Storm Blown

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Storm Blown Page 13

by Nick Courage


  “I can’t see you,” the cameraman shouted. “Where’d you go?”

  Alejo scrawled a quick note in the card, then slipped it into a sandwich bag, like Nando had done before him. Rushing as fast as he could, Alejo pulled open the junk drawer beside the sink—looking for tape, so his message wouldn’t blow away. He pulled so hard the drawer derailed from its tracks, spilling its contents onto the floor. Dead batteries rolled across the tiles and clipped recipes fluttered to his feet.

  But there was no tape.

  The walkie-talkie continued to buzz as Alejo stared wild-eyed around the kitchen.

  He couldn’t leave the card on the table, unattached.

  “Kid, we don’t have time to play games here.”

  Alejo agreed.

  His padrino’s weathered knife was heavy in his pocket.

  He’d wanted to hold on to it, to keep it safe for Nando—but he flicked it open instead. The blade was short and polished, used mostly to pare oranges. Sweet chinas, Padrino Nando’s favorite. He turned them slowly in his hands so their thick skin came off in one long piece. Raising the tiny knife aloft, Alejo jammed it through the center of the sandwich bag and into the soft blond wood of the kitchen table. “Feliz cumpleaños!” the front of the card read. Happy birthday. Beneath the rainbow-colored greeting was a picture of a teddy bear holding a balloon bouquet. The bear looked a little squeamish to Alejo, but he’d been spared.

  The Mylar balloons hadn’t been so lucky.

  Alejo wiggled the weathered handle and smiled.

  The knife didn’t budge.

  “I’m still here,” he shouted, gripping the walkie-talkie against his cheek as he ran back outside. The helicopter was hovering directly overhead, so low that it was making its own waves, and the rope danced over the water just a few feet out from Padrino Nando’s front porch. All Alejo had to do was grab the rope and he’d be saved, but as soon as he jumped across the threshold, the porch gave way beneath him. The storm clouds blurred into the surf as he fell, his legs throbbing with the hot red insistence of freshly skinned knees.

  Blinking back at the doorway, Alejo tried to understand what had thrown him.

  But there was nothing to see, just the front door bobbing gently in the waves.

  Only, it wasn’t Padrino Nando’s door that was bobbing.

  It was the porch, rolling like a docked raft.

  Unmoored by the flooding.

  The walkie-talkie slipped into the backwash of the encroaching sea and Alejo’s heart sank along with it. His wrist ached sharply beneath his chest. He’d fallen on it wrong, and he was worried that it was broken. That he wouldn’t be able to hold on to the rope. But there was no time to second-guess himself. The turbulence from the helicopter’s spinning blades was so strong that he stumbled as he climbed to his feet, cradling his wrist against his chest. His scrapes stung in the wind, but Alejo bit the inside of his cheek and pushed on….

  Inching toward the water.

  “C’mon, kid!”

  The cameraman leaned out of the helicopter’s open door as he shouted, his voice hoarse in the wind. He was close enough that he didn’t need the walkie-talkie, but far enough away that he had to yell for Alejo to hear him over the crashing waves.

  “Grab the rope!”

  Despite its weight, the rope snaked back and forth in the wash of the helicopter’s rotors, five feet from the lip of the porch. Alejo stared at the loop tied into its bottom and at the rising tides beneath it. Since he’d been awake, the waves had worked their way up past the sidewalk and over the rear wheels of Padrino Nando’s truck. He watched them break above its rusted tail, pulled by invisible tides and currents, and—taking a deep breath—backed against the door. From the helicopter, it looked like he was giving up, but Alejo was determined to fly.

  He just needed a running start.

  Balancing on the porch, Alejo cradled his wrist—his legs acclimating to the roll of the sea. “Vamos, vamos, vamos,” he told himself, swallowing a growing fear.

  “Just…go!”

  Time didn’t stop as Alejo ran to the lip of the porch and leapt.

  It didn’t even slow.

  He felt himself grasping for the rope almost as soon as his feet left the porch, but it was smoother than he expected and slick with rain. It slapped against Alejo’s cheek as he hugged it to his chest, gripping it as tightly as he could with his good hand. Clutching it. The cameraman yelled encouragements as he slipped down to the loop, but they hardly registered. Beneath Alejo’s kicking feet, the porch was pulling away from the house—tipping precariously into the crashing waves as the helicopter drifted slowly upward.

  The longer he held on, the farther he would fall if he let go.

  And with every passing second, he was farther from the sea.

  “You can do this,” Alejo whispered through gritted teeth, punching his broken wrist through the loop. He pretzeled around the rope as it swayed back and forth across the water—locking himself into place just in time. The rope spun wildly as the crew pulled him skyward, slamming Alejo against the side of Nando’s house, then swinging him over the waves in a wide arc. Alejo didn’t scream or shut his eyes as he smashed against the gutter of a nearby roof. Instead, he stared up at the helicopter, squinting against the rain.

  Trying to make himself as small and light as possible.

  The nylon chafed against his wrist, and he could feel it swelling. But he didn’t care.

  He’d made it.

  “We got you, kid,” the cameraman shouted.

  Lightning flashed over the Atlantic, casting his wolfish grin in a sickly green light.

  “Hold on!”

  The cameraman strained as he pulled him into the open door by his armpits, the nylon rope falling into a limp pile at his boots. As soon as Alejo was safely in the helicopter, the cameraman grasped the back of his head, staring into his eyes. “Are you okay?” he asked, looking for the spark he had seen the night before, when Alejo had given him the pint of melted ice cream. Alejo just blinked, the blood from his skinned knees mixing with the rain running down his legs. He was shaking with shock and adrenaline and holding his arm like a broken wing, crooked delicately across his chest. He needed a hospital, but that would have to wait.

  The bowl of the storm was tightening….

  The clouds on the horizon growing larger by the minute.

  “It’s okay,” the cameraman said, softening his gruff voice into a comforting growl. “I’ve got you,” he repeated, as much to himself as to the Alejo. “You’re safe.”

  Alejo just nodded, holding his tongue.

  He was grateful to have been picked up by the camera crew and was sorry that their van was missing. He wanted to apologize…but it was better to say nothing, he thought, than to bring it up and risk upsetting everyone after everything they’d done for him. The helicopter pitched forward as the cameraman guided Alejo to a free seat and buckled him in.

  The pilot wasn’t taking any chances.

  He had already pointed the helicopter toward Fort Buchanan and was flying it as fast as it would go. “No time for a drop-off,” he announced, activating the crackling intercom. He sounded calm and in charge, but the intercom stayed on as he mumbled encouragements to himself—unaware of his terrified audience.

  The cameraman squeezed Alejo’s shoulder. “We’ll get you back to your family,” he said, shouting to be heard over the whining engines. “Later, after the storm.”

  Alejo nodded and leaned against his straps, straining for a look at La Perla through the open doors, but he couldn’t see much. An impenetrable fog crept below them, and he could just barely make out the faded gray line of Calle Norzagaray as they flew inland. Once they were over land again, it started raining—so hard it sounded like the helicopter would be drowned out of the sky.

  Alejo clutched his throbbing wr
ist.

  He didn’t know where they were going, but they were flying over San Juan and he couldn’t even see the island to say goodbye. In the distance, the jagged smudge of a mountain range poked up above the clouds. The Cordillera Central, where Nando had been evacuated—driven in a crowded bus by the National Guard to a high school auditorium in Barranquitas.

  He was safe now, Alejo told himself.

  For the time being, they both were.

  Silas and the rest of P7 Beta’s skeleton crew had landed at the heliport in Venice, Louisiana, in the small hours of the night, officially abandoning their rig to the coming storm. Tacked onto the southernmost tip of the state, Venice was a funny place: a fading freckle above the mouth of the Mississippi River that was, at three in the morning, completely deserted. Silas had been too tired to make the drive home in the dark, so he’d curled up on the front bench of his truck with the windows down, a stone’s throw from the river and so close to the Gulf of Mexico that he could almost hear the coast eroding as he tried to drift into sleep.

  It hadn’t come easily.

  Silas had twisted fitfully on his makeshift bed, his knees knocking against the dashboard. It made it hard to relax, knowing that one good wave could wipe him off the map. That if Valerie came in hard, he could be the last person to spend the night in a truck on the side of LA-23, listening to the cattle egrets gossip in the reeds. He’d texted his wife to let her know that he’d be home as soon as he could and stared into the twinkling blackness beyond his bug-flecked windshield, waiting for an answer.

  Seven hours later, he woke with a start.

  The sun hadn’t risen, not properly.

  The horizon was just a gray haze, and Silas had no idea how late he’d slept until he answered his ringing phone. “Hey,” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as his wife muted the news in their apartment. “How’s everyone?”

  Silas stretched and stared into the distance as she filled him in. Her sister Lillian was halfway to Arkansas. She was begging them to join her, and everyone in their building had already evacuated. But his daughter, Emily, wasn’t answering her phone. His daughter—it wasn’t like her. Silas frowned as a flock of brown pelicans flew low over the marsh, circling archipelagos of cane and tall grass in search of mullet and minnows.

  Breakfast.

  “It’s a what?” he said, his stomach growling and knotting at the same time.

  The last time Silas had checked, Valerie was still a Category 3 hurricane—strong enough to force an evacuation of the rig, but just barely more than a tropical storm. At some point in the night, she’d been upgraded into a full-blown disaster. It was news to him. Silas turned his key in the ignition and pulled his truck onto the highway, its all-terrain tires spitting clamshell gravel in his wake.

  “A megastorm,” he repeated, whistling through his teeth. “Hang tight,” he said. “I can be home in an hour.”

  Silas pressed his steel-toed boot against the gas, then scanned the radio frequencies until he found the emergency alert station. Based on projections from the National Climatic Research Center, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) had issued a preemptive call for first responders. They needed people with experience in a crisis. People who could be helpful when push came to shove. The address they gave for their pre-storm headquarters made Silas sweat into his collar. Volunteers were being asked to meet in a series of soccer fields in Audubon Park, in the center of the city—so after six days of twelve-hour shifts on the sweltering rig, Silas was headed home…

  To ground zero.

  If the roads stayed clear, he told himself, they could still make it to Arkansas.

  He’d just have to gun it.

  Silas flipped to a rhythm-and-blues station, the crosswind roaring as he switched into a higher gear. The music didn’t match his mood, but he hardly noticed. His daughter was AWOL and every building he passed—every diner and bar and two-bit motel—was boarded up for the storm. The megastorm. Silas clenched his teeth, his jaw squaring as the speedometer climbed above seventy miles an hour and then eighty. He was driving too fast for the road, kicking loose rocks up against the undercarriage of his truck.

  But Silas didn’t have a choice.

  His family needed him.

  * * *

  —

  Joy practically tumbled out the rear door of the government-issue SUV. She caught herself before she slipped on the grass, her tennis shoes sticking in the mud. The air was so humid her hair frizzed on contact, but she took a deep breath anyway—filling her lungs. The flight from Washington had been awful, and not because of the turbulence.

  Bumps she could handle.

  It was the coughing that had gotten to her.

  Her colleagues—the alpha force of disaster preparedness—had gone through two boxes of tissues and a bag of maximum-strength lozenges on the short drive from the airfield in Venice to the emergency response headquarters in Audubon Park, but it hadn’t helped. They were so sick they could barely keep their eyes open. It was more than Joy could say for herself. She was exhausted, too, but with all the sneezing, she hadn’t been able to get any sleep on the plane.

  And the germs.

  She shivered beneath the oaks just thinking about them.

  Inside the SUV, Dr. Abigail Carson snored on Rob’s shoulder as he drooled against the glass. Joy watched the window fog and smiled. They were out cold, and she wasn’t about to wake them. It was going to be a long day, and her job was only going to be easier without the director sniffling down her neck. She closed the car door as gently as she could and tiptoed to the nearest police officer.

  “Joy Harrison,” Joy whispered, tapping the officer on the shoulder. “NCRC. Who’s in charge here?”

  While the rest of the city evacuated, Emily pulled herself onto the lowest limb of a gnarled oak. From there, it was an easy climb to her new hideaway: a sheltered nest at the heart of the tree, where three thick branches forked and folded in on each other. Emily felt protected in the twist of their ancient arms, shaded by gossamer curtains of Spanish moss. Completely oblivious. With her phone’s battery dead, she had no way of knowing that the storm had been upgraded. Or that she was sitting in a state of emergency. It was drizzling, but the tree kept her as dry as if she’d been in her own bedroom—and it was so much better than skulking around the streets in the rain, working up the nerve to go back home.

  To face her mother.

  It was perfect.

  So perfect that Emily hadn’t wanted to climb down…but she’d needed to go to the bathroom for over an hour and she couldn’t wait any longer. She scrambled down the trunk, upsetting the goose, who had been napping between the loosely braided roots with his legs tucked beneath his downy chest. He shuffled nervously after Emily as she made her way to a dense cluster of cattails. She could feel him blinking at her as she peered through the reeds.

  “Shoot,” she whispered, watching the lagoon ripple with raindrops.

  The weather was taking a turn for the worse and she’d left her book next to her backpack, propped in a cache of brown leaves and dried acorns twenty feet above the ground. Emily peed as fast as she could, then sprinted back to the tree, where she swung herself up through the branches like one of the gibbons in the zoo.

  Racing against the rain.

  She needn’t have worried.

  The storm battered the outer crown of the tree, but the trunk was dry and soft, the layered canopy impervious to the rain. Its leaves whispered all around Emily, shimmering in the wind as she settled back into the curve of the oak and brushed a cluster of pollen from her mom’s old book. It had been through a lot since Emily had started reading it, and she wasn’t even halfway done. She ran her finger down a dog-eared page, finding where she’d left off and picking up again, but she couldn’t focus.

  She was too sad and too anxious.

  And too angr
y.

  It wasn’t right that she had nowhere to go.

  That she had to hide in a tree on a swampy little island while rain clouds gathered overhead. The unfairness of it simmered in Emily’s veins, the steam rising and crowding her thoughts as she tried to read the same paragraph three times in a row. But the words barely registered, and when she tried to read it through a fourth time, she was distracted by the chimes.

  The way they jangled in the rain sounded lonesome.

  They reminded her of her mother.

  Of everything they’d been through together.

  Emily stared up into the leaves, her eyes swimming with swaying patterns of light and dark as she tried to fight back tears. A fat carpenter ant crawled across her arm and a squirrel chittered somewhere below as she matched her breath to the wind: inhaling and exhaling as the trees danced in the rain. Inhaling…

  And exhaling.

  There was a hole in the tree beside Emily’s perch—a hand-sized hollow stuffed with fallen sticks and leaves. She absentmindedly cleared it, tossing the dried foliage out into the rain as she dug. The hole went back a good foot into the trunk, where it expanded into a natural safe—dry and secret. Protected. Emily brushed the chamber clean with the palm of her hand, then scanned her tree for other hidden treasures.

  For handholds and pathways, for when she brought Elliot.

  With his help, she could turn the little island into a full-blown fort, with hammocks and pulleys and everything. Emily wiped the tears from her cheeks and climbed higher into the boughs, taking stock of the twisting angles and wondering if she could branch out into neighboring trees. If there was a way to bridge them. She was vaguely aware of a brewing excitement in Audubon Park as she worked her way through the canopy, but the muffled sirens and distant voices made her feel safe, not scared.

 

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