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by Carrie Vaughn

  CHAPTER TWELVE • THE COAST ROAD

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  The Next Worst Storm

  Routine carried Dak and Enid as they trekked from the ruins. They found water, hunted for late-season fruit and edibles. Wasn’t much, but as Enid had said, they weren’t going to starve, not as long as they kept heading toward the Coast Road. Once they found the road, they’d get to a settlement in less than a day’s walk in either direction, or they’d meet other travelers who had food to spare. Imagine, always having food to spare. But the road was still days away.

  They made camp, had sex, but it was by rote. Perfunctory, frustrated, and the physical release was palpable but fleeting. She dug fingers into his hips, kneading his skin, trying to hold on to an ephemeral emotion. Was this what it had been like right after the Fall, when Auntie Kath said they’d come up with the implants? Hungry, tired, but they still had sex because it was what they had. Because it meant not thinking so much.

  After, they lay next to each other, and she was afraid to touch him. Afraid that he wouldn’t like her, that he would push her away, and she didn’t want to know how she’d respond to that.

  Things weren’t going to go on as they were, and that was a hard thing to know because she couldn’t see what would happen next. At least she wouldn’t have to think about it until they got back to Haven. Or until she got back to Haven.

  Finally, they left the hills and forests leading out of the ruins, and the world opened up to the plains that they knew. Far ahead, another few days’ travel, was the wide, packed dirt of the Coast Road—a real road, not the shadowed gaps of the ghost road they’d followed in and out of the ruins. Enid spread her arms wide, smiling, taking in a huge breath of clean, familiar air. She’d had an adventure, and she’d appreciated it, but she was glad to be back among the familiar.

  “Enid, look.” Dak was studying the sky behind them.

  Black clouds gathered. Roiling, angry things, filling the horizon from one end to another. The kind of storm front that you knew had another storm waiting right behind it, and fierce winds pushed them all straight toward you, spawning tornadoes, prompting whole towns to flee into their cellars.

  “That thing’s going to pound us when it gets here,” she said. “We need shelter.”

  “Yeah.”

  But they’d left whatever shelter the ruins offered a couple of days ago. They picked up their pace, driving ahead. Maybe they could beat the storm. But not an hour later, the wind started gusting. She could smell the rain on the wind. The size of those clouds meant it would come in fast and last a long time. Lengths of gray connected the clouds to the ground, rain already pouring. The ruins must have been getting soaked. She hoped the families were tucked away safe.

  This all felt familiar—the brimstone scent touching the air, the tension causing her hair to stand up. This was going to be a bad one.

  They were still in the wild, not near any settlements she could remember. There might be a way station nearby, if they reached the road at just the right spot. But even that much would take another day of fast walking.

  They were out of time.

  Best thing would be a sturdy building or cave, even overhanging rocks. Trees would be okay—but all the trees were on low ground, along creek beds, and if the storm was bad enough, the creeks would flood and those gulches would turn deadly. They needed high ground.

  “Over here,” she said, grabbing his sleeve and trotting over the next rise.

  The wind blew from the west, beating against her, whipping her hair. Dak held up an arm to protect his face and hugged his guitar in a way that reminded her of that woman with the baby. They needed to get to the eastern sheltered side of a rock outcrop or ravine. Ahead, Enid spotted a smudge of rocks with a bramble of scrub oak growing around it. Pathetic as a shelter, but in the wide open, it was better than nothing.

  As the rain started falling, they crawled into the scrub oak, up to the outcrop, a section of bedrock that had eroded away. That gave them a wall to brace against at least, and the shrubs kept some of the wind off them. The branches and leaves scratched at them, caught at their clothing, but they picked through it until they found a cave-like space and settled in. Lodging one of their blankets in the branches above them and bracing it with her makeshift staff gave them something of a roof and allowed their little cocoon to hold in some heat. They snuggled together and waited.

  The rain pattered softly at first, but quickly turned to sheets of water, solid and endless. The shelter of shrubs and blanket meant the water came to them in drips and trickles rather than buckets. They got soaked slowly instead of all at once.

  It went on for hours. Wind pounded, threatening to tear away the blanket that whipped and rippled like the sail on Xander’s ship. Enid held on to the edges until her hands cramped, until she was sure the wind would tear it from her anyway, it was so impossibly strong. For a while, the sound of the rain—a constant background hissing, punctuated by the odd patter and pop of drops striking their shelter or nearby leaves—was worse than the wet. The noise got louder, then started a throbbing in the back of her head. She pressed her hands over her ears, as much to soothe the headache as to stop the sound. The pounding became ubiquitous; the world would never be quiet again.

  This, she decided—this was now the worst storm she’d ever lived through. And maybe the worst storms were just the ones where you had a lot to lose.

  They huddled together, trying to keep warm. Enid dozed off, then Dak did, and they clapped hands and rubbed each other’s arms for warmth; the movement helped as much as the friction did. But they were only going to get colder as this went on. They didn’t really have space to light a fire without burning themselves up, but she was about ready to try. Clear a little space, light just a little bit of vegetation. As if they could find anything dry enough.

  If they had known how close the storm was—how bad it would be—they might have tried to stay in the ruins. The shelter back there wouldn’t have been much, but it would have been better than this. Still, Enid wasn’t sorry they’d left. She thought of those kids, the mother with the baby, and then just couldn’t think of them anymore.

  Then, the storm got worse. After calming for an hour or so, the wind picked up again, and the rain turned to hail. Not just water falling on them, but punches, a million little nails trying to drive straight through the earth, the branches, the blanket, and into them. It felt like it would go on forever. She’d read about storms in decades past, the mega-typhoons that would stall out and rotate on and on, continually drawing heat and water from the ocean to dump it out as rain that lasted for days and washed away whole towns.

  The sky turned dark. She thought for a moment the storm was growing worse—the clouds blacker, angrier. But no—night had fallen. And still the rain fell. It couldn’t last forever; no storm lasted forever. But what if . . .

  The night passed badly. Enid’s legs had cramped from huddling under their soaked blanket, and she was shivering.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, having to shout over the noise of the storm. The branches of the scrub oak lashed them; the vibrations rattled the twisting trunks down to the roots. The ground under them trembled as if the whole hillside might be swept away at any moment. But if they tried to run, where would they go?

  “Me, neither.” Dak’s voice was taut, his jaw clamped against chattering teeth, just like hers.

  “How long can we hold out like this?”

  Any other time he might have had a quip, a smile. A word of encouragement. Now, he just shook his head. She was already soaked through, but a new wash of stabbing cold passed under her. Dak felt it too; his hands clenched on her.

  The ground under them was turning into a river. Trickles of water the width of her hand poured down the hillside under them, carrying mud, and those trickles widened to sheets, joining together to become a solid, growing river, racing down the hill. The rock outcropping that she thought would shelt
er them made it worse, diverting more flowing water to the flood, driving it harder down the slope. The wider and more powerful the rivulets became, the more dirt they carried, the more slippery their footing. The ground was no longer stable, and then the scrub oak they were clinging to tilted. The mud washed away, exposing roots, which then came loose. The whole stand of scrub started sliding down the hill.

  They didn’t even have to discuss it. They scrambled to their feet, grabbed their packs and blankets and each other’s hands, and braced against the deluge.

  She squinted; everything seemed bright to her. It wasn’t sun—she’d just been huddled under that makeshift shelter for so long. Daytime again, the sky was a uniform gray, mist shrouding details. As her vision adjusted to the light, she tried to make out the landscape, figure out what was happening.

  The grassy hillside had turned to a slope of brown shifting mud. All of it moving downward. Their feet were sliding as the water tried to pull them down, too. They clung to each other.

  “Up or down?” Dak gasped.

  She thought a minute, despairing. She didn’t know. The storm was everywhere; they had no place to go. The flood was traveling downhill. Torrential rivers lay downhill.

  “Up,” she shouted into his ear.

  They slogged with no promise of anything but more rain at the top. For every step they took, the mud pulled them half the distance back again. The wind was a wall, and they bent their heads into it and pushed on. But however cold and wet they got struggling through the storm in the open, they would not drown. In a way, the desperate, panicked movement up the hill got them warm again. Nice to have something to focus on.

  Dak slipped. Enid cried out, grabbing for him as he went down in the mud and half the hillside seemed to fall with him. He rolled, and there was an ominous crunching sound. Something breaking, and she thought at first it was bone. Her worst nightmare come to life, one of them breaking a bone in the middle of nowhere, and they’d have to hobble onward, or one of them would have to go for help—

  But it wasn’t bone; it was wood. Even as he plunged down a slick track of grass and mud, unable to find his footing, Dak scrambled after his guitar, trying to keep it off the ground, to keep from crushing it any more than he’d already done. Enid went after him, grabbing his arm, clutching the fabric of his tunic, and bracing to get some purchase. Finally, they slid to a stop, rain and mud pouring around them. Dak hugged the guitar case; Enid couldn’t see well enough to tell what had happened to it. Just that something had broken. She didn’t have time to think of that now, not when it felt like they were drowning without actually being underwater.

  Hands digging into each other’s arms hard enough to bruise and unwilling to let go, they stumbled back up the hill, hunched against the rain and making progress by inches. Enid wanted to brace with her staff, use it to help haul them up, but she’d lost it somewhere. Back in the scrub, maybe.

  They fell again, got bruised. For her part she was exhausted, but if she stopped, what would happen? That didn’t bear thinking on, so she hauled up Dak and herself, and Dak hauled the guitar, and somehow they made it to the top of the hill, until finally the mud wasn’t trying to suck them down anymore.

  Getting to the top of the hill didn’t clarify anything. The rain still fell hard—at least it wasn’t hail anymore—and the sky was still solid gray, rain obscuring everything but their little patch of hilltop. Enid couldn’t see a break in the storm and couldn’t tell how much damage the rest of the plain leading back to the Coast Road had taken. The road itself seemed an impossible goal at the moment. But it was better than no goal at all.

  Continuing hand in hand—she didn’t dare let go of Dak, and his grip on her was just as fierce—they sloshed and slipped along the top of the hill until they stumbled into a sheltered depression near another cleft of rocks. This gave them a moment to catch their breath out of the wind. The rush of water wasn’t so bad here—instead of being caught in a river, they just had to deal with soaked ground. Surely, the world would never dry out after this.

  Dak’s leather guitar case was soaked through. She couldn’t guess what the instrument inside looked like, how damaged it must be. He still cradled the thing close. It made moving awkward, but she didn’t argue. She wasn’t going to tell him to leave it behind.

  They huddled there for what seemed like a long time. But every moment of the storm had seemed like a long time.

  “Is it breaking off?” Dak sounded more hopeful than sure.

  The rain seemed to be coming down just as hard as ever. The wind still chilled her, and her clothes felt frozen to her skin. But it might have been a little less than it had been an hour ago. The clouds were no longer that terrible, ominous black they had been, and unless she’d gotten turned around, she still knew where west was, and west didn’t look any worse than anyplace else.

  They should move. If they moved, they wouldn’t freeze.

  “Come on,” she said, and noticed that she didn’t need to shout over the storm anymore. That was something. Maybe it was breaking off.

  “Enid. Wait. I just need to rest.”

  They’d been sitting for hours. But as he tried to stand, he stumbled, his legs unwilling to straighten.

  “You’re cramping up,” she said. “You’re freezing—we have to get moving, keep warm!” She was in a panic now. It would be easy to sit back down with him. But if they did, they might not get up again. They were right at the edge of failing.

  She chafed his legs, trying to rub some life back into them. He cried out, tried to push her away. “That hurts!”

  “I know,” she said, bringing her face close to his. His hair was plastered to his head, and his face was ashen, bloodless. She couldn’t feel her own face anymore. Her hands were ghostly. “But we’ve got to move.” She kissed his chilled lips.

  She wrapped her hand in the front of his tunic and pulled. He didn’t have the energy to resist and stumbled after her.

  Slinging arms around each other’s waists, they slogged through the mud and didn’t stop. If they stopped, they’d be done. They just had to find a roof and a fire. That was it. Not so hard.

  The whole world was drowning. Inches and inches of rainfall in a matter of hours. Their every step splashed on grasses mashed under a layer of water. Propping each other up, they slipped but didn’t fall. Once they started moving, she didn’t feel as stiff. She hoped Dak was moving easier, but didn’t have the spare attention to ask. Her focus had to stay forward, always forward.

  A cut appeared in the land ahead. A shadow. She thought it might be a low cloud or fog, or another flooded section where a creek had overspilled its banks. They kept toward it because that was the direction they were already heading.

  And then, the grass stopped. The cut, the gap—a road cut through the plain. Wide, flat, dirt-packed. Only now more like a boggy stretch of mud. But it was the Coast Road.

  “Dak, look,” she said, thumping his chest. He sighed.

  They didn’t walk on the road but kept to the grass alongside. The grass was wet, but solid, while the road had turned to soup. Still, they had direction now. They had a long way to go. North. The shape of the sun was now visible through the clouds, and it was sinking west.

  Not a quarter of a mile up the road: a way station. Just a house, garage, garden plot, and windmill—not enough to be a whole household, just a place on the road between towns for people to rest, borrow a car or a bike, water their horses, have a roof for a bit.

  Perfect. The most perfect thing she had ever seen.

  Visibility had improved—she could actually see ahead to where she pointed.

  Dak nodded tiredly and resumed the slog. That last little bit might have been the hardest part of the whole journey since the storm began. She wondered—if they just sat in the grass, wouldn’t someone eventually find them? They could wait for someone to find them.

  But no, a hundred more steps would bring them to a roof, a fire, dryness, stillness. They’d come this far; they could do
that much more.

  “Almost there, Dak. Come on.”

  He chuckled. The sound was a little mad. Then he turned and kissed her on the cheek. A little rough, a little sloppy, and his lips were cold, but she laughed and appreciated the gesture.

  Then, they arrived. A winding path lined with rough stones led from the road to the front door of the house. But Enid cut straight across from where they were to their goal, the straightest line she could make so she didn’t have to waste a step. A sign hung on the door reading WELCOME in straight, practical letters. The windows had friendly looking curtains of yellow linen inside.

  At the door, they straightened, took deep breaths. Enid knocked, wondering how pathetic the two of them really looked. A man in his thirties answered. He had neat clothes, brown skin, a rather shaggy beard. They all blinked at one another for a moment.

  The way station’s proprietor finally said, plainly horrified, “Oh no, were you caught out in that?”

  They didn’t even have to answer. The man, who was named Abe, shuffled them inside and sat them by a warm, blazing, blissful charcoal fire burning in a wide hearth. They didn’t bother with chairs, but sank to the flagstones and started pulling off their sodden packs, blankets, coats. Abe pulled these out of the way and traded them for dry towels. The touch of dry fabric was blissful, clouds of pure warmth. The heat radiating from the fire was almost painful. Her muscles cramped; she might never be able to move again, but right now she didn’t want to.

  Rain wasn’t falling. That was enough.

  A half-dozen other travelers had gotten caught in the storm and had spent the last couple of days at the way station, waiting. They’d all had the good sense to stick to the Coast Road so they’d spent no more than an hour or so in rain. They’d gotten wet, but not driven themselves to hypothermia like Enid and Dak had. Everyone helped—someone brought hot tea with ginger and honey, someone else brought blankets, and everyone gathered around to hear the story, waiting while the pair of them thawed enough to be able to talk.