Read "A Town is Drowning" by C.M. Kornbluth online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
An air watcher, it doesn't matter which one of the thousands he was, stepped from the hospital elevator at the third, and top floor. He went through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE and climbed iron stairs to the roof. It was black and drizzling; he hoped the rain wouldn't get worse, at least not during his tour of duty. He had heard on a news broadcast that west of his area there were cloudbursts.
He was tired from a long day at his appliance store on Broad Street and he was a little sorry he had signed up for this Ground Observer Corps thing, but everybody in Rotary was taking a shift so he felt he had to go along. He threaded his way around the invisible obstacles that studded the hospital roof and groped at the black-out curtain of the shack.