by Nick Courage
They could improvise.
Emily put on a brave face.
“It’ll be like in My Side of the Mountain,” she said.
“That’s just a book,” Elliot groaned, bumping the back of his head against the trunk for emphasis. Loose bark crumbled onto his shoulders, and Emily’s turtle poked his nose out from her backpack to investigate. He crawled halfway into Elliot’s lap, snapping happily at the mossy bits—oblivious to the mounting storm. Elliot’s eyes widened as he stared down at the turtle and then back at his sister.
Torn between laughter and despair.
He stroked the turtle’s head with the tip of his finger as Emily looked to Alejo for support. But Alejo was squatting in the mud, inspecting a shallow puddle. “Hey,” she said, crouching next to him as he held his good hand just above its surface—watching the water shimmer in the wind. Emily cocked her head as she stared into her own rippling reflection.
There was something about it that looked wrong to her somehow.
Something she couldn’t quite explain.
“What is it?” Emily asked, watching the corners of Alejo’s mouth twitch in horror as the puddle danced beneath his palm. Elliot stopped bouncing his head against the tree and sat up straight, his face pale with effort. “What’s going on?” he asked, but Alejo didn’t answer. Instead, he held Emily’s hand above the muddy water so she could feel it, too. Elliot shifted, leaning forward for a better view—but there was nothing to see. Just the look of consternation on Emily’s face as the puddle jumped to meet her fingers.
“You feel it coming,” Alejo whispered. “Right?”
Whatever it was, it was like the pounding of a distant drum.
Her palm shook over the dancing water as the turtle retreated into the safety of her backpack, sensing danger. Something terrible was happening and they needed to leave, to get as far away from the storm as possible. But Emily was too scared to think, and before she could even start to formulate a plan, lightning struck a nearby tree—close enough that she could smell it burning, even in the rain.
Emily screamed.
She couldn’t help herself.
The lightning touched down like an explosion, so loudly that her own shrieks sounded muted in her ears—like they were coming from someone else. From somewhere else. Thunder cracked and tumbled overhead as Emily jumped deeper beneath the cover of the tiny island, running toward her brother and away from the rain.
Alejo wasn’t far behind.
“We’re not safe here,” he said.
Emily nodded, not trusting her voice not to catch in her throat.
She stood speechless, watching as Elliot loosened his grip on his side—testing to see if the bleeding had stopped. It hadn’t. Emily and Alejo shared a worried look as they watched a darkness spreading through his shirt, between his dirty fingers. Emily swallowed, swinging her backpack to her shoulders as Elliot closed his eyes and rolled his head against the tree.
“You two stay here,” she said. “I’m going for help.”
Emily turned on her heels, running to the edge of the island before Alejo could try to stop her. Before she could stop herself. She was already leaning into the wind and the rain, her feet settling into the deeper mud of the flooding banks, when she felt Alejo’s good hand on her shoulder.
“I’m coming, too,” he shouted.
“He can’t be alone,” Emily said. “And it’s up to me—”
“To save him?” Alejo shook his head. “What if you need help?” he asked.
Emily thought it over.
She didn’t have time to argue.
The faster they were able to get Elliot to safety, the better, and Alejo had already helped her once today. Wounded wrist and all. The rain was fast and hard and stung their faces as they stepped through the bramble and into the knee-deep water, but they kept walking—tripping through the mud into the lagoon; stumbling and falling as the thunder shook more rain loose from the sky. In their wake, the last able-bodied birds in Audubon Park erupted from the upper branches of the island. Shaken from their perches, a plague of oil-feathered grackles arced high over the battered canopy—coasting upward through the downpour on warm, northbound currents.
Leaving their nests behind.
Distant voices broke through the rain.
In her excitement, Emily slipped in the mud.
“Help!” she yelled, splashing awkwardly to shore. “Someone’s hurt!”
They were halfway there, just thirty feet from land, but she couldn’t see the men who were calling through the storm. The rain was too thick and too unrelenting, and the muck beneath their feet trembled, like Jell-O on a train track—vibrating. Alejo steadied his bad arm on her shoulder as Emily covered her eyes, squinting as a spotlight swept back and forth across her face. Zeroing in on their position.
“Hey!” Emily shouted, waving into the blinding light.
She fell to her knees as the ground shook beneath their feet.
“Help us!”
* * *
—
The grackles didn’t get very far before they alighted, perching beneath gutters and in the eaves of dormer windows as they tried to make sense of the storm. Five blocks away from the tiny island, a well-fed juvenile preened on the sill outside Emily’s living room, attempting to shake its feathers dry as the television played to an empty couch. The apartment was similarly empty, even though the front door was ajar and bouncing on its hinges. The lights flickered on and off as the first waves of Megastorm Valerie drenched the little bird. The building wouldn’t have electricity much longer, but for now, Emily and Alejo waved from the television screen, live on Channel 4 news.
To the young grackle, they were just two grainy black spots on the dry side of the window, shadows in the noise of the storm. It dug its claws into the soft wood of the windowsill, anchoring itself against the wind while the reporter shouted from the television. The white-hot lights of the news crew illuminated the reporter’s dripping face as the image jumped out of focus and then steadied, refocusing on a trembling blade of grass. The cameraman had set his camera on the ground and sprinted toward the island, abandoning the broadcast. He was just barely visible in the corner of the frame, diving into the shallow water.
“We seem to be having a technical difficulty,” the reporter announced, trying to sound like he was in control of the situation. His wet shoes filled the screen as he gestured for someone to pick up the camera. They were made from a thin Italian leather, too fancy for the weather. “Hey,” the reporter yelled, chasing after the cameraman. “This is a live feed, genius.”
Just as the reporter began to swear, the broadcast cut to a commercial.
It didn’t matter.
The television in Emily’s apartment had gone dark.
An electrical transformer had exploded two blocks from the park—the first of many. They sparked blue, then green and orange and pink, flaring out like fireworks atop crooked telephone poles.
Somewhere below the empty apartment, a window shattered.
The wind whistled and howled as it blew across the broken pane, a lonely flourish to announce the approaching storm. Startled, the ruffled grackle took flight—its little beak open, panting as it launched itself upward into the rippling currents. Elsewhere in the abandoned city, car alarms shrieked and wailed, triggered by small seismic tremors that shivered up through rubber wheels and into windshields.
Shaking hairline fractures into the glass.
Nobody had been in the offices of the National Climatic Research Center for at least twelve hours, but the bank of monitors above Joy’s desk continued to update with projections of the storm. Red lights flashed with each new model, alerting the empty room to storm surges that could reach the northern prairies of Missouri and seismic tremors fissuring the soft sediment of the Mississippi delta. In the entire fifty-year his
tory of the NCRC, the potential for destruction was unprecedented.
And it was only getting worse.
As Megastorm Valerie shifted her bulk from the Gulf of Mexico onto the shuddering shores of the southern United States, the emergency lights flickered and died, enveloping the office in darkness. There wasn’t anybody in the room to witness the monitors fade to black, and even if there had been, there was nothing they could have done about it.
Valerie was out of their control.
For the first few seconds after landfall, the outage was localized to New Orleans, but as transformers popped and fizzled, the blackout quickly cascaded into Alabama and South Carolina, overloading power stations and substations all the way up the eastern seaboard. Satellite images showed the darkness climbing up the coast like a time-lapse video of mold in a petri dish.
Satellite images that the NCRC couldn’t access.
Not without power.
An automated generator switched on in the basement of the sprawling government building. It hummed underfoot, reverberating through the tile floors as fluorescent lights crackled to life overhead. One by one, the NCRC workstations booted up. Except for Joy’s personal laptop, they all defaulted to password-protected log-in screens. Joy’s computer, on the other hand, started playing where she’d paused it. A reedy voice from a black-and-white monster movie shouted into the empty room.
“Hey, what are you doing out there—come back!”
The warning lights started flashing again as a webbed creature crept through the deep water of her smudged screen, stalking the silhouette of a swimming woman. The soundtrack swelled ominously from Joy’s tiny speakers, reaching a crescendo as a phone began to ring in Dr. Abigail Carson’s office. With no one in the room to answer it, the phone rang and rang as a boat full of explorers chased after the monster, readying their nets and harpoons.
Finally, the caller gave up and left a voice mail.
“Dr. Carson,” a man said.
He sounded distracted.
“Dr. Carson, this is the president’s office.” There was shouting in the room behind him, and he muffled the phone with his hand as the explorers continued to hunt the Creature from the Black Lagoon on Joy’s laptop. “The president was watching the news when the power went out,” the man finally said.
He paused for a breath as another argument broke out in the background.
“Abby, she needs to know how bad this thing really is.”
Elliot stared listlessly into the canopy, blinking the rain out of his eyes as it dripped down through the leaves and onto his upturned face. He clutched his side, applying pressure to his wound even though it didn’t seem to help. Not really. His stomach throbbed beneath his dirty fingers, so badly that he wanted to check it again—to see just how broken he really was. But he couldn’t make himself look.
He didn’t want to see the blood…he couldn’t handle it.
But he half smiled at the irony.
He’d switched places with his little sister.
It was Emily’s turn to save him now.
The megastorm was so close he could feel it in his bones. Tiny ripples pulsed through every puddle on the island, the vibrations spreading outward and up through his outstretched legs. With his nonclutching hand, Elliot reached into the pocket of his shorts, remembering the big blue pills he’d palmed for later. He didn’t care that they made him tired—he’d held off as long as he could, and he needed to manage the pain before it got even worse.
Worse.
Elliot smirked at the thought.
He was trapped and bleeding on a tiny island in the middle of a megastorm.
It was hard to imagine his situation getting any worse.
But the medicine was gone.
Elliot squeezed his eyes shut in frustration as he felt through the leaves at his side with the tips of his fingers, digging until he connected with the smooth surface of his missing pills. He popped them into his mouth as soon as he found them—without looking, before he had a chance to lose them again—and tasted grit as he swallowed. Elliot rolled the dirt around on his tongue, spitting as lightning splintered the sky overhead. He hoped his sister would be back soon with help. She’d only been gone a few minutes, but the storm was coming in hard and fast.
If she took much longer, he’d have to try to make it across the lagoon on his own.
It hurt to even think about.
A twig crunched, and Elliot’s eyes snapped open—but it wasn’t his sister or her new friend. Just a plump goose who’d decided to join him at the base of his tree.
“Don’t worry,” Elliot said out loud, addressing the goose. “She’s coming.”
The goose blinked twice, shuffling nervously around Elliot’s feet.
He couldn’t help but laugh when it stepped onto his lap, honking mournfully as it tucked its broken wing against its breast and settled down. The goose was one of Audubon Park’s regulars, so used to people feeding it that it expected special attention. Elliot didn’t mind. “Everyone left you, too, huh?” he said, resting his hand on the bird’s back as its soft undercarriage warmed his legs. If he tried, Elliot could almost pretend that he was home in bed, tucked beneath his blankets with a pile of unread comics at his side. He yawned, which meant the medicine was kicking in. It wasn’t until he heard footsteps crashing through the brush that he opened his eyes again.
“Hey,” he mumbled sleepily, expecting his sister.
But it wasn’t his sister.
Not even close.
The goose hissed as a man with a scraggly beard jogged toward them in jeans wet up to his thighs. He was wearing a utility vest covered in Velcro strips and pouches bulging with camera lenses. “Sorry,” the man said, pushing the goose out of Elliot’s lap. He squatted and the goose nipped at his heels, but he ignored the attack as he folded Elliot into his arms and grunted—the veins and muscles in his neck straining from the effort as he stood back up again.
Elliot couldn’t think of anything to say, so he didn’t say anything.
He just let himself be rescued.
Cattails slapped his face and legs as the bearded man splashed through the reeds surrounding the tiny island, ferrying Elliot to the mainland. He could feel the soft floor of the lagoon trembling ominously beneath the man’s boots, but as they neared the far shore, he was reassured by the sounds of his sister shouting and splashing into the water to meet him. Elliot blinked through the rain, recognizing the bright lights of a news crew behind her.
As thankful as he was to be off the island, he hoped they weren’t there for him.
It felt so stupid to be saved like this.
Carried like a baby.
Elliot peered into the storm.
The bright lights seemed to be moving, like lanterns swaying on a foggy bridge—swaying…and falling to the ground as the grass rolled beneath them. Elliot tightened his hold around the bearded man’s neck, watching in horror as the lights sparked into darkness while trees shook on the horizon. The bearded man cursed, planting his legs into the thick mud to ride out the tremor while the rest of the news crew dropped their equipment and sprinted into the piercing rain.
Leaving Emily and the new kid alone in the shallows.
* * *
—
Alejo was ankle deep in the lagoon when the first of the major tremors shook their way through the park. He could feel them working their way up his legs, his knees turning to jelly as he stumbled backward into the mud. It was like stepping off a runaway skateboard…but still rolling. Unable to fall and unable to stand without falling. Emily splashed wildly at his side, clutching his hand to steady herself as she flailed through the aftershocks.
His bad hand.
Alejo screamed as his swollen wrist clicked against her palm.
The cameraman—halfway across the lagoon with Elliot in his arm
s—stared, openmouthed. Elliot stared, too. But not at Alejo, whose eyes were watering, his tears mixing with the unrelenting rain. Cradling his arm against his soaking chest, Alejo turned in time to see the rest of the news crew sprinting for the helicopter that was waiting for them beyond the tents.
Abandoning Alejo and his friends.
Alejo shouted.
Not to stop them, but to warn them.
“Watch out!” he yelled, his voice lost in the wind.
It was hard to know what else to say.
If they had just looked before they scattered, they would have seen the tent filling with wind and straining against its stakes. They would have stopped in their tracks as it fought the storm and failed, mushrooming up beneath the clouds. The reporter with the slick shoes was the first to notice, pivoting away from the makeshift camp as the tent burst free from its moorings and spun wildly overhead. Its heavy canvas straps whistled through the wind like sharpened knives as he changed course, ducking down into a black government SUV. The rest of the crew wasn’t far behind. They flocked like crows: black shadows against the horizon, pumping their arms as they ran—desperate to get away as fast as they could.
Desperate to save themselves.
By the time the cameraman finally reached shore, staggering under the weight of the boy in his arms, the SUV was already fishtailing through the mud—halfway out of the park. “Run!” the cameraman shouted, pointing toward the helicopter with his scraggly chin. The tent swirled and spun above their heads as they raced through the storm, shielding their eyes and hoping for the best.
They didn’t have a choice.
The rest of the camp had already evacuated, and the helicopter was their only ticket out. “Last chance,” the cameraman yelled as they hustled through the billowing tents. Alejo joined in, shouting at the top of his lungs—not even making words, just howling as he sprinted toward the empty field where the cars had parked. There was only one person left in the NCRC’s satellite headquarters—only one person who heard them as they screamed their way to safety. Her short hair whipped in the wind when she stepped out from beneath a flap, her eyes widening at the sight of the abandoned camp. She held her walkie-talkie to her mouth as she ran alongside Alejo, barking orders into the receiver as they splashed into the grass. The lawn had turned to mud, and the mud was so gouged by tires that the tread marks had filled with rain, forming puddles.