But in the park on the way home from the dumb new school there was a playground on the top of the hill. Jimmy stopped there every day. It had one of those merry go rounds you could make go real fast and jump off of, a beat-up metal slide, and swings made from thick black rectangles of recycled rubber tires that Vinnie Mercado had supposedly done a three sixty on, although that sounded like a bunch of BS to him.

The best thing it had was the jungle gym. It was made out of metal, and it looked kind of like a rocket ship. From the top of it you had a pretty good view down the hill and into the town. Right when school started it had been crowded with little babies, although most of the parents were too scared to let their fat kids climb up on it. But it was October now so there were only a few babies around these days, although he’d still get nasty looks from some of the parents who obviously agreed with his mom.

This afternoon he’d swung around the bars for a while, and was sitting right at the top, pretending he was fixing up the nose cone after an alien laser attack. They were only about ten miles in from the ocean, and when he the sun the shining off of water in the valley below, he wondered if maybe he was high-up enough that he was seeing the beach.  But that made no sense when he thought about it.

Then he realized it was coming closer and closer, and getting higher and higher. The waves crashed into one of the houses a few blocks away, and the building exploded from the force of it. It was almost cool, except it was scary, and it was obvious that something was really wrong.

Hey pointed at the wave and yelled out “Hey!” One of the parents turned to look, then she started to scream. But it was coming towards them so loud and so fast that a moment later he couldn’t hear anything except for the water roaring.

When it hit the hill, the kids, parents, dogs, and moms were all gone in an instant, swept away by the force of the flood. He could feel the metal bars underneath his hands thrumming as the wave smashed into them, sending up a thick spray of the churning brown water that soaked his jacket. Chunks of wood, plastic, dead birds, and other… things bounced off of the bars as the water rose higher and higher.

Then there was more screaming, and Jimmy realized that one of the fat little baby kids had managed to grab onto the jungle gym. He was shouting out a word, over and over again. Maybe it was “mom”, but Jimmy couldn’t really tell what it was, except that it definitely wasn’t help.

He scrambled down a few rungs, and reached out his arm. The water was rising up fast, and the kid was floating up higher with it, getting closer. And just when he was high enough to grab Jimmy’s hand something under the water smacked right into the little kid’s back. It made a wet noise, like a big steak slapping the floor when you dropped it and your Mom gets pissed at you, or his did last week anyway. The sound of it was loud enough to hear over the roar. It made the kid’s squinty brown eyes popped wide open, and he let go. The water sucked him under in an instant, and he vanished like a rabbit in a magic trick.

Jimmy sat for a while, staring at the place where the kid had been, his hand still outstretched. Then he felt a cold wetness seeping into his shoe, and realized that his left foot was still on the lower rung. He clambered back up to the nose cone and sat there, watching the water slowly rise, wondering just how high it would get before it stopped.