by Nick Courage
Like she wasn’t alone after all.
Beneath her, at the foot of the tree, her goose settled back down between the knotted roots. Emily could just barely see his black tail twitching from her perch. She smiled, then reached into her backpack to pat her turtle’s mossy shell. It was impossible to read the expression on his leathery face, but he seemed content to stare at her as she worked. Emily shivered as she pulled herself onto an even higher limb. Not because she was cold, but because she was full and she was dry and she was happy.
If just for a little while…
Alejo sat cradling his arm in the belly of a matte gray C-40 Clipper, a reinforced tank of a plane that was putting as much distance as possible between itself and Megastorm Valerie. The Clipper was a military jet, so there were no frills and no snack carts, but the cameraman had found him a can of soda, anyway—a Diet Coke from the pilot’s private stash.
Alejo sipped it slowly as they hurtled over the Atlantic.
Making it last.
There was a nervous energy on the plane, an excitement that felt wrong after what had happened to La Perla. Alejo could feel it rippling through the cabin as he sat quietly in his seat, trying to ignore the engine roaring just outside his window. He’d started out leaning against the double-paned glass, transfixed by the curve of the earth receding into the distance, but it was his first time on a plane. For all his talk about flying away, Alejo had drawn the shade halfway through takeoff to help fight his growing nausea.
The painkillers weren’t helping.
Back at the base, a medic had given him something for his wrist—along with a splint and an oversized sling. The sling he’d double-knotted around Alejo’s shoulder, the pill he’d cut in half…but it was still too much. Alejo could feel it turning in his stomach, agitated by the bubbles in his drink. He swallowed a burp as a man in a pressed blue uniform hustled toward the cockpit behind a woman in fatigues: the soldier who had helped him onto the plane when he’d almost fainted on the tarmac, waiting to board.
He’d needed to sit.
To lie down on the polished concrete.
But he’d leaned heavily onto the soldier’s arm instead. She’d asked about his parents, and Alejo had tried to answer—to explain about Padrino Nando and his mother in the States—but his mouth felt like it was full of cotton.
“What’s that, sweetie?” the soldier had said, not unkindly, but she’d been distracted.
Everyone had been doing their job—shouting into phones and walkie-talkies.
Rushing to beat the storm.
A little boy on the airstrip was the least of their priorities.
As she led him up the stairs and to his seat, Alejo had wanted to ask if she knew where the evacuees had been taken and when they’d be back in La Perla. But by the time he got the words out, she was already gone. It was like he was invisible. Nobody on the plane seemed to notice him, and nobody thought to tell him where they were going. They were all too busy. The cameraman and his crew had rushed into the hangar and onto the tarmac, and—except for the soda—he’d been swept up and forgotten in their wake.
It wasn’t that they meant to ignore him, Alejo knew that.
They just needed to be airborne before the megastorm hit.
“We’ll figure everything out later,” the cameraman had said.
But Alejo didn’t want to wait for later, so he kept his ears pricked as they flew, listening for clues and swallowing the bile creeping up the back of his throat. The plane was on its way to New Orleans, a city at the very bottom of the United States. That was where everyone thought Valerie was going to make landfall, and they were expecting her to be big.
Bigger than she had been in San Juan.
That was why the news crew was on board.
The rest of the passengers were officers and military personnel. Alejo could tell from their uniforms and from their way of talking—clipped and official and heavy on the acronyms, like they were speaking in code. He didn’t know exactly why the army was rushing into the storm, as if it were something they could fight….
But they seemed confident, like they knew what they were doing.
Alejo wished he could feel the same way as he watched the man three seats in front of him lean into the aisle, joking with a passing officer. He couldn’t hear what the man said, but he would recognize the reporter anywhere. Alejo stared at the back of his ear, wondering if he knew what exactly they were flying into—and if they were going to make it out okay. The reporter just scrolled through his phone, taking an occasional sip from a silver flask, until he finally felt Alejo’s eyes boring into his over-gelled hair.
He turned around, scowling, and Alejo hugged himself with his good arm.
It was cold on the plane, and the ice-cold soda made it even colder.
Torrential rain pounded against the windshield, so hard that Silas couldn’t see the road. He swerved to avoid the median, gripping the steering wheel with whitening knuckles as he spat. Cursing at his own bad luck. The skies had been clear when he’d pulled onto the highway and he’d been breaking the speed limit for thirty minutes straight, but it didn’t matter. Valerie was catching up to him. With no trees or traffic blocking its way, the storm whipped off the bayou and buffeted his truck until the steering wheel jerked in his hands—shying away from the wind, like a frightened rabbit.
Silas would have pulled over and parked right then if he’d had a choice.
If it had been a normal summer squall instead of a megastorm…
He leaned forward to adjust his windshield wipers instead, but there was no higher setting. They were already working at top speed and struggling to keep up. Silas ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair and sighed. It was impossible to see the bay through the rain, and yet—even with the windows shut and the air conditioner on full blast—the sound of the waves crashing against weathered piers filled his truck. As long as he stayed his course, he knew he could outrun the storm, but it was hard not to second-guess himself when there weren’t any other cars on the road.
At least, none that he could see.
Silas frowned.
His eyes were strained and he could’ve used a strong cup of coffee, but there was no telling when that would happen. There was no telling anything. If he could have just called his wife again, he would have felt better, but his phone was propped in a cup holder—fully charged and as useless as the wipers. He’d lost reception as soon as the rain picked up, and visibility was so low that the occasional flash of reflective yellow paint in his headlights was the only thing guiding him. That and the rhythmic thump his tires made as they ran over thick seams of tar in the asphalt.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, Silas thought. Like the Jaws music.
Silas turned the radio on and flipped through the channels, searching for a trace of news in the static. Searching for anything. None of the FM stations came through, so he switched to AM with his eyes still on the road, trained for flashes of yellow in the gray. Except for two signals—a bluegrass station and a call-in show—it was all white noise. Silas stopped on the call-in show, hoping for a break in programming or an emergency alert. The show was pretaped, but he kept the radio on anyway, turning up the volume as he peered into the rain. Out of the corner of his eye, through the relentless blur of the storm, he spotted something in his rearview mirror.
Something that made his heart stop.
Silas took a deep breath and fumbled with his phone.
He knew he didn’t have any bars, but he kept trying regardless.
“Come on,” he said, staring into the massive cloudbanks building over the bayou behind him. It was a wall of gray, like static on the radio, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near it when it touched down on the coast. If he had been able to get through to his wife, he would have told her to run—to take Elliot and find Emily and drive as fast as she could. To meet
Aunt Lillian in Arkansas and to do it quick. But his phone didn’t work, not anymore—not when he needed it. Silas tossed it onto the passenger seat as he stomped on the gas, his tires spitting mud back into the approaching storm as the speedometer jumped from eighty to a hundred miles per hour.
Taking advantage of a break in the rain, Elliot stepped out from beneath the trees and circled the field of low-slung tents that had been pitched over the course of the morning. He tried to look confident, like he had a reason for being there, but it wasn’t easy. Almost everyone else was wearing a uniform, and he was the only kid in sight. Elliot had never seen anything like it. Between the flashing lights and the emergency workers shouting to be heard over rumbling generators, the park was like a movie set.
Except here, the danger was real.
Megastorm Valerie was headed straight for them.
And Emily was nowhere to be found.
Elliot threaded his way between two fire engines, keeping to the shadows as he peeked beneath them—looking for his sister. She’d said she was playing with friends in the park, so he knew she was somewhere. He just didn’t know where, exactly, and the path around Audubon Park was almost two miles long. Long enough that Elliot was sweating from his search efforts, his stitches straining beneath his shirt.
“Governor’s on the line, Joy,” someone shouted.
“Do we have a situation report?”
Elliot flattened against one of the trucks, hiding in plain sight as a young woman in a wrinkled blazer and dirty white Converse hustled past him. Luckily for Elliot, she was too busy tapping on her phone to see his skinny arms splayed awkwardly across the bright red metal. Exhaling, he watched her disappear beneath the flaps of a nearby tent, his hand hovering protectively over his side. The last thing he needed was to be caught sneaking around the encampment….
For one of the lingering uniforms to escort him home, to safety.
Emily would have felt the same way.
Wherever she was, she would have hidden as soon as the tents went up.
Elliot was sure of it. That’s why he had kept his distance from the makeshift base all morning. While police cars crisscrossed the bustling fields, he’d crept around the less trafficked fringes of the park, stealthily checking all their usual hangouts: the playgrounds and the fence by the zoo. The dusty embankments beneath the mildewed stone bridges. He’d even looped around the lagoon twice, scanning the reeds that lined its muddy shores.
Fighting a rising panic.
He’d been trudging through the rain and mud all morning and except for a handful of turtles and one lonely goose, Elliot hadn’t seen any signs of life. The goose had honked at him from across the water, and—feeling suddenly light-headed—Elliot had taken a deep breath, and then another, as giant wind chimes danced in the twisted branches above his head. It was only after his heart stopped pounding in his ears that he’d thought to check his messages from the previous night.
To look for clues in the blurry pictures Emily had sent him.
The mossy turtle on her floor, gnawing on a tangled cord.
A series of tilted selfies, each one blurrier than the last.
Elliot had pinched the screen above Emily’s shoulders, zooming in on fuzzy leaves. Straining to see some landmark in the selfies that would help him find his little sister. To find something he might recognize in the pixels behind her messy hair. A statue in the distance; a tree that looked familiar somehow. But his fingers—slick with sweat—smudged the screen, and the photos were out of focus to begin with. Emily could have taken them anywhere, and Elliot had looked everywhere he could think of…
Everywhere except the one place he’d been so careful to avoid.
* * *
—
The wind picked up as Elliot leaned against the fire engine, whipping gusts of rain and pollen through the narrow corridor. Elliot sneezed, doubling over from the effort, then sneezed again—so hard it was like a punch to the gut. He wiped a tendril of spittle from his chin, his hand trembling with shock, then counted to ten and waited for the pain to subside. He reached eleven and then twenty, but Elliot could still feel his stitches pulling on his waist.
Pinching.
Like a scalpel, he thought, blanching as he slid to the ground.
Elliot closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing.
“You’re okay,” he whispered, clutching his side—afraid to look. In the distance, gibbons screeched. It was the barometric shift in the air.
They knew something was wrong.
They knew what was coming.
“It’s okay,” Elliot repeated, his lips dry and bloodless.
But he was still catching his breath when his phone rang.
He checked the caller ID as he slipped his phone from his pocket, hoping it was Emily and frowning when he saw that it wasn’t. It was his mom. She’d finally realized he was gone. Elliot’s stomach clenched as he let the call go to voice mail, his hand limp on the grass. He leaned his head back, bouncing it gently against the fire engine’s tire as he listened to the chug of a nearby generator—ignoring his chirping phone.
All he wanted was to find his sister and bring her home.
They could deal with their mom afterward.
Together.
But the twist in his gut was telling him to stay where he was.
His phone started ringing again almost as soon as his mom was able to leave a voice mail. Elliot lifted it to his ear slowly, as if he were underwater. Delaying the inevitable. “I’m okay,” he said, barely looking up at the firemen as they trudged past him, stepping over his outstretched legs with their heavy boots. One of the firemen looked back quizzically as he ducked into a tent, and Elliot wondered if he had heard his mom yelling on the other end of the line.
Elliot rolled his eyes just in case, to show that he wasn’t embarrassed.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I just needed to—”
But his mom wasn’t listening.
She was on a roll.
“I can’t get through to your sister,” she screamed, her voice ragged with stress. “And I can’t get through to your father, either. I can’t get through to anyone. And you’re sick, Elliot. What are you even thinking?” Elliot pulled a handful of grass from the ground and tossed it into the wind as he waited for her to finish. He hated that she sounded so desperate and he hated that it was his fault. She’d gone through so much already. But Valerie was coming. He could hear the emergency workers preparing while his green confetti swirled ten feet away, caught in invisible updrafts.
Emily was in trouble—they all were, and there was no point denying it.
“Em’s out here,” he said. “I had to try to find her.”
He waited for his mom to say something—anything—but there was no answer on the other end of the line.
Just a soft sobbing.
“Mom?”
The two firemen exited the tent, accompanied by the woman named Joy. The firemen were deep in conversation and didn’t seem to notice Elliot as they stepped over his legs again. The woman named Joy, on the other hand, kneeled next to him—planting her knee in the wet dirt. She typed a quick message on her phone as she waited for him to finish his call. On the other end of the line, Elliot could hear that his mother had placed her own phone on the kitchen counter. He could tell because she was running the sink.
Splashing the tears from her eyes.
He nodded at Joy, his phone still pinned to his ear.
“Hey,” she said, looking up from her emails. “You doin’ okay?”
Elliot shrugged, his stomach twinging beneath his fingers.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “I can’t find my sister, is all.”
“Your sister?” Her voice was tight with concern. “She’s lost?”
Elliot decided that he liked Joy.
He
liked her dirty sneakers and her wrinkled blazer. And the shirt she was wearing beneath it. A black T-shirt for a band he hadn’t heard of. She didn’t seem that much older than him—not really. It was just the lines around her eyes that made her look like an adult. And the way her lips turned down at their corners. Elliot took his hand away from his stitches to gesture toward the park—where Emily was, somewhere—but his shirt was dark and wet where his hand had been.
He clutched his stomach again, hoping she hadn’t noticed the blood.
“Where’d you lose her?” she asked, stretching her legs out as she sat next to Elliot and rested her head alongside his on the massive tire. Elliot shifted beside her, making room. The oak leaves rustled overhead, the branches singing in the wind. Joy looked like she could fall asleep then and there. Elliot could recognize the signs—he’d felt the same way every day for the past two weeks—but her phone started ringing almost as soon as she sat down. He could see that she was tempted to ignore it, but even if she wanted to, an older man jogged out from beneath the tent, red-faced and waving his arms.
“Joy,” he shouted, his voice thick with a cold. “It’s the governor!”
Joy rubbed her eyes as she turned toward Elliot and smiled.
“To be continued,” she said, holding up a finger. “Okay?”
Elliot nodded as Joy rolled to her feet, dragging her heels as she paced between the fire trucks, her chopped hair blowing in the wind. The pain had subsided for the most part, but the light-headedness remained. He blinked dizzily up at the gnarled oaks, remembering something his mom had yelled before she’d left her phone on the counter. About the pile of clothes she’d found on Emily’s floor, soaking wet and smelling of sewage. Elliot watched Joy circle the tents three times, explaining the NCRC’s emergency response strategy to the governor and smiling at Elliot each time she passed him.