Hollis Fenn had stayed behind on the lower narrow high walkway to monitor the backup intake grates. Just then, the back-surge struck. It wasn’t a magical flare or a burst of solar fire. It was the brutal, high-pressure reality of forcing fifty thousand gallons of high-pressure river water through an obsolete drainage network engineered three decades before the war.
For forty minutes leading up to the zero mark, Hollis had patrolled the damp narrow high walkway sixty feet beneath the road deck, his grease lantern swinging in his blistered hand. Every five paces, he had stopped to lay his bare palm against the cast-iron flanges of the intake pipes. He felt for the subtle, rhythmic shudder that signaled bubbling blast. Silt in the mountain river was always an enemy of high-pressure pumps. Under normal operation, the fine quartz sand suspended in the ice-slow runoff acted like liquid emery, grinding away the bronze impellers and scouring the packing glands until they leaked black grease. But as the weir bypass engaged above, the character of the water had changed fully. The river current was no longer cold and sour. It was hot, stone-hardened, and reeking of boiled sulfur. It bubbled with scalding foam that coated the iron grates in a greasy white crust of white lime-chalk.
