to make a crossing here. The barges, making their way to and from the port at Baltimore, were filled with enormous loads of cargo—steel, rocks, logs, electronics, you name it. They were half a football field long or longer, and they carried a ton or more of goods. Far too heavy to be tossed around in a storm like this, they were normally moored down in the Chesapeake until it was their turn to be brought by their tugboats into port. Why, the only way one of them could break free, come this way and do any harm in a storm like this, would be if the huge, boxlike metal vessel was… Jerry had paused for a minute to think about it, and the horror crossed his face at the realization… empty.

As soon as Jerry thought the word, the sense of doom came down on him, and he let out a breath. At first it sounded like the booming thunder he’d grown used to hearing for hours now in the distance, getting louder as it came closer. But he knew that wasn’t what he was hearing this time. And he knew there wasn’t anything he could do to stop this final ship as it sailed through his narrows. He had opened the bridge for its last time. The darkness, he thought, had been complete that night, but the depths of the blackness got far deeper as he looked up to see the massive shadow of the twisted heap of rusted steel raging toward the drawbridge and the safety of Jerry’s tower. With one final glance down at the smiling face of his wife, as though for reassurance, for only a moment did Jerry hear the bomb-like explosion, heard for nearly twenty miles around, of two tons of steel crashing through the 120-mile-an-hour winds into the concrete barrier of the Choptank Narrows Bridge, turning his entire small island into a gnarled, useless pile of debris in seconds, and almost instantaneously Jerry heard nothing.

There was no longer a link from Matthew’s Island to the rest of the world.