Hugh Howey - The Hurricane

“It depends,” Carlton said, helping himself to soup. He turned down the heat on the Coleman, and the hiss lessened. “It could be that we got the worst of it, that there isn’t much damage across Beaufort or any of the surrounding area. If that’s the case, they’ll be able to concentrate on us and get things back to normal in a few days.”

“But that’s not what you think,” Daniel said between bites.

Carlton frowned. “After we eat, we should try your radio again.”

Daniel nodded. He turned as Zola exited from the bathroom, rubbing her eyes and pouting.

“Come get some soup, honey,” their mom said.

The four of them ate in the kitchen. Zola sat on one of the stools by the island, but the rest ate standing up. For Daniel, it was from having been prone so long. He suspected it was also out of abject hunger. He was too famished to take the time to get comfortable; and the noise outside made him feel too revved up to rest. There were three empty cans of vegetable soup by the sink, and after second helpings, the pot was scraped clean. Carlton turned the stove off with a click of the knob, and Daniel wondered how many of the canisters they had. His brain was in survival mode.

After the meal, Daniel and Carlton went through the house closing the windows against the rain. The threat of the low pressure sucking off the roof was gone, if indeed there was anything to the myth. Now there was just rain spitting in to soak the carpet and furniture.

Daniel surveyed his room as he fastened the window upstairs. He felt guilty for how untouched it was. The carpet wasn’t even all that wet since his room was on the back of the house and out of the direct blow of the wind. Compared to the wreck of Zola’s room, it was nothing.

When he and Carlton got back downstairs, his sister and mom were tackling the living room, even as the wind blew a steady thirty or forty miles an hour outside. The glass had been swept up. With a mop and bucket, they worked on getting the puddles up from the fake hardwood floor. They wrung the mops out by hand and chatted quietly while they worked. Carlton mentioned the radio again, and Daniel retrieved his Zune from the book bag in the bathroom.

The same station came in a little better than before. They were still talking about the storm. Daniel and Carlton took an earbud apiece and listened to the numbers. The storm had reached category five status just before landfall, an upgrade after getting some better wind readings. It was still a category three even with the eye sixty miles inland. A clip from the Governor was played; he was already declaring it a national emergency to open up federal funds. There was talk of an evacuation nightmare as last-minute residents from Charleston had clogged 26 and 601, leaving themselves locked in gridlock traffic while the storm dumped rain and hail on top of them. Even though the station was based in Charleston, the name Beaufort came up over and over again. The eye had passed right through the city, nearly at high tide, which had caused massive flooding. Power was out for several counties, wrapping up hundreds of thousands in the same sort of living situation Daniel and his family were experiencing. Hearing about the wide swath of damage, at how many were affected, had Daniel thinking of Hunter and Roby and everyone else he knew. Part of him felt a twinge of excitement that school might be out for part of the next week, plunging them right back into an extended summer vacation. An even bigger part of him, however, was dying to be around his peers to hear their stories. There was some guilt to how giddy he felt; perhaps the sensation was as much from the unusual sleep schedule as from the afterglow of surviving something dangerous. He wrestled with the conflicting emotions as he spent the rest of the day’s light working around the house mopping up, collecting shards of glass, and fastening a shower curtain over the blown-out window (which appeared to have been caused by a broken piece of limb, found halfway across the room).

Carlton took Zola up to scavenge more items from her room, which left her in tears once again. There was little to be done to keep the wind and rain out of the room. Carlton grabbed a hammer to beat back some exposed nails where broken bits of roof truss poked down through the shattered sheetrock, just to keep anyone from running into them. Daniel felt like they were all searching desperately for something to do, for some way to burn energy, to beat back the storm, or to save their house and possessions. They had spent nearly a full day cowering and helpless, and now it felt recuperative to do anything at all.

The mood lasted until the sun began to set, which seemed to happen suddenly for summertime; the clouds to the West once again gobbled up the remaining daylight prematurely. The wind continued to blow outside, though abating somewhat each hour. If felt like they’d always lived with it, this new wind. It blew as they ate another meal of soup, the fuel canister on the Coleman sputtering as it emptied. It blew as they congregated back by the hallway to drag blankets and pillows out into more space. The four of them ended up in the master bedroom, which had remained dry. It wasn’t so much for safety—the house seemed to have survived and would not get worse—it was more for comfort. It was to be near each other as Daniel and Zola curled up on the floor and their mom and stepdad took to the bed. The wind continued to blow as they fell into another long, dark, and fitful sleep, the house creaking with aftershocks as the family slumbered.

Daniel was the first to wake the next morning. His mouth felt full of cotton; his head pounded from getting too much sleep. He extricated himself from the knotted tangle of sheets and covers and padded softly across the carpet, out of his mom’s bedroom, and through the house.

The quiet outside was unfamiliar and haunting. Once again, the birdsongs were notably absent. The house had also become lifeless. In the perfect stillness, Daniel realized how much residual buzzing he was used to hearing. The refrigerator normally hummed, but he didn’t know that until he heard it not humming. The compressor usually clicked now and then, but it hadn’t for over a day. There was nobody on the family computer; its whirring fans had fallen silent as well. The living room TV was peculiarly quiet. Normally, at all times of day, someone was vying for control of it.

Daniel padded upstairs and changed into a pair of shorts that were already stained from an art class project. He grabbed fresh socks and changed into a new t-shirt, then rummaged through his bedside table for his cheapo digital camera. Back downstairs, he grabbed his shoes by the front door and slid them on. He let himself out into the motionless air and heavy calm of Hurricane Anna’s wake.

Even though the sun was just coming up, the sky was already bright blue to the east. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, almost as if the storm had swept them all up and dragged them off toward Columbia and North Carolina.

Daniel made his way into the front yard and studied the massive tree propped up against the house. The shingled roof was dented in around the trunk of the tree, the flat plane punctured and demolished. He worked his way through the tangle of branches from another fallen tree to admire the peeled-up root ball of the old giant oak. A wall of soil stood up from the yard, held together by the tree’s tangle of roots. Where they had been pried up from the earth, a deep depression lay full of several inches of Anna’s rain. The void of the missing roots formed a massive bowl, like a giant spoon had descended from the heavens and taken a bite out of their front yard. Daniel fished his inexpensive digital camera out of his pocket and took a picture of the mud-caked wall of roots, marveling at the way the ends had been torn from the violent ripping of the tree’s demise. He took a picture of the tree resting against the house, the missing dormer making it appear as if the façade were winking at him. As he panned the camera to take one of the littered yard, he noticed movement in the house. His mom opened the front door and looked out at him, shielding her eyes with a crisp salute.