Restless Storm

by Jamie Summer

  How did you sit tight when the world was crashing down on you? How did you stay calm when your mind was going crazy, your body a mixture of fire and ice, fighting its own war within you?

  I had no idea.

  I told Scott I was going to get a coffee and got up just as a loud crack echoed along the shelter walls. I quickly scanned the area, noticing the door still standing. A howling accompanied the sound, so I knew there had to be a leak somewhere.

  There were a few people scattered to my right, so I started walking toward them, instantly realizing what the issue was.

  The walls were falling apart.

  It wasn’t only the door we needed to worry about. It was the whole damn shelter.

  I ran over. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few others do the same. “Get something to stuff inside the holes. We need to close this as soon as possible. The bigger the hole gets, the worse it’s gonna be!” I yelled, looking at the crack. It wasn’t much larger than my hand, which I guessed was a blessing.

  “Here.”

  I held out my hand without even looking up. Something was shoved into my palm and I grasped it, pushing whatever it was into the hole.

  I stepped back and studied it. The pillow I had been given wouldn’t do much, but it would work for now. Due to some smart thinking, we had everything needed to fix holes in the walls. The dry cement they had carried down here was ready to be used. We just needed to add water. Scott and Steve got to work, closing the crack within minutes.

  “Thank you,” I told them.

  “No need to thank us yet. Something tells me it won’t be the last time we’ll need to do this today. We’re gonna get to work on the door, too,” Steve explained. I nodded. We had refrained from doing so earlier because we didn’t have an endless supply of cement on hand. We needed to make sure we had enough left to last us throughout the storm.

  I headed back toward the kitchen when I heard another crash, this one slightly quieter than the one before. Nobody moved, so I knew nothing had been broken.

  However, the sounds from the outside, paired with the issues we had started to have on the inside, only meant one thing. The storm was underway again.

  I heard sounds of water and the howling wind, but nothing to the extent of earlier.

  Ten minutes passed. Then twenty.

  Thirty.

  Forty.

  An hour after it started, the sounds became almost nonexistent. People walked around the shelter, trying to gauge what was happening outside. Steve’s suggestion to check the small radio room was vetoed. It was still too dangerous. There was no telling what was going on right now. For all we knew, it could’ve simply been another short break in the storm. I highly doubted we had escaped the worst already.

  I took a sip of coffee when a scream broke the silence. I saw a small group gathered at the far end of the shelter and ran over to the area. I pushed my way through, gasping at the sight of someone lying on the ground, motionless.

  “George,” I whispered. “What happened?” I asked no one in particular.

  “He passed out. Krystal said he clutched his chest before he went down, so I’m thinking it could be a heart attack,” Jane, one of the few people from the local hospital who stayed, explained. She didn’t look up from her position next to our mayor as she continued to do CPR on him. I had no idea how I would be able to help, and the feeling wasn’t one I liked. I saw Anna kneel next to her, assisting. Everyone else had moved away.

  George was motionless and pale as a ghost, as if his spirit had already left his body.

  No. No, no, no. It can’t be.

  I had been fully prepared to lose people to the storm outside, but I had spent no thought on losing people to something on the inside. My throat dried up when I considered every possible outcome. My head felt light. I needed to focus on something other than the body on the floor in order to get myself under control.

  Betty rushed past me and knelt next to George. “Will he be okay?” she cried. I felt my heart break at the sight of her.

  Jane didn’t say anything. She worked on him for a few more minutes, then sighed and stopped, resting her hands on her knees. “Betty, I’m so—”

  “No!” she cried, bending down to hug George. I felt myself start shaking, a single tear falling down my cheek. The sight of Betty so broken and hurt did something to me. It shattered something within me I didn’t think I’d ever be able to piece back together.

  Anna and Grace gently pried Betty from George, and while I wanted to comfort her, I couldn’t. I merely watched as two men put a sheet over George’s lifeless body.

  I felt cold.

  I felt numb.

  I felt nothing.

  Nothing but the emptiness within me.

  It can’t be true. I can’t...

  I closed my eyes, pushing back the tears threatening to fall. All the weakness I wasn’t allowed to show. I couldn’t fall apart. We couldn’t fall apart. Some of us needed to be strong…for everyone.

  “Let’s go,” Scott whispered, moving me in a random direction.

  I had never been truly close with George, but he had always been there for everyone, the way a mayor should be. He kept his home open any time of the day or night and never said a bad thing about anyone. When I first moved here, he had been one of the first men to talk to me, inviting me into his home. I had never met a more gentle and caring soul.

  It couldn’t imagine him being gone.

  Scott pressed something into my hands and brought them up to my lips. The whiskey burned my tongue, but still felt good going down. As if it slowly reminded me I was alive.

  “Better?” I heard my best friend ask.

  I finally opened my eyes, nodding slightly. I realized we were in the kitchen, right where we’d stashed away a few bottles of hard liquor.

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” When his gaze went to the glass in my hand, I noticed it was empty. “Another one?” Scott asked. Though I was tempted, I shook my head.

  “I need to keep my mind somewhat clear. With everything going on, I can’t deal with being on edge due to alcohol in my system.”

  “Doesn’t it usually do the opposite? Take the edge off?”

  “Not tonight,” I replied. He didn’t argue. Instead, he took a sip from his own glass before putting it down again.

  I heard weeping from the other side of the shelter, seeing several people surrounding George’s body.

  “I wish there was somewhere we could put him. Leaving him out in the open like that seems…” My voice trailed off, unable to find the right word.

  “We’re low on options, but I agree. Maybe we can put him on one of the unused beds. That way, it will only look as if he’s…as if he’s sleeping.” Scott’s voice cracked, and I didn’t blame him.

  “Let’s do that.”

  We decided to talk to Betty first and tell her our plan. She agreed, her eyes filled with unshed tears, dried ones on her cheeks, a sight I had never seen before and didn’t care about seeing again anytime soon.

  Ten minutes later, George was safely tucked away under a blanket in the back of the shelter, his hands to his side.

  Asleep. Nothing else.

  I told myself the same thing over and over, and while my head was ready to believe it, my heart knew the naked, hurtful truth.

  I was on my way to my bed when the storm picked up again. The wind howled through the small cracks in the walls. A melody as beautiful as it was deadly. The water followed soon after, pushing against every inch of the shelter, trying to find the smallest holes to sneak through. Scott and Steve had done a great job closing the gaps that had opened up so far, so it would take a while for the waves to do any damage.

  Then an ear-splitting crack sounded behind me. I spun around.

  The wall to the left, where we’d installed a few showers and made a bathroom, had split open. Screams and the sound of running feet were mixed with the sound of water crashing against every surface. I tried my hardest not to let
the oncoming panic take over.

  I scrambled over the beds to reach the first wall of sandbags we had placed there. I took a few, and the others followed suit. It wasn’t going to be enough to hold off the onslaught of water, but we needed to try with the few bags we could spare. Everybody joined in, carrying them over to where we needed to build a new wall, the water soaking our shoes and pants. The cold sea made me shiver, but I ignored it. My only focus was on making sure we survived the ocean currently invading the shelter.

  It kept coming. Every second, more water flowed in. I heard Betty and Grace yell at everyone to move away from the crack. I knew they were making sure everyone stayed on the other side of the shelter, far away from the deadly water.

  I wouldn’t lose anyone else to this storm. I couldn’t. I worked furiously, in sync with the others as we moved sandbag after sandbag. Time seemed suspended when I realized there was no hope. The storm was relentless, blowing more and more of the ocean into our safe haven.

  “Get back!” I yelled at the workers around me. We’d used all the sandbags, and while the water hadn’t reached the top yet, I knew it was only a matter of time. “Scott, we need to close the hole.”

  He stared at me, eyes wide. “Are you crazy?”

  I shook my head in reply.

  “How exactly do you want to do it? If drowning won’t kill you, pneumonia will,” he yelled over the loud noise around us.

  “We need to try. If we don’t, the water will keep rising, killing everybody in here. There is an endless supply of water out there. Do you think the ocean will move back because we want it to? It doesn’t work like that.”

  Scott watched me carefully, probably thinking up ways to curse me to hell, but all I saw was him wasting time.

  “Now!”

  That got him out of his stupor and he nodded. “At least we’ll go down fighting,” he remarked, making light of a situation I knew was much worse than I let myself believe.

  The water came too fast, the wall of sand too low, and there wasn’t anywhere for the people to go. We were stuck down here.

  I needed to try. It was the least I could do. I grabbed the first thing I found, which was a wooden panel. It wouldn’t hold forever, but we couldn’t use the cement now that the crack was partly covered in water.

  Scott had grabbed a few of the panels floating around, and we sloshed through the knee-deep water. I felt the current fight me, but it wasn’t strong enough…yet.

  “Not this one,” I said to Scott as he handed me a hammer. I pressed myself against the wall in order to not be pushed back by the force of the stream coming out of it. It was about one foot by one foot, small enough that we could close it, but the force of the water was strong. That was the main issue.

  Scott moved to the other side and we went to work. We operated in unison. A team pulled together by one task—to save the people.

  The first piece of wood broke from the force of the water. As did the second.

  “Those won’t work,” I commented.

  Scott looked around, grabbing a thicker piece of wood a little bigger than the hole. “Let’s try this.”

  I glanced at it before nodding.

  I pushed against the water with all the strength I had left, hearing Scott curse beside me. I had no idea what was going on because the stream of water made it hard for me to see completely. It looked like Scott had trouble positioning the board up on the wall. I held on, feeling the exact moment he was successful. The board stopped shaking in my hand, the flow of water decreasing. He stepped over to my side and put on the sticky material he’d used on the other side to make the board stick to the wall. I had rejected the idea of hammering so as not to weaken the walls any further.

  “Press it there and don’t let go,” he explained. I did, while he went back to his spot, leaning against the edge of the wood with his whole body.

  Seconds passed. Or was it minutes? Hours?

  I watched our makeshift board, praying it would hold. It moved slightly, but otherwise seemed okay.

  “I think we’re good,” Scott carefully said after a while, and I nodded.

  We both moved away from the board slowly, our eyes trained on the wall. It needed to hold. When nothing happened for a few minutes, I relaxed my fists, not having realized I’d clenched them in the first place.

  “Good job, man,” I said to him, allowing myself to smile…just as another crack echoed along the wall.

  Then another.

  And another.

  Water streamed in around the shelter. The momentary relief I felt seconds earlier was replaced by an all-consuming fear.

  “Get moving!” I yelled and saw men spring into action. Every one of them grabbed a board and went to work on the holes that had opened up. Thankfully, none of them were as big as the first one, but the number added up.

  We worked tirelessly, the only sound the water streaming to the floor, the sandbags, or our feet. I barely took notice of anything besides the board in my hands.

  “Got it,” someone yelled from down the wall, just as I fastened my board up against the minor hole.

  “There will be more,” I commented, straightening. “We’d better get ready.”

  They got to work—fast, efficient, preparing for the worst. Preparing for more cracks, for the door to crash in, for the whole shelter to be compromised.

  But nothing happened.

  Within an hour, the wind blowing through the tiny holes in the wall stopped and there was barely any sound of the ocean outside. The only sign of a storm having passed through was the water in the shelter, contained by a wall of sandbags that had held.

  “Is that it?” Scott asked, his gaze on me, as if I were able to read the weather better than he could.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m afraid to say yes.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “It could only be a break,” I remarked.

  “Nothing has happened for at least half an hour. And the eye passed a long time ago.”

  I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to give anyone false hope.

  “There’s only one way to find out.” I blew out a breath and walked over to the shelter’s main entrance.

  Feet shuffled behind me in quick succession. “You want to open the door? What if the storm isn’t over? What if it’s only the break you’re talking about?” Scott grasped my shoulders and turned me to face him. “It could be suicide.”

  “We need to know for sure.” Nothing about the tone of my voice left anything to question. Scott sighed, stepping back.

  “I’ll go with you. I know the radio station better than anyone. If the storm has truly passed, I can see how badly damaged our communication system is.”

  I nodded and motioned for him to follow. I asked Steve to come with since he knew his way around the weather station.

  Scott and I opened the door together. I was prepared for the water to hit us, but the cold rush of it still shocked me as the icy tendrils went through my body.

  “Jesus!” Steve yelled and shook himself, as if that would make any difference.

  I turned my focus on the task at hand, ignoring the way my feet and fingers started to numb. The water rose around our feet, but due to the bags we had positioned close to the door, it didn’t go much farther than a few feet into the shelter. I grabbed the flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on, illuminating the long hallway in front of me. Thankfully, it had survived the onslaught of water.

  We carefully made our way up, listening for any sound from outside.

  But there was nothing.

  Everything was eerily quiet. There was no sign of life. No birds chirping, no rumble of thunder, nothing. A calm had settled upon the ocean, showing no signs of there ever having been a storm at all. The clouds had vanished, giving way to the dark, starry sky.

  It was three a.m., so the sun wouldn’t rise for a few hours, but at least we would see it. We would be able to watch something as beautiful as a sunrise on the horizon.

&nbs
p; Then realization hit. We’re alive. Relief rushed through me, releasing the tension in every part of my body.

  “It’s over,” Scott whispered, and a laugh escaped my lips.

  “Seems like it,” I replied, unable to confirm it. I was scared the moment I did, another wave of storms would start rolling in.

  I shook my head, trying to get rid of those thoughts as I looked at the beautiful scenery in front of me. The stars were out full force, making me wish Maddy were here to enjoy the sight.

  The longing grew within me. I’ll see her again soon. Exactly like I promised her.

  I kept chanting it in my head while I walked over to the station. Scott had already opened the door. It looked better than I would have imagined. A few shelves had fallen over, but the walls only showed a few cracks, nothing else. That was as close to a miracle as there was.

  Steve checked the radio. I watched him work, trying to read his expression. Are things working?

  “Okay. So… The electricity is out. No surprise there. There doesn’t seem to be any damage to any of the lines, which is good. We need to go to the power plant and check it out. We’ll probably need to work on it, but from what I can tell, it shouldn’t be as bad as we expected.” He straightened and faced me, his shoulders squared. “We did it.” A huge smile spread across his face. “We did it, man.” He walked over and clasped me on the shoulder, pulling me into an embrace. The happiness radiating from him was infectious. I found myself starting to fully admit that everything was over.

  While I kept throwing worried glances over at the ocean, the sea didn’t change. There was barely a wave out there, and no sign of a cloud in the sky. As if the past hours never happened.

  The destruction on the beach was a reminder that it did, though. Trees everywhere, broken branches strewn all over the place, as well as remnants of the ocean, like seaweed and dead fish, covering almost the whole surface. It would take weeks to clean it, but I didn’t care. We could take care of that. We would bring the island back to its full glory. What we wouldn’t be able to get back were the lives lost.

  George. Bart.

  Their names shot through my mind, a painful reminder of the people we did lose due to the storm.