The Tempest

by A. J. Scudiere

  She was even hoping to sleep in. Though Radnor had summoned them on one of the Saturdays, there were no call times for this weekend. She caught Sarah’s attention in the rearview mirror now. “What's on tap for tomorrow?”

  Sarah had served as their local chaperone for the past several weeks, making sure they got enough “Alabama” to know their way around. “I don't know. It's been three weeks, and I'll be honest, there isn't that much more to do or see around here.”

  She waited a beat, thinking. “There are a few wineries, but these are definitely Alabama wines. Not as well-known as France or California, for good reason. We could hit Noccalula Falls, if you want.”

  “What is it?” Deveron asked, joining in on the weekend planning for once. He always tagged along, but hadn’t expressed real interest until now.

  “Just a nice little park and the falls. And there's a statue of the woman it's named after. You know, there’s a plaque and it’s pretty. You’ll get some local landscape.”

  Joule and Deveron looked at each other. That was pretty much their usual work: study the bedrock, avoid hurting the plants and critters. But without Radnor peering over their shoulders, it would be better.

  “It's worth the drive,” Sarah added, as though she’d decided to sell them on the idea only now.

  From the front passenger seat, Cage uttered a single choice word: “Shit.”

  Before she could even ask, he turned around and held his phone up. “The radar is showing a bad storm coming in.”

  “Tomorrow?” she asked. There went the falls …

  “No. Right now.” He turned around to face her, pointing to the tiny screen. “It's ugly. And it's coming up right behind us.”

  5

  Cage stood at the window next to Sarah, each of them holding back one of the curtains. He let his knuckles touch the cold glass to keep Sarah from seeing that his hand shook just a little.

  Joule was hiding in her room, deep in a book, earbuds in so she could pretend there wasn’t a storm. But Cage stood watch, as if keeping an eye on it would hold the storm away—as if his tension would keep him safe. He knew better, but he still stood at the window, watching.

  “Was that a shingle!” He jerked as something black swooped by. Was the house falling apart? He was grateful he wasn't the owner.

  “Maybe,” Sarah answered, in a far-too-calm voice. Then again, one of the things he’d learned in the past several weeks was that Sarah didn't show her hand often.

  “Losing shingles doesn't concern you?”

  “It does.” Then she echoed his own thoughts. “But it's not my house. And nothing's leaking …” She looked up as if to check that she was correct.

  Cage let his gaze follow hers, but she kept talking.

  “Helio Systems will get us a new house if this one's broken.” She was still gazing out at the yard, in flux with high winds.

  All of that was true, but … “I'd rather not be in this one when it breaks.”

  Sarah looked him then, laughing. “It won't break. Not for this.” Then her face went back to its normal passive expression. “It might, however, flood.”

  Ice chilled his veins at the word, and he forced himself to watch over the backyard and breathe. He counted the familiar things in the grass: the smoker that had stood empty, as none of them knew how to use it. The green-painted picnic table. The log the squirrels kept hopping along that Joule had taken to leaving her toast crusts on. It had taken them a whole week to find out the gently sloping area beyond Squirrel Log did, in fact, lead down to a creek.

  Floods were not his thing. It was difficult to keep his voice level. “Does that happen often?”

  Sarah’s expression grew wary. “More often lately than before.”

  Though her words didn’t say it, he felt the implication that she was mostly referring to one incident. So he next asked the question he dreaded, but that's why he was out here watching the world blow by. “Was there anything in the water?”

  “No. The water itself is bad enough when it happens.” Sarah shrugged, a too-small gesture for the next words out of her mouth. “It took out a handful of houses and swept away some cars, though. We lost some neighbors.”

  She said it as though the neighbors were of the same consequence as the cars or the porches. “I heard that out west, some bull sharks came inland with the waters.”

  Cade didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He wasn't ready to tell the story.

  Sarah seemed to catch on that he wouldn’t say more, and she turned to him as if to comfort. “This isn't a rainstorm. The radar looked really bad, but it picks up mass, you know—density—not water. So sometimes it looks like rain when it's really something else. Pressure. Clouds. Who knows?”

  He did know that. He’d been prepared for a rain that would raise both the creek and his heart rate. “I'm not used to seeing things blow by horizontally.”

  A piece of white paper whipped through the yard, followed quickly by a plastic bottle tracing the same path.

  “It’s just high winds.” Though she was watching alongside him, she sounded mostly unconcerned. Cage was terrified.

  He still didn’t quite trust the nonchalance she projected. He’d believe it when she returned to the brown leather couch and the quilt with the skull design and watched one of their three channels of TV. But Sarah stayed at the window, eyes on the gathering damage. “At least we're not in Tornado Alley.”

  That was the whole point, he thought. A solar display that was toppled by tornadoes multiple times each year wasn’t cost-efficient. Building damaged the environment, so rebuilding each year wasn’t economically or environmentally feasible. It’s why Radnor was breathing down their necks now.

  He knew this storm probably wouldn’t tear up any of the newly-installed test posts, because they had to build them to withstand more than this force. As harsh as the weather looked from here, Sarah was right. It wasn’t much.

  Central Alabama had experienced one of the new F6 classes earlier in the year. An F3 had come through here. The good news was that, according to frequency, if they could build the solar array now, they should have an average of a ten-year span before it would need to be repaired again. But averages weren’t storms and they worked only if it didn’t get worse.

  Unlike Joule, who was hiding in her room and not watching the storm, Cage preferred to keep his eye on the problem. He and Sarah stayed at the window, silent for a few more moments, each of them holding back their side of the curtains. He was trying to hide the tension that suffused every cell, but…

  “Is that snow?” In Alabama?

  The big, fluffy, white pieces blew across the yard. First, just a few came through, confusing him. But when they gathered steam and he saw the flurry of fluffy white …

  “Hold on!” Sarah laughed at him as she dropped her side of the curtain. She headed out the door into the back sunroom.

  “Wait!” Was she going outside?

  “It’s just wind.” She tossed the words too casually over her shoulder as she headed onto the back porch.

  His jaw clenched and he told himself she’d be fine, even though the screens that enclosed the porch billowed and shook furiously around her. Several of the small, painted wood pieces had blown from their perches and Cage spotted the decorative piece with the red, white, and blue star crammed into the corner, now upside down. He waited for the wind to pick it up again and aim for Sarah.

  But it didn’t.

  Unlatching the back door, Sarah fought the wind for a moment. She put one foot onto the step, then followed with her head and one hand, the other holding tightly to the frame. Cage grimaced, waiting for a stray shingle—or worse—to smack her, but it didn’t happen.

  Instead, she snatched one of the little masses of “snow” from the ground and brought it back in. She handed it to him as she leaned against the door and bolted it shut with a misplaced grin.

  “It’s cotton!” he said, squishing the soft mass between his fingers. It felt just like a store-bought cotto
n ball.

  “Yeah. It looks like the wind stripped somebody’s field.”

  Cage was still examining the piece she’d brought back in. Sarah was unfazed by it, but he turned it over with wonder. “It comes off the plant this way?”

  “In the wind, all the time.” She’d already turned to look out the window again, as more debris blew through their yard. This time, the smoker tilted a little in a big gust, but Cage was now more impressed with the white fluff blowing by.

  What he held in his hand looked like a slightly dirty, unraveled cotton ball. He examined it for another moment, thinking about the fields he’d passed all the time since moving here. “Is this somebody’s crop? Did their livelihood blow away?”

  “If it's a big company, then this loss—” she waved her hand at the yard where the white was already thinning out,“—isn't enough to wipe them out. If it's a family farm, then the cotton probably isn't their only income.”

  Cage turned the cotton ball over in his hand, as if he were still inspecting it, but his thoughts had pulled elsewhere. He knew the disasters he’d encountered might have been odd or unique. But it didn't matter if the disaster was big or small. It mattered how hard the disaster hit you.

  He jerked and dropped the cotton ball as something smacked against the window.

  6

  “What misfuckery is that?” Joule asked, leaning forward from the back of the car, her hand clutching the fabric of Cage’s seat as she pulled herself forward to look.

  She’d survived last night’s nasty windstorm and she was letting Sarah drive again. She was growing as a person. But it sucked monkey balls, because now she wished she were at the wheel and could see more clearly.

  A line of people in work clothes and boots held signs and shook angry fists in the distance. “Is that for us?”

  It couldn't be, she thought. She watched the side of her brother's face as he, too, frowned.

  “It can't be.” Deveron spoke as though he’d plucked it from her brain. “We're building a solar farm. I mean, who even cares?”

  But Joule noticed that Sarah was slowing the car.

  “Oh, it's for us,” her roommate confirmed as she scanned the crowd. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel as she muttered, “You have got to be shitting me.”

  Joule wanted to push and ask how Sarah knew, but decided Sarah would reveal it in her own good time.

  The car slowed more as they got closer. The protesters were now pushing in and crossing the road. The car in front of them came to a stop and Joule felt her own forward momentum abruptly end. The people surrounded the lead car, but Joule turned around to look out the back. Several more angry pedestrians had come in behind them. With the protesters blocking the road in front, Sarah’s car was fenced in.

  Joule wasn't really one for panic. It was true, she'd survived a lot of things the others around her had not. Still, these were just people, not killer animals—and she didn't even know yet what they were angry about. But as the protesters crowded the cars, she was able to read a few of the signs.

  “Solar = noise pollution, heat pollution, water pollution.”

  She frowned. That wasn't right. The whole point of the solar farm was to reduce pollution. Her head turned the other way and she saw a sign that said, “Take your solar farm and stick it where the sun don't shine.”

  That didn't even make sense. She read the third one she saw out loud to the car. “Solar equals cancer? But how?”

  Sarah sighed and leaned back, banging her head against the headrest a few times in irritation. One hand gripped the steering wheel, the other reached up to her hair, and she explained. “The oil and coal companies give them information that’s only partly true. So these people have heard about the gases that are inside the solar panels.”

  “Right,” Joule agreed, though she dragged the word out. “But those are literally trapped inside the panels. Unless they're cracking them open and sucking it down, there's no cancer to be had. In fact, I don't think we're even sure if the gas inside the panels would cause cancer if you did suck it down. It's just not really on the ‘approved foods’ list.”

  “You and I both know that,” Sarah said as she waved her hand in front of her, palm up, to gesture to the people who stood in the road in front of the car. “But they don't.”

  Joule tried to lean back and let the tension leach away. There was a little truth in all of it. The accusation of heat pollution existed because putting in a solar panel did raise the temperature near the panels. An array as big as theirs could raise the field temp a few degrees.

  But that was why half of their team members were environmentalists. She couldn't help herself, and she opened her mouth again. “Do none of them understand that I spent the last three weeks being shot down by you two, because I can't use a paint that a hamster might ultimately ingest about a gram of?”

  “Again,” Sarah sighed harshly into the car, “You know, and I know—”

  But she didn't finish the sentence. The passenger side door of the car in front of them flew open and Melinda Gonzalez hopped out. Apparently, the lead environmental tester had had enough and wasn’t ready to be late to her job. Protesters be damned.

  “You need to let us through.” Her voice was firm and borderline angry. Joule heard her say she was one of the management team. Apparently, Melinda Gonzalez also had a bitch switch, because the kind teacher Joule had seen before was gone. “You have two choices. You can get out of my way or I can call the police.”

  Joule was pretty sure she heard the large man who was getting in Melinda’s face grumble, “It's public property. We have a right to be here.”

  As Joule watched, her hand clenching the door latch, ready to hop out and defend the woman, Melinda didn’t flinch.

  Gonzales was taking none of this shit. “One, public property or not, you're obstructing a roadway. That's illegal. And two, it's not public property. The Helio Systems property line is about five hundred yards back that way, asshole.”

  Ooh, Joule thought, that was a nice punctuation.

  But the man leaned forward almost into Melinda's face, definitely aiming to use his size to intimidate. Even Joule towered over Melinda, but Gonzalez was already leaning forward, using his move against him. Though the conversation seemed to be happening between two people, Melinda was letting her voice carry, maybe so she’d have lots of witnesses. Joule made a mental note but was listening raptly again as Melinda leveled another accusation.

  “This is my property, not yours. Anything you do is assault. And anything I do is self-defense. So bring it.” She jolted forward at him and Joule felt the smile creep across her own face when the man jerked back at the sudden, if small, threat.

  When he only stared for a moment, making no further gestures, Melinda turned away from him as though he were no longer worth her time. This time, she addressed the crowd at large. “I'm calling 9-1-1 now. And I saw an officer on the road, right back there, less than a mile,” she threatened, pointing. “He'll be here quickly. You won't have time to get off of my property before you get arrested for trespassing. And you will be arrested. Helio Systems will prosecute to the full extent of the law.”

  Joule watched as the peripheral people started to shift away at the threat. They probably didn’t have the money nor the time to fight a corporate giant. Who did? But it was odd, sitting in the car and feeling like she was part of the machine. Even if she knew most of what they were protesting was untrue.

  Melinda was already dialing her phone and Joule watched as the crowd now dispersed in earnest.

  Go Melinda, she thought and at that moment, she realized if she ever wanted to move into management, she wanted to be Melinda Gonzalez.

  The crowd might be leaving, but they did so belligerently, moving close to the cars, holding up theirs signs to be sure the workers inside could read them. The man who’d harassed Melinda came close to her again, but Melinda just offered an expression that said he wasn’t worth her time, and climbed in, slamming her door.r />
  Joule breathed easier with the manager out of harm’s way. Even as Melinda pulled forward, the man leaned in as if to look into the car for contraband or such. Sarah started the motions to follow along.

  But as she shoved the gear shift into drive, her head snapped to the left. The lead man had leaned down to her car window and was looking directly at Sarah … as if he knew her. And he was making a motion to let her know he was watching.

  7

  “That's a nice T-shirt, Cage.” Izzy laughed at him as she passed by, carrying specimens up to the main tent.

  They’d not seen him in just a T-shirt before, but today he’d tied his hoodie around his waist. He was known for being perpetually cold, but the Alabama humidity had broken him yesterday. He was hot and he didn’t like it. He wanted his jacket on, but needed to do the work, and the work made him hot.

  He, Sarah, and Mitch were back at the same job today—doing the sweaty task of catching field mice and anything else they could get their hands on. Even Sarah—finally in a better mood after the encounter this morning—was singing “Little Bunny Foo Foo” as she emptied the traps.

  Cage already had three containers stacked under his arm as Sarah held out another. “Take this one.”

  He double-checked her field sticker with the trap number and exact GPS coordinates of where she'd found the little guy. Inside each clear plastic box, a single creature scrambled about. Cage now held two field mice, a lizard, and a huge centipede.

  He headed away from their little cluster of workers before she could hand him another box, or before Mitch could get any ideas. Walking slowly at first, Cage waited for his critters to settle down. Normally, they were a little anxious at first, then got used to the container and eventually handled the field checks like recalcitrant teenagers. But not today.

  Was it yesterday’s wind storm that had them all stirred up?

  The field solar array was huge and it took him quite some time to trek his way to the main data tent Helio Systems had set up on the edge of the field. He passed people that he knew along the way, saying hello to each of them as he went.