by Nick Courage
That was also where he had been careless enough to cruise right into the scientists’ invisible nylon nets. “Hvad er dit navn?” the scientist had asked, holding the petrel in the palm of her hands. She was part of a Danish team of ornithologists studying the effects of climate change on migratory birds.
“What’s your name, little friend?”
The petrel had stared at her with his tiny black eyes, not daring to move.
The scientist pretended to be offended while she reached for the needle.
Her job was simple: take the petrel’s blood as quickly as she could, holding his sharp beak away from her fingers—which were already scratched and pecked by other birds—then cinch a small aluminum band above its webbed foot. The band was stamped with an identifying number and the research team’s contact information. Should the bird be caught again, the scientist would know where the wind had blown it.
It had only taken a moment, and then it was done.
The tiny petrel was free to go.
“Det var godt at møde dig!” the scientist had called after him as he wheeled out over the icy Weddell Sea. “It was a pleasure to meet you, my friend!”
That had been almost a year ago, exactly.
Now the band flashed with lightning as the storm swirled around the little bird. He had been flying for days before he had gotten caught in the storm, chasing the deep-sea trawlers that crawled the Atlantic for fish.
Feeding on the snacks they left in their wake.
When the clouds had formed and the sky turned dark, the little petrel hadn’t given it a second thought. Storms were nothing to the petrel, who loved flying low above the waves, his long legs grazing the whitecaps as the ocean swelled beneath him. He was small, but he was strong, built for the sea and all it had to offer.
At least, that was what the little petrel thought.
He was too young to know what was coming.
Too young to know that he would be stuck in the eye of the storm, unable to break through the thick walls of wind and rain circling around him. His friends had known—they may have even tried to warn him, but the little petrel hadn’t paid them any attention. He’d been too busy darting through the troughs between waves, for the joy of it.
For the thrill.
Now the little petrel flew in the dark, trapped in a pocket of calm at the heart of the storm. He rode the rising currents when he could, trying not to flap. Saving his energy. He was already getting tired, and he was always hungry, but he couldn’t stop—not now that he was a part of something bigger than himself.
Not without being battered into the surf.
If he was going to live through this, the little petrel needed to keep flying.
After watching the news vans drive away, Alejo had taken the cameraman’s advice and gone back inside the San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino. He hadn’t liked feeling left behind, but he hadn’t liked the long-toothed cameraman, either…and he didn’t have any other options.
Not really.
He could go inside or stay where he was, in the dark.
In the rain.
The lobby had been full when Alejo dripped back inside, so full that that there were no chairs or couches left for him to sit on. He circled the room twice before giving up and sneaking into the cloakroom by the office, where he took off his waterlogged shoes and curled up on the soft velvet settee he knew he would find there.
Beneath the hangers, out of the way.
For a while Alejo had felt happy, surrounded by the muted sounds of people talking and joking and eating the last of the ice cream sandwiches—just in case. It was like a party, he thought, nestling into the seams between the cushions. A party where everyone was invited except Valerie. He closed his eyes and pictured Padrino Nando nodding off in his pea-green armchair, the storm raging outside his windows.
Safe.
Alejo was half asleep by the time the hotel manager found him, tucking him in beneath a white feather comforter she’d borrowed from one of the Pilastro’s many empty rooms. Ms. Ana knew Alejo well. She knew that he lived with his padrino Nando, who helped keep the hotel grounds beautiful. Who arranged a meeting with her every fall, to make sure that Alejo could come to work with him during the summers. The San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino was a family, so Ms. Ana wasn’t worried that Alejo was alone in the cloakroom.
Just that he was wet and tired.
“This rain, it’s nothing,” she reassured him, pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. “Just a tropical storm.”
It was the same line she had asked him to give to the guests earlier in the evening, but Alejo believed her. The comforter was so soft that he felt like he’d been wrapped in a cloud, and as much as he wanted to stay awake and watch the news, his eyelids were too heavy. Nothing bad could happen to them at the Pilastro, he remembered thinking.
Nothing bad would happen.
Two hours later, Alejo woke up in a sweat.
The lobby was empty, and as he kicked free from the comforter, unease spread in the pit of his stomach. He had dreamt of cormorants: big, oily black birds racing into the mirrored windows of the resort. Smashing themselves into lifeless bits of blood and feathers. Alejo rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to tell himself it was just a dream, that it didn’t mean anything…but he couldn’t help remembering what Padrino Nando had said about the birds.
The birds and the storm.
Alejo shook his head, trying to forget the piercing sea-blue stares of the birds in his dream. It felt wrong, being alone in the Pilastro in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t leave me, he told himself. But—hidden away in the cloakroom—he was easy to overlook. The rain was beating against the lobby’s fogged glass windows in sheets, the roar of the wind so loud he could barely hear the emergency broadcast.
La tormenta del siglo—the storm of the century.
Alejo pushed the comforter to the floor.
The marble tiles were cold on his bare feet, but his sneakers hadn’t dried, and the thought of putting them back on while they were still wet was too much to bear. A chill ran through his legs as he padded toward the big screen above the front desk. On the television, a hot pink blob covered the blue of the Atlantic Ocean, trailing yellow and orange over the island. A red band on the bottom of the screen flashed a hurricane warning in capital letters:
¡URGENTE: ALERTA DE HURACÁN, URGENTE!
“Aló,” Alejo said, his reedy voice echoing through the empty lobby.
The lights were still on, so he knew it wasn’t that bad. Not yet, anyway. But a woman on the television said that the winds had reached over seventy-five miles an hour in the core of the storm, which was heading right toward them. And a high-pitched emergency alert had started screeching at him from every television in the San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino, like canaries in a coal mine.
Like Valerie, heading right for them.
Where was everyone?
“Hello!” Alejo shouted, jogging to the kitchen.
Half-empty glasses were strewn across the chef’s stainless-steel tables, along with the leftovers from earlier. Attracting flies. Alejo shook his head in disbelief. He’d never seen the San Juan Pilastro like this, not ever. It wasn’t so much that everyone had just…disappeared. It was the mess they’d left behind. Alejo frowned, reaching for a crumbling block of cheese. They wouldn’t leave me, he told himself again, taking nervous bites as he made his way to the breakroom.
From behind the closed door he could hear the television warbling—but when he pushed it open, there was nobody there.
Just empty cookie trays and a half-finished bottle of orange soda.
There was nobody anywhere.
Just as he was starting to feel like he was the last person left in the world, the telephone at the front desk began to ring. Alejo ran to answer it, his feet slapping loudly agai
nst the floor. “It’s Alejandro,” he whispered into the phone, in Spanish.
Breathless.
“Where is everyone?”
“Hi, yes.”
It was a woman with a fancy accent. One of the guests. The phone felt slippery in Alejo’s sweaty hands. “We ordered room service about an hour ago and I was just wondering if that order went through or…”
The woman trailed off and Alejo wondered what he should say.
“This is the front desk, right?” the woman asked. “Hello?”
Alejo hung up the phone.
He felt bad about it, but this was no time for room service.
More than anything, he wanted to crawl back into the cloakroom and burrow down, forgetting that any of this was happening. But he knew he couldn’t. Not with everyone gone and Padrino Nando out in the storm. Whether he liked it or not, Valerie was coming. Hiding beneath the comforter wasn’t going to stop her.
Alejo took a deep breath.
The television said the hurricane was going to hit in the early morning. Predawn, before the sunrise. If he hurried, that was plenty of time to find Nando and bring him back to the Pilastro. All he needed was a ride to La Perla. Alejo kicked himself for listening to the cameraman. He could have been there and back hours ago—when Valerie was still just a tropical storm.
As it was, Ms. Ana had to be somewhere.
She would give him a ride, he knew.
Someone would, if he could find them.
If everyone hadn’t already evacuated.
“Excuse me, do you work here?”
Alejo jumped.
There was a bald man in the elevator bay wearing an open robe and bright red swim trunks with yellow crabs on them. As happy as his shorts looked, the man looked the opposite. Crabby, Alejo thought. Like he wanted to yell at someone. Alejo looked down at his own wrinkled shirt. He wasn’t one of the Pilastros’ fancy concierges, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to be yelled at. He was only supposed to help his padrino sweep the bougainvillea petals from the walkways around the pool. To fold the blue and white striped towels, warm from the wash.
“Sorry, mister,” Alejo said. “Quisiera ayudarte, pero…” I wish I could help you, but…not now, he thought. Not really.
Alejo tried to look clueless so the crabby man would assume he didn’t speak English and find someone else to bully.
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“Aren’t you the kid that came to my room earlier?” he asked, his flip-flops slapping the marble floor as he walked toward the front desk. Alejo shrugged as the man rested his arms on the counter. Ignoring Alejo, the man surveyed the lobby. His arms were muscled and hairy. A heavy silver watch hung loosely from his wrist.
“Where is everyone, anyway?”
Alejo opened his mouth to say he didn’t know, then closed it as the revolving glass door at the front of the lobby started to spin slowly on its axis. Pushed by the wind. Alejo and the man watched it spit rain and leaves into the lobby until finally, frowning, the man in the funny shorts walked toward the door. He kneeled, clicking the floor lock closed as if he owned the place, and the revolving door stopped spinning.
Outside—in the hot, black night—the storm still raged.
“Excuse me, hi,” a woman said, resting two fingers on Alejo’s shoulder. He’d been so distracted that he hadn’t heard her coming. The man in the crab shorts hadn’t either. He was standing stock-still in front of the revolving door, his thick arms limp at his sides.
Watching the storm.
“I just called down about room service and…”
Alejo rolled his shoulders, shrinking away from the woman and her thin, cold hands—but again, it didn’t matter. She was too distracted by the rattle of the big windows in their metals frames to finish her thought.
“He speaks English just fine,” the crabby man said, not looking away from the glass. Somehow, even with the spinning door secured, the rain continued to drip into the lobby. It pooled on the floor, and when the man turned around, his flip-flops squeaked on the wet marble.
“This kid was as smooth as Sinatra earlier. Everything’s gonna be great, he said.”
Alejo didn’t like the way the man imitated his voice, high-pitched and singsong, like a cartoon mouse. As the man stared at him, waiting for Alejo to say something—anything—one of the deck chairs shuddered across the tiles outside. Unmoored, it bumped into the glass, then slid sideways over the terra-cotta, its wooden feet groaning as it went.
Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded.
“I didn’t realize how bad it was out there,” the woman said.
The crabby man just looked at Alejo.
“Where is everyone?”
His voice was hard and cold, but Alejo didn’t know.
And he didn’t like being left to run the hotel alone, in a hurricane.
It wasn’t fair.
“One moment, sir,” Alejo said, trying his hardest to sound calm as he looked the crabby man in the eyes. The crabby man smiled crookedly, pleased to have caught Alejo in a lie. It wasn’t like he was a genius, Alejo thought. Just because he was Puerto Rican didn’t mean he wasn’t American. Everyone on the island spoke English, even Padrino Nando, who spoke mostly Spanish when he had the choice.
The crabby man must have forgotten that.
Or maybe he never knew.
Alejo plastered on a fake smile and backed away from the front desk.
“Let me get my manager,” he said without a trace of an accent.
“Told you so,” the crabby man said to the lady, turning back to the window. The lady stared at the television over the front desk, pretending not to hear him. Neither of them picked up the phone when it started ringing.
They let it ring and ring and ring.
“That kid’s a smooth operator,” the crabby man muttered.
As Alejo jogged toward the office, the emergency alert started up again—an urgent, high-pitched squeal. A headache waiting to happen. He knew he’d only find flat soda and leftovers in the back rooms, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t expect to find the manager, not where he’d already looked. Manager was just the magic word—his key out of the lobby. The phone continued to ring as Alejo hurried past the kitchen and the breakroom and into a seldom-used stairwell. Without looking back, Alejo pushed his way through a scuffed metal door and into Hurricane Valerie.
Outside, the rain was harder than he remembered.
Sharper.
It sliced at Alejo’s face and arms, drenching him before he was even halfway out the door. Still barefoot, Alejo shielded his eyes with his skinny arm and splashed through the storm. His plan was simple: circle the Pilastro, checking for lights in the lower windows, looking for anyone who wasn’t a guest who might know where everyone had gone. The side door opened onto a path to the pool, so Alejo angled toward the back patio first. From there, he could cut through the parking garage to the front of the hotel.
Bypassing the crabby man and the rest of the guests completely.
Even though the path was sheltered by overhanging balconies, running against the storm was hard work—especially without shoes. The blossoms and petals that had littered the walkways earlier in the day were joined by palm fronds and broken branches, their flesh white and twisted against the black of the night. The wind that had felled them was so strong that it almost knocked Alejo off his feet, so he hugged the walls, creeping like Spider-Man as he tiptoed through the debris.
Trying not to blow away.
It would have been fun…if it weren’t so terrifying, Alejo thought, ducking his head against the rain. He braced himself as he rounded a corner onto the back patio of the San Juan Pilastro, stepping into the wind. It groaned as it smashed against the rear-facing wall of the resort, like the cormorants from his dream. Already, the wind had loosened one
of the awnings that he and Padrino Nando had secured before the storm, binding them with impossible knots that they expected to cut when the weather had passed. The awning flapped angrily against the cabana, snapping and cracking so wildly that Alejo jumped.
He couldn’t help himself.
The thunderous, crashing waves of the Atlantic were close enough that he could feel their spray, but the beach was shrouded in fog so thick that he couldn’t see them. Not until the hazy spotlights of the news crew panned across the surf, roiling and gray with foam. Alejo’s heart pounded in his chest as towering whitecaps crested angrily toward shore.
The news crew.
And beyond the crew and their spotlights and their cameras…
A churning darkness.
Emily was sound asleep when her phone rang.
She tried to stay that way, ignoring the muffled ringtone—grasping after the last fading tendrils of a half-remembered dream. But it was too late. By the time the call went to voice mail, Emily was more or less awake. She sighed as her phone dinged with a new message, then started ringing again.
Stretching, she opened her eyes.
She wasn’t surprised to find herself curled up on the grass, but her mind was still fuzzy. While her phone rang and rang and rang from her pocket, Emily stared up into the dark webbing of branches swaying gently overhead until it all came back to her.
The goose, the island, the turtle.
Elliot.
Everything.
Wind chimes thrummed quietly in a warm breeze, so soft and deep they gave Emily shivers. If the goose hadn’t started nipping at her hair again, she might have thought it was all a dream. That she was still dreaming. It was only when he stepped heavily onto her stomach that she knew for a fact that she wasn’t. Huh, huh, hunk, the goose said, his dented beak so close to her face that she almost choked on his breath.