The Hurricane (8 page)

Daniel flinched and felt goose bumps run up his arms. He
turned around and shoved his bed away from the window to keep it from getting
wet. Then he ran around and gathered up the clothes on the floor and threw them
on top of the bed. Something scampered across the roof—or a limb tumbled across
it—but it sounded like it was right on the other side of the sheetrock above
his head.

“This is fucking nuts,” Daniel said to himself. He felt a
rush of adrenaline from all the pounding and creaking. As the upper story
swayed, the image of being on a ship during a storm was complete. He opened his
door, feeling the wind yanking against him. He slid his dresser down the wall
as he held the door all the way open, pinning its edge behind the furniture. He
then ran to Hunter’s room and cracked a window there. He wondered what Hunter
was going through across town. He always seemed to get out of doing stuff with
the rest of the family. Zola’s room came last. As Daniel approached her door,
he thought he heard squishing from the carpet beneath his feet. He was still
processing this when he opened the door and stepped inside—

Something bushed across his face; Daniel screamed and
dropped his flashlight. He waved in the air to shoo whatever it was off, and
his hands tangled in twigs and leaves. He bent for his flashlight, the spray of
rain pelting him. The thunderous roar of the wind was so thick, it drowned out
his thoughts. He felt like he’d stepped outside, or through some dimensional
rift from his comics and into a hellish, infernal plane of existence.

He shined his light inside as the door banged against his
foot. Something ran across the floor and disappeared into the darkness.
Splintered two-by-fours hung from the busted-open flesh of cracked and hanging
sheetrock. Zola’s ceiling fan was on the floor, glass shades and shattered
light bulbs glittering—he aimed the flashlight up—there was a tree trunk angled
through her dormer, a thick limb splitting her bed in two. Another squirrel ran
past, twittering and complaining. Now that he knew what they were, he placed
the sound in the attic from earlier. The animals were moving from their downed
home and into
his
.

“Holy shit,” someone said behind him.

Daniel startled and nearly fainted. He felt Carlton’s hand
on his shoulder as his stepdad aimed his own light past and added it to
Daniel’s.

“That’s the old oak out front,” Carlton said, more awe in
his voice than fear. “We need to get downstairs.”

Daniel nodded his agreement. The two of them turned and
hurried back toward the stairs, the wrath of the storm outside threatening to
send another tree their way. The door to Zola’s room slammed shut as the wind
swept through the house. He and Carlton thundered down the steps, their lights
jouncing, their hands sliding along the railing, drowning out the scampering of
smaller, no less frightened feet up in the attic.

“Dude, your room is toast.”

Daniel and Carlton squeezed back into the bathroom, which
smelled sulfurous from freshly lit matches. Zola looked to Daniel, her face
pinched in confusion.

“It was a pretty good sized tree,” Carlton told their mom.

“What do you mean
toast
?” Zola asked.

“You’d be
dead
right now,” Daniel said. He didn’t say
it to torment, more out of shock and awe and from his pounding heart.

“
Dead?
” Zola howled.

“Daniel, don’t do that to your sister.”

“There’re squirrels everywhere.”

“Mom!”

“Daniel Stillman!”

“Everyone calm down,” Carlton said. He turned off his
flashlight and set it on the counter. Daniel’s mom was sitting on the edge of the
tub; his sister knelt on the floor amid a tangle of pillows and blankets. Her
eyes were wide and fixed on Carlton.

“What happened?” she asked.

Carlton lit another
candle. “A tree fell into the house,”
he said. He looked to their
mother. “It went through the dormer in Zola’s room, but it looks like—”

“There’re
squirrels
in my room?” Zola howled.

Carlton showed her his palms. “Everything’s gonna be okay,”
he said, but Daniel knew he was just placating her. There was no way to know if
everything was going to be okay. How did they know where the storm was exactly?
It could still be miles away. The eye wall could be barreling right for them.

“My Zune,” he said, shrugging off his backpack and setting
it down on the floor.

“Is the house okay?” his mom asked.

“It’s holding up the tree, but I’d say the worst of the
impact is long over.” Carlton paused. “The damage from the rain isn’t going to
be good.”

“The insurance is up to date. I remember writing that check
just a few weeks ago. This wouldn’t qualify as flood damage would it?”

“I don’t think so,” Carlton said. “I’m not sure.”

Daniel dug in his bag for his Zune. It was yet another
humiliation in his life. All his friends had iPods, and every connector to
everything in the universe seemed to be designed for Apple’s ubiquitous device.
His aunt’s
car
even had an iPod dock, even though she didn’t own one.
She had bought him the Zune for Christmas, then asked him to plug it into her
car and play some of his favorite music. Daniel had to weasel his way out of
telling her she’d bought the wrong thing and had done his best to sound
grateful for the gift. He didn’t even like pulling it out in public and had
bought some white earbuds so it would look like an iPod if he kept it in his
pocket.

But it
did
have an FM tuner, something many of the
iPods didn’t. Daniel had never used it before. He powered it up while Zola
begged Carlton for more details about her room. Their mom had to tell her that
she was most definitely
not
going up there to see for herself.

“Does anyone know any FM stations?” Daniel asked. He
couldn’t personally name a single one. The rare times he listened to music in
the car, he just tapped the search button from one commercial to the next until
he found an actual tune.

“NPR is ninety five point seven,” Carlton said. “I think one
of the AM stations has a duplicate signal on the FM range somewhere.”

Daniel struggled to figure out how to adjust the frequency.
If
it was an iPod
, he thought to himself,
it would be intuitive.

He got the dial moving, the digital numbers ticking down,
while he put one earbud in. Carlton patted his shoulder and pointed to the
floor. Daniel sat, and Carlton sat down beside him, reaching for the other
dangling earbud.

“You mind?” he asked.

Daniel waved his hand.

“That’s gross,” Zola said, as Carlton leaned close and
popped the loose bud into his ear.

Daniel was getting nothing but static. He dialed into the
NPR frequency, and there was something there, but it was too faint to make out.
He started tapping through the numbers, one decimal at a time, while Zola and
his mom dug out bottles of water and passed them around.

“I shoulda charged this thing up,” Daniel said, noting the
quarter charge on the battery.

“Wait. Go back,” Carlton said.

Daniel went up two decimal points. There was a voice behind
a curtain of static.

“I think that’s a Charleston station,” Carlton said,
pointing toward Daniel’s display.

“Everyone be quiet,” Daniel said.

He and Carlton strained to hear.

••••

“What did they say?”

Zola dug into a box of cheerios and crammed a few into her
mouth. Daniel took a swig of water. Now that he knew the house was open to the
elements, the sound of the wind upstairs seemed closer and more potent.

“It’s all they’re talking about, of course.” Daniel looked
to Carlton. “Did they say winds up to a hundred forty?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.” His stepdad bore a
grave expression.

“Where’s the storm centered?” his mom asked.

“It was all in relation to Charleston,” Daniel said. He
wrapped the buds around the Zune and tucked it into his pocket, saving the
battery.

“I think it’s going to hit just south of us. Maybe right on
top of us,” Carlton said. “They were saying sixty miles south of Charleston.”

“How far away? Is the worst over?”

“It had made landfall,” Daniel said, “so it can’t be much longer.”

“It could get worse before it gets better,” Carlton
cautioned.

“When can I go see my room?” Zola asked. “Oh my god, my new
laptop is up there! We’re responsible for those!”

“Nobody’s going upstairs,” their mom said. “And the school
will get you a new laptop if anything happens to that one.”

Zola looked nearly in tears. She dropped the fistful of
cheerios in her hand back into the box and shoved the box away from herself.

“How long will that radio last?” Daniel’s mom asked.

“I dunno. A few hours or so. I’ve never run it all the way
down.”

“If there’s nothing else we can do, or if you guys don’t
need to use the bathroom, we should probably get some sleep.” Their mom flipped
open her cellphone and glanced at the screen. “It’s almost four, so the sun
won’t be up for another two hours. I don’t want anyone moving around or
exploring before then.”

“What will we do if another tree comes through here? Or if
the house falls down around us?” Daniel thought about images of demolished
homes on the weather channel, the piles of jumbled building material and
furniture that nobody could live through. He wondered what it would be like to
crawl their way outside in this mess only to search frantically for some place
to wait out the storm. Would they have to lie down in a ditch? Or was that for
tornados? Would they bang on a neighbor’s door like refugees, begging to be let
in? What if someone else all of a sudden banged on
their
door and said
their
house had been knocked over and now they had to find room for them and share
food and water?

“This is the safest place to be right now,” his mom said.
She blew out one of the candles Carlton had just lit and rubbed her hand over
Daniel’s head. “You should try and get some sleep. It’ll make it go by faster.”

Daniel nodded, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep at
all. His heart was pounding from the adventure upstairs. The noise from the
wind and rain had him anxious—he felt like a thing constantly under assault and
from all directions. But he knew his mom was right. If they were sailors at
sea, riding out a terrible storm, they couldn’t survive if all of them stayed up
for nothing. In shifts and whenever they could, they needed to get some sleep.
He moved back by Zola, who had lain down on her side, facing the wall, and had
arranged one of the many pillows now piled up on the crowded bathroom floor.
Carlton adjusted the extra blanket and pillows he’d grabbed from the bedroom,
and their mom blew out the last candle.

Daniel lowered his head. He could feel the cool wetness in
his jeans from the water that had spit through his cracked window. He ran a
catalog of his stuff through his head—the things in his room that could get
ruined if they got wet. For once, he was glad his parents kept the home
computer down in the nook attached to the kitchen. All their pictures,
documents, emails, home movies,
everything
was on that computer. He had
an idea to go out and grab the tower and bring it into the bathroom with them.
He was imagining curling up to the unit, keeping it safe, when exhaustion and
the late hour won their battle over his racing heart.

A great noise had startled Daniel awake the first time—an
eerie silence pulled him from his slumber hours later. Daniel sat up and saw
that his mom and Carlton were gone, their blankets folded back away from their
dented pillows. Zola was making sleep sounds beside him. He rubbed his face to
remove the fog from his brain and got up quietly to go search for his parents.

The first thing he noticed was that it was light out, the
pale glow of dawn filtering through the windows. Daniel went around the corner
and saw that the front door was wide open. He crossed the living room and
stepped outside into a different world.

“Holy shit,” he whispered, which drew looks from his mom and
Carlton. They stood together on the front stoop, her arm around his back, him
clutching her shoulders. They had been looking toward the massive tree leaning
askance across the front of the house.

Out in the front yard, it was a tangle of limbs. Piles of
broken branches formed vast dunes and disjointed heaps of greenery. What was
odd was the lack of sound. Not even the birds chirped; there didn’t seem to be
any fluttering about. Daniel hurried down the steps to look back at the house.
The tree that had gone through the roof was one of the biggest in the yard.
Three people couldn’t have reached around it holding hands.

“Don’t go far,” his mom said. “In fact, I’d rather you stay
in the house.”

“Why?” Daniel looked around, his arms raised. “It’s over,
right? Man, we’re gonna be picking up limbs for ages. And how do you get a tree
like that off your roof?”

“It’s not over,” Carlton said. He shielded his eyes and
looked up at the brilliant blue patch of sky overhead. Gray clouds stood in the
distance. “I’m pretty sure this is the eye. Storms don’t end this suddenly.
There’s just as much wind and rain on the back side of the storm, if not more.”

Daniel looked up at the sky. He could see clouds off in one
direction, but the house blocked the other. It didn’t look like the solid wall
of a hurricane’s eye like he imagined it should, but then, the woods hid the
entire lower half. He was just seeing the dark tops of the storm.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Pretty sure,” Carlton said.

“The worst part was the last hour,” his mom added. “It
sounded like the house was gonna blow over. And then it just went dead quiet.”
She snapped her fingers.