Ten o'clock that morning, a four-inch fire-suppression main on the second floor of the office building, corroded beyond its limit, blew apart.
A muffled boom. A high-pressure column of water punched through the ceiling and roared down through the pipe shafts toward the first floor.
Directly below the second floor sat our company's primary inventory warehouse, packed wall to wall with high-value goods.
Outside the warehouse's heavy steel security shutter, water was rising fast.
Inside were the precision electronic instrument control boards Mr. Greyson had mortgaged his wife's property to afford before the long weekend. Over twenty thousand units. Worth north of eighty thousand dollars.
Ten minutes submerged. That was all it would take. Every last one of them, destroyed.
The entire shipment was scheduled to go out to a major client in Silicon Valley the first business day after the holiday.
By the time a security guard heard the noise and made it to the first floor, murky brown water was already sloshing over his ankles, bubbling up through the gap beneath the warehouse door.
He called the building manager immediately.
The building manager pulled up the security footage, then dialed Mr. Greyson.
Mr. Greyson was standing in line for the roller coaster at a suburban amusement park with his wife and kids.
The Building Abbott second the call connected, every drop of color drained from his face. The cotton candy slipped from his fingers and hit the ground.
"Open the door! Get someone to open that door and pull the stock out NOW! It can't all be underwater!"
He was screaming into the phone.
"Sir, the warehouse security door has a high-grade lock. We don't have a key on our end. Where's your on-duty person today?"
The building manager was pacing the corridor, stomping his feet in frustration. The water had already risen past his calves.
Mr. Greyson pulled up the employee duty roster. There, in the column for Day Four, two words stared back at him: Hope Fox.
His fingers trembled as he dialed her number.
No sound. Only silence, then a single flat tone as the call dropped.
He tried voice calls, video calls. Every single one vanished into nothing.
At that moment, Hope's phone sat in a waterproof pouch outside her hotel room. She was on a jet ski, shrieking with joy as she bounced across the waves, oblivious to the barrage of calls.
10:45 a.m.