by Paul Briggs
Thel gritted her teeth and made a little noise of frustration. “Mom, I don’t know if you noticed,” she said, “but I’m not a little kid anymore.”
“I’m the one who buys your clothes, young lady,” said Carrie. “So, yes. I’ve noticed.” Thel was fourteen. Thanks to a growth spurt this year, she was now an inch taller than her mother—another gift from Roger’s DNA. “But we’re moving everything irreplaceable out of the governor’s mansion, and that includes you.”
“And unlike the glassware, you’re not likely to get damaged in shipment,” said Roger. Thel rolled her eyes.
“You are a fairly mature young woman,” said Carrie in defiance of the immediate evidence. “On a normal day, I can look after you and Virginia at the same time. This is not a normal day. You know what’s coming.”
“Yes. I know. I was kind of hoping to get some good storm footage.” Thel harbored ambitions of becoming a movie director.
“Come back when it’s over and you can collect footage of the aftermath to your heart’s content.” From the look on Thel’s face, that wasn’t going to do it, but she couldn’t find a way to admit that she was really only interested in the cool part of the chaos and destruction.
“But do I have to spend three days in the middle of nowhere with Mike and Samantha? Not to mention the no-neck monsters?” (Two weeks ago, Roger had taken Thel to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) “With school starting next week?”
“Grandma and Drew are going to be there too,” said Roger. “That help any?”
“Now go back upstairs and finish packing,” said Carrie.
* * *
It was Monday at noon. Hurricane Gordon was expected to arrive in a little over thirty-six hours. This morning, the President had authorized emergency declarations for North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, D.C. and—just to be on the safe side—Pennsylvania. Carrie, who had declared a state of emergency three days ago, had spent half the morning in teleconference with the head of FEMA and the governors of Maryland and North Carolina.
Carrie had also finished shutting down every part of the executive branch that could be done without for a week and instructed the employees to get their families together and seek shelter. The legislators had adjourned. Courts were cancelled over much of the commonwealth. Schools were closed today—even those out of harm’s way might be needed to handle evacuees. The National Guard had taken charge of the buses, and was using them to evacuate people who couldn’t otherwise leave. Police and fire departments had stocked up on extra supplies. The hospitals were all swearing they were ready.
Her brain was trying to juggle the information of a dozen briefings—the condition of the power grid in eastern Virginia, location and readiness of potential shelters in the rest of the commonwealth, sociocultural data on the Tidewater communities with information from previous hurricanes on who was most and least likely to be willing to evacuate, and who might be willing but need help… it was like cramming for a test, only a lot of people would die if she got less than an A.
But she’d sent help to those who needed it and were willing, and the evacuation of the low-lying areas was going well. The fact that the Navy had pulled its assets out of Norfolk over the weekend had sent a pretty strong message: if we can’t fight this thing, what chance have you got? Everywhere else, there were the usual holdouts—people too stubborn to retreat in the face of the elements, people worried about looters, and probably some would-be looters. To these people, Carrie gave the usual last-minute advice: “If you feel you must stay in the area, please write your Social Security number on your arm or leg in permanent marker so that rescue workers can easily identify your remains.”
This afternoon, she was going to be reading reports from every county in Gordon’s path, trying to guess ahead of time which of the counties that all swore they were ready really were ready. One of the things Carrie had learned from the Mimicane simulation was that trying to reinforce a county government didn’t work if that government was completely overwhelmed.
Which could happen. The Commonwealth of Virginia was divided into ninety-five counties—more than California, New York, or Florida. A lot of them were tiny little places with limited resources. And some of the smallest and poorest counties were the ones Gordon was most likely to hit. Carrie began planning a task force to help them get the lights back on and personnel back in their offices… or somewhere that could serve the same function if those offices were no longer standing.
* * *
Five hours later, the task force finally set up, Carrie got a message on her computer. It was from her mother. She clicked on ACCEPT.
Judging from the angle, Mama was holding her tablet in her lap, allowing her to look down upon her daughter with an expression of affection and good cheer that was completely unlike anything Carrie remembered from her during childhood. In her early seventies, she was as wiry and healthy as ever, but her moods had mellowed out a lot. Behind her was the interior of Papa’s old vacation home in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Is this a bad time?” said Mama.
“Actually, this might be the only free moment I have today,” said Carrie.
“I’m just calling to say I can hear Roger’s car coming up the driveway.”
“Thank you.” Of course it would be Mama who called, rather than Roger or Thel. Both were still miffed at her for moving them as far as possible from anything that looked like danger, although Roger would never say so. Naturally they’d neglect to tell her when they’d arrived and make her worry even more. “Is the rest of the family there?”
“All present and accounted for.” She turned her tablet to give Carrie a good look at the living room. Her brother Mike and his son Liam were seated nearby. Mike looked like a smaller and less cheerful version of their father in his prime, a portly man with a heavy-jowled face and dark hair just starting to go gray. Liam, almost twelve, stuck his fat little face and hand out from behind his father to wave at his aunt on the screen.
Her other remaining brother, Drew, was leaning against the windowsill, gazing out onto the front lawn. Despite this, Samantha, Mike’s wife and business partner—to the extent that they still had a business after the fiasco in January—was trying to keep her short, fat self interposed between her two little daughters and Drew’s indifferent back. One day, Samantha, thought Carrie, you will learn that just because somebody is single and lives with his mother doesn’t mean he’s a pervert. You can figure it out. I believe in you. You’ve already learned that racist tweets on the company Twitter account are a bad idea. Having to publicly repudiate her sister-in-law’s comments had not been the high point of Carrie’s political career.
Just before Roger and Thel came in, Drew turned away from the window. Unlike Mike, he didn’t look like anybody else at all, which was good news for anybody else. After sixteen years, the patchwork of burn scars and skin grafts on his face had faded and weathered into something that was still unpleasant to look at, but at least wouldn’t be a source of nightmares.
Thel strode up to Drew, wrapped her arms around him and kissed a spot to the left of his mouth where there were some functioning nerve endings. “How’s my creepy uncle?” she said.
“Doing all right,” he said, hugging her awkwardly with the heels of his palms pressed against her spine. Samantha glowered at Thel as if the girl were doing this just to mess with her, which was probably true. That’s our family, thought Carrie.
* * *
It was noon. In Richmond, there was already a gray carpet over the sky. Carrie could hear the thirty mph wind driving the rain against the mansion’s eastern windows, but she couldn’t see it—sheets of plywood and heavy blankets were over the inside of the windows. The eye of the hurricane was still three hundred miles away, off the coast of North Carolina, but Virginia Beach was already getting damaged.
And the worst was yet to come. Not long after midnight, Gordon’s eye would be coming ashore right at the border with North Carolina. The Newport News and Norfolk areas
would get the worst of it. Carrie had moved fleets of bulldozers into Richmond and Petersburg, ready to go down there as soon as the weather allowed and clear away the remains of the houses, boats, and trees that would be littering the streets.
Richmond and Petersburg… that had been the toughest call, whether or not to stay here. This area was the heart of the commonwealth, and withdrawing from it would add days to her government’s response time. But if the storm turned out to be too powerful, if it destroyed everything she’d put here for safekeeping… not only would her career be over, it would deserve to be over.
No point second-guessing herself now. Carrie was as certain as she could be that she had done everything in her power to protect lives and property in Virginia. The time had come to make one last call to FEMA.
To Carrie’s surprise, it wasn’t a FEMA representative who appeared on the screen. It was Congressman Darling, R-OH. His cleft-chinned, perfect Hollywood face was easy to recognize.
Carrie didn’t know the names of everybody in Congress, but this guy she’d heard of. John Lyman Darling was one of those politicians who had a way of drawing attention to themselves that was all out of proportion to their actual power. He had started out as a generic right-wing Republican from rural Ohio. When his district was redistricted out from under him a few years ago, everybody thought that would be the end of him. Instead he’d changed a bunch of his positions, reinvented himself as a political maverick and, to the astonishment of all, won the election—and with very little help from the national party. You couldn’t be sure any more where he would come down on any particular issue, but he was good at both PR and constituent service.
“You’re still there?” said Carrie.
“Myself and a half-dozen others,” said Darling. “Not enough to get any business done, but it didn’t feel right to desert the nation’s capital.” Carrie mentally translated this to we all want to be seen boldly standing our ground even though there’s no sane reason for us to be here. This was an election year, after all. “We’re all just trying to stay out of the way of the professionals.”
“Are you sure you’re safe where you are?”
“There’s a reason FEMA set up the JFO here,” said Darling. “The Capitol is probably the safest building in D.C. right now. After all, we’re on a hill—we’re not going to be flooded out. And this place was built back when they knew how to build strong. No storm is going to knock down these walls, I promise you.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Carrie. “Speaking of staying out of the way of the professionals…” Darling took the hint and signaled for somebody from FEMA.
The eye of the storm, thirty miles wide, passed over northern Cape Hatteras, Nags Head, and Kill Devil Hills. This was little help to the few remaining residents, as it was immediately preceded and followed by winds blowing at 140 mph.
As predicted, the eye came ashore not long after midnight. Fortunately, the meteotsunami—the dome of water formed by low air pressure—entered the Bay just as the tide was going out, or the damage would have been even worse. As it was, a twenty-two-foot storm surge passed between—and over—the Virginia Capes. From there it spread out, losing much of its height, only to regain some of it in narrow places where the storm forced the water inland.
The eyewall moved north by northwest, over Norfolk, Newport News, and Hampton, before moving over the York River. Fragile frame houses were quickly destroyed—the wind forced its way in through drafts and popped them like balloons, or simply tore them apart. The pieces were propelled like shrapnel into the sides of other houses, creating a chain reaction of devastation. The storm surge forced its way through the lightless streets, carrying boats, cars, and trucks with equal indifference.
At dawn, the eyewall’s course turned more to the north, on a course that would carry it midway between Richmond and Washington. At 11 a.m. Gordon’s eye passed over Reston, Virginia. By this time its strongest sustained winds were down to 110 mph. Like a Confederate army, Hurricane Gordon crossed the Potomac into western Maryland and the hills of Pennsylvania where, late in the afternoon, it would die.
But even its death throes were a force to be reckoned with. Its rains flooded the Potomac, the Patuxent, the Patapsco, the Gunpowder, and the Susquehanna—all of which flowed into the Chesapeake Bay, where the storm surge was only just beginning to recede.
* * *
The flight from Svalbard to BWI via Reykjavik and Boston had been long, slow, and full of terrible weather. The drive through Maryland had been an obstacle course of downed trees and power lines, not all of them surrounded by traffic cones. All the way to Tilghman Island, over the old bridge and down the island’s main street, with every mile of terrain showing more signs of damage than the last, Isabel kept herself happy by looking forward to the moment when she could walk through her parents’ front door and collapse onto the comfy old couch in the living room.
So of course, no sooner had she turned onto the little side street where her parents lived than she saw that old couch out on the curb. When she pulled into the driveway and opened her car door, she got a good whiff of the mildew that had taken hold in its upholstery. Mom and Pop must not have been able to get it up the stairs, and the floodwaters from Gordon must have gotten into the house. It was like looking at the corpse of a family pet.
Isabel could easily see how high the storm surge had gone. The evidence was painted on the walls of every home, the trunk and branches of every tree, on every streetlight and road sign—a layer of silt that the rain from Gordon’s trailing edge had been unable to wash away, now dried by the sun to the color of cardboard. When Isabel stood on the front lawn of the house, the high-water mark was about level with her eyes. Suddenly, she didn’t want to go inside and see how bad things were. She did it anyway.
The living room looked like a room in an abandoned building. The rest of the furniture was still upstairs, and the pictures hadn’t been put back on the wall. The old carpet was gone. Kristen, home until Chesapeake College reopened, was scrubbing the naked floorboards by the light of a solitary lamp, so at least the power was back on. Her platinum-blond hair was crammed under a hairnet to keep it off the floor. With only the briefest of pauses for greetings, Isabel tucked her ponytail into the back of her T-shirt, got down on the floor and joined her, glad she wasn’t wearing good clothes.
When Isabel went to refill the bucket, she saw the kitchen was already clean. Dad had moved the fridge and freezer downstairs again. Mom was lining up dishes on the counter. She turned to look at Isabel.
“Shouldn’t you be in school, young lady?” she said with a smile.
“I’m supposed to be back in class on Monday,” said Isabel. “How are things here?”
“Oven’s not working. We’re going to polish off the last of the leftovers tonight. Tomorrow… well, we’ll have to think of something.”
* * *
Dinner turned out to be a little bit of chili, cauliflower, and vegetable soup. The good news was that the vegetable soup had been made with that wonderful crab broth. Just tasting it took Isabel back to a dozen and more afternoons spent helping her mother in the kitchen, cracking open the crab legs joint by joint, collecting the bigger chunks of caked-on Old Bay from the bodies of crabs, putting them in the slow cooker with lemon and garlic and water to simmer overnight until all the flavor and protein from those tiny little bits of rich dark crabmeat had gone into the broth.
“So how bad off is the island?” Isabel finally asked.
“I’ll put it this way,” said Pop. “I’ve seen Tilghmans and Misters working together cleaning stuff up.” Isabel was glad she had Pop to keep track of the complicated feuds on this island. It was the sort of thing she wasn’t much good at herself.
“I know at least three people who had to have dead deer hauled off the front porch,” said Kristen. “Poor things drowned trying to take shelter.”
“A couple of deer got up on the roof of the Comegys place and couldn’t get back down,” said Dad.
&n
bsp; “What’d they do about it?”
“Held a cookout,” said Kristen, grinning. “Probably not legal, but…”
“Wish I’d been there. I could’ve helped get rid of the evidence.”
“You might want to spend the weekend with Chelsey and Rod,” Mom said to Isabel. “We’re a little short of good rooms here.”
“It’s too bad the house is such a mess,” said Pop. “I’ve been hoping to meet this Hunter fella.”
Isabel tried to will her face not to turn pink, but it didn’t work. There was no possible way for her to say that she and Hunter weren’t quite at that stage of the relationship yet, especially since her parents took her boyfriends a lot more seriously than they took her girlfriends. And for them to approve of Hunter would be a miracle on par with Jesus personally appearing on their front lawn to heal the old couch.
“He’s very busy,” she said. “I’ll try and bring him by before the holidays.” She wasn’t lying. Between schoolwork and Enginquest, Hunter really was very busy. Her parents didn’t need that much detail.
Rummaging through her brain for a quick change of subject, Isabel suddenly remembered an important piece of news she’d forgotten to tell.
“I’ve been invited on the Walt Yuschak Show,” she said. (On some level, she knew that wasn’t its official name. It was called “This Week in Freedom with Walt Yuschak” or “This Week with Freedom in Walt Yuschak” or something like that. But everybody called it “The Walt Yuschak Show” or just “Walt Yuschak.”)
Everybody at the table needed a moment to take this in.
“It’s not just because of that thing with the bear,” Isabel added. “Well, it’s partly that. But they also want me to talk about what we found up there, with the change in sea temperature.”
“I’ve listened to him a few times,” said Kristen, “and I honestly think he’s kind of a jerk.” She said it with a touch of sorrow, as if it hurt her a little to make such a harsh judgment. Which it probably did. If Kristen thought you were “kind of a jerk,” you’d reached a point in life where your best bet was to run around your house weeping and smashing all the mirrors.