2
HYPERCANE
Everyone else was asleep on the roof, in tents and structures up there, sweating out the November heat. It was so still; all the air was sucked out of breathing. I couldn't sleep. I didn't know why. Something wasn't right, but I couldn't feel what. I took the plastic bag out from under my pillow and looked at the photograph inside it, smoothed the bag's wrinkles out and looked at Mother's face, not smiling at the camera, but pointed toward a microscope, her profile blurry in the darkness.
Then the air was pulled out of my lungs, the world inhaling before a scream, and a wind hit the longhouse hard. Bix's body tumbled into mine, face-to-face and staring. I felt Bix breathing, felt her fear, wanted to reach to her, like she was small, and I was small, and we were in the twin bed in the old apartment and Mother was still alive and would lie down with us and brush our hair back and kiss our foreheads and say, "Good morning, my sea butterflies."
Lightning flashed. "Nonie! Bix!" Father's voice.
"Allan!" Keller was reaching for gear. The wind scattered all our things.
Bix slipped into big-sister bossing, she almost screamed into my mouth, "Go, Nonie!"
I found shoes and go pack. In my pack I had the Logbook, wrapped in oiled canvas and safe from rain, tucked under my rain shell for extra protection. I felt for it. It was there. I'd kept it with me for months. There was strange weather. There was so much to make note of. It felt safer to have it with me always after Mother died, no chance to lose it in a storm. I shoved the baggie with Mother's picture in next to it. I felt for my water bottle, the ammonite.
A sound like a giant taking a bite out of the top of a forest echoed overhead, and the roof above me was gone. Shock drained into my blood.
"Run!" Father yelled. I put the pack on my back and ran. Bix and Keller and I reached the longhouse door as the wall poles buckled. We pushed outside. I turned to look as the house crumpled, going down like one of Keller's shot deer, knees failing under it.
"Run!" Keller shouted.
It only took a second for the place we'd lived for eight years to fall to the hypercane. The storm didn't care at all. I stood and stared.
"Nonie!" Father called, running for the stairwell, Bix and Keller behind him.
I stood still. I couldn't remember what to do. I knew I needed to follow, but I watched the storm build behind them. I moved one foot in their direction. I made the seconds small and fast. This was how it was in a night storm. We got up. We got safe. In a bad storm we ran for the museum library below us, the windowless stacks, safe as a thick-walled bunker, dark, mold-smelling and caked in lonely days and nights spent waiting out storms.
I stumbled, followed Father and Keller and Bix through storm-pitched pieces of Amen coming apart, faces of people I loved flashing past, the pressure sinking so fast my teeth itched. Around the broken frame of our house, tarps and poles of other structures collapsed in the gale, people crawled from under on their bellies. Wind moved through Amen, a curious animal, ate up what it found until there wasn't a thing left to eat. My ears popped. The pressure fell, wind braided and doubled with a funnel cloud forming over the Park, coming our way.
I saw Jess and Beaumont at their hut, she was pulling out a pack, he carried a jug of water, a lantern, his bow. She was carrying baby Evangeline in a sling around her body, stooped over her so the rain wouldn't hit the baby's face, compass around her neck. She looked up and saw me. I screamed at her, "The Monster in the Water?!"
"Yes, Nonie!" she yelled back over the storm. "Get to the stacks. I'm right behind you!"
"OK!" The baby worried me. There was so much wind. "Remember the shark," she yelled, hoisting the pack onto her shoulder. I remembered what she'd told me. When I was scared and started to disappear into silence and blankness, I could think about how you can hypnotize sharks by rubbing your finger down their snout. It calms them so they don't panic. When I started to panic and go back to quiet, to hiding, Jess said I could rub the skin between my thumb and forefinger with the fingers of my other hand and I would feel calm, too, and maybe not need to disappear at all. "Go, Nonie! I'll be right there," Jess yelled over the wind.
I found speed then, my feet obeying where my mind did not. A downpour of water came, almost too dense for moving, a heart of lightning, random hail, a voice of the wind that shut out thought, and then I was running to catch Bix's advancing back, chasing her like a ghost through the unknown air.
