Stormwalker

by Mike Revell

  I rubbed my eyes, but the tears came back. I shouldn’t have to do this, I thought. She’s supposed to be here. She’s supposed to be here for years yet. No one else at school has got a dead mum. Some people’s parents are divorced, but at least they still get to see both of them.

  I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts.

  I needed to be quick. I had to get it over and done with.

  I could see what I was looking for already. It was in the box at the bottom, beside the shoes. How could one person have so many shoes? I had three pairs: one for school, one set of trainers, and one set of football cleats. Mum probably had about a million shoes in here, all different colors and shapes.

  I took the box and slid the lid off. There were photos inside. Photos of Mum and Dad together, looking so young. Dad had longer hair. There were no wrinkles on his face, no bags under his eyes. And he was smiling. A proper smile that stretched all the way across his face.

  Some of them had me in them. Me as a baby, me as a toddler, me on my first day at school, wearing that stupid purple sweater.

  But I wasn’t here for the photos. I was here for the DVD. There was a label on it that read our wedding day in big black letters. I took the case, then set the box back beside the shoes and closed the wardrobe.

  I rushed out of the room and shut the door. I fell back against it, taking deep breaths. It was exactly how she left it. Those clothes were hanging like that because it was how she wanted them. Those shoes were in that order because it was how she liked it.

  My heart pounded. I felt like I was going to throw up every bit of Dad’s food. My eyes burned again, and I closed them tight, trying not to cry. Sometimes if you felt like you were about to cry and you didn’t want to, you could think of simple things and it went away. Like a rabbit in a field or the sunrise or snow in the park. They were so easy to think about that you could concentrate on them, and the burning feeling would go away. So that was what I did now.

  I headed into my room and played the DVD. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, but I had to hear her voice—her proper voice, not the one whispered to me by a freak storm.

  The video started off showing all the guests arriving at the church in dresses and smart suits with flowers pinned to their chest. Dad was there before Mum. His eyes darted around and he fidgeted every few seconds.

  “How are you feeling?” the cameraman asked.

  “Excited. A bit sick,” Dad said.

  There was a cut, and a car pulled up with white ribbons draped over the hood and flags trailing from the back. Granddad stepped out and opened the passenger door. And there was Mum, with Auntie Jane and Auntie Grace, huge smiles on their faces and flowers in their hair.

  This was it. The moment I’d been waiting for. Granddad took Mum’s arm and led her up the steps toward the camera, and there was that same question, “How are you feeling?”

  Her eyes shone. A strand of hair fell into her face and she brushed it away. I leaned closer to the TV. I hardly dared to breathe.

  “It’s a dream come true,” she said. Granddad squeezed her, and she rested against him, beaming. “I couldn’t be happier. I’m . . . oh, you’re going to make me cry!”

  She swiped at her eyes, laughing. Auntie Grace inspected her, checking her makeup, and then they walked away from the camera toward the church door.

  I paused the film on Mum’s face. Her cheeks were rounder than I remembered. Her hair was brown and golden, like the sun shone right out of it. I left it frozen like that, just staring at her, because that was how I had to remember her. That was how I had to keep her in my mind.

  Not white faced and dark eyed. Not slow and thin and drowsy. Here, her face wasn’t gaunt and her eyes weren’t lifeless.

  There was a spark in her.

  There was happiness and love and life.

  I left it there for what felt like an hour, then turned off the TV. An afterimage flashed up when I blinked. Then it faded and disappeared.

  When my alarm blared the next morning, I rolled out of bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I stepped out onto the landing and was just about to go downstairs to make Dad’s breakfast when something made me stop.

  Normally his door was closed and the room was dark and full of shadows. Now it was wide open and morning light flooded through the windows.

  “Dad?” I said. I headed downstairs, and opened the kitchen door to the smell of fresh coffee wafting out. And there was something else too. Something sweet. Something hot and delicious.

  “Thought it’d make a change having oatmeal,” Dad said, glancing at me over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it would.”

  I sat at the table, watching him quietly. His hair was messy and his chin was dark and stubbly but his eyes flickered with life.

  The garbage was full of takeout containers. I tied the bag up in a knot and took it out to the big recycling bin, then gathered all the empty bottles from the side of the counter and took them out too. Dad had cooked dinner for himself last night, and this morning he was doing a proper breakfast. There was a spring in his step that hadn’t been there for ages, and it was all because of the writing. It had to have been.

  “That’s my boy,” Dad said, when I got back to the warmth of the kitchen.

  He ladled some oatmeal into a bowl and set it down for me. As I muttered, “Thank you,” he poured himself some coffee and sat next to me, smiling the same proper smile as yesterday.

  “How did the game go?” he said, as I swirled syrup into the steaming oats.

  “Hmm?”

  “The big match, against Westfield. I don’t think I ever asked you about it.”

  “Oh! Um, we lost,” I said, remembering the text from Danny and feeling a fresh wave of guilt. The team had needed me, and I hadn’t been there.

  Dad slurped his coffee and locked onto me with his tired gray eyes. “Well, you’ll have a second game, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t thought of that. I crossed my fingers under the counter, praying I didn’t miss that game too. I didn’t think Danny would ever forgive me if I did.

  “Was thinking I might be able to pop down. You know, cheer you on. Help you send them packing.”

  “Really?” I stared at his face, trying to see if he meant it. Even just talking about going out was a big improvement. “That’d be really good.”

  Dad sipped his coffee and turned back to the window. Was he sitting up straighter? His shoulders weren’t slumping like they normally did. He turned back to me. There was a spark in his eyes, a flash of his old self. All the pieces that had broken apart when Mum died—the things that made him him—just for a moment it was like they’d joined back together again.

  And that was when I realized . . .

  The only thing that had changed was the writing.

  Maybe I jumped into Dad’s story for a reason. Maybe—

  Maybe if I finished it, I’d get my dad back. Properly back, I mean. He’d be like this all the time and the bags under his eyes would disappear and he’d come to watch me play football again.

  All I had to do now was figure out how.

  19

  Danny avoided me at school that day.

  I tried sitting next to him for roll call, but he just moved away. Every time I went to approach him about the match, he saw me coming and walked in the other direction.

  “Give it a few hours,” Slogger said, when we lined up outside Math. “He’ll come round.”

  But he didn’t come round for the rest of the day, and he didn’t come round on the bus on the way home, either. By the time I got there, he was sitting in our usual place at the back, but none of the other seats were free. I sat on my own at the front, trying to take my mind off it.

  Why wouldn’t he just talk to me? I needed him to know I couldn’t help it. I never asked to jump into Dad’s story. I didn’t have any control over it. He wrote, and somehow I got dragged into it. It happened so fast . . . and, I knew, thinking about it, it would happ
en again. It was just a matter of time.

  As soon as the bus stopped, I ran off and walked quickly home. Danny would just ignore me again anyway, and I didn’t want to argue with him.

  That thought kept flowing through my head: It will happen again.

  And it did. It happened again that night.

  I was running down the wing on FIFA, about to cross the ball in when I felt the tug in my gut. I fluffed the kick and looked down as my stomach wrenched and a million butterflies exploded in every direction.

  Then I looked up, and a shiver ran through me.

  My bedroom was gone. Everything was gone. I was back under the dome, in the stark light of the market square. I scrambled to my feet, breathing quickly. I was back. The storm was raging above the camp, just like last time.

  Am I in Dad’s mind right now? I thought. Or is it another world, some strange new reality that he’s created just by writing? I didn’t know how it worked, I only knew that it did. I was back—back in the story—and I had to figure out how to finish it.

  “Jack?” Iris said. She was leading me toward the edge of camp, with kids rushing past us and robots grinding in the rubble-strewn alleys.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What are we doing?”

  She eyed me warily. “Farming.”

  I looked toward the distant fields, if you could call them fields when there was no grass on them. People were already working there, digging on their hands and knees. “How long’s it been since the Stormwalking? Have I . . . have I missed any time here?” If I missed time back in real life, maybe it would be the same here.

  “We only went out yesterday. Why would you miss time? What do you mean?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. I shivered, remembering the storm getting so close last time, remembering the cold and the sound of Mum’s voice. “Are we going out again tonight?”

  “We go out every night,” she said, then laughed, seeing the look on my face. “It’s not always that bad. Usually we get two or three runs in—enough for the generators, and to power the radio tower on the hill.”

  I thought back to my first night here, and the Darkness peeling away from the headlights.

  “Can’t you just—you know—drive out there in a pocket of daylight?”

  “There are some areas the truck can’t get to,” Iris said. “Especially when the road breaks down. The Darkness changes the landscape every night. Anyway, I told you, glowroot only grows in Darkness. As soon as the light touches it, it dies.”

  “So they send us out into the storm. A bunch of kids.”

  “We’re dupes,” Iris said, shrugging. “Get used to it.”

  We passed the remains of an old fence. It had been ripped out and chopped up until only stubs remained, buried in the dry soil.

  “If anyone hears you asking this many questions, they’ll report you. I thought you said you could—you know—look into Jack’s mind, or something.”

  “I can. Or, at least, I thought I could. But lately he’s been distant. Ever since—”

  “Ever since what?”

  “Since I saw the memories of his dad. Since I saw him getting dragged away. Like all the children here—taken because we were duplicates.”

  Iris was quiet for a moment. The only sound was the crunch-crunch-crunch of the dry ground beneath our feet as we walked onward again.

  “I volunteered, actually,” she said quietly.

  What?

  I stopped in my tracks. Jack’s dad hid him under the stairs to avoid him becoming a Stormwalker, but Iris—she wasn’t just given up, she wanted to be one . . .

  “Why would you do that?” I asked, searching her eyes.

  “I had my reasons,” she said.

  I stared at her, desperate to know more, but I’d seen that look before and I knew better than to press her, so I changed the subject.

  “It must have been bad, back in the City. I mean, a Duplication Act? I thought this was supposed to be the future.”

  “They were out of options. Mrs. Cloud said they had to tax floor space, and even that didn’t work. The City was big, but not big enough for so many people. So the Marshals sent us out to find somewhere we could live, and grow food without the storm killing everything. It’s not that bad,” she said. “When we get through to the City, they’ll be able to expand. Some people can live here, and some can live in the City. There’ll be room to spread out. The Act will be lifted.”

  Her words hung in the air. I didn’t know what to say, so I walked in silence, letting it sink in. We were approaching the dried-up field where our group was Farming. A river ran alongside it—the River Cam, I guessed. Back home there would have been ducks swimming in it and moorhens panicking if you got too close. Here there was just the steady whisper of the water.

  Beside the river, the earth was scorched and blackened. A dozen people were digging up the ground, some with shovels, some with just their bare hands.

  At the edge of the field, I noticed someone running sprints back and forth along the tree line.

  Seth. The guy who organized the Stormwalking last time I was here. He must have been on a different timetable from us.

  “He’s the Pathfinder,” Iris said, as if that explained everything. “He doesn’t have to Farm. He has to chart the glowroot, to help us grab as much of it as possible.”

  She handed me a shovel from a heavy-lidded container, and I followed her toward an empty patch of dirt. In the distance, I could make out what looked like corn growing. But we were planting potatoes and millet, the sort of thing that could grow in harsh weather, I guessed.

  I wasn’t as fast as Iris, but it felt good to be doing something.

  Ever since the storm hit, everything had been a jumbled rush, but this—

  When I dug the shovel into the earth, it scraped and crunched just like when Dad did the gardening at home. It felt real. It was tiring work. Even though it wasn’t particularly hot in the faint gray light, my rags grew sticky with sweat.

  What kind of government would send kids into a storm that wiped out the world? They must have been very desperate, or very disturbed, or both.

  I thought about Dad, back home in his study, making all this up. Where did it come from? I’d always seen him as being quite happy, up until this year anyway, but this . . . this didn’t come from the mind of a happy man. Thinking that made me want to finish the story more than ever.

  Bracing myself, I tried to access Jack’s memories again. I didn’t want to push it, and I definitely didn’t want to feel as sick as it made me last time, but if I was going to finish the story I had to be able to get inside Jack’s head.

  It had been so vivid before. Those memories of his dad . . . he’d been taken on Icarus 1, but where were they going? Maybe I had to find out if he was still alive. Maybe I could track him down, somehow. Unite our camp with theirs.

  But that didn’t solve the mystery. What was it Dad said? I’ve always wanted to write a story where not everything is as it seems. There was some kind of puzzle to figure out, and I was at the heart of it—I had to be. That was why I kept jumping here.

  “Have you ever heard from the other Icarus projects?” I asked.

  Iris shook her head. “We’ve been trying to reach them for months. If LRP got through, we’d know about it,” she said.

  “Why only months?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “LRP haven’t been trying to trace them for longer?”

  “Jack,” she said, frowning at me, “we’ve only been here six months. It takes time.”

  I dropped the shovel with a clatter. It had taken a while for the thoughts to slot into place, but now that they had, I couldn’t shake them. We’ve only been here six months, she said, but I’d seen Jack’s thoughts, and I knew that wasn’t true. We were taken when we were eight years old, and yeah, they trained us at the City before we left, but not for three years.

  “Are you all right?” she said, passing the shovel back to me.

  “Yeah,” I l
ied. Six months? It would be impossible to build such a big camp in six months. Couldn’t she see that? It would take ages to set the perimeter, to carve out a hall in the cellars under the university. To get their systems in place, running like clockwork.

  Just then something moved above us. The Darkness was fading at the top of the dome. Its writhing tendrils flickered as it slithered away. The clouds above us now were gray, not black. They didn’t seethe and ripple with life. They didn’t screech or howl.

  The Darkness retreated until it was no more than a distant shadow on the horizon. Then when I blinked again, the storm was gone. With a sound like a great, electronic moan, the floodlights cut off.

  What was going on? Ever since I’d been here, the storm had been an ever-present threat. It was always there. Then I thought back to the first jump. We were out of camp, weren’t we? We were trying to escape it as the clouds shot closer. Out in a pocket of daylight. This must have been another one. But time was different here, wasn’t it?

  The constant yellow glow had been replaced with real, natural light. It wasn’t daylight, not exactly. The sky above us was clouded over, a blanket of gray, like evening wanted to approach but didn’t know how to go about it. It felt better than the floodlights. But how long would it last?

  I rubbed my arms to get rid of the goose bumps. Before, I could only see as far as the protective barrier allowed, but now—

  Now I could see how far the wasteland stretched.

  “The whole town’s like this,” I whispered. The words sounded hollow.

  “The whole world’s like this,” Iris said.

  I turned toward her. The disbelief must have shown on my face, because she laughed, and said, “You really were telling the truth, weren’t you? About not being from around here?”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “No one could fake a look like that.” She scrutinized me for so long that it made me turn away. “I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But I don’t think you’re lying.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I tried to imagine what it might feel like if Danny suddenly changed, if he told me he had someone else inside him, someone from years and years in the past.