by Nick Courage
“It’s okay,” Emily said, disappearing into the foliage. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She ducked beneath fallen branches, digging her way through an endless tangle of twigs as she tunneled inward. They scratched at her face and shirt, but Emily didn’t have the time to clear a path through the tree. Not with the earth shifting beneath her feet and the sinkholes swallowing everything they touched. The sky flashed pink as lightning forked overhead, casting long-fingered shadows across the drowning park.
Illuminating Emily’s mother.
She stood motionless, surrounded by broken greenery in the heart of fallen oak, so sick with fear and worry that her chest convulsed with it. The terrible knot in Emily’s stomach finally loosened as she ran into her open arms. “I didn’t know,” her mother whispered, clenching Emily into a hug so tight she could feel it in her ribs. She sobbed softly, her cheeks wet against Emily’s forehead—whether from rain or blood or tears, Emily couldn’t tell. “I didn’t know,” her mother repeated, so quietly it was barely a whisper. Her face crumpled as she tucked a muddy strand of tangled hair behind Emily’s ear, but their reunion was short-lived. The tree shook all around them—suddenly and violently, showering them with acorns and Spanish moss—and Emily shrugged free from their embrace.
“Wait,” her mother said, “Emily—”
But there wasn’t time to talk.
There was barely time to think.
Emily pulled her mother’s wrist, dragging her through the twigs and brambles. Pushing her—when her mom dug her heels into the mud—toward the waiting helicopter. They were so close that Emily could see it through the leaves, glinting brightly as the lightning flashed, and she couldn’t understand why her mom wasn’t trying harder to reach it.
“Emily!” her mom shouted, wresting her arm free.
She pointed back into the thick of the fallen tree.
Emily blinked the rain from her eyes, twisting her head in the direction of her mother’s finger…and ran, her voice lost in the thunder as she shouted for her dad. His shirt was ripped and stained with grass and mud, his muscles straining as he pushed against a tangle of branches. Yelling from the effort. The oak tree groaned, but not because he’d moved it. The dirt beneath its roots was caving in, dragging the tree—inch by terrifying inch—into the depths of the sinkhole.
Pulling her father down with it.
“Dad!” Emily shouted. “We have to go!”
Lifting himself from the thickening mud, Emily’s father shook his head. Rain cascaded down his face as he grasped the mossy branches, but he didn’t move to wipe his brow. He shouted into the storm instead, pushing his shoulder against the bark as he tried to right the fallen oak. “Dad!” Emily yelled, reaching for his sweaty arm. “It’s me!”
But her father just kept lifting, his jaw clenched from the effort.
“Don’t look!” he grunted, straining against the wreckage of the tree.
But it was too late.
Emily’s heart stopped as the floodwaters puddled over the awkwardly splayed legs of the pilot, who was pinned to the ground beneath a heavy limb. His face was contorted into a grimace, but he wasn’t moving. Not even as the dark water lapped against the side of his head, threatening to suck him deeper into the mud beneath their feet. The cameraman groaned at the pilot’s side, knocked unconscious by the very same branch—but not trapped.
Not yet.
Emily’s mother screamed.
“No,” Emily whispered.
Without the pilot, they didn’t have a chance.
She splashed beneath the heavy branch, pushing against its bark with every muscle in her body, and collapsed to her knees when the tree failed to move. Not even an inch. Thunder crashed overhead and mud streamed down Emily’s face as she crawled through the water, bracing her feet against the tree for leverage as she tugged at the pilot’s arms. She pulled so hard she was sure she was going hurt him, but he didn’t budge. She would have given up if both of his hands weren’t fists, clenched so tightly she was sure that he was still alive.
That they could still save him and get to the helicopter in time.
Emily tightened her grip on the pilot’s balled fists, pulling him with all her strength as the first house toppled on the avenue. The screech of wrenching wood and metal cut through the rain like the cry of a wounded animal and the cameraman moaned at her feet, clutching his temples as its beams and shingles clattered into the shivering earth.
Yielding to the storm.
“One more time,” Emily’s dad grunted, launching himself at the giant branch as aftershocks rippled through the park. The tree jerked backward as he wrestled against it, unmoored at the edge of oblivion by the swelling tremors. Limbs snapped—ripped and smashed from its trunk—as the tree rolled away from the pilot, crashing farther into the sinkhole.
Finally free, the pilot relaxed, unfolding his fist in Emily’s hand.
In the center of his dirty palm, silver and shining, was a small metal key.
Emily wiped the key clean on her ragged shirt while her dad staggered under the weight of the injured pilot.
“Okay,” he said, nudging the woozy cameraman with the toe of his boot. “Let’s go.”
Emily cleared the controls with the back of her arm, sweeping chunks of shatterproof glass and splintered wood to the floor of the cockpit. Her heart pounded as she tried to find the ignition. It didn’t help that the upper branches of the ancient oak were still poking through the windshield, pulling against the helicopter as the tree shuddered and slipped farther beneath the surface of the park. Rain filtered down through its leaves, dripping onto a hundred switches and gauges that flickered to life as Emily turned the tiny, silver key in the dash.
Outside the helicopter, she could hear the sinkholes expanding.
Pulling the rest of the avenue into their depths.
Swallowing everything they touched.
But Emily didn’t have time to look.
“Now what?” she shouted, glancing up from the blinking controls as her dad climbed into the cabin. He stumbled beneath the weight of the injured pilot, gently dropping him into the copilot’s chair at Emily’s side. Emily looked back and forth between her dad and the pilot for instructions, but none were forthcoming. The pilot just groaned, grasping at his broken legs as her dad climbed back into the cabin. Sobbing, Emily’s mom clutched Elliot to her chest as she watched her husband dig through the cargo holds, hunting for a first-aid kit. He tossed three bright orange life vests onto the metal grating, then a flare gun. Finally, he ripped open a small white box, unspooling the skinny roll of gauze inside and throwing it to the ground in frustration. It wasn’t enough to cover the wounds on the pilot’s thigh.
It wouldn’t stop the bleeding.
“We need to get him fixed enough to fly this thing,” her dad shouted, pulling his button-down shirt over his head. He climbed back into the cockpit in his undershirt, kicking the first-aid kit as he knelt beside Emily. He wrapped his own torn sleeves above the pilot’s knee, pulling them as tightly as he could. The pilot screamed, spittle running down his chin. But Emily’s dad kept pulling, cinching the makeshift tourniquet into a sloppy knot.
Emily twisted in her chair, averting her eyes.
But the backseat had its problems, too.
The cameraman had collapsed on the bench between Joy and Alejo, and the three of them were so bruised and bloody that Emily winced just looking at them. “How’s it going up there?” the cameraman slurred, stroking mud from his scraggly beard as Alejo nursed his wrist. Even the headset dangling from Joy’s neck was broken, its connection to the president’s office severed along with the telephone wires on the avenue.
They were alone, Emily realized.
They were alone and nobody was coming to save them.
“Are we ready to go now?” Emily asked, turning back
to the pilot.
He grimaced at the sound of her voice, shrinking farther into his seat.
Emily’s dad frowned at his side, waiting for the pilot’s pain to subside while Emily stared at the dashboard. She tried to read the gauges, but they didn’t make sense. There was no button to make the helicopter fly, no gas pedal to stomp. She jiggled the joystick between her knees and could feel that something was happening overhead, but when she craned her neck to check if the blades were spinning, all she could see was the roiling black core of Megastorm Valerie, towering just blocks away. Emily pulled the joystick harder, squeezing its red trigger over and over and over again.
Panicking.
But still, nothing happened.
The helicopter wasn’t moving.
“He has to help us!” she shouted, shaking her dad by the shoulder. Making him drop the aspirin he’d salvaged from the tiny kit. Before he could answer, the floodwaters surged, slamming them against the dashboard. Emily fumbled with her shoulder straps, locking them into place—better late than never—as the helicopter slid another ten feet toward the growing sinkhole….
Wrenching itself from the fallen oak with a crash.
Valerie’s headwinds roared through the broken windshield, filling the cabin like a parachute as the last of the helicopter’s windows showered to the floor. The ground beneath their skids pulsed with tremors and the cameraman braced himself against the nylon webbing—but there was nothing for Emily to brace herself against as she stared into the encroaching darkness, face to face with Megastorm Valerie. She reached across the narrow aisle, tapping frantically on the pilot’s arm.
Help, she mouthed.
Drawn and white, the pilot didn’t answer.
“Go, go, go,” Emily’s mom shouted from the backseat as her dad leaned closer to the pilot, repeating simple yes-or-no questions in the hopes that the pilot might nod or shake his head. That he might give them any kind of clue that would help get the helicopter off the ground. “Do I push a button to make the rotors start?” her dad asked, his voice as level and soft as the storm was wild. The pilot just trembled in his seat, his face distorted in agony. Emily’s dad nodded, then gestured at a quadrant of flashing lights on the dashboard.
“Is it one of these buttons?”
Emily couldn’t wait any longer.
She slapped the dashboard, running her fingers across the toggles and switches.
Flipping them randomly.
Praying for movement.
But nothing happened.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Go.”
The temperature cooled as the churning eyewall of Megastorm Valerie approached, so quickly that the hair on Emily’s arms stood on end. With the cold front came a fresh wave of rain. It fell hard and fast, lightning striking on all sides as thunder enveloped the helicopter.
Emily shivered, shocked into a momentary deafness.
Her ears rang as the fault lines beneath the streets rumbled in response, the cockpit rolling and swaying beneath her feet. Swallowing her fear, she squinted at the glowing gauges as the helicopter spun slowly and deliberately toward the avenue, carried by rising wavelets that splashed roughly against its battered metal frame. The sky had grown so dark—and so suddenly—that Emily could barely see the sinkholes anymore.
But she could feel them.
They all could.
She squeezed her eyes shut as the helicopter shifted again, jumping another few feet toward the hole. “Snap out of it!” her dad shouted at the pilot, losing his calm as the entire cabin tumbled forward in a tangle of limbs: arms and legs and wordless shouts, all slamming into the back of the captain’s chair. Alejo yelped, his bad wrist pinned painfully beneath Elliot in the pileup. Emily joined him, screaming as the nose of the helicopter dipped precariously over the void.
“You have to help us!” she yelled.
She yelled it again and again, so loudly and at such a high pitch that the pilot frowned—shaken, finally, from his stupor. Fighting gravity and his own broken body, he ran his fingers along the side of Emily’s chair, feeling for a familiar lever. He screamed as he pulled it, the tendons in his neck popping from the effort—and then he collapsed, slouching against the windowless door.
At first, it felt like nothing happened.
The wind shrieked across the chasm so piercingly that Emily could hear it above the ringing in her ears—but she couldn’t hear the rotors humming into action above her head. It was only when the joystick started shaking in her white-knuckled fist that she dared to open her eyes again. Gathering the last of her courage, she looked down into the sinkhole and blinked the wind from her widening eyes. She was still staring over the edge of the abyss….
But they weren’t falling.
They were floating above it, shooting skyward so quickly that Emily’s stomach jumped into her throat as she peered into the floodwaters—watching them shrink beneath her dripping-wet shoes. Emily’s dad joined her in the captain’s chair as they rose, wrapping his calloused hands around hers on the joystick. Steadying it as windblown debris pinged the sides of the helicopter so hard it dented the metal frame and pierced straight through the tortured chassis. In the rearview mirror, Emily could see her mother hugging Elliot and Alejo, squeezing them tightly as hot tears streaked Emily’s cheeks.
But it wasn’t time to cry.
Not yet.
Not with the black expanse of Megastorm Valerie filling the broken windshield.
Emily wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand as the helicopter strained against the storm’s outer winds, its rotors whining from the struggle. Her dad pulled the pilot’s lever even harder and the engine keened, shooting them higher into the sky above the park. They twisted in the updrafts, spinning faster and faster—and the joystick jumped in Emily’s palm, bucking her grip. When she couldn’t hold it any longer, she simply let go. She didn’t like ceding control to the storm, but they were running out of time and there was no use fighting it.
Valerie was too strong, and the only way out…
Was up.
Rain blasted through the broken windshield, stinging Emily’s cheeks as they spiraled out of control. The world outside the helicopter blended into grays and blacks and blues, and Emily saw Alejo dry-heave in the rearview mirror. It was the last thing she remembered seeing before her dad pulled her into a tight hug, sheltering her from the crosswinds as they twisted through the writhing cloudbanks and into the thinning upper reaches of the storm.
“Hold tight,” someone yelled.
Emily hunched over, tucking her head into her lap as the rotors started to smoke.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see the city below them. It was whirling like the floor of a carousel, a point of spinning focus at the center of an endless blur. She stared into the shrinking park as they spun, watching the first surge of storm water run through deep fissures in the earth, filling the gaps between the trees that were still standing.
Swallowing her tiny island.
Emily squeezed her eyes shut, tears cutting through the mud on her cheeks as the helicopter continued to rise—its body shaking as it climbed over three thousand feet above sea level, and then six thousand. At ten thousand feet, they finally broke free from the worst of the storm. With the highest winds safely beneath them, the helicopter slowed into a gentle spin, looping in arabesques above the darkened city.
“Look,” Alejo said.
From so high up, everything was small.
The park, the highways, even the spinning mass of the megastorm.
As they drifted upward through the gathering clouds, surfing a trailing wind, lightning flashed beneath them—harmless, like fireflies. Emily took one deep breath and then another, staring into the rearview mirror as she recovered from the shock. Joy and the cameraman leaned into their shoulder straps, staring—like Alejo—into the
darkness below while her brother rested against the curve of her mother’s neck. Emily sighed, exhaling as she felt her backpack rustle at her feet. She frowned at first, then smiled as she unzipped it. Her turtle was still in her bag. He’d finally come out of his shell again and was chewing the corner of her book.
It was thick with mud and spackled with algae.
But Emily had bigger things to worry about.
“Where are we going now?” she asked, her cheeks red from the wind as she leaned back into the crook of her father’s arm. He shifted to make room for her, replacing his hand on the helicopter’s joystick with her own. She held it lightly, letting the currents guide her as she kept one eye on her turtle and the other on her brother in the rearview mirror.
“We can figure that out later,” her dad said. “For now, let’s just fly.”
The turtle contracted his neck, pulling his head back into his mossy shell. He blinked sleepily as his thick skin folded up around his ears, warming his cold blood and muffling the wind. He hated the way it whistled, unceasingly, across the lip of his carapace, but there was only so long he could hide. And there was so much happening outside his shell that he didn’t understand. As soon as the helicopter leveled out above the storm, he sniffed—stretching his wrinkled neck back out into the cockpit.
Sensing movement, the girl hugged him tightly against her chest.
He struggled against her grip, pushing into her arms with his webbed claws. He didn’t want to scratch her, but he was curious—and the girl wasn’t going to put him down without a fight.
“We’ll just follow the river,” her father said. “Do you see it, that brown squiggle down there?” The girl traced the curve of the Mississippi River with her fingers and the turtle opened his beak, threating to snap at them as he wriggled against her shirt.
“Fine,” the girl mumbled, setting him down at her feet.
Too distracted to deal with him.
The turtle smiled to himself, testing the air with the tip of his tongue as he followed his nose into the cabin. The hard metal grating shook through his stout little legs, vibrating him to his very core as he scrambled beneath the fold-down seats, taking experimental nibbles at wet shoelaces and the hems of waterlogged jeans. But none of them were as satisfying as the girl’s old book, with its soft paper marinated so nicely in algae and dirt. Undeterred, the turtle traced its scent all the way back into her backpack, the nub of his tail wagging expectantly behind him.