by Nick Courage
It was awful, like fresh fish and rotting leaves.
“I’m up,” Emily coughed, rolling out from beneath her pushy new friend.
Jumping to her feet, she fumbled in her still-wet pockets for her phone. It had to be her mom calling her. If she was being honest with herself, Emily felt relieved. She’d be in trouble—she couldn’t imagine not being in trouble—but at least she’d be able to sleep in her own bed. The goose stood up, too, his neck stretched tall as he hiccupped his disapproval.
“Stop that,” Emily hissed, scanning the darkness for the telltale glow of lit cigarettes.
Remembering.
The park didn’t scare her, not really, but the people in the park…they were still out there somewhere. The swings had stopped creaking, but she could hear them—their voices mixing with the midnight chuckling of restless wood ducks. And I just let my phone ring about a hundred times, Emily thought as she tucked her head into her shirt so she could check her messages beneath the damp cotton.
The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to the light.
The second-to-last thing she wanted was to be yelled at, but there was no avoiding that. Emily wondered if her mom would start out worried and then get angry, or if she’d start out angry and go from there. Either way, Emily wouldn’t have to wait to find out. As soon as she worked up the confidence to scroll through her missed calls, her phone started vibrating again.
Her hands trembled along with it.
Two calls in a row was bad, but three meant her mom was freaking out.
Like, about-to-call-the-police freaking out.
Emily answered quickly, her heart pounding at the back of her throat….
But it wasn’t Emily’s mom who was trying to reach her.
“Katie?” she whispered, her head still in her shirt.
There was a rustling on the other end of the line, like a chip bag being crumpled or a phone falling into a lap, but no answer. Just the nonstop reporting of cable news from a distant television. Emily cupped her hand over her free ear, cocooning herself in her wet T-shirt as a hot wind cut through the trees overhead. Upsetting the chimes. “A hurricane warning is in effect,” a newscaster said. She heard him as clearly as if she’d been in her own living room, her feet propped on her mom’s lap. “For residents living in the red-outlined area, a mandatory evacuation has been ordered. I repeat, a mandatory evacuation has been ordered….”
“Katie,” Emily whispered again, as loud as she dared.
Wherever Katie was calling from, it sounded like someone was pulling cabinet doors open and slamming them shut again. There were voices, too—people arguing, adults—and Emily strained to hear what they were saying. She was listening so intently that when her friend eventually sighed into the receiver, she almost jumped.
“Em, is that you?”
Emily took a deep breath.
“Hey,” she said, trying to sound normal with her head in her shirt.
“Hey,” Katie said, bubbling with nervous energy. “This is crazy, right?”
“Yeah,” Emily whispered, trying her best to match Katie’s excitement. But she had no idea what her friend was talking about. For a disorienting half-second, she wondered if Katie somehow knew that she was hiding in the park at one in the morning.
“Is, um…” Emily trailed off, stumbling as the goose threaded between her legs. “Is everything okay?”
Katie didn’t answer right away.
Emily could hear Katie’s mom asking her questions from another room, so she listened to the newscasters’ banter while she waited. It felt nice, in a weird way, to hang out again—even if it was wordlessly, on the phone. But after one minute passed and then another, Emily wasn’t sure if Katie was still on the line. Between the emergency broadcast and Katie’s parents, it was hard to make out what was going on. “We’re leaving the beach early,” Katie finally said, breaking the silence. “Because of the storm and stuff.” She barely took a breath between words. “They’re saying everyone has to go, so we’re getting the car ready now.”
Emily popped her head out of her shirt, like a jack-in-the-box.
She was smiling, for the first time since she could remember.
If Katie came home, that would change everything.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah,” Katie said, but she sounded distracted.
“Do you…” Emily trailed off when Katie’s dad interrupted.
He was packing the car and wanted to know if Katie was planning to help.
“Do you want to come over when you get back?”
“We’re actually driving up to Atlanta,” Katie said offhandedly, like she was used to crossing state lines on midnight road trips. “It’s already raining kind of hard here and my parents are trying to leave now so we can beat the traffic. They wanted me to tell you that if you guys end up having to leave the city, you should come stay with us….”
Emily nodded blankly into the night, but of course her friend didn’t see that.
In the background, she could hear Katie’s mom asking about Elliot.
And Katie’s dad hollering from their porch.
“One sec,” Katie said, palming her phone.
Emily stared at the matted patch of grass where she’d fallen asleep.
There was no way her mom was going to drive to Georgia—not even if Katie’s storm made it all the way to their front door. Not even if her dad came home and thought it was a great idea. Not in this universe. Her mom barely left the apartment as it was, and she certainly wasn’t going on any adventures until Elliot was feeling better. Emily sighed and looked for her turtle. The last time she’d seen his angry little face, she’d been cradling him in her arms—and now he was nowhere to be found. She frowned, investigating a clump of clovers with her toe.
He was just a turtle.
He couldn’t have gotten far.
Emily paced back and forth across the grass as she listened to Katie’s parents clear out of their rented beach house, her eyes peeled for the shine of the moon on a shaggy black shell as the news blared through her telephone. The breeze died out while she walked, and the hum of the wind chimes with it. Katie’s television was warning about potential flooding in Florida and Alabama, but it didn’t feel like a hurricane was coming—not to New Orleans, anyway. It didn’t feel like anything. Katie and her family could drive all night if they felt like it, but all Emily wanted was to find her turtle.
To show Elliot.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
She was so focused—so determined—that she didn’t notice the group of teenagers huddled beneath a flickering streetlamp until they’d already noticed her.
“Hey,” one of them said, more to his friends than to Emily. His voice was deep and ragged from smoking, and his arm cast a shadow so long it felt like it was going to reach out and grab her.
Emily tensed.
But he was just pointing.
She clenched her phone and slowly looked up.
The pointing boy wore cutoff shorts and a faded army jacket, the scraggly beginnings of a beard doing its best to hide the freckles and acne on his cheeks. He and his friends were older than Emily and clearly up to no good. They didn’t even try to hide that they were staring at her, their faces bathed in the warm glow of a shared plastic lighter. Emily held her ground as she watched the smoke curling up from the cigarettes in their dirty fingers.
Crawling happily toward them—of course—was her turtle.
Emily took a deep breath and told herself to be brave.
“Hey,” Katie said, hopping back onto the line. Her voice sounded too loud in Emily’s ear as she walked resolutely toward the teenagers, leaves and sticks crackling underfoot. “I have to go, okay—my parents are already in the car and everything. Stay safe!”
Emily nodded at the boy
in the army jacket as she scooped up the turtle with her free hand. “Yeah,” she said, using her normal voice instead of a whisper. Straightening her back, she stepped out of the darkness and onto the asphalt—escorted by the goose. He puffed out his chest and flapped his one good wing while the older boys whispered to each other. Emily kept her phone to her ear even after Katie hung up, avoiding eye contact with the boys, who were staring at her like they’d seen a ghost.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said, pretending she was still on the phone with someone—with anyone—to keep the boys from bothering her. The turtle was less shy now and clawed against her arms as she walked past them. Emily clutched him tightly against her chest and held her breath, trying to play it cool—but the goose wasn’t having it.
He rushed at the boys, honking and flapping.
Protecting his friend.
“That bird’s crazy,” one of the boys said.
Emily smiled.
She had been expecting trouble, but the teenagers just cursed appreciatively and stepped back onto the grass. It was only later, when she saw herself in a mirror, that Emily understood why. Her hair was tangled, her legs and arms scratched and caked with mud and algae. She looked like the last survivor of a tropical plane wreck. Like Swamp Thing. Tiptoeing through the midnight shadows with her turtle and the wild goose, Emily had been the bogeyman of Audubon Park.
Joy sucked the last of her soda through the soggy twist of a red licorice straw, then started chewing. Too much sugar made her tongue swell up, but she wouldn’t make it to the morning without the rush. Every minute already felt like a lifetime and she was only two hours into her second shift. Yawning, Joy tossed the empty can onto the overflowing bin beneath her desk. It landed with a clink at the top of the pile, then rolled to her feet.
“Only six more hours to go.”
Joy rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses and checked the screens.
One of the four monitors was tuned to WeatherTV, which she had muted. The other three were linked up to NCRC-3, a hundred-million-dollar satellite feeding atmospheric data into the NCRC’s predictive modeling program. It was state of the art—the heart of their entire operation. The meteorologists at WeatherTV did the best they could with the tools they had, but it was years behind what Joy’s team had been able to accomplish with their high-precision technology. NCRC-3 could tell them exactly where a weather system was going, when it was going to be there, and what it was going to do when it got there.
And it wasn’t just the reams of data the satellite bounced to their computers every second. It was what they were able to do with it. Their Washington office employed no less than ten certified super-brains, all recruited by the United States government. Some were scientists: meteorologists, volcanologists, and geologists. Others were software engineers or sociologists, like Joy. She was an expert in human behavior, which was useful when it came to predicting evacuation patterns and helping cities get their citizens to safety…but most of the feeds on the three NCRC-3 monitors didn’t mean much to her.
She wasn’t a numbers person like the rest of them, and she liked to joke that it was good to have at least one actual human on the team.
Joy reached for another piece of red licorice.
The whole setup was costing a fortune, but nobody ever questioned it.
Not when there were at least ten natural disasters in the United States every year that caused over a billion dollars’ worth of damage. Each. They happened so often, Joy’s team even had a name for them.
BDDs—Billion-Dollar Disasters.
And it wasn’t just the money.
Joy wouldn’t have worked with the NCRC if that was the case. When a Category 5 hurricane was headed straight for you, it took time for people to evacuate. To prepare. Every minute counted, and the center was able to give people valuable hours.
Days, even.
The NCRC was saving lives, and there wasn’t a politician on Earth who would refuse them. They funded the research and development of the NCRC-3 satellite without blinking an eye. And the two satellites that came before it, all of which had the NCRC’s motto etched onto their Kevlar hulls.
Forewarned is forearmed.
Luckily for Joy, the system was smart.
Practically smart enough to run itself.
If the NCRC-3 satellite picked up on any atmospheric aberrations, it wouldn’t hesitate to let her know. Almost two full days before the last BDD, their entire office had lit up like the Fourth of July. Until the alarms sounded, though, there wasn’t much for Joy to do. She wasn’t a weather person by training. She was a people person. And right now, when she should have been home in bed, she was the canary in the coal mine.
“Unless the lights start flashing,” they had told her, “it can wait for the day shift.”
So—ignoring the four screens mounted above her desk—Joy pressed pause on her fifth screen, a laptop she’d propped on her knees. She was four hours into a monster movie marathon and three sodas into the night, and it was time for a bathroom break.
Joy smiled as she made her way through the control center.
Of the ten certified geniuses employed by the National Climatic Research Center, she was the only one who hadn’t woken up with a sore throat and a raw pink nose. Which meant she was the best of the best. That was what she was going to tell everyone, anyway. She might be stuck with a double shift, but even the flu was no match for her.
Joy spun an empty chair as she passed it, just because she could.
It was still spinning when her phone started ringing.
She stood in the doorway of the bathroom, waiting for the red emergency lights to activate….
But it wasn’t a BDD—it was nothing.
Just a phone ringing in an empty office.
The phone was still ringing when Joy left the bathroom, wiping her wet hands on her jeans. “Okay, hang on,” she shouted as she grabbed another soda from the mini-fridge. The lights weren’t flashing, but Joy ran to her desk anyway. Her phone was hidden beneath a stack of newspapers, so it took a moment to find it. When she finally uncovered the caller ID, she sighed.
It was Rob.
“Hey,” she said, before he could say anything. “Remind me why I’m here if you’re not taking the night off?”
“Couldn’t sleep.” Rob sneezed. “So I was running some of the Valerie numbers and I’m probably not thinking straight, but…”
“But what?”
“Joy, my simulations are looking huge.”
“Huh,” Joy said, scanning the monitors. To her untrained eyes, everything looked more or less normal. Everything except for one blinking number in the corner of the third screen. The most recent number for Valerie’s internal speed. It had jumped another fifty miles per hour since the last reading. Rob sniffled as the number turned red before her eyes, setting off a cascading ripple effect across the monitors.
Joy’s fourth can of soda slipped to the floor as the numbers flipped from gray to red, triggering the emergency lights overhead. A Billion-Dollar Disaster. Rob yelled on the other end of the line, but Joy barely heard him as she hung up the phone, immediately dialing another number.
Flu or no flu, this was procedure.
This was why she was here.
“Dr. Carson,” Joy said. “I don’t want to bother you at home, but you might want to come into the office.”
She swallowed hard, her hands shaking from too much caffeine.
“Valerie just turned BDD.”
Alejo wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
It didn’t do any good.
The rain was endless. It ran through his hair and down his back in rivulets and rivers that puddled around his bare feet. He even spat rainwater, like it had found a way inside of him.
There was no escaping it.
There was no escaping Valerie.
Still, Alejo stood his ground, squinting through the rain at the familiar glow of the news van. The van was parked haphazardly on a slick strip of boardwalk on the far side of the Pilastro’s sprawling deck, across from the hot tubs and the swimming pool. Its windows were lit from within by the soft blue light of monitors and screens, which meant the yellow-eyed cameraman was nearby. Alejo smiled, as relieved as if he’d seen Padrino Nando in the lobby, stirring too much sugar into a midnight coffee.
It was true: the way the cameraman stared through Alejo made the little hairs on the back of his neck stand on end…but he’d been out in the storm all night.
He’d been in all kinds of storms.
If anyone could get Alejo back to La Perla, it would be him.
A wet wind whipped around the corner of the Pilastro, chilling Alejo to the bone. He hadn’t been lying to the guests when he told them that he’d seen plenty of bad weather. But none like this. None that strangled the beach in fog and blew the skinny palms so hard they almost snapped.
Alejo squared his narrow shoulders and stepped toward the glowing lights.
No matter what, he wouldn’t lose them this time.
He couldn’t.
Not again.
The path to the beach was littered with twigs and branches, and Alejo half regretted leaving his shoes to dry in the cloakroom—but there wasn’t time to go back. He picked his way toward the van quickly, without a second thought. It was only when lightning flashed across the sky that he slowed. Horror-struck. In the split second before the thunder, he could see everything as if it were frozen in time: the awning, pulled taut—like a sail—and tangled in a power line, its thin metal cables lashing wildly in the wind, just steps away from Alejo.
When the thunder finally cracked, it was so loud that Alejo shook.
The dirt beneath his feet was soft with rain, the mud warm between his toes.
He sank into it—stunned—as the metal cables snapped against the cabana, hard enough that Alejo swore he heard the wooden posts splinter and then split. He’d been heading toward the cabana out of habit. If the lightning hadn’t struck, if he hadn’t seen the power line…