by Hugh Howey
Daniel nodded.
His mom slipped into the bathroom and shut the door. He could hear Zola still apologizing and making excuses inside.
“I’m going to crack the ones in our bedroom first,” Carlton said. “I’d like to grab an extra pillow and a blanket and drop them back off here.”
“I’ll do the living room and then just peek upstairs real quick,” Daniel said. “You’ll do the kitchen?”
“Okay,” Carlton said. He nodded, and Daniel caught the barest of smiles. Carlton tucked the flashlight between his elbow and ribs, clapped his hands once, and said, “Break,” like a football quarterback.
Daniel laughed and headed off in the other direction.
As the house rattled in the assault of wind and rain, he stopped laughing and padded along silently, hoping the house wouldn’t take his stepfather’s suggestion literally.
12
As Daniel crept down the hallway, playing his flashlight across the floor and up the walls, he suddenly felt like he was on patrol. The wild sounds outside made it feel as if he were on a ship being tossed on the seas. He was a lone sailor checking the bilges after crashing onto a reef, seeing how much water the ship was taking on.
It most certainly didn’t feel like his house. All the lights were off. As he passed through the kitchen and into the living room, he saw that even the appliances were dead. All the twinkling blips that normally graced their powered-down faces had blinked shut. The place looked abandoned. Condemned.
Daniel stole across the living room carpet toward the windows looking out over the front yard. He set down his flashlight and unlocked the window. Air hissed and whistled through the seams, the wind outside like a passing freight train. With his fingers bent in the jamb, Daniel lifted the window a few inches, and the air burst inside immediately. He had a sudden impulse to slam the window shut as the storm clawed its way inside, but refrained. He figured the whole point of opening the windows was to allow the insides of the house to match the fury outside. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it or not, but he thought his ears had popped like descending in an airplane. He squeezed his nose and blew out, then bent to retrieve his flashlight.
Before he moved to the next one, Daniel pressed the lens of the flashlight up against the window, shining it outside. The pathetic dribble of light did little to wash away the darkness, but he could see several of the trees outside bending in the wind. Unlike before, however, when the small trees had been moving, Daniel could now see the big ones swaying. The little ones were snapped in half. He could see flashes of white wood where their raw and exposed interiors caught the light. Brambles of limb littered the yard already, looking like a scattered hedge. Leaves sped by like jet-powered bugs; the wet ones plastered themselves to the house and windows. Rain came in sideways and in blinding sheets, like a powerful sprinkler dousing the house. Daniel felt the water misting him across his thighs as it blew through the screen and the new opening he’d made. It was hard to move away from the window. He was transfixed by the incredible forces powering through their front yard.
Finally, he tore himself away and moved to the next window. He cracked it, then ran to the dining room, bumping into a chair that had been left pulled out from the table. Carlton yelled something from the kitchen, but Daniel couldn’t hear over the wind he was inviting into the house. He flashed his light through the windows to look for a tree or anything leaning against the wall. Seeing nothing, he ran back to the living room and up the first few steps toward the second floor, shining his light well ahead of him.
The storm sounded twice as fierce upstairs. It sounded like the roof was off. The howl and whistle were completely unabated, like Daniel would walk up the next few steps and find naked clouds roiling above, leaves blowing through, just a few bits of low wall standing around him.
He took each step cautiously and reminded himself that it would be raining on him and the carpet would be soaked if the roof were actually gone. Once his head was higher than the second floor, he rotated his light around through the pickets of the railing, just to be sure. All the walls were there. Daniel kicked himself for being so stupid and afraid. He ran up the last handful of steps and went straight for his room. Throwing the door open, he first grabbed his book bag, which had his books, schoolwork, and a few comics in it. He slung both straps on and moved to the window.
Daniel peered outside. He could see a second cone of light shining out below where Carlton was scanning the back yard from the kitchen window. If the front yard looked like a war in progress, the back looked like the aftermath. One of the really big trees was down. The sight of such a large cylinder of wood lying flat through the back yard was jarring. Limbs stood up from it like smaller trees sprouting vertically from its bark. These were whipping around like the pom-poms fans shake at the high school football games. As Daniel cracked the window, he saw bits of bark and pine needles, along with the usual leaves, stuck to the outer glass. The air shrieked as he let some in, and the door to his room slammed shut with a loud bang.
Daniel flinched and felt goose bumps run up his arms. He turned around and shoved his bed away from the window to keep it from getting wet. Then he ran around and gathered up the clothes on the floor and threw them on top of the bed. Something scampered across the roof—or a limb tumbled across it—but it sounded like it was right on the other side of the sheetrock above his head.
“This is fucking nuts,” Daniel said to himself. He felt a rush of adrenaline from all the pounding and creaking. As the upper story swayed, the image of being on a ship during a storm was complete. He opened his door, feeling the wind yanking against him. He slid his dresser down the wall as he held the door all the way open, pinning its edge behind the furniture. He then ran to Hunter’s room and cracked a window there. He wondered what Hunter was going through across town. He always seemed to get out of doing stuff with the rest of the family. Zola’s room came last. As Daniel approached her door, he thought he heard squishing from the carpet beneath his feet. He was still processing this when he opened the door and stepped inside—
Something bushed across his face; Daniel screamed and dropped his flashlight. He waved in the air to shoo whatever it was off, and his hands tangled in twigs and leaves. He bent for his flashlight, the spray of rain pelting him. The thunderous roar of the wind was so thick, it drowned out his thoughts. He felt like he’d stepped outside, or through some dimensional rift from his comics and into a hellish, infernal plane of existence.
He shined his light inside as the door banged against his foot. Something ran across the floor and disappeared into the darkness. Splintered two-by-fours hung from the busted-open flesh of cracked and hanging sheetrock. Zola’s ceiling fan was on the floor, glass shades and shattered light bulbs glittering—he aimed the flashlight up—there was a tree trunk angled through her dormer, a thick limb splitting her bed in two. Another squirrel ran past, twittering and complaining. Now that he knew what they were, he placed the sound in the attic from earlier. The animals were moving from their downed home and into his.
“Holy shit,” someone said behind him.
Daniel startled and nearly fainted. He felt Carlton’s hand on his shoulder as his stepdad aimed his own light past and added it to Daniel’s.
“That’s the old oak out front,” Carlton said, more awe in his voice than fear. “We need to get downstairs.”
Daniel nodded his agreement. The two of them turned and hurried back toward the stairs, the wrath of the storm outside threatening to send another tree their way. The door to Zola’s room slammed shut as the wind swept through the house. He and Carlton thundered down the steps, their lights jouncing, their hands sliding along the railing, drowning out the scampering of smaller, no less frightened feet up in the attic.
13
“Dude, your room is toast.”
Daniel and Carlton squeezed back into the bathroom, which smelled sulfurous from freshly lit matches. Zola looked to Daniel, her face pinched in confusion.
�
�It was a pretty good sized tree,” Carlton told their mom.
“What do you mean toast?” Zola asked.
“You’d be dead right now,” Daniel said. He didn’t say it to torment, more out of shock and awe and from his pounding heart.
“Dead?” Zola howled.
“Daniel, don’t do that to your sister.”
“There’re squirrels everywhere.”
“Mom!”
“Daniel Stillman!”
“Everyone calm down,” Carlton said. He turned off his flashlight and set it on the counter. Daniel’s mom was sitting on the edge of the tub; his sister knelt on the floor amid a tangle of pillows and blankets. Her eyes were wide and fixed on Carlton.
“What happened?” she asked.
Carlton lit another candle. “A tree fell into the house,” he said. He looked to their mother. “It went through the dormer in Zola’s room, but it looks like—”
“There’re squirrels in my room?” Zola howled.
Carlton showed her his palms. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he said, but Daniel knew he was just placating her. There was no way to know if everything was going to be okay. How did they know where the storm was exactly? It could still be miles away. The eye wall could be barreling right for them.
“My Zune,” he said, shrugging off his backpack and setting it down on the floor.
“Is the house okay?” his mom asked.
“It’s holding up the tree, but I’d say the worst of the impact is long over.” Carlton paused. “The damage from the rain isn’t going to be good.”
“The insurance is up to date. I remember writing that check just a few weeks ago. This wouldn’t qualify as flood damage would it?”
“I don’t think so,” Carlton said. “I’m not sure.”
Daniel dug in his bag for his Zune. It was yet another humiliation in his life. All his friends had iPods, and every connector to everything in the universe seemed to be designed for Apple’s ubiquitous device. His aunt’s car even had an iPod dock, even though she didn’t own one. She had bought him the Zune for Christmas, then asked him to plug it into her car and play some of his favorite music. Daniel had to weasel his way out of telling her she’d bought the wrong thing and had done his best to sound grateful for the gift. He didn’t even like pulling it out in public and had bought some white earbuds so it would look like an iPod if he kept it in his pocket.
But it did have an FM tuner, something many of the iPods didn’t. Daniel had never used it before. He powered it up while Zola begged Carlton for more details about her room. Their mom had to tell her that she was most definitely not going up there to see for herself.
“Does anyone know any FM stations?” Daniel asked. He couldn’t personally name a single one. The rare times he listened to music in the car, he just tapped the search button from one commercial to the next until he found an actual tune.
“NPR is ninety five point seven,” Carlton said. “I think one of the AM stations has a duplicate signal on the FM range somewhere.”
Daniel struggled to figure out how to adjust the frequency. If it was an iPod, he thought to himself, it would be intuitive.
He got the dial moving, the digital numbers ticking down, while he put one earbud in. Carlton patted his shoulder and pointed to the floor. Daniel sat, and Carlton sat down beside him, reaching for the other dangling earbud.
“You mind?” he asked.
Daniel waved his hand.
“That’s gross,” Zola said, as Carlton leaned close and popped the loose bud into his ear.
Daniel was getting nothing but static. He dialed into the NPR frequency, and there was something there, but it was too faint to make out. He started tapping through the numbers, one decimal at a time, while Zola and his mom dug out bottles of water and passed them around.
“I shoulda charged this thing up,” Daniel said, noting the quarter charge on the battery.
“Wait. Go back,” Carlton said.
Daniel went up two decimal points. There was a voice behind a curtain of static.
“I think that’s a Charleston station,” Carlton said, pointing toward Daniel’s display.
“Everyone be quiet,” Daniel said.
He and Carlton strained to hear.
••••
“What did they say?”
Zola dug into a box of cheerios and crammed a few into her mouth. Daniel took a swig of water. Now that he knew the house was open to the elements, the sound of the wind upstairs seemed closer and more potent.
“It’s all they’re talking about, of course.” Daniel looked to Carlton. “Did they say winds up to a hundred forty?”
“That’s what it sounded like to me.” His stepdad bore a grave expression.
“Where’s the storm centered?” his mom asked.
“It was all in relation to Charleston,” Daniel said. He wrapped the buds around the Zune and tucked it into his pocket, saving the battery.
“I think it’s going to hit just south of us. Maybe right on top of us,” Carlton said. “They were saying sixty miles south of Charleston.”
“How far away? Is the worst over?”
“It had made landfall,” Daniel said, “so it can’t be much longer.”
“It could get worse before it gets better,” Carlton cautioned.
“When can I go see my room?” Zola asked. “Oh my god, my new laptop is up there! We’re responsible for those!”
“Nobody’s going upstairs,” their mom said. “And the school will get you a new laptop if anything happens to that one.”
Zola looked nearly in tears. She dropped the fistful of cheerios in her hand back into the box and shoved the box away from herself.
“How long will that radio last?” Daniel’s mom asked.
“I dunno. A few hours or so. I’ve never run it all the way down.”
“If there’s nothing else we can do, or if you guys don’t need to use the bathroom, we should probably get some sleep.” Their mom flipped open her cellphone and glanced at the screen. “It’s almost four, so the sun won’t be up for another two hours. I don’t want anyone moving around or exploring before then.”
“What will we do if another tree comes through here? Or if the house falls down around us?” Daniel thought about images of demolished homes on the weather channel, the piles of jumbled building material and furniture that nobody could live through. He wondered what it would be like to crawl their way outside in this mess only to search frantically for some place to wait out the storm. Would they have to lie down in a ditch? Or was that for tornados? Would they bang on a neighbor’s door like refugees, begging to be let in? What if someone else all of a sudden banged on their door and said their house had been knocked over and now they had to find room for them and share food and water?
“This is the safest place to be right now,” his mom said. She blew out one of the candles Carlton had just lit and rubbed her hand over Daniel’s head. “You should try and get some sleep. It’ll make it go by faster.”
Daniel nodded, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep at all. His heart was pounding from the adventure upstairs. The noise from the wind and rain had him anxious—he felt like a thing constantly under assault and from all directions. But he knew his mom was right. If they were sailors at sea, riding out a terrible storm, they couldn’t survive if all of them stayed up for nothing. In shifts and whenever they could, they needed to get some sleep. He moved back by Zola, who had lain down on her side, facing the wall, and had arranged one of the many pillows now piled up on the crowded bathroom floor. Carlton adjusted the extra blanket and pillows he’d grabbed from the bedroom, and their mom blew out the last candle.
Daniel lowered his head. He could feel the cool wetness in his jeans from the water that had spit through his cracked window. He ran a catalog of his stuff through his head—the things in his room that could get ruined if they got wet. For once, he was glad his parents kept the home computer down in the nook attached to the kitchen. All
their pictures, documents, emails, home movies, everything was on that computer. He had an idea to go out and grab the tower and bring it into the bathroom with them. He was imagining curling up to the unit, keeping it safe, when exhaustion and the late hour won their battle over his racing heart.
14
A great noise had startled Daniel awake the first time—an eerie silence pulled him from his slumber hours later. Daniel sat up and saw that his mom and Carlton were gone, their blankets folded back away from their dented pillows. Zola was making sleep sounds beside him. He rubbed his face to remove the fog from his brain and got up quietly to go search for his parents.
The first thing he noticed was that it was light out, the pale glow of dawn filtering through the windows. Daniel went around the corner and saw that the front door was wide open. He crossed the living room and stepped outside into a different world.
“Holy shit,” he whispered, which drew looks from his mom and Carlton. They stood together on the front stoop, her arm around his back, him clutching her shoulders. They had been looking toward the massive tree leaning askance across the front of the house.
Out in the front yard, it was a tangle of limbs. Piles of broken branches formed vast dunes and disjointed heaps of greenery. What was odd was the lack of sound. Not even the birds chirped; there didn’t seem to be any fluttering about. Daniel hurried down the steps to look back at the house. The tree that had gone through the roof was one of the biggest in the yard. Three people couldn’t have reached around it holding hands.
“Don’t go far,” his mom said. “In fact, I’d rather you stay in the house.”
“Why?” Daniel looked around, his arms raised. “It’s over, right? Man, we’re gonna be picking up limbs for ages. And how do you get a tree like that off your roof?”
“It’s not over,” Carlton said. He shielded his eyes and looked up at the brilliant blue patch of sky overhead. Gray clouds stood in the distance. “I’m pretty sure this is the eye. Storms don’t end this suddenly. There’s just as much wind and rain on the back side of the storm, if not more.”
