I lie there with my hands tucked under my head. How will I know when we’re in the worst of it? Will the walls crash in, or is the building strong enough to withstand it?
As if in answer, the wind whistles at a higher pitch as it forces itself through the branches of the trees. Crack! An arm of a tree breaking off. I sit up, on high alert, pressing my fingers into my ears.
“River?”
No answer.
All I want is to be home. A clean bed, my shower, and the AC so cold I need a sweatshirt. I lie down again, shifting from side to side. Am I asleep or awake? I’m so hot I feel faint. My body jerks. I dream the dream I’ve had over and over, a replay of when I was I five and I fell off the handlebars of my cousin’s bike and fractured my ankle. The nightmare nests in my brain like the one about the hurricane that leaves me gasping for air.
Victim.
I’m always a victim. I shift again and start to close my eyes when lightning illuminates the gym like a lightbulb exploded. I stare at River’s back for a few seconds before the gym goes black again. Now I know what I saw. A scar across half his back. I close my eyes and start to slip into sleep, but I’m jerked awake by more thunderclaps.
“River?”
Say something, anything—that you’re not afraid, even if you don’t mean it. Anything. I’m scared.
I lean over him to look at his face. Despite the explosions, he’s deep asleep, breathing softly and evenly. I reach into my waterlogged backpack and search until I find him: Cubby, my teddy bear. His chocolate-colored fur has worn off now, and he’s bald in spots from years of cuddling, but that doesn’t matter. I tuck him under my cheek, inhaling his familiar musty smell.
“Cubby.” It’s comforting to whisper his name in the dark. I used to talk to him like he was my worry doll, and he took in my words silently—the keeper of all my secrets—always there for me. I lean against his soft stomach, exhaustion spreading through me, and drift off.
Something—not the storm—wakes me. Talking. Where is it coming from? We’re in total darkness except for flashes of lightning.
River.
A lightning flare bathes him in brightness for a split second. I sit up. Another crash of thunder and splintered light. A voice. What am I hearing?
He’s talking, but not to me. In his sleep?
“No!” He turns away, upset, muttering. He sits up breathing hard, his hands locked around his bent knees, staring ahead. As if in slow motion, he reaches for his jeans on the floor and slides the knife out of the pocket. Click. He targets something ahead of him with the point of the blade.
BOOM! Rattling thunder! BOOM! Another explosion like a cannon blast. I startle. River doesn’t even hear it. He takes aim. I can’t take my eyes off him. He turns and reaches over to me suddenly, grabbing my wrist tightly, his face inches from mine.
“I’m not going to tell you again, OK?”
I’m fixated on the tip of the knife, inches from my face. I try to pull back, but he tightens his grip and won’t let go.
“River.” I try to shake free, to wake him. “You’re having a bad dream. Let me go—it’s Jillian!”
Seconds go by. Does he hear me? He releases my arm. His body goes slack. The hand with the knife falls away, only he doesn’t wake. He sits staring ahead, transfixed by the visions in his head. He’s asleep, in a trance. I’m walled out; he can’t hear me. I hold my breath, watching him. He folds the knife and puts it down next to him. He lies back, his eyes close. In seconds his breathing becomes soft and regular again.
He was asleep the whole time.
Now I can’t sleep. I take out my dream catcher and put it on the floor between us, like that might make a difference now. What I really need is a Saint Christopher medal.
Chapter 15
2 HOURS TO LANDFALL
RIVER
I force my eyes open. How long did I sleep? A hot, searing pain shoots through me as I turn, and it all comes back to me. My shoulder. It’s swollen, burning inside. Probably a break, not that it matters now.
Sweat dries, blood clots, bones heal. Suck it up!
One of my dad’s marine corps slogans. I take a deep breath and get up. I walk to the window.
Daylight. The sky is a ghostly green with a deep intensity. I’ve never seen this color outside before. An uneasy feeling spreads through me. It looks like I’m inside another galaxy. Just the lightest sprinkling of rain now. In the distance there’s a faint rumble of thunder.
I walk toward Jillian. She’s curled up on her side, her head resting on a stuffed toy, red hair everywhere, her lips parted. The pale skin, the soft swell of her breast spilling outside the lace edge of a pink bra. Low-cut panties. I turn away quickly, my breath catching.
It takes me forever to pull on my filthy jeans with one arm, trying to keep the bad shoulder still. The jeans are damp and mud-caked which doesn’t help. I make my way down the corridor.
Briggs’s office. My head floods with memories. I lean against the wall to brace myself. I haven’t eaten, maybe that’s it, low blood sugar. Or not. Fear surges through me, my heart punching as the memories come back. Goddamn him.
I force myself to keep walking. I stop at the science room with the framed Tropical Storm Allison pictures up on the walls showing Houston turned into a nightmarish Waterworld. Focus. I try to block out the searing pain in my shoulder throwing me off balance.
Food, water, supplies. Food, water, supplies. Focus.
I search through closets. Nothing. I go through the teacher’s desk. Advil. I take four and chew them up, then stuff the bottle into my pocket. A portable radio. That’s a start. The jarring sound of a human voice.
“… force of Hurricane Danielle still … static … offshore, but a sea of cars overloaded with—” The radio rumbles with static. “… and short on—”
The voice is familiar. Jesus … Jillian’s mom. “… filled with crying children and barking dogs, continues to jam the freeways as hundreds of thousands of residents of the Gulf Coast make a last-ditch effort to reach …” It cuts out. “… the storm approaching category four is still building and appears to be heading for landfall … between … Houston whose metropolitan area …
“The gridlocked exodus, estimated to include some 1.8 million people, is fanning the flames of anger and resentment among residents who are questioning whether the planning for this giant evacuation was adequate”—again, static interrupts—“Governor and the military are preparing to aid stranded vehicles.”
Then something about the eye of the storm, a few miles wide in diameter. I think of the unsettling color of the sky. The quiet before …
And my dad? Is he still sitting there in the driver’s seat, waiting? When would it dawn on him … I turn it off. Don’t think about him. What good will it do? I go from room to room looking for anything useful before ending up in the kitchen. I find juice boxes and oatmeal cookies. Enough to fill our stomachs, for now.
JILLIAN
It’s light. Morning? I turn to look for River. He’s gone.
“River?” My fluttering heart registers his absence before my brain. This is my school, I know my way around, but that doesn’t matter now. “River?”
Pain shoots through me as I stand. My feet are swollen, blistered, filthy; my red toenails encrusted with mud. My feet barely support me. I pull on my damp, filthy shorts and pad into a classroom down the hall. I stare out the window and everything inside me tightens.
We’re surrounded by water, with islands of high ground strewn with toppled trees, tangles of fallen tree branches, and an odd collage of objects, from empty rubber garbage pails and children’s red wagons to beaten-up bikes, garage doors, car doors, roof tiles, and slats of broken wooden fences. I watch a refrigerator float down the street. The fender of a car.
The windows aren’t rattling. Silence. Is the storm over? Did it hit category 5? If it did, i
t wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. I snicker to myself. I have something to brag about now, surviving a cat 5 hurricane.
“I can’t believe this,” I say out loud, to assure myself I still have a voice. I go to the wall and check the lights. Nothing. We must have lost power overnight.
I hear footsteps behind me and I turn.
“I found this stuff,” River says with a boyish grin. I smile back at him as he hands me oatmeal cookies and juice. We sit on the mats and tear at the wrappers, then stuff our faces. His jaw is shadowed by the stubble of a light beard.
“I didn’t hear you get up.”
“I called you, but you didn’t move,” he says.
“I’ve never been that tired in my life.”
His shoulder looks worse than before, an irregular patch of deep purple. “How do you feel?”
He shakes his head dismissively. Should I tell him about his dream? Does he even know he had it? I doubt he would want to hear how I watched it happen.
“I wish we had a radio.”
“I found one in a classroom.” He pulls a transistor out of his backpack and looks for a station that isn’t full of static.
“It’s your mom.”
“What?”
I hear Mom’s voice. “Half of the city is without power this morning,” she says. I grab it from his hand. It’s like she’s in the room with us, only she’s not. She’s the eyes and ears for the world, only I can’t reach her. She does radio reports sometimes. Now she must be covering for someone who couldn’t get there to do the story. It feels so odd to hear her. She has no idea where I am or that I’m listening. She doesn’t know if I’m dead or alive.
Mom! I want to shout, It’s me, but that’s crazy. She’s in another world, at least it seems that way.
“Overnight, the storm dropped fifteen inches of rain, flooding cars, highways, and … Wind gusts in some areas are now up to one hundred miles … in the next two to four hours. If you are at home waiting it out, do not leave your safe areas now. The eye of the storm is almost … things will get quiet again, at least for a while. As we’ve said before, the worst is still to come. By no means are we …”
A colleague cuts in. “Can we tell listeners what they can expect?” Crackling static drowns the answer.
“I just wanted to hear her.”
River stares at me. He leans back against the wall. “Welcome to your new home.”
I shut my eyes. Kelly. I have to text her back. Where is she? Still on the highway? I reach for my backpack and pull out my phone.
“Forget it,” River says. “The cell towers are down.”
I shake my head and stare out the window. “Did you see the sky?”
He nods.
“It’s so eerie, so creepy. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“The eye of the storm,” he says, gazing out.
“Should we go outside?”
“Why?”
“To see it up close. To know what it feels like.”
He snorts. “It’ll feel like Danielle is taking aim, like she’s got us in the crosshairs.” He pretends to target me and makes a loud popping noise as he pulls the trigger.
“Stop it.” But he keeps it up, as though he’s peering at me through the scope of a rifle. “How much time do you think we have until it really hits?”
“Minutes, hours. Who knows?”
I turn to the window. That deep rumbling again. River hears it too, his face changes. It’s a low growl that sounds like it’s coming from the center of the earth.
I jump to my feet. “Before it’s too late.”
River squeezes his eyes shut momentarily. “Why not?” he says. “Nothing left to lose.”
Chapter 16
THE EYE OF THE STORM
JILLIAN
The one time I smoked a joint, Kelly was over. Ethan had gone out with Jerry. We knew they smoked because Ethan’s room reeked from weed even though he left the window open. They must have been wrecked because they left a half joint burning in the ashtray.
I inhaled, then passed it to Kelly.
“Feel anything?” she said.
“Nuh uh, you?”
She shook her head, took another toke, then passed it back to me. We stared dumbly at each other, and then at the same moment began grinning stupidly at nothing and everything. The grins turned to peals of laughter as everything around us suddenly had a hilarious side that only the two of us were privy to.
I can’t help thinking about that now, as River opens the door and we stand there, transfixed. His eyes are shining. We stare at each other in sync, sharing something that no one else in the world is part of, high on fear now, not weed, like adrenaline junkies or storm chasers waiting for a rush.
No rain, no wind, no anything. A mesmerizing, all-encompassing stillness, the sky a ghostly, treacherous green. Even the birds are silent. Everything alive is in retreat, in a state of suspended animation. The whole world is waiting. I look back and see small frogs stuck up against the door.
“River!”
He stands wide-eyed, taking it all in. We step through the knee-high moat surrounding the school, rainfall mixed with sewage beginning to reek. The world has been shaken, debris everywhere. As we walk through it, the unimaginable happens.
The clouds begin to part, as if a screen is opening, the backdrop on a stage set. The sky morphs from an incandescent bile green to cornflower blue. The sun breaks through.
“Could it be over?” I feel strangely giddy.
“Not a chance. That’s what Danielle wants you to think. She’s toying with us.”
“How do you know?”
“Feel it in my bones,” he says.
I look for evidence. There’s an unnerving calm to the air, as if we’re in another universe. I take a few steps and nearly trip over a bulging tree root that’s buried underwater.
River points to a downed tree. “If we were out here when that fell we’d be buried.” But it’s not fear on his face, it’s amazement. This is a rare living science lesson. “Look,” he yells. He reaches an arm out and holds up the neck of a quivering snake that dangles down the side of his arm, past his elbow. I see black, red.
“Red touch yellow, kill a fellow; red touch black, venom lack.” The crazy rhyme I learned in camp springs to mind. It isn’t a poisonous coral snake, I’m sure. We studied snakes in science. Texas has more varieties than any other state in the country, and Houston is home to nearly a third of them. Only now I’m blanking. I have no idea what this one is.
It’s undulating as if it would rather not be held up.
“Get rid of it before it bites you.”
River reaches back like he’s about to throw a javelin and pitches it, as hard as he can while trying to keep half his body from moving. We both turn away.
“It’s following us.” I laugh hysterically.
He slithers his fingers up my back, snake-like.
“Don’t do that!”
“Do what?” he says.
We walk through the water, dipping down to steer clear of low-hanging power lines. I step up on a broken tree stump to survey what happened around us and I stop. There’s a sound, like a yelp. “Did you hear that?”
He nods.
“What was it?”
“An animal,” River says.
The sky is slowly changing. Time is running out. The sun’s still out, but the light is fading. River hoists himself up onto the arm of a bent tree. “Whatever it is, it’s here somewhere.” He jumps down and heads across the watery lawn and then trips, falling on his injured side.
“Ow, Jesus,” he yells.
I run over and try to help him up, but he’s like dead weight. “It’s broken, it’s got to be,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut.
“We’ll bandage it to keep it from moving.”
&n
bsp; “With what?” he asks, “Your trusty first-aid kit?”
“We’ll find something.”
He shakes off the pain and looks around us. “Maybe if we had food we could find whatever it is and get it inside with us.”
“You think it’s a dog?”
“I hope not.”
We walk cautiously, searching, trying to figure out which way to go. The sun retreats and the sky begins to deepen from turquoise to blue gray.
River looks at the sky, biting his lip. “We have to get inside soon.”
“I’ll go find something in the kitchen.”
“I know where the stuff is,” he says. “I’ll go. I’ll be fast, you look out.”
I stare at the sky. “Hurry!”
What’s taking him so long?
The sun is gone, blue sky replaced by clouds deepening by the minute. I take a last look around, walking carefully, trying to find whatever it was, but there’s nothing. Was it our imagination? Maybe we’re both going crazy. I need to find River. Now. I walk toward the school door as the wind begins to whip my face. I pull it open and scream.
Chapter 17
JILLIAN
River is slumped down on the floor, a few feet from the door, his eyes closed. Did he pass out? Is he dead? Near his opened hand I see packages of crackers.
“River?” I rush up to him and kneel down
No answer.
“God, please!” My heart is about to burst through my chest. I reach for his left wrist, pressing it with my index finger. I can’t find a pulse, nothing. I try his right wrist. Still nothing. Maybe it’s me. I’m not doing it right. My hands are shaking. I doubt if I could tell if I felt a pulse inside him, or if the throbbing came from inside me. I breathe in and out slowly to try to calm myself then try again, on the left hand.
Then I feel it. “River?”
Nothing.
“River, answer me, please!”
I stroke his forehead, his hair. I run my fingers down his face, along his cheek. Seconds go by and he lies there, still. What do I do? What does it mean? Why didn’t I take a first-aid class so I’d know what to do?
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