Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

“You can’t go in there.”

“Well, she can’t go on stage without her notes! There’s a lot of numbers for her speech that she hasn’t memorized. Important numbers.”

He hesitated. Clearly he wanted Marianne on stage. Finally he said, “You go back to your seat. I’ll give her the tablet.”

“Okay.”

She handed it to him and turned to go. When he opened the door, she darted through ahead of him.

“Hey!” He was outraged but she saw he was also hesitant; whatever was supposed to happen on stage, he didn’t want Tim alerted to it. Sissy watched him pull himself together. “We got rules, but since you’re already in….” She had never seen anything as fake or horrible as his smile.

“Thank you,” Sissy said sweetly. She closed the door behind her. Marianne and Tim stared at her. “Listen, Tim, there are some men in the ballroom, and I think that security is part of it and—”

“Tell me in order,” Tim said, just as Marianne’s cell, held halfway to her mouth, said in the slight vibrato of a speakerphone, “Marianne? I can’t talk to you now. Sorry. Bye.”

“Scott! Wait!” Marianne said. “I’m in New Mexico and I need to know if a—”

“New Mexico?” the vibrato said. “Where in New Mexico?”

“Downtown Albuquerque. Is there a storm coming? A big one?”

“How do you know that? We don’t even know that for sure. GOES East is offline again, fucking ancient equipment, but everything else up near you says the situation is deteriorating. It could all go away or it could be something big gathering. I—”

“How big?”

“Don’t know yet. But stay alert, okay? Is there a safe shelter where you are?”

“I—”

“Something that can withstand a major tornado?”

“Major? New Mexico doesn’t—”

“Gotta go. Watch the Weather Channel!”

Sissy said, “My tablet doesn’t work.”

“Of course it does,” Marianne said, holding up hers.

Tim said swiftly, “Yours didn’t work in the ballroom? They have a jammer out there?”

“I don’t know!”

“Okay, stay calm. Tell me what you saw in the ballroom.”

Sissy did, finishing with, “Who did Marianne call?”

Marianne said, “Friend of mine at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. Tim, what do you think?”

“I think—”

Marianne said, “Sshhhh!” and held up her tablet. A talking head, looking tense, said, “We have just gotten word from the Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma that a powerful storm system is forming over parts of New Mexico. Warm air drawn far northward from that Gulf of Mexico low-pressure zone is meeting colder air off the mountains and—just a moment, here comes an update, and… This looks like a tornado, folks, very unusual for New Mexico, centering on Albuquerque. Climate changes due to global warming have of course altered many usual—”

Marianne said to Tim, “Does the hotel have a safe shelter?”

“Just the basement. Sissy, were those guys in the ballroom carrying any signs or doing any chanting or anything to identify them?”

“No.”

“Were they armed?”

“I think so.”

“Fuck,” Tim said. “Okay, here’s what we do. We’re not going out that door to the stage. You two go in that coat closet there and wait while I deal with the hallway guard.”

Marianne said, “No! No violence! You don’t even know for sure that there’s any threat!”

There was a threat. Sissy knew it, and so did Tim. This was just Marianne being all trusting and liberal. Not that Sissy wished her to be any different, except in times like this.

“Do it,” Tim said, and locked his eyes on to Marianne’s. Something passed between them that Sissy didn’t quite understand, but when Sissy grabbed Marianne’s hand and pulled her into the closet, Marianne went.

It smelled musty, as if no one had put coats in it for a long time. Hangers rattled against Sissy’s shoulders. A few minutes later, Tim opened the door. “Come on.” They followed him back through the green room and into the corridor. The man Sissy had seen before lay on his stomach, very still. Sissy put her hand to her mouth.

“He’s not dead,” Tim whispered. “Come on!”

He led them away from the ballroom and down the service stairway Sissy had used before. One flight down, a door said EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND. Tim pushed it open and was blown back against Marianne, knocking her into the wall.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Tim cried.

Sissy saw the twister, then, moving toward them over the city. It looked just like in the movies, a swirling black cone of wind and dirt and God-only-knew what else. The wind howled and rain lashed into the stairwell. Tim staggered to his feet. Sissy’s tablet, which she hadn’t even realized she was still holding, blew out of her hand and smashed against the wall. Marianne clutched hers against her.

“Come on!” Tim screamed. There was no shutting the door against that wind. They staggered after him down the next flight of stairs, the wind following them like a shrieking demon. Only Tim’s great strength got the door at the bottom, which opened outward, wrenched apart. They squeezed through and the door slammed shut behind them from the force of the wind. Sissy pushed her hair off her face in time to get a confused glimpse of a cement-floored underground corridor, just before the lights went out.

“Hold hands and follow me,” Tim said. Sissy groped for Marianne’s hand. She must already be holding on to Tim because Sissy was tugged forward. Marianne followed. The lights went back on.

“A generator,” Marianne said. “The hotel has a—”

“Quiet,” Tim said. And then, “Get down!”

Sissy dropped to the floor and pulled Marianne down, too. From somewhere ahead, around some turn in the corridor, came shouting.

Tim looked around. Sissy knew what he was thinking, as clear as if the words appeared above his head in little balloons: No place to hide. He drew his gun and whispered, “Stay here.”

“Tim—” Marianne began. Was she going to argue now ? Sissy pinched her boss, hard. Marianne, startled, jerked her head around and then nodded.

Tim moved sideways to the end of the corridor, then motioned them to come on. Sissy and Marianne crept forward. The bare corridor turned, and around the turn was another, much wider hallway lined on both sides with maids’ wheeled carts loaded with fresh towels, cleaning supplies, canvas bins for dirty linen, vacuum cleaners. At Sissy’s end of the corridor was a closet; the other end led to the hotel kitchen. Tim pointed to the closet.

But when Sissy tried the door, it was locked.

Shouts erupted in the kitchen.

Then it all happened at once. Tim ducked behind the cover of a cleaning cart, dropped to a crouch, and began firing. Sissy pushed Marianne behind another cart. A spray bottle of Soft Scrub toppled over onto them, followed by a stack of towels. Sissy shook off the towels, trying to get Marianne farther behind the rack. Tim kept firing, the sounds deafening in the corridor, and then the whole building started to shake. The whole hotel!

Someone screamed.

The lights went out again.

But that didn’t stop the firing, and in Sissy’s mind the gunfire merged with the sudden howling of the wind—how was she hearing the wind way down in the basement?—and the clean smell of the fresh towels all around them. Marianne cried out something in the dark, and then pain shot through Sissy like nothing she had ever imagined, not that she didn’t have a good imagination, and Marianne cried out again and it all went away, everything, all of it, forever.

A Force 4 tornado had hit parts of Albuquerque, where no tornado should have been. The city had had twelve minutes’ warning. Roofs and walls were torn off well-constructed houses; heavy cars were lifted off the ground and thrown; trees were uprooted. Two sections of the city were uninhabitable. The winds reached two hundred miles per hour, the storm path nearly one-third of a mile wide. The Albuquerque tornado had been only part of the superstorm now raging from Texas to Minnesota. Power was out, cell towers down. There was massive flooding, hail in places, gale-force wind. From the desert site where the federal government was intermittently building its spaceship, came reports of major damage to the ship. Hundreds of people in five states whose luck or shelter-strength or warning system had failed, were now dead.