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- Flood Corps

 

The volunteer citizen navy had been given instructions to tie the numberless, nightmarish corpses to streetpoles to be collected later. I saw bodies appear from the water. The full extent of the danger is unknowable and unknown. They float in the water, they hang from the trees, they lay untended in the streets. They are being covered in leaves, at best.

Increasingly, the recovery of the dead has become more commonplace. In an apartment home for the blind, the staff had abandoned the residents. This exquisite evidence illustrates a preponderant absence of benevolence. Bewildered, evacuated hospital patients wade through flooded streets. An alligator emerges from the water and drags a disabled man underneath. The dreadful next phase is still in its infancy.

As patients started to die, nurses tried to protect their dignity. A place of overflowing toilets, a sweltering and surreal void, scraggly residents emerged from the waterlogged wood to say strange things and then return into the rot.

He sat on his porch eating pickled pig lips. Others had to leap from rooftop to rooftop. There's another one in the freezer, a seven-year-old with her throat cut. Its feet jut out from a damp blue tarp.

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