Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  “How do you know it’s not?”

  “Because I know the building they’re doing that in front of, and that building is in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. I don’t know what’s really going on, but there’s no evacuation down in Puerto Madero, that’s for sure.”

  “Why would they be—”

  Jesse shrugs. “Could be anything. They don’t want people to panic but they just had a mutiny. Things are coming in so fast that they can’t pick people up, so they’re trying to keep them calm till it hits. Different factions feuding one place or another. Or if you ask me, they’re badly delayed but still planning to come for us, and they want to make sure everyone stays near an evacuation point. Like if the zipline is down—which happens fairly often—then they don’t want people piling up at the linehead; it will just make loading the zipline harder, and there’s no shelter at the zipline head anyway.”

  Mary Ann grins at him. “You’re really something, you know. You think about explanations like that. Most of the people I’ve ever known in my life would just have said ‘It’s typical’ or ‘Oh, what can you do?’ but you think up twenty things it could be.”

  “All of which are probably wrong.”

  “Oh, sure, but that doesn’t matter. I was just thinking that you actually do that—explain things—instead of just giving it to me from a script.” Mary Ann pulls a bandanna from her back pocket and wipes her sweatcovered face. “I don’t like how warm and still it’s getting, and I really don’t like the green color in the sky.”

  “Me either.” They move close to each other, so that their shoulders touch; it’s even warmer, but Jesse would rather be in contact as they look at the green-brown wash of thunderheads now boiling their way across the sky, chasing the last blue off to the east behind them.

  They finish lunch and have another cup of coffee. “This is going to blow in suddenly,” Jesse says, “and an outdoor café under an awning is not the place for it.”

  “The assembly point is all the way outdoors.”

  “True, but your house is about thirty steps from the assembly point. And from your second-floor window we can watch for the bus.”

  She sighs. “I suppose the problem is that till the wind and rain start, I’m not going to get over the feeling that they just need to matte in a nicerlooking sky. All right, let’s get going.”

  As they walk the short block back, Jesse sees what she means; there is something about the faraway look of the evil green thunderheads, their black anvil bases sailing like bargeloads of coal high above, that seems unconnected with the world below. The air gets more and more still, and the dark clouds roll over thicker and heavier.

  He’s trying to remember all the terms Diogenes taught him. He knows the big, heavy clouds are cumulonimbus and they get that pattern of dark base and fluffy top because there’s a warm updraft pouring from the base up into the sky, and that the whole thing acts like a big Van de Graaff generator, so that there are charges being separated up there and the potential for lightning is building up. And that row of thunderheads is called the squall line? Seems right. And somewhere back behind that there’s an actual front… no, that’s just in regular storms back home, he thinks. Still, somewhere out there the wind is about to pick up—

  They are already going up the garden path when the rain hits—and “hits” is the only word for it—it feels like a cold firehose turned suddenly on them. A moment later the wind is whipping up fiercely, and though they run and Mary Ann has the key in her hand, in their ten steps they are soaked to the skin.

  “I can’t see three feet out this window,” Mary Ann points out.

  “There’s no bus coming in this, anyway,” Jesse says. “Glad you got a high-rent place; hope you had to pay extra for the walls.”

  “The place was redone for security but I didn’t pay much attention to what they did,” Mary Ann says, and leans against him. He puts an arm around her, doing his best to be reassuring, and very grateful to have someone whom he has to reassure, since that seems to keep his teeth from chattering.

  The rain hits the windows in sheets, like water on the windshield in a car wash.

  “Guess we better ride it out in an inside room,” Jesse says. “There’s not really anything to see here.”

  She nods. “The house has a powerchip, and there’s plenty of food in the fridge. We can sit out a few days if the storm doesn’t manage to get in here at us.”

  “What about the windows?”

  “Passionet worries about snipers, believe it or not—ever since what’s-her-name, the blonde who appealed to low-end markets—ever since Kimber Lee Melodion got shot. So these are a lot tougher than regular windows.”

  The water is surging, thumping on the window; the view through the window (which reveals nothing but gray light and something grayly green beyond it) is like looking up from the bottom of a river. “Uh, did they do anything special with your window frames?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then let’s get to an interior room.”

  The wind and the rain are loud; they don’t even realize anyone else is in the house until they get into the kitchen. But it makes sense that it’s Señora Herrera, her husband Tomás, and a bunch of children. “I am sorry, madame—” she begins at once.

  “Nonsense,” Mary Ann says. “The bus didn’t come, this place has power and it’s a good place to ride out the storm, and it was only sensible for you and Tomás to come here. And I think even with all the young appetites there’s probably enough food for everyone for a week. But, er—I’d no idea you had so many—that is, are all these children yours?”

  Señora Herrera translates for Tomás, who speaks no English, and he laughs, before she turns back to explain to Mary Ann. “No, ours are grown. These are nieces and nephews and grandchildren, madame.”

  There are six of them, now that Jesse’s had a chance to count. He knows the fridge is huge and it was well stocked just beforehand, so he’s not worried about food supply, and since Mary Ann is taking a generous attitude about her house, he can hardly complain. Still, he’s just a little jealous; he had been sort of hoping to have the whole place and Mary Ann just for himself.

  That triggers a guilt attack and nowadays guilt always reminds him of Naomi. Well, if she had any sense she stayed out of Tehuantepec today and if she was really smart she went up to Oaxaca; there might be some danger there from floods when Clementine’s rains hit the volcanic slopes around the city, but chances are that Oaxaca will come through it with minor wind damage—in fact, the news (his brother Di seems to be on the television news every night, maybe because that reporter, Berlina Jameson, keeps interviewing him) was talking about the storm dying when it got up to the mountains.

  The wind outside booms against the walls, and there’s a low shudder that runs through their feet. Tomás turns to Jesse and says, in Spanish, “The two of us could tie down the roof. I don’t believe it is, and it needs to be.”

  Jesse doesn’t know what Tomás is talking about, but figures Tomás knows more than he does. So he says, “All right; what do we use to tie it down?”

  “There is”—a Spanish word that Jesse doesn’t know—“in my truck outside; I will flip a coin and one of us will run for it—”

  “I’m already wet,” Jesse says. “And what is—?”

  It takes them a long couple of minutes to figure out that the English for what they are talking about is “airplane cable”—lightweight wire rope. Tomás needs the big roll of it; he has already brought in his toolbox, which has the necessary wirecutters, wrenches, and saddles. He had been about to make the dash when Jesse and Mary Ann turned up.

  The truck is parked behind the house, sheltered from the direct fury of the rain. Running for the cable is like diving into a cold swimming pool; Jesse is drenched in just one step. Then the wind hits him from behind, and he is thrown to his hands and knees on the rain-slick cobbles before he can adjust his balance. The cold water sluices around his wrists and legs for a long second as he bends his
head inward to draw a breath; then Jesse rushes forward to the truck and his cold, numb hands sting as he is thrown against its door. It’s lucky this thing has a sliding door because he doubts he could open a door that swung out against the wind.

  Gasping, he opens the truck door with a hard yank, climbs inside, and slides it closed behind him, not fast enough to prevent everything getting soaked in the brief second or so. He brought a flashlight in his back pocket—even though it’s only about one in the afternoon—and now he’s glad he did. It’s darker in here than it would be on an ordinary night.

  He finds the big coil of aircraft cable where Tomás said it would be, and pulls it onto his shoulder.

  The truck rocks hard a couple of times; the wind isn’t strong enough to pick it up or roll it, but more than enough to make it bounce on its shocks. He draws a breath—

  It’s much worse getting back to the house—he has to run face-first into the storm. He doesn’t lose his balance, but his feet slip and give under him as if he were wading upstream in a mountain river, and the rain pounds flat against his chest so hard that he holds his breath. As he starts his run, the house, less than fifty feet away, is not much more than a blur, and he’s so blinded by the rain that he hits the wall next to the door before he slips in sideways.

  Tomás grins at him. “That will save you a few years of bathing.”

  Jesse heaves a long breath and says, “Shall we place bets on how long till the truck goes to San Cristóbal without us?”

  Tomás laughs. “I have an idea about that too. The roof won’t blow off in the time it will take you to change clothing, though, so why don’t you do that—”

  “Well, if we’re going to do something about the truck, why don’t I do it while I’m still wet?”

  “Because it seemed too heartless to send you back out into that, especially with the difficulty of crawling underneath the van to stretch cargo straps under the frame—”

  “You were thinking of tying it down? Why not just back it up close to the house and then weight it?”

  Tomás stops, scratches his head, thinks. “That would make more sense,” he admits. “But what can we weight it with?”

  “There are empty fifty-five-gallon drums in the room with the washer, right? So if I back up close to there, and we put four drums in the truck and fill them with water, that’s about a ton of added weight. And there’s no shortage of water just now.”

  Tomás claps him on the shoulder. “Señor Callare, you are a brilliant ingeniero. And you did mention that you’re already wet.”

  It’s not quite so bad this time, because he knows he won’t be running back through the water; he’s impressed with Tomás’s maintenance—the truck starts right up. He’s going from memory about where the garden, curb, and utility-room door are, and there’s a nasty bump as he goes over the curb into the slick goo that’s about all that’s left of the roses, mulch, and compost, but though the tires spin for an instant, they catch, and he gets backed up against the wall, just two quick steps from the door.

  As he bursts in, Tomás says, “May I ask you something, Señor?”

  “Call me Jesse. I think we can declare democracy till the storm’s over, at least.”

  “Then may I ask you something, Jesse?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why didn’t it occur to either of us to do this first, so that you didn’t have to run the whole way three times, or carry that roll of cable?”

  Jesse’s jaw drops, and then they’re both laughing.

  It’s still something of a battle to get the empty drums across the gap of a few feet into the truck, and there’s a lot of water on the utility-room floor by the time they’re done, but once the drums are in it’s just a matter of running a hose out to the van to fill the drums.

  As the drums are filling, they go upstairs, pick several likely points, and fasten tight loops of aircraft cable around the rafters of the house and through eyebolts driven into the roof. It will now take a great deal more lift before the roof comes off.

  As they’re working they take breaks to run down and move the hose from drum to drum, so that house and truck are secured at about the same time. With as much safety secured as they can manage, Tomás goes into the main bathroom, and Jesse goes upstairs to change.

  Mary Ann hands him three towels and a change of clothing. “At least with the powerchip, as long as the house stands up we have a washer and dryer.”

  “What about water supply?”

  “We’re on a cistem.” She gestures at a window, and Jesse whacks himself on the side of the head. He takes a quick, hot shower, then steps into the hot, dry sauna in her bathroom and relishes getting really dry and warm.

  Naomi Cascade did go to Tehuantepec, and she knew the whole way there that it was against common sense, but something in her wouldn’t let her stay put in safety when so many people she knew were in danger, and so she went. She got there just in time to realize, along with everyone else, that the evacuation wasn’t going to happen.

  At the moment that Jesse is getting into a hot shower just over two hundred miles to the southeast, she’s huddled with a bunch of kids from the school, their backs to a wall on the side away from the wind. She has had a hard time not screaming: first when the roof came off, lifting like a single immense kite and then bursting into pieces flying away downwind; then when the interior wall they were facing went over in an explosion of lath and plaster against the far wall of the building, leaving nothing but a scoured area between the walls; and now as the wall above is visibly eroding down toward them. There are four children clinging to her, and she can’t possibly hang on to them if they are directly exposed to the wind.

  As soon as the wall above has eroded far enough, they will be exposed to the wind.

  As far as she can tell the wind is still rising. The last news she’d heard was that Tehuantepec was going to take the eye directly.

  She wishes vaguely for Jesse, because her gut says that as the wall wears down closer to the ground it will wear more slowly, but she isn’t sure enough, and she suspects her Science Guy, as she used to think of him, would be able to tell her. If the wall won’t erode all the way down to them—and she thinks it won’t, she thinks it won’t, she keeps telling the children it won’t—then they might as well stay here till the eye arrives and then run for better cover. But if the wall is going to keep on wearing down, they need to crawl down to the end of it before the wind gets any stronger, and then somehow get across the street to the little cathedral—surely that can’t have been knocked down—a few dozen feet away. She has no idea how to get these kids there without being blown off into the wind or hit by rubble that she can hear and feel slamming like bullets and cannonballs into the other side of the wall.

  She always loved Tehuantepec, though the zócalo there is not particularly fine, there’s no especially lovely architecture, the local seafood dishes are good but no better than what you can get anywhere up and down the coast, it’s just a small city where people passing through change buses and people who live there work serving the road and the neighboring farms… a small town like any other….

  That phrase, “small town,” makes her think of Jesse again. She has to admit, though he probably is no better at such situations than anyone else would be, there’s something about his small-town world-by-the-tail attitude, the way that he figures since he can fix a flat or climb a rock he ought to be able to fly a rocket or build a nuclear reactor, that would be so reassuring right now. Besides, he might have a better idea about what to do than she does.

  She’s grateful that her mother can’t hear her thinking.

  Luisa, the smallest one, curls more tightly against her and asks, screaming above the wind, if they’re going to die. Naomi strokes the child’s hair, resists the urge to say “Not yet,” and instead shouts back that it will be okay, but they’re going to get very wet and dirty. She’s not sure that Luisa hears her over the booming thunder of the wind and rain.

  A big chunk b
reaks loose overhead, and gravel rattles down on them, but the piece of the wall—two feet by four, it must weigh a hundred pounds—sails off into the dark rain all but horizontally. Naomi doesn’t hear it hit anywhere. Maybe it landed too far away or maybe the roar in her ears from the wind is louder than she had thought.

  The kids huddle closer, and Naomi tries to slide as far down the wall as she can without extending her body too far away from it. The sky grows darker, and the roaring louder, until finally she is left alone, except for the press of the smaller bodies against her, with her thoughts.

  She finds she has many. Though the roar, the rubble pounding the wall, the gravel rattling down around them, and the dark are terrifying in one sense, the fact that she is not in pain at the moment but merely uncomfortable, the absence of anything effective she can do, and the inability to do anything for the children, other than be there, leave her with a great deal of time on her hands. She wishes she could sleep—if she lives through this she will want to have rested, and if not it might be easier to die in her sleep.

  She replays an argument she had with Jesse and has to admit he was right; this would have happened sooner or later anyway. There’s plenty of methane clathrate on the ocean floor and in the tundra permafrost, and sooner or later a volcanic eruption, or a major meteor strike, or even just the slow progress of global warming itself, was going to release it. Truly no one knew this would happen, and it seems doubtful that any of the world leaders involved had any acceptable options.

  Sitting here behind this crumbling wall, she’s learning quite a bit about what “not having any acceptable options” means.

  The kid everyone just calls “Compañero”—Naomi doesn’t know his name, but he’s the son of the chair of the local Communist Party and a real trouble-maker at the center—is shaking, with fear or cold or something, and she gently strokes his hair.

  If she lives through this she is going to violate all her principles and have kids of her own. She was brought up believing that global population must diminish very rapidly, only three percent of the population at most should have children and the rest should be sterilized… but despite all the pressure from her parents, she never had it done. So, fuck them, here she is with a bunch of other people’s kids, and if she gets through it she wants her own. Besides, before all this is over, the world will get a lot more depopulated.