Into the Hurricane

by Neil Connelly

  Soon, she’s reached her objective. The tall gray building is supposed to resemble a medieval fort, Max supposes, complete with an exterior that looks like enormous stones, turrets rising from the corners and, most important to her, a tall central tower, stretching fifty feet into the air. Out front, a sign proclaims THE SPORTSMAN’S CASTLE. The whole thing seems wildly out of place next to the sun-beaten smaller shops along this pitiful wannabe boardwalk.

  She pulls right up to the entrance, where an archway rainbows over the front door, covered in plywood. Sabine says, “There’s an alligator that lives in the moat of this castle. Be careful.”

  Max says, “Okay, honey,” not really paying attention. She dismounts and finds twin handles for what must be a double door, jutting out through sawed-off openings in the plywood. When she tugs on them, they don’t budge.

  Taking Sabine by the hand, she starts splashing around the castle wall, looking maybe for a bathroom window that didn’t get boarded up, anything. The store backs up to the gulf, and Max isn’t surprised to find the tide way up over the beach. High above, she sees the tease of the unreachable tower. Max has never liked damsels in distress, whether they come from fairy tales or Disney movies, but she finds herself wishing Eli were here. Or if not him, a good crowbar. This tower is her goal, the highest ground she can hope for.

  At her side, water up to her knees, Sabine seems to sense her desperation and asks, “So that boy’s gone?”

  “I think so,” Max tells her. The second sentence, that he probably drowned, she doesn’t say.

  “Maybe he’ll be back,” the kid says.

  “Maybe so,” Max says, not sure if she’s imagining Eli’s return as a ghost or in the flesh. She leans into her knees, doubled over like a runner after a race, and is certain of only this: Right now, they are on their own. This child is hers to take care of. The rain beats on Max’s bent back.

  When she lifts her head, her eyes catch on something beyond the side parking lot. There’s a tall black fence, one that looks like the bars of a prison cell, and she wonders what kind of medieval gimmick this is. Driven more from curiosity than anything else, she wades over. The fence forms a large rectangle, nearly the size of a basketball court. In its center there appears to be some sort of mound, an island that even in normal conditions would be surrounded by a ring of water just inside the fence line. This is a cage, Max realizes, something meant to imprison and hold.

  She follows the bars around to the front, which isn’t all that far from where she parked. And there she comes across a sign that reads IVORY THE ALLIGATOR. It explains that albino alligators are rare, and because their unique pigmentation undermines their natural camouflage, they don’t survive long in the wild.

  “I seen Ivory before,” Sabine tells her. “Charity let me look at him when we were getting groceries at Cormier’s once. It’s free to just look.”

  “That’s fine,” Max says. She watches the ocean waves rollicking through the bars, and she wonders if alligators—albino or not—can survive in salt water. It’s not her problem, she knows that, but letting a creature die like this seems cruel. Max walks the fence till she finds a gate just around the corner from the sign. With the tide, the gate swings back and forth on its hinge. If she wanted to, Max could slip inside the pen. For a second, she wonders if some animal lover came and broke the gate down so Ivory would at least have a chance, but then the more practical truth asserts itself. Surely an albino alligator is precious, too valuable to leave behind in disaster’s path. Surely when the Sportsman’s Castle owners evacuated, they took Ivory along with them.

  Looking at the black gate, pushed open and inward, Max sees an image spark to life. Together she and Sabine hustle back to the ATV. Only when Sabine tries to climb on, Max sets a hand on her shoulder and shakes her head. “I got to do something to get us inside. Just wait here.”

  Sabine says, “Please don’t go away again!”

  Max slides behind the controls. When she turns to answer Sabine, she sees the child’s need in her eyes. Max isn’t used to having someone rely on her, and the sensation, though unwelcome, also brings with it a burst of motivation. “I’m not leaving you, kid. I wouldn’t do that. Go over by the wall there and just sit tight.”

  Sabine, cradling Jasper, does as she’s told, and Max gets to work. She steers the ATV up to the front door, then unwinds the rusty chain from the headlight. In her mind, she’s picturing a scene from a cheesy Western her dad loved, when John Wayne was wrongly imprisoned in the local jail. He summoned his faithful horse with a whistle to the window, then tied its reins to the bars. When the horse backed up, it ripped the metal frame right from its brick housing.

  Standing over the front of the ATV, she searches for some way to attach either end of the rusty chain to the doorframe. With no other option, she unwinds a few feet of chain, loops it around one door handle, then ties a knot.

  Max climbs back into the driver’s seat and slowly reverses, taking up the slack in the chain. Then she revs the engine. The chain trembles with the strain, but the door is unyielding. Max brings up the throttle as high as it will go, until the engine’s throaty roar is clearly a complaint, with no luck. She eases back and tries something else. Slowly, she inches the ATV forward, nosing up to the door. This time she jolts backward all at once, accelerating like a starter off the block. Her head snaps forward when the chain catches, a kind of reverse whiplash. She goes ahead and speeds back a second time, even a third, yet the door doesn’t seem to notice.

  Max can feel the tightness in her eyes that comes before tears. Determined to make one more attempt, she nuzzles the ATV close to the door, then guns the engine full bore, launching the ATV violently backward. There’s a momentary hitch, and she’s ripping through the water into the parking lot, away from the Castle. When Max looks up, the door remains exactly where it was. She leaps into the water and feeds the chain through her fingers till she finds the end. The knot she made holds tight to the door handle itself, yanked free.

  Sabine appears at her side. “I don’t think that’s working so good.”

  “No,” Max says, her fear turned to anger. “But I got a Plan B.” She curls the chain back around the headlight and sits at the controls, then reaches for Sabine’s red helmet. “I need to borrow this for just a second.”

  The helmet is tight, but Max shoves it on anyway. Her eyes are fixed on the wood protecting the double doors thirty feet away. She hunches low to make herself smaller, grits her teeth, braces herself, then revs the engine and launches straight ahead, suddenly riding a battering ram. The ATV sprays water in its wake like a Jet Ski. She’s now driving at high speed toward a solid wall.

  When she slams into the door, the whole ATV bucks and Max goes airborne, spinning over the seat even as the ATV careens sideways and forward. She’s inside. A sharp spike of pain flares along her spine as she crashes into a row of shopping carts and down into the shallow water. Everything goes still. If she blacks out, it’s only for a few seconds, and then she hears, “Hey! You wrecked real good!”

  Max sits up in the water, rattled but recovering. Smiling, Sabine stands over her with Jasper. With effort, Max tugs the helmet off, then reaches for the straps of the backpack, wincing at the ache the movement causes. She drops it on her lap, the weight from the urn solid and heavy. Max inhales and exhales deeply, testing to see if any ribs are broken, but she finds breathing easy enough. She looks around and locates the ATV, on its side and rammed into a customer service counter. A sign reads NO RETURNS WITHOUT A RECEIPT! At the store’s entrance, there’s an open rectangle of gray light where the door used to be. Higher water rushes through at the base.

  “C’mon,” Max says, getting first to her knees and then to her feet. She’s dizzy, and when she tries to straighten, something stings the muscles along her backbone. Bent like an old woman, she hobbles forward, ankle-deep in rising water. Sabine slides under one arm to support her.

  In the deep gray dimness, Max locates a wall of flashlights. She
selects a small one for Sabine and a bulky square one for herself. With her teeth, she rips open the packages and then loads the lights with batteries swiped from the checkout lane. On the chance that the batteries run out, she grabs some neon glow sticks wrapped in black foil.

  Sabine asks, “You gonna pay for that stuff?”

  “You bet,” Max tells her, sending a shaft of pale light into the dark rafters of the upper levels. “In fact, I’m going to buy the whole store.”

  She unwraps a Mighty Good Granola Cookie and gives it to Sabine, then opens a second for herself. It tastes like chocolate chalk, but Max devours it just the same. She tosses a handful into the backpack. From the cooler nearby, they each grab a couple bottles of water. Max chugs one greedily and okays Sabine’s request for a Sprite.

  Armed with the flashlights, they explore the larger store, wandering from aisle to aisle. They find camping supplies—tents and walking sticks, folding chairs and mini gas grills, binoculars. They slosh down a row of nothing but fishing rods and bait, and then enter an open section of camouflage clothing in more varieties than Max knew existed. Not just pants and shirts, but baseball caps, raincoats, even baby clothes. She locates some dry pants for her and the girl, along with sweatshirts and some fisherman boots, black plastic that goes up past their knees. Although she’s sure they have dressing rooms, they change right there in the open, back-to-back. Max was beginning to forget what it felt like to not be soaking wet.

  Next, Max and Sabine come across a display of kayaks and paddles, and Max thinks about righting the ATV and trying to tow one back to the bridge to search again for Eli. She pictures his body facedown, bobbing along those rocky waves. But Max recognizes the impulse to go look for him as foolhardy. She’s on her own with this odd child, and she feels the weight of that responsibility. So when she finds a wall of orange life jackets, she slides Sabine’s arms through the openings and straps the belt around her waist. The girl asks, “Are we going back outside?”

  “No way,” Max says. The rest of what she thinks—that the hurricane is coming to them—she keeps to herself. Max selects a life vest where the padding isn’t too thick, and she finds it’s more comfortable to swing the backpack around to her front now, wear it like a pouch across her belly.

  “You look like a pregnant lady,” Sabine tells her.

  Max shines the light so she sees the kid’s face, which is beaming with a smile at her own clever line. Angie must be about to enter her third trimester by now, and surely she knows the baby’s gender. Max’s mind wanders. Does she have a little brother waiting to be born, or is it a sister? That unborn child is the last bit of her father, the final remnant of the family she once had.

  Distracted by such thoughts, Max nearly walks into a steady flow of water cascading from the ceiling. She aims her light up and finds water easing from a white ceiling, maybe a leak in the roof above. Satisfied that they’ve exhausted the first floor, she doubles back to the camping area and grabs some hand-crank lanterns and two sleeping bags from high shelves. Max finds an end cap of ready-to-eat meals in silvery pouches, the kind that can be heated over a Sterno can, and she stuffs a dozen into the crowded backpack. They walk past the firearms area, heading for the stairs to the second floor. Max scans the glass display case, looking over the pistols and rifles. Everything is locked up, but she imagines smashing the glass and getting her hands on something with a little more stopping power. Still, she’s never loaded a weapon, let alone fired one, and here in this place, she can’t think of why she’d need to. What good are bullets against a hurricane? Outside, Celeste howls, making the windows shiver.

  Sabine darts up the stairs ahead of Max, who almost tells her to slow down but then decides against it. After all, alone in an empty building, what real trouble could the kid find? This question is fresh in Max’s mind when she hears Sabine scream from above, a sound that sends her sprinting up the steps into the darkness. The kid’s flashlight illuminates the face of a gray wolf, low to the ground and poised to pounce. Its lips curl back in a snarl, fangs exposed, eyes locked open.

  Without thought, Max flings her flashlight, and it bonks off the wolf’s head and drops to the carpeted floor. The wolf remains unchanged. It doesn’t even blink.

  “Stuffed,” Max declares. She catches her breath and retrieves her flashlight. When she sees Sabine staring at the wolf, trembling still, she kneels down next to her. “It’s dead. It can’t hurt us. Think of it like a big stuffed animal.”

  Sabine twists Jasper’s face around in her arm and grimaces, and Max regrets the comparison. She’s coming to the conclusion that she’s not so good at this big-sister thing.

  All around them, the wind whistles and whines, battering the boards nailed tight over the handful of windows. Max aims her light behind the wolf, where a raccoon stands in the shadow of a black bear up on its hind legs, reaching up to twelve feet with its massive claws. Past the bear is a buck with an impressive rack of pointy antlers, bending as if to drink from a stream. There’s also a snarling boar like the ones that chased her and Eli this afternoon, along with a mountain lion standing on a fake rock and a bright red fox posed over a stuffed pheasant.

  Max sees a strange shine in the girl’s eyes. She tells her, “None of them can hurt you. They’re all dead. Really.”

  But Sabine doesn’t seem comforted. She wraps one arm around Max’s leg. Max hesitates, then settles a hand on the girl’s shoulder, using the other to shine her light across a whole pantheon of stuffed heads mounted on the wall: a half-dozen deer, two rams, a moose, another bear, and something that must be an antelope of some sort. Max can feel something unsettle in her, like those dead beasts are judging her. Once, these eyes saw the world. Once, blood pumped through these creatures’ veins. There was a day when each awoke and went out into the world—the forest or the swamp or the prairie—unsuspecting and doomed. And now, though lifeless, these animals seem to gaze on Max. She feels as though she is intruding in the land of the dead.

  Sabine seems to hear these thoughts, and she speaks in a voice Max recognizes as a version of Mother Evangeline’s: “The dead are all around us. They don’t never really go.”

  Rather than try to argue, Max moves her light away from the heads, letting the dead return to shadow. They find an open entryway with the words OBSERVATION PLATFORM: NO MERCHANDISE! on a sign above the door. Max realizes this must be the central tower, where they will be highest when this storm surge thing comes, and she leads Sabine inside. They begin to climb the spiral stairs, but then a sound makes them pause, something like the rippling of creek water. The wind gets louder, and when they reach the top, Max is met with a staggering sight: a huge chunk of roof has collapsed, and the open sky above them pours in wind and rain. This, she knows, must be the source of the weeping ceiling downstairs.

  Without comment, she turns and leads Sabine back down to the second floor. Far from the crumbling central tower, in a corner away from the stuffed creatures, Max locates an open area by a display for a deer stand, where they roll out their sleeping bags. Sabine looks back toward the menagerie, and Max says, “Come lie down.” Obediently, Sabine sits on the floor. She tilts her red helmet to make a nest for Jasper. Max works the hand crank on a lantern, casting an eerie illumination on the hunting books and fishing guides lining the wall. Max finds a book about birds of Africa and gives it to Sabine for distraction, but it quickly becomes clear that Sabine isn’t interested in any book. The kid’s just looking at the walls, likely wondering same as Max how long they will hold.

  Max digs one of the glow sticks from the backpack. After tearing the thick foil, she cracks the green wand and shakes it, causing the stick to shine with a radiant glow. Sabine takes it and smiles in wonder. “How’s it do that?”

  Max knows it’s some kind of chemical process, but instead, she says, “Magic.”

  The girl grins, and Max holds up a silvery pouch of Chicken Burrito Bombshell. “You want some more food or something?”

  The child tells her no, a
nd Max feels an odd sensation, the gratification of being needed. Sabine is relying on her in a way no one else ever has.

  The water on the first floor is rising steadily, and the roof of the tower will likely collapse further. Max can’t help but imagine what might happen to this building as the storm gets stronger. She wonders if she should turn the lights out, if maybe they should rest. Would it be better if they were asleep when death came? Would they wake before they died?

  Sabine shuffles next to her, sets down the glow stick. “Shouldn’t we ought to pray?”

  Max looks at the girl’s face, smiling hopefully in the greenish glow. “Pray if you want. See if you can get God to shut this storm off.”

  She regrets her tone, worried that she may have come across as mocking, and she reaches over awkwardly to pat Sabine on the arm. The girl slides over and sets her head on Max’s lap, using it like a pillow. Softly, Max brushes a hand over her hair, stroking it gently.

  Max sees the girl’s lips twitching with prayer. If she were the praying type, what would she pray for? Would she ask to be back in Jersey, out of harm’s way? Would she want to go back in time and say a proper good-bye to her father? Maybe she’d erase how she acted when Angie came around and try to be more accepting. Her mind free-floats through all these impossibilities. But one wish keeps returning, insistent. It seems too much to ask to have him restored to them, but she’d give anything just to know: What happened to Eli?

  I’M SPINNING IN A STORM OF BLACKNESS AND WIND, FLIPPING around and upside down with no sense of whether I’m rising or falling. Blood rushes to my head, and it’s hard to suck in a good breath. At first, I stretch my arms way out, but then I cross them over my face and try to curl up my body, waiting on the crash that’s got to be coming. I’m hoping for water but picturing the iron girders of the bridge. But I don’t crash at all. Something whacks the back of my head—hard enough that I taste blood—but somehow I don’t die. Lightning crackles from the tumbling clouds, and I just keep on twirling away, time stretching out all dizzy, like in a dream.