Storm Blown

by Nick Courage

  He looked up at Alejo and then at his sister and smiled.

  “Emily,” he said. “I found you.”

  His voice was little more than a rasp, and his lips were cracked and spackled in algae. But he was awake and he was smiling. Emily frowned through her tears, then smiled through her frown. Alejo couldn’t help but smile, too. As the girl hugged her brother, the first drops of Megastorm Valerie broke through the thick canopy above their heads—funneling down between the cracks in the layers of leaves, dripping into the soil beneath their feet. Compared to the storm beyond the muddy shores, it was barely a drizzle. For the moment, they were high and dry…

  But that moment was quickly passing.

  “C’mon,” Silas said, tapping his heavy boot against the gas.

  The drive to New Orleans had taken twice as long as it should have. There was flooding in Belle Chasse—bad enough that half the roads were out—and so little visibility on the bridge that Silas had crossed it blind, slowing to a crawl to keep from crashing into the river. Every few minutes, the radio buzzed with an emergency broadcast. Silas had still been plowing through puddles on LA-23 when the first one broke through the static. He’d gripped the steering wheel, cursing under his breath as city officials announced a mandatory evacuation. Expecting gridlock, they’d reversed the flow of traffic on all southbound highways, sealing the city off before the storm.

  Silas prayed that Sarah had fixed things up with their daughter.

  That they hadn’t waited for him and were already on the road.

  But he had no way to find out.

  His phone didn’t have any reception, and he’d thrown it to the floor the last time he’d tried and failed to reach them. It slid beneath the passenger seat while Silas raced home, scanning the radio for the hundredth time. Searching for a clear signal in the deserted city, for someone to tell him that he wasn’t too late. But all Silas could find was country music. The plaintive cry of steel guitars joined the drumming rain as he sped through familiar streets, not bothering to slow down for stop signs or red lights. Half hoping, as he turned onto his block, that their apartment would be empty.

  And half hoping to see his wife and kids.

  To save them from the storm.

  Either way, Silas had no idea what to expect until he slammed on his brakes, his rear wheels skidding on the asphalt as his wife stared at him from the middle of the road. White-faced, her outstretched hands pressed against the hood of his oversized truck. Silas threw the door open, blocking the empty road and jumping into the rain—the country music following him onto the street as he rushed to meet his wife. “Sarah,” he shouted, pulling her into his arms. “Let’s get the kids, come on, let’s go!”

  But something wasn’t right.

  Sarah was shaking.

  She was crying.

  “They’re gone,” she said. “They’re both gone.”

  “They’re what?” Silas asked, swallowing a mounting dread. “It’s okay,” he said, filling in the blanks when his wife refused to answer. “Wherever they are, we have time, Sarah—we can pick them up. We just need to go, okay?”

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered, pushing Silas away, her fists clenching helplessly in the rain. “I don’t know where they are and they’re not answering their phones.”

  Silas held his wife tighter as he tried to process what she was telling him.

  Megastorm Valerie was bearing down on them, and their kids—their sick little boy and their baby girl—were missing. He should have been worried. He should have panicked. Any person in their right mind would have. But Silas couldn’t let himself panic, not with so much on the line. He was used to emergencies, he told himself. They happened all the time on the rig, and the only way to get through them was to think through them, one step at a time. He pressed his lips against the top of Sarah’s head, tasting the rain in her hair as he tried to think past the adrenaline coursing through his veins.

  Their apartment was too small to hide in and there was nowhere else to go.

  Not now that the city was shut down.

  Silas frowned.

  The streetcars had stopped running, and the only place he could think of—within walking distance—was ground zero: the emergency headquarters he’d heard about on the radio. Everywhere else had been evacuated, and the park was just a few blocks away. Their kids would have heard the helicopters and fire engines. He didn’t like it, but with nothing else to do, Silas could see them being drawn to the excitement.

  “It’s okay,” he said, hugging his shivering wife in the rain.

  Hoping he was right.

  “We’ve got this, okay?”

  * * *

  —

  Silas walked quickly, jogging to keep up with his wife so he could stretch a wide blue tarp over her head as well as his own. Not that it was doing much good. The cuffs of his jeans were thick with mud and the tarp pooled and overflowed as he chased after her, the rain stinging his fingers. It was coming down so hard that he had to shout to be heard over it, but Sarah didn’t seem to mind the downpour, or even notice it.

  If his wife was anything, she was resilient.

  She’d had to be, with everything she’d gone through this past year.

  It hadn’t been five minutes since Silas found her on the street in front of their apartment, and as she stepped onto the wet grass in front of the makeshift camp, he watched her transform into a woman on a mission. Soaking wet and full of fight, she darted from tent to tent—lifting the flaps and peeking inside, calling for their kids.

  Calling for Emily.

  Silas was glad that she’d found her second wind, because he’d started to second-guess himself as the storm gained strength. It was as if the entire city was stuck between radio stations, trapped in a static hiss, and the rain was so thick that he could barely make out his own hands when he held them two feet from his face. Assuming he was right about Emily and Elliot—assuming they were in the park somewhere—they had three hundred fifty acres to search before Valerie came crashing down on them.

  “Emily!”

  Sarah’s voice hit a ragged upper register as she ran to the next empty tent, and then the next. Silas caught up with her long enough to wrap his arm around her shoulder. To pull her into a protective hug beneath the tarp.

  “I’m sure they’re around here somewhere,” he said.

  But he didn’t feel sure.

  Not anymore.

  He couldn’t imagine his kids staying outside in this weather, and Sarah was running out of tents to check. Meanwhile, what Silas could see of the camp was turning into a ghost town before his eyes. Pre-responders in plastic ponchos darted through the deluge to their cars, gouging huge tracks in the grass as they peeled out of the park. They weren’t going to be any use to anyone drowned—and with Valerie’s foot on the gas, they were running out of time.

  Silas blinked the water from his eyes, then closed them.

  He wished he’d left the rig earlier.

  That he’d driven through the night.

  Even with the slap of the rain against the tarp, he could hear the storm more than he could see it. There was a vibration in the air—and in the ground. Something separate from the sudden onslaught of thunder and lightning. It reminded Silas of the distant grind of a five-hundred-pound drill bit into the seafloor beneath P7 Beta. Of the way you could feel it, just barely, through the soles of your boots. He pricked his ears, his brow furrowing as he let the tarp drop to the ground. The rain stung his forehead and cheeks, running down his neck and chest and into his jeans, which sagged on his waist as they soaked up the storm. It was only when he opened his eyes—blinking into the rain—that it truly hit him….

  The vibration, the seismic waves.

  It was like an earthquake.

  In that moment, as Valerie beat down onto his upturned face,
Silas imagined Valerie screaming through the Gulf with waves so violent they ripped the rig from its moorings. So strong they made the ground shake a hundred miles away. There were over two thousand deep-sea rigs off the coast of Louisiana, and Silas could almost hear their metal twisting in the wind—rusted screws popping like bullets in the swirling vortex of the storm.

  Silas held his breath, hoping he was wrong.

  But as much as he hated to admit it, he could feel the ground buzzing—barely perceptibly—beneath his boots, with the steady rhythm of crashing waves. As Sarah trembled at the entrance of the last tent, Silas prayed for a miracle. For Emily and Elliot to be hiding behind the flaps, safe and dry. For his family to make it through to the other side of the storm, somehow.

  “Emily,” Sarah whispered, trailing off as her face crumpled into a silent sob.

  “Elliot…”

  * * *

  —

  Joy Harrison looked up from her computer, annoyed and running on zero hours of sleep, as Silas joined his wife at the flap. Unlike the tents they’d already checked, the last tent was full of people. But none of them were children. Joy turned back to her computer, scrolling through updated warnings as the rest of the NCRC curled up on fold-up cots, laid out by a particularly virulent strain of seasonal flu.

  The thunder overhead was never-ending, a constant rumble punctuated by the occasional spine-shivering shock of lightning. Valerie was ahead of schedule—so far ahead that even the NCRC had been taken by surprise. That is, the last remaining member of the NCRC still well enough to read the signs. Almost as soon as it started raining, Joy had double-checked her monitor and given orders to disband the encampment, citing a massive cloudbank that dwarfed the skyline. Local disaster response teams began evacuating soon afterward, and FEMA was right behind them. The only boots still on the ground were Joy’s dirty white Converse, and they were drenched through to her socks.

  “Update on landfall?” she asked, tapping her headset.

  “And are the highways clear?”

  She gestured for Silas and Sarah to enter, then abruptly stood, striding across the length of the tent as she waited for a response. The rain had come so fast and hard that it had crept beneath the waxed canvas edges, so much so that the ground was soggy beneath her feet.

  Not a good sign.

  “Okay,” Joy said, but she hadn’t gotten the answer she’d been hoping for.

  For the storm to have come this quickly—four hours ahead of an already expedited schedule—meant two things: (1) the storm was stronger and faster than they predicted, and (2) they had less time than they expected to evacuate. In fact, according to the latest readings, they should have been gone an hour ago. Lives were on the line, and Dr. Abigail Carson and the rest of the team were too sick to be any help. Only Rob—their data analyst—was halfway well enough to be useful, and he was a computer guy. Not the action hero Joy would have chosen to send out into a BDD, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  “Rob,” Joy said, kicking the foot of his cot with the toe of her sneaker.

  Rob sat up slowly, sniffling as he rubbed the crust from his eyes.

  “Help these people find their kids, okay?”

  He wasn’t much of a search party, but Joy had seen the boy earlier and knew he was lurking around the tents. Besides, she had the rest of the city to worry about. By the time Rob stood up, she was already fielding another call on her headset. But Silas didn’t leave—not even after Rob pulled on his shoes. He waited, his wife pulling anxiously on his arm, until Joy was done barking orders; then he told her about what he’d felt.

  What he was still feeling—the vibrations beneath their feet.

  “You’re with the NCRC,” he said. “You see stuff like this all the time, right?”

  Joy stared at Silas for long moment.

  She was overworked and exhausted, and she wished she could say that Silas was imagining things. The truth was, the tremors he was describing weren’t news to her. They hadn’t been on any of the NCRC’s earlier projections, but as soon as they started registering, she’d been inundated with seismographic readings from their home base in Washington, DC.

  She just hadn’t known what to do with them.

  Nobody did.

  They were a complete anomaly.

  Valerie was a complete anomaly.

  “So,” Silas asked. “What’s the protocol here?”

  He stole a quick glance at the various monitors peppered throughout the tent. There were graphs on most of the monitors—black lines that spiked into an alarming shade of red. The specifics of the data may have been nuanced, but the general idea wasn’t difficult to understand.

  “You guys have some special emergency plan, right?”

  Joy shook her head.

  “We get as many people as we can as far away as possible,” she said, turning back to her computer. “Preferably before the storm hits.”

  The tent went silent except for the pounding rush of rain and Joy’s clicking keyboard—but Silas didn’t have time for follow-up questions. His kids were out there somewhere, in the storm, and there was no one to call—no cavalry coming to save them. He folded his calloused hand around his wife’s trembling fingers and nodded at Rob.

  “We’re not leaving without our kids,” he said.

  Rob frowned as he followed them back out into the storm, unsure of what to say.

  “Rob,” Joy called after him. “Ten minutes, max.”

  “I was going to bring you out here,” Emily said, nervously tapping the mud-streaked cover of her book. “I was just planning to wait until you were better, is all.” Elliot sighed, clutching his stomach as he stared up into the dripping canopy. He wasn’t sure if his stitches had stopped bleeding, but the wound still stung enough to take his breath away and he didn’t have the courage to check. Meanwhile, the new kid paced beneath the trees, circling the still mostly dry interior of the tiny island.

  Taking stock.

  There wasn’t much to see.

  A heavy veil of rain surrounded them on all sides, so thick that it was impossible to make out the rest of the park. There were enough shaggy trees on the island to shelter them, at least for a little while longer, but the rain had started to crack through the upper branches and a sogginess was spreading from the edges of the island inward. Fresh mud mixed with feathers left by the ducks and geese that roosted there alongside herons and more exotic birds. Except for Emily’s little friend, most of them had flown away long before the rain had even started.

  Emily wished she could fly away, too, but she wasn’t sure what to do about Elliot.

  He wasn’t looking good, and she couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  They had to do something.

  She had to do something.

  “Hey,” Emily said, joining the new kid at the edge of the tree line. The rain was hitting the dirt so hard that it splashed back against her shins, splattering them with mud. The new kid was getting splashed, too, but he wasn’t jumping back beneath the trees, so Emily didn’t either. “I don’t think I could have gotten him out of there without you,” she said. “That was awesome.”

  The new kid didn’t answer.

  He just stared into the storm.

  “I was thinking that we can wait for this to let up,” she said, nodding toward the white-hot bursts of lightning in the darkening sky. “Then we can make a run for it.”

  “It’s not going to let up,” he said.

  Emily frowned as the new kid rubbed goose bumps from his arm.

  “The storm, it’s la tormenta del siglo—the storm of the century.”

  The new kid turned to Emily, squinting through the rain. He was skinnier than Emily and seemed younger than her, too, but there was something about his pained smile that made her feel like she was five years old. “It’s going to keep coming and
coming,” he said, holding his left hand out for an awkward handshake. For the first time since they reached the island, Emily noticed that his other wrist was hanging limply at his side.

  Hurt.

  She clutched her book beneath her armpit and shook his outstretched hand.

  It was small and slick with rain, but warm and strong.

  “My name’s Alejo,” he said. “I came here with the news crew, in a helicopter.”

  “I’m Emily,” Emily said. “And this is Elliot.”

  Elliot didn’t respond except to bounce his head against the soft bark as he stared up into the trees, delirious with pain. Noticing that his phone had slipped from the loose pockets of his basketball shorts, Emily kneeled beside him and wiped the dirt and duckweed from its screen. It was wet from his fall, but it was still working—sort of.

  Alejo leaned in close, watching as Emily tried to make a call….

  But she didn’t even get a busy signal.

  Just dead air.

  “The storm of the century?” Emily asked.

  Alejo nodded.

  They were running out of options, and Alejo didn’t look like he was going to be much help. Emily tried not to stare, but now that she knew he was hurt, she couldn’t stop herself. His bad wrist looked like a ripe plum—so swollen that he was having trouble moving it—and she could tell from the way he grimaced that it was getting worse. They’d only barely made it onto the island with his help; without it, she wasn’t sure that they’d be able to leave.

  Not with Elliot, anyway.

  “We could try to stay here,” she suggested, jumping up to inspect the perimeter. Her sneakers slid in the wet grass, which was only growing wetter with every passing minute. But there were still dry spots, both on the ground and in the forked and folding branches overhead.