Some Fine Day (10 page)

Almost too late, I remember to look back over my shoulder to see what Bob is doing.

His face is a mask of blood. He’s absolutely maddened. And what he’s doing is coming down on me like an avalanche. Bob makes a sound like a kettle about to boil, his hands reach for my throat, and I suddenly register the cool sand under my fingers.
Not dry, wet
.

I spring forward. My right hand parries his left fist down and away. I swing myself around behind him and drag my pinky across his eyes, digging in for the choke.

When I was a third-year cadet, a boy got his cornea scratched during a fight. He said later it was the most painful thing he’d ever endured, worse than a direct hit of pepper spray.

Bob hisses in agony, clamping his hands to his face. I get my wrist hooked against his airway, closing the vise with my left forearm. Everything is slippery with blood. His body is pressed tight against mine, I can smell him, and it’s not a bed of roses. I wrap my legs around Bob’s waist, arch backward and start counting. Seven seconds later, he’s gone. In a full airway choke, the body plays possum. It’s a reptile brain defense mechanism. Seven seconds, every time.

Unless you’re panicking. Then it’s less, because the brain uses up its supply of oxygenated blood even faster. Bob sways, limp in my arms. The final question is which way he’ll fall. And it’s just my luck that he starts to go down backwards. On me. I twist his head to the side and his body obediently follows, sparing me the experience of being buried under two-fifty-odd pounds of sweaty giant.

When it’s done, I slump back. The sun is blazingly bright. I watch a tiny blue crab scuttle along the waterline. It occurs to me that I probably stink too, I just can’t smell myself anymore.

I only want to be left alone, but eventually people come and carry us both away.

The late Fifties  witnessed a series of minor rebellions among Raven Rock’s disaffected classes, easily quashed. This consolidated the power of the quasi-authoritarian state, although civil institutions and liberties were not dissolved entirely.

Will sews me up again, and is very obviously not happy about it. Then they give me a tarp-tent with a cot. I stay there, rising only to hobble to the latrine. Twice a day, Rupert brings me the usual cup of gruel and seaweed. So much for improved cuisine now that we’re on land.

In the afternoons, the rains come. This is not the fake drizzle I’m used to at home. No, this sounds like someone turned a fire hose on the roof of the tent. Within minutes, the clearing is a muddy quagmire. Every time the wind gusts, sheets of water sweep through the two-inch gap in the door flap. I curl up and try to sleep, but the noise is just deafening. I obsess about whether one of the canes has caught us, even though I know we wouldn’t still be here if that was the case.

The bumps and bruises are healing but my agoraphobia or whatever it is just keeps getting worse. I didn’t feel like this when I first got to the surface. The difference is that I knew the moles were waiting to take me home at the first hint of danger. Even on the ship, at least we were moving. Here we’re just sitting ducks. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

On day three, Lisa drops by and gives me a shirt and shorts she says belonged to her daughter, Fatima. Also a pair of rubber flip-flops about three sizes too big, but I’m glad to have them. My feet are filthy and bruised from going barefoot to the latrines.

“How old is your daughter?” I ask as Lisa lays the clothing out on a small plastic table.

“Just turned nineteen.” Lisa grins. “Won’t listen to a damn thing I say anymore. She’s a sharp kid though. Charlie’s teaching her to stormcast. He says it’s more of an art than a science. All I know is when he makes the call, we head for the boats.”

“Stormcast?” That makes me sit up.

“Yeah, you know. Calling the evac. Knowing which way to run.”

“Has a hypercane gotten close before?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“Aye. We have to be ready. Sometimes there’s only a few hours warning. The surge can hit faster’n you’d believe, right out of a blue sky. Once it smashed up some of the boats and swept a bunch of tents away, some with people inside.”

Great. Just what I wanted to hear.

“Why don’t you come out and have dinner at the fire tonight?” Lisa says.

I make a noncommittal noise. “Maybe. I’m still a little tired.”

I look at my grey skin and ask for a bucket of water to wash with. Soap too. Lisa brings both things, and I scrub until I’m raw and tingling all over. I get dressed, savoring the feel of clean clothes. Then I go back to bed. If it was less muddy, I’d sleep under my cot. Instead I just hide under the thin blanket they gave me.

Four more days pass. I keep making excuses to stay in my tent. After a while, I can tell Lisa’s not buying it. So when she shows up with Will and the captain in tow, I’m more or less resigned to whatever they plan to do to me.

“You’re a surprise, Nordqvist,” Banerjee says, looming at the foot of my cot while the others wait by the door. “And I’m not a person who’s easily surprised.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I say.

“We kept our end of the bargain. Now you need to keep yours. Are you holding back on me?”

“No, ma’am,” I say. “I’m just. . . not quite right.”

“In what way?” Her black eyes bore into me.

“I don’t know,” I say, feeling miserable and sorry for myself. “I just don’t want to. . .”

“Don’t want to what? Get on with it.”

“Don’t want to go out there,” I say in a rush.

Will steps forward. The tent is tiny and with four of us in here, the air feels thick as jelly.

“Surface sickness,” he says.

The captain rolls her eyes. “Are you sure she’s not faking? She did fine fighting Bob.”

“No, I’m not sure,” Will says. “But look at her hands. The way she’s clutching the cot like a lifeline. That’s fairly typical from what I’ve read. Of course, I’ve never seen an actual case myself. But it’s a recognized disorder.”

I force my fingers to uncurl and rest at my sides. They lie there like dead spiders. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.

The captain lets out a long sigh through her nose. “OK, assuming it’s real, how do you treat it? I won’t have her lying around all day like a bloated tick. She’ll make herself useful or I
will
leave her on that atoll.”

“Understood,” Will says. He turns his cool gaze on me. “What is it precisely that worries you?”

I’ve been afraid for so long that it comes as a relief to be annoyed for a change. One, that they’re talking about me as if I’m not here. Two, that he could be so dense. Not to mention pompous.

“What is it?” I say. “Well, let’s see. Let me think. Oh, here’s something. We’re on an island, surrounded by water
, living in tents
, and there’s fivehypercanes ripping up the planet somewhere, maybe headed this way, and we have no way of tracking them until it’s too late. I’m mean, your lives are basically one long game of Russian roulette.” I laugh. “Or maybe a short game. Very short. Am I the only person around here who sees that?” My voice has risen to an embarrassing, cracked sort of screech and I shut my mouth with an audible click.

Banerjee and Will exchange a look.

“I’ll take her to Charlie,” he says.

“Good idea.” Banerjee leans over me. “I want you teaching in two days. I want you hauling water and checking nets. In short, I want you to be a functional part of this group. There’s work to be done. So pull it together, Nordqvist.” She tosses the last words over her shoulder on the way to the door. Lisa steps aside to make way.

“Or what?” I yell at her back. “I’ll die? That’s going to happen anyway.”

Banerjee doesn’t bother turning around.

I scowl and pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders.

“Get up,” Will says, not ungently.

“Where are we going?”

“Not far.” He sees the naked fear in my eyes. “Come on. You go to the latrines, don’t you? Well, Charlie’s tent is no farther than that.”

“You promise?” I sound like a little kid and heat rises to my cheeks.

“I promise,” he says solemnly, and my anger at him dissipates. “Come on. You marched down to that beach to meet Bob like it was nothing. You can walk across a clearing.”

I take a deep breath and let the blanket fall. “I knew where Bob was. I knew what he looked like. I knew when he’d attack. With the canes, you don’t know any of those things.”

Will offers me his hand. It’s calloused and dry, despite the humidity.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he says.

Charlie turns out to be the old guy from the boat, one of the few who didn’t vote to throw me overboard. Up close, he looks like some kind of friendly brown gnome. Bright blue eyes, random tufts of white hair. Skin so leathery he could be seventy or a hundred and seventy, it’s impossible to tell. After handing me a cup of water and gesturing for me to sit down, he tells me his job is to watch the sky, watch the ocean, watch the barometer and the LIDAR. I can tell he trusts the first two more than the latter.

“There’re lots of natural signs if you know to look out for them,” Charlie says, clearly enjoying a chance to talk about his favorite subject. “Cloud formations on the horizon that look like rooster tails, swirling out from the edges of the cane. The height of the waves and the distance between the troughs. If they increase to twelve feet and seven seconds, you probably have a cane less than seventy-two hours away.”

These early signs are critical, he tells me, because by the time the wind picks up and the barometer drops like a stone, the monster is already on you.

“I’ve seen ’em do strange things,” Charlie says. “But that’s why we keep ready. Captain’s drilled on evac a thousand times. We can be in the boats and underway in two hours now. Ain’t never caught us yet.”

It makes me feel a little better that Charlie’s in charge of the stormcasting. He’s obviously not a novice. But I still have a million questions.

“What if there’s nowhere to run to?” I ask. “Hypercanes are huge. What if two of them come at us from opposite sides?”

Like a trap closing.

Charlie thinks for a moment. “Well, they just don’t do that. Now, normal hurricanes, the little ones, they won’t form over land. All their energy comes from warm ocean waters, right? And as soon as they do hit land, they start to die. Hypercanes are different. They’re so blessed big they can steamroll right over a continent and not even slow down. But none of ’em can cross the equator. It stops ’em sure as a giant invisible wall. Those that live in the northern hemisphere have to stay there, and the same for the ones in the southern hemisphere. It’s a consequence of the Coriolis effect.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about but I nod anyway.

“I ain’t seen a hypercane come off the continent in more than a decade. That leaves the ones out to sea. So we keep along the shelf and run north or south as necessary.”

“Why don’t you just stay at the equator?” I ask.

Charlie laughs. “That’s a dead zone,” he says, leaning his hands on his knees. He’s wearing shorts and an unbuttoned shirt that might have been plaid about a century ago. “Water’s too hot for fish and the air’s too hot for anything else. You’d be cooked through in a day, and if you lasted any longer than that, you’d starve to death. Anyone with half a brain went north.” He glances at Will, who’s sitting quietly on the floor between us. “Like his people.”

I want to ask Will about where he comes from, but then I remember him telling me that his parents are dead and decide it’s probably not a topic he’s dying to talk about with a complete stranger.

“So what’s the average warning time that a storm is coming?” I say instead.

“Plenty long,” Will jumps in, eager to change the subject. “Usually a whole day or more, wouldn’t you say, Charlie?” He shoots him a look only a complete idiot could miss.

“Oh,” Charlie says. “Absolutely. And what you have to understand is that when we catch the first signs, the cane itself is still at least thirty-six hours away.”

“That sounds pretty close to me.”

“Well, it is and it isn’t,” Charlie says. “Like I said, we can be gone in two.”

“And you can outrun a hypercane? In sailboats?” I say.

“Yep.” Charlie grins. He’s got about six teeth. “The wind’s usually good at that point.”

He and Will laugh like it’s the funniest thing ever. I’ve never seen Will laugh before. I mean, the boy barely smiles. It makes him seem his age instead of like a forty year-old actuary trapped in the body of a teenager. Of course, when I tell him this he stops laughing and looks mystified, which makes me and Charlie laugh even harder.

“What’s an actuary?” Will says, as he walks me back to my tent.

“It’s someone who analyzes risk and tries to minimize losses.” I don’t tell him that actuaries contracted by the military were the first to propose we go underground. They said there was a three percent chance humanity would survive if we didn’t. “They tend to be very serious people,” I say.

We pass the central fire pit where some of the crew eat together. I hear them talking and laughing together in the evenings.

“Charlie knew, didn’t he?” Will says.