Storm Blown

by Nick Courage

  But he didn’t run back inside, to where it was dry and safe.

  Not even as the ocean spray stung his eyes.

  Instead, he gripped the doorway, steadying his legs, and took in what was left of La Perla. He was even luckier than he had realized. The storm surge had reached the asphalt in front of the house while he slept. Any farther and he might not have made it to morning. Alejo watched the waves lick the tires of Padrino Nando’s truck. It had flipped overnight, capsized by the rising tides, and its windows had collapsed under thick piles of sand. The sand filled the entire front cab, leaking out of the cracks in the door like a broken hourglass. Everything beyond the truck—the honeycomb of brightly colored houses, stitched together with power lines and tiled mosaics. The empty pool where the skateboarders spent sunburned afternoons, flying up the curved walls into the cloudless sky. The crumbling stairway down to the beach, overgrown with crawling vines and banana plants…

  It was all gone.

  Swallowed by the steel-gray sea.

  The front door swung on its hinges, tapping Alejo’s back as the waves slapped against their newfound shore. He was so lost in thought that he almost didn’t notice the woman waving to him from the stairs beside their house. “Hey,” she yelled, straining to be heard above the white noise of the wind. Her hair was tied back in a thick ponytail and an overstuffed laundry bag was slung over her shoulder. She was with two men who were also carrying bags—garbage bags, packed to bursting. They kept climbing the stairs as the woman shouted at Alejo, their broad shoulders bent against the wind.

  “¡Oye, boy!” the woman yelled. “You can’t stay here!”

  Alejo stared blankly at the woman and her friends.

  She was right, he knew—but he was too stunned to move.

  His pulse quickened as Padrino Nando’s ruined truck groaned beneath the weight of wet sand. He wanted to run with every fiber of his being, to leave before it was too late. But Alejo stood frozen on the porch instead, his legs numb with shock as the woman stood steadfastly against the wind, waving for him to join her.

  “¡Vamos!” she shouted. “Everyone else, they’re already gone!”

  But Alejo couldn’t leave.

  And he couldn’t stay, either.

  Not with La Perla sinking beneath the waves. The truck would be the next to go, and then the house. And then Alejo, if he didn’t get moving. But wherever Padrino Nando was, it felt wrong to leave without him. The woman yelled at Alejo again as he ran back into the house, the door slamming shut behind him. “We’re out of time,” she shouted, cursing loudly as he disappeared inside. “We can’t wait any longer!”

  Alejo barely heard her.

  He was too busy unlatching the shutters and throwing open the windows, letting what was left of the sun into the house he shared with Padrino Nando. A day-old newspaper fluttered on the dining room table and the curtains billowed in the salty breeze as Alejo jogged from room to room, rifling through the old man’s belongings in the strange yellow light.

  Looking for a sign.

  A clue.

  Anything.

  But everything was in its place.

  Nando’s summer blazer hung from a hook behind the kitchen door, and his wooden pocketknife and pipe were resting on his bedside table, worn smooth from decades of use. Padrino Nando wouldn’t have left without them.

  He wouldn’t have left without Alejo.

  Not if he could help it.

  Alejo slipped the knife into his pocket.

  He ran his thumb across its handle as he swept through the rest of the house twice, and then a third time for good luck. The heft of it was reassuring in his hand, like a part of his padrino was still with him, protecting him. But the truth was that he had left a long time ago, like Alejo should have.

  It wasn’t until he worked up a sweat that Alejo admitted it to himself.

  Padrino Nando was gone.

  A sudden gust of wind ripped through the open windows, knocking a framed photo from the wall. The glass shattered, the shards exploding across the hardwood floor. Alejo could have closed the windows and looked for a broom, but he sat heavily at the kitchen table instead, resting his forehead on the cool white tiles.

  Closing his eyes.

  La Perla was drowning and his padrino had left him and there was nothing Alejo could do about it. He had tried his best…and there was nothing he could do about any of it. “Dame fuerza,” he whispered, clenching his fingers into a fist.

  Give me strength.

  But Alejo didn’t even know where to start.

  Sighing, he slouched into the stiff-backed chair.

  It was only when he rubbed the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand that he saw the note. It was folded into a small square and wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag that was duct-taped to the table so it wouldn’t fly away. Alejo sat up in his chair and scraped the tape from the tile with his thumbnail. Even with the note still folded in plastic, he could make out his name through the back of it. Padrino Nando had pushed down hard with a blue ballpoint pen….

  So hard the paper had ripped.

  Alejo’s heart pounded as he unsealed the bag.

  As he unfolded the note and started to read, the woman with the thick ponytail climbed into the driver’s seat of the van she had found at the top of the wall—its keys in the ignition, like a sign from God. She crossed her heart and told herself that the National Guard was still patrolling. She’d call them as she drove—she’d flag them down if she had to. She’d do whatever it took to make sure the boy made it out alive. But she wouldn’t stay in harm’s way any longer, not with the worst of the storm breathing down their necks. She couldn’t. Two other families were already piled in the backseats, their entire lives packed in overflowing trash bags on their laps.

  Waterproofed, like the old man’s note.

  The last of La Perla.

  Alejo squared his shoulders and squinted through the windows of Padrino Nando’s house, at the darkening horizon, as the van scraped over the sidewalk and onto Calle Norzagaray. The wind continued to shriek and sirens sounded throughout the city, but he’d grown accustomed to the noise. It was the oncoming clouds that bothered him. He refolded the note and stowed it in his pocket as he studied the sky.

  There were layers to the haze that he hadn’t noticed before.

  There was movement.

  The corners of Alejo’s mouth twitched downward as stacks of clouds blurred into focus. It wasn’t just haze that was making the sky gray. It was the massive inner wall of Hurricane Valerie, a centrifuge spinning at over a hundred miles per hour, tracing a deadly circle around the island. The bright green veins flashing through the cracks in the clouds: lightning trapped within the depths of the storm, flickering like a dying bulb.

  Alejo stepped outside, craning his neck as he searched for a break in the wall.

  A break that didn’t exist.

  The wind swept his hair back from his forehead and thunder echoed over the Atlantic. Alejo fingered the note in his pocket as the rain picked up again, cascading in sheets across the last remaining bits of La Perla. Washing the hot tears from his face. The note was short and had been written in haste. “Lo siento,” it read in a tightly slanted cursive. “I’m so sorry, Alejo. I tried to stay for you, but I didn’t have a choice. Call your mami as soon as you can, and remember,” Padrino Nando had written. “The birds…”

  They always come back.

  “This can’t be right.”

  Clusters of pixelated storm fronts spiraled across the bank of monitors above Joy’s desk, converging on the southern seaboard. Their coverage was so dense that Joy’s boss—Abigail Carson, PhD, director of the National Climatic Research Center—was having trouble making out the red outlines of the map beneath them.

  “Is that…?”

  She squinted at the map, bu
t all she could see were shades of gray.

  “Florida, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi. Everything,” Joy said.

  Their latest numbers had Hurricane Valerie making landfall in T minus 12 hours. Even if she’d been a normal hurricane, it would have been a national emergency, but Valerie wasn’t a normal hurricane.

  Not by the time she reached the Gulf Coast.

  Not by a long shot.

  That was thanks to a trio of low-pressure systems currently brewing in the Caribbean Sea. On their own, they were just bad weather: board games at the hotel instead of swimming at the beach. If it wasn’t for Valerie, they’d be blips on the NCRC’s scanners. Now they were all anyone could think about. As Valerie passed over Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the low-pressure systems would be swept into her widening vortex. The cable news channels were already calling it the big one.

  Joy was trained to deal with Billion-Dollar Disasters—they all were—but Valerie’s projections made her skin crawl. She was too big, the size of three hurricanes rolled into one…and she was moving too fast. Faster than any hurricane they’d ever tracked before. Throttling at full speed toward the coast and spanning hundreds of miles, she’d be completely unstoppable.

  Joy raised a paper cup of vending machine coffee to her lips, then set it down without drinking it. She’d been up for over twenty-four hours and was so full of soda that her blood was practically carbonated. As good as the coffee smelled, if she had any more caffeine, there was a chance she’d never sleep again. Instead, Joy closed her eyes and settled into her chair. Valerie was only getting stronger, but the flashing red lights had long been disabled and the alarms quieted, replaced by a chorus of blowing noses.

  Flu or no flu, all hands were on deck.

  They’d been on deck since Joy sounded the alarm at one in the morning.

  The whole team had been coughing and sniffling and draining cup after cup of burnt coffee to shake off their nighttime cold medicine—but they were at their desks, preparing for the coming storm. Joy took a deep, meditative breath and tried not to think about germs while Dr. Carson studied the monitors.

  “Rob,” Dr. Carson said, her voice barely a whisper. “Run these numbers again, okay?”

  Rob rubbed the raw, red wings of his nose with the back of his wrist.

  He’d been parsing NCRC-3’s satellite feed for seven hours without a break, tweaking his algorithms. Trying to find the best-case scenario he hoped was hiding somewhere in the reams of data, like a needle in a haystack. “I’ve checked nine times now,” he said. “Every time, she’s on track to go mega.”

  Dr. Carson thumbed through the contacts on her cell phone as she strode purposefully toward the hallway. Stepping out of the control room, she looked up to lock eyes with Rob. “Run it a tenth time,” she said. “And hope we got something wrong.”

  Rob shook his head.

  The numbers never lied, but there was no arguing with the boss.

  He would have tried to, but she was already gone.

  Joy watched Rob clack away at his keyboard, his eyes reflecting the blue glow of the computer screen as he worked his magic. Even with disaster looming, Rob smiled as he updated his projections with the most recent readings. Like everyone Joy worked with, he lived for the big stuff: earthquakes off the Richter scale, tidal waves the size of skyscrapers. His thrill was in the numbers—the bigger, the better—but Joy was paid to think about the people on the other end of his equations. The people who were going to meet Valerie, up close and personal, whether they wanted to or not.

  Through the glass door, Joy watched Dr. Carson pacing as she talked on the phone. One of her hands was thrust into her pants pocket while she punched the air for emphasis. The walls were reinforced, so Joy couldn’t hear what she was saying, but even from a distance she could see Dr. Carson’s face reddening as she shouted into her cell phone, clutching it so tightly Joy wouldn’t have been surprised if it shattered. As tired as Joy was, she felt a sudden, unexpected relief at not being on the other end of the line.

  She took a tentative sip of her coffee, then drained the entire cup.

  There was no chance she was going home. Not anytime soon.

  “Huh,” Rob whispered.

  Joy turned to see a smile corkscrewing across his chapped lips. “What is it?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair, but the red lights started flashing again before she had the chance to walk over and see for herself. “What happened?” she shouted, raising her voice to be heard above the emergency alert and the two desk phones that had started ringing at the same time. Rob was so entranced by his numbers that he barely seemed to notice.

  The numbers didn’t lie—he was right about that much….

  But they could change.

  The phones clicked over to voice mail, then immediately started ringing again—but still, nobody answered. Fresh data streamed across the monitors, scrolling so quickly it was impossible to read. Even just glancing at the screens, Joy could tell it was bad. The numbers were more red than black, and red wasn’t good—it was easy enough to interpret. Past that, Joy would need a doctorate in atmospheric science to know what exactly the numbers meant. She held her breath as Rob’s program finished loading, then studied the swirling visualization of the storm that filled the monitors. It was the same mass of gray smothering the same map of the southern United States.

  Except for the projected landfall, it seemed unchanged.

  It took Joy a moment to isolate the difference.

  When she did, she felt as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her.

  Where the bold readout in the top corner of the screen had once predicted T minus 12 hours until landfall, it now flashed T minus 10 hours. To lose two hours of traveling time, Valerie would have to be traveling at incredible speeds. It was almost beyond comprehension. Joy felt the Twizzlers and the soda and the coffee twisting in the pit of her gut as Dr. Carson glanced through the window from the hallway. Noticing the flashing lights, she stepped back into the room, her phone pinned to her ear as she studied the monitors.

  “You’ll need to mobilize everything you have.” Her voice was firm, not betraying the nervous panic bubbling up among the scientists in the room. She waited a moment; then she shook her head, not happy with the response from the other end of the line. “National Guard, Emergency Response…the Pony Express. We’ll meet them down there, but we need all the help we can get.”

  Dr. Carson ended her call and marched back to the hallway. Joy watched with the rest of the room as she thumbed a quick message into her phone. “That was the vice president,” Dr. Carson finally said, the red lights flashing across her face. “She’s arranging for a military escort. Wheels up in ten minutes.”

  Joy did the math in her head.

  It was a two-hour flight from Washington, DC, to the Gulf Coast. If Valerie was going to hit—and she was definitely going to hit—that would give them eight hours before she made landfall. When it came to BDDs, eight hours was practically a lifetime. If Valerie didn’t pick up speed over the Gulf of Mexico, they’d have enough time to coordinate last-minute evacuations with local officials and to help advise as more accurate readings came in.

  To make sure as many people lived through Valerie as possible.

  “You heard the lady,” Joy said, surveying the room.

  They were a miserable bunch, red-eyed and runny-nosed. If they had any other job, they’d be home in bed. But they were the NCRC, and boots on the ground was part of the job. Swallowing her nausea, Joy crumpled her empty coffee cup into a ball and tossed it into the trash. A green army helicopter was already making its descent into the adjoining parking lot. In five minutes, they’d all be expected to be onboard and en route to Joint Base Andrews, where an air force pilot was waiting to transport them to a naval air station just outside of New Orleans, Louisiana.

  They’d have two hours in the a
ir to catch up on sleep.

  After that, they had work to do.

  Emily shaded her eyes as she stepped beneath the trees.

  At some point during her long walk from the grocery store, the clouds had cleared, blown by the approaching storm. In their place: the blank canvas of an endless sky, crisp and crystalline blue. Emily shivered as the leaves rustled overhead, wishing she’d thought to bring a hoodie. But there was no planning for this kind of weather. Even in the shadows, the light was strange—overcast and bright at the same time.

  Unsure of itself.

  Sensing that he was close to his watery home, the turtle shifted in Emily’s backpack, slowly rearing onto his hind legs. Stretching toward the parted zipper with his wrinkled neck. “Shhh,” Emily whispered, rolling her shoulders so he tumbled back to the bottom of her bag. Apart from a young man playing with his daughter on the swings, the playground was empty. Emily watched them from a distance, frowning as the little girl screeched and kicked her chubby legs toward the sun while the man scrolled through his phone with his free hand.

  There was something…off about the rhythmic squeaking of the rusted swing.

  The way it echoed through the oaks gave Emily goose bumps.

  She listened for one minute, and then another, until she was finally distracted by a maintenance truck trundling around the bend in the track. She hopped onto the wide stone lip of a nearby fountain for a better look. There wasn’t much to see. The driver’s sunburnt arm dangled from his open window, his fingers drumming on the weathered door. Unlike most days, there were no cyclists or joggers circling the track, so his foot was on the gas when he veered off the road and onto the grass. A cloud of dust trailed behind him as he disappeared onto the rolling turf of the golf course.

  As if on cue, a flock of grackles exploded from the upper branches of a nearby tree, black shadows darting in formation against the cloudless sky. It was only after they shimmered and faded into the distance that Emily realized what was wrong. It wasn’t that there were so few people in the park. That was weird, especially on a Sunday morning, but even more unsettling was that there were no squirrels wrestling in the canopy overhead. No sparrows hopping in the grass; no ducklings nipping at her ankles, begging for bread. The grackles were the first birds she’d seen all morning, and they were flying away as fast as they could.