Her brown eyes aren't visible in the gloom, but her voice is clear and steady as she shines a flashlight beam around, catching traces of the high-water mark a few inches from the ceiling, a pile of mysterious rubble in a dank corner, a Pepsi machine that had smashed through a wall of the Office of Community Services. It moved with tremendous force, and churned like a blender in every direction, blowing into the game room and back out, into the Ramskeller, the theater, into all the mechanical systems and the bookstore, north, south, east and every direction in between. This is absolutely the worse situation I've experienced. When I first saw the lower level of the student center, my knees buckled.
Blood watches as workers trundle past, wheelbarrows loaded with sodden remnants of people's lives.
A man shuffles past, arms straining with the weight of a load, but still he pauses to exchange light-hearted banter with Blood before trooping off to dump the refuse. A sense of humor helps, she says, and remembers two carp that were caught, one in the bookstore and another in the bowling alley. One was caught and returned to the Lagoon, but she isn't sure what happened to the other fish. Somebody's dinner, maybe. Some stories have a happy ending, too, like a student's master's thesis that Mike Sullivan rescued out of a locker on the flooded lower floor.