The Storm (The Barren Trilogy, Book #2) Read online

  Until the tiki torches burned lower and finally all went out in a gust of wind.

  My hair blew into my face.

  "Wow," I said, spitting it out. "What's with the weather?"

  Only darkness remained. Hours had passed. The air blasted against me harder and harder, kicking up dust and making me cough.

  Gina stood up. I had forgotten what joke she was telling. She backed into the dugout held her hand over her face. "Is this a dust storm? It feels like one."

  A nearby power line wobbled in place like it was struggling to stand up against it. I had never felt wind like this before. More dust kicked up and the last torch snuffed out. We were left with the roar and nothing else.

  At last, I shouted, "Run home!"

  The world tilted as I bolted across the park, grabbing Alana's arm. Jerome swore and ran in another direction. Tony laughed as he and his girlfriend Mina ran yet another way. We were all scattering.

  A storm was coming down on us.

  And it was going to be a bad one.

  "My house is closer!" Alana yelled, yanking me down Strawberry Street.

  We ran down the middle of the road together, using the pavement as our guide. I coughed again. The air was full of dust and death. I'd seen a few dust storms where the air turned brown or tan and it got dark, but this was something else. The wind was howling. Grains blew against my skin, threatening to blast it off. I kept my head down and Alana cast her blanket over us both, which held out the dust. I wrapped my side of it around me as the wind plastered it to us. I could breathe in here. Alana stayed close and I bumped into a metal pole. The stop sign. We had reached her street.

  We walked backwards now, keeping our faces out of the wind which threatened to push us over. Keeping my balance was hard. It was the booze. I would never have any again. We held onto each other. Our combined weight kept us anchored. Neither one of us spoke. We knew what we had to do.

  "We're here!" Alana shouted at last. She pulled me to the right and we were walking uphill into a yard now. The dust intensified. My shoes scraped concrete. A driveway. A minivan, doors still open. A whiff of a horrible smell that should have dissipated by now. It was all that was left of Alana's family who had been lying inside for days.

  And finally, a door.

  Alana had left it unlocked. We both fell back into her kitchen, landing on the linoleum floor as her front door beat against her house as if angry we had walked in and invaded. Alana laughed as she threw the blanket off.

  I got up, pushed against the wind, and closed the door.

  Chapter Two

  The more booze I got out of my system, the more I realized how lucky we were.

  The wind howled against the house, making eerie whistling sounds as I coaxed Alana to drink more water. I opened yet another bottle for myself, sucking it down after my fifth visit to the bathroom and to the toilet. The candle had burned down almost all the way and I lit another one--a Christmas one with Santa and reindeer that Alana's mother must only get out as decoration once a year--and renewed the light in the kitchen.

  The house creaked.

  It was all blowing dust out there. I couldn't see it, but it was hitting the house like dry, angry rain.

  "How did we make it?" Alana asked at last. She had moved over to the couch and was holding her head. "How did anyone make it home in that?"

  Something thumped against the house. It wasn't just dust out there. The wind itself was doing damage. I took a breath and counted to five, willing my heartbeat to slow. The guy on the emergency radio had talked about bad storms flaring up across the world. It was something about how the gamma ray burst had messed up the atmosphere and the way the sun was hitting the ground now. I hadn't thought that dust storms were included in that. In Arizona we rarely got bad storms. Flooding sometimes, but that was about it and that was because the ground was so hard.

  "I don't know if the others did," I said.

  "Ouch," Alana said, covering her ears. "Please don't talk so loud."

  I took another swig of my water bottle. We didn't have a ton of them left. "You need water," I said. "I think you have a hangover."

  "I thought those were the morning after," she said and grimaced again.

  "Well, we've never really drank before," I said. I was getting us off the thing we needed to talk about. "I hope the others found shelter." I'd heard stories about the Dust Bowl where people got blinded for life because the storms got so bad. This must be like that, only worse. Would it last for days? I was tempted to open the fridge and count the water bottles and the cans of soda just in case, but thought against it. We'd wait until morning.

  "What's going on out there?" Alana asked. "This is the biggest dust storm I've ever seen."

  "We don't know yet," I said. I wasn't going to offer any false hope. Alana and I had barely made it home. The storm had gotten worse after we got in the door.

  I never should have given in and drank. I thought about what careful Dad would say. How disappointed he'd be if he was even still alive to be disappointed.

  My own head was starting to pound. Alana groaned and turned over on the couch. "I might throw up."

  "Find something to do it in," I said, and waited until I realized she wasn't going to get up. I grabbed the candle and searched around Alana's kitchen until I found a big cooking pot. I rushed into the living room just as Alana sat up.

  The worst happened and I threw the pot outside, leaving the back door open just long enough to let the wind blast in. It was sucking the breath out of me. My skin went on fire again as grains screamed across it. I couldn't breathe. The pressure was too great on my lungs. I threw the pot onto the back deck and closed the door. "We can't go outside," I said. "Not even with that blanket."

  "Great," Alana said, turning over on the couch again.

  "Drink something," I ordered, giving her a water bottle. "Something that's not beer."

  "Leave me alone."

  "You're the one who had like, three or four drinks."

  "And I'm never doing it again."

  "Neither am I," I said. "We might have seen that storm coming sooner if we hadn't. Or heard it, anyway. We could have died out there, Alana."

  "I know."

  I cracked open her water bottle. "You're dehydrated," I said. "Drink."

  She did, slowly and carefully. The water wasn't that cold anymore. We were six days into the apocalypse, after all.

  No water we had was going to be cold unless we found some deep meat freezer.

  "I feel a little better," Alana said, putting down the water bottle. "I'm glad that wasn't cold. I would have puked again for sure."

  "No more drinking," I said, "At least until we know for sure things are safe." I held up my pinky. "We have to swear on it."

  She wrapped her little finger around mine. "I swear."

  "Now we both have a promise to keep," I said. "Why don't you sleep? It's not like we're going anywhere. And you need it." I felt like Alana's mom. "You might feel better after you do. The really horrible grief starts wearing off after a few days."

  "Did things ever get back that way for you?" Alana asked. She lay against the couch pillow. Her eyes were watering. Reality was back. "Did you ever feel normal again after losing your mother?"

  "Not completely," I admitted. The answer was really no, no and definitely no. "But it does get a little better with time. It's horrible now. I know that. I'm not going to tell you to cheer up or keep busy because that's not in the books right now." I threw the water bottle away as something else thumped against the house.

  What if the roof came off? The whole building was creaking like something wanted to pop. I imagined hurricane force winds out there, blasting dust like a billion little knives. I rubbed at the peeling skin on my arms, left over from the sunburn I got at the Visitor Center before we realized the ozone layer was pretty much gone. It made a sound like scotch tape as it came back. Gross. I wondered how long it would take those strange moles to appear there. A few years? A month? It could hap
pen at any time. And if it did, I would break my promise and leave. There was no way I would let Alana go through the loss again.

  And there was no way I could do that again.

  Alana closed her eyes, muttered something, and fell into sleep.

  I needed to join her, but had already slept much of the day away. The Christmas candle continued to flicker in the kitchen. For a moment, if I lay there on the floor and watched the circle of light dance on the ceiling, I could pretend that this was just another power outage. A car had struck a utility pole and the crews would be out to fix it in no time. I stretched out on the patterned rug and put my hands under my head, closing my eyes.

  And I watched the memories of the night play behind my eyelids.

  People laughing. Gina's jokes. Jerome twirling me in a circle. His smile, which threatened to infect me. Me laughing and having a good time. I had let myself become vulnerable. Death wanted that. It wanted you to get connected to people so things would hurt extra badly when it snatched them away. I couldn't let it do that to me again.

  From now on, it was all business. Keeping Alana as a friend was necessary. Her survival depended on it. But I couldn't let in anyone else.

  Some of them could be dead right now.

  I wouldn't let it get to me but I found myself worrying about Gina and Jerome. We had made it across the desert together, after all. Gina lived in the trailer park across town. If she ran that way, she might have gotten caught in the really bad winds.

  I let out a breath.

  Counted to ten.

  There was nothing I could do about that right now. I had to sleep. I had to get some rest that wasn't full of nightmares and then I needed to think about getting out of here. Alana had to leave, too.

  But what if it was like this everywhere?

  Five to ten percent.

  I rolled those numbers around in my head for what felt like hours as the wind continued to beat against the house.

  Chapter Three

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, or the next afternoon, or whatever--a brownish glow had overtaken the house and I wasn't sure if it was even daytime.

  Alana, like me, had put blankets up in the windows to keep out the UV rays and closed all the curtains she could, turning her home into a crypt. The only thing missing was death. Thankfully, her mom and brother had died outside in the minivan and her father had left years ago for another woman over in California, leaving only the three of them. Alana was lucky, like me. No one had actually dropped dead in our houses from the radiation. Well, Chester had in mine, but he didn't produce the smell that a human did. It was nothing compared to what the others in our group had gone home to. Poor Jerome had stepped out of his house the night before last, vomiting. The look in his eyes was full of self torment, of the I should haves and I could haves, the impossible guilt trips that haunted you whenever you lost someone.

  And then he had gone on to help move everyone’s bodies to the drainage ditch. As if he were laboring to atone for something.

  "Finally?" Alana asked. "You're awake?"

  I blinked and tried to remember what dreams I'd had. It was something I automatically did since junior high, since dreams were supposed to have some meaning. I even continued that after Mom died and I lost all those beliefs. But I pulled nothing out of my memories.

  Good. My body felt refreshed, even though I had a lingering headache. I went for the water, glad that I had sucked some down last night. The hangover didn't feel as bad as Alana's and at least I didn't want to throw up. Some of the pain vanished after I finished off the bottle.

  "Yeah," I said. Alana was sitting at the kitchen table. I noticed her there for the first time. "I'm awake."

  She had changed into her sparkly purple shirt with the low collar, the one her mother never let her wear to school so she had to sneak it out in her backpack. We had all the freedom we wanted now. But Alana was leaning on her hand and staring into space. She had a ways to go yet. She might even have had her world shattered even more than mine. I had lost my mother, but so had she and potentially the rest of her family. She still had grandparents in Baltimore, maybe, but getting over there was going to be a huge issue.

  "It's been light for a few hours," Alana said. "If you call that light."

  I followed her gaze to the kitchen window, which overspread the space above her sink. Alana had blocked it with a pillowcase held up with duct tape. It didn't look pretty, but it worked. The Santa candle had burned down to nothing and Santa himself was melted down to his boots. It made me sad. Alana's mother put it out every year and it was a staple in her household. Now it was gone.

  "Let me look," I said, grabbing a chair. The window looking outside didn't face east or west, so the sun shouldn't glare in my face, but I had to act quickly. I got on the chair and peeled the pillowcase up.

  That's when the sound came back to me. The wind, blasting grain against the house. The whistling. During the last several hours, my brain had blocked it out, the way you tuned out an annoying radio station that was playing in the background. The roar was just as bad as last night.

  I couldn't see the neighbors' house through the blackish brown dust and they only lived thirty feet away. The chain link fence that separated them from Alana barely stuck out of the blowing grains. I felt like we were floating in some dust void on another planet. This was the worst I'd ever seen. The wind rattled the window and I let the curtain fall back down. "We need to count what we have in the fridge. Or did you already?"

  "No," Alana said, making no effort to get up. "I really wish we had some beer again. Now I’m thinking about things.”

  "Our promise," I reminded her. I would be her mother for at least a little while.

  “Fine,” she said. “Our promise. You’re keeping yours so I guess I’ll keep mine.”

  In the fridge, there was a half-used case of two dozen water bottles, leaving us twelve. Much of the food inside was moldy and I went to work throwing away anything that made me wrinkle my nose. We were left with condiments, a loaf of bread that Alana's mother must have stuck in there to keep away the mold, and the light bulb. It was awesome. We were down to bread and water.

  "We need to stretch things," I told Alana. I opened the cabinets to find crackers and chips and the usual snack fare. "Maybe not a ton, but some. Meat is done unless it's something from the gas station or any fish managed to come down the river. I could go for fish right now."

  "Oh," Alana said. "You used to go fishing with your parents."

  "Mom mostly," I said. "Dad was afraid I'd get the hook in my skin or something. Yeah, I can fish, but we need to go down to the river to do it. Maybe some of the marine life made it through the second wave of radiation. Or some from the east side came down the river. It's possible. It's been about a week now."

  "And we need a grill," Alana said. "We have one in the garage."

  "I'm not grilling without ventilation," I said. I had been around those a lot, too, and Mom always told me that if I was grilling to do it outdoors no matter what. Smoke was deadly. Smoke, like the stuff that nearly killed me in Happy's Gas. I would always remember that. "I'm glad you're talking."

  "I have to. Like Gina said, we all have to have ways to keep sane."

  "Then talk all you want. Keep talking. Wow, I hope the others got home all right, or at least found shelter. I wonder how long this dust storm is going to last."

  "Too long," Alana said. "I'm tired of being cooped up. We got to be outside for a few hours last night, but what if we can only go out a few hours at a time? I feel like a rat in a burrow."

  Another blast of wind blew against the house. Something kept banging down the street. A trash can, maybe, or something worse. "This had better not last for days."

  "It might," Alana said. "We're going to starve to death in here."

  This was not my friend. My friend always injected the hope into any situation, no matter how dire. "The dust storm would have to last for over a week," I said. "The worst one we've seen only went fo
r hours."

  "Things are different now."

  Alana was right. The dust storm continued for the rest of the day. I dug through the closets and pulled out some board games. There was nothing else to do but stare at each other and talk about how bad things were, so we stuck with Candyland, Shoots and Ladders and even the dreaded Monopoly. There was something soothing about Monopoly. It was so boring...and yet we couldn't stop playing as the wind howled against the house. We depleted half a bag of chips, but my stomach roared and wanted more. I needed protein. I thought about those meat sticks at the gas station and I was almost tempted to venture out into the storm with a blanket over me. Almost. I remembered how I could barely push the back door open last night. I'd never get there without falling over or getting hit by debris.

  My dreams that night were full of swimming fish and grills and sizzling meat. When I woke that second morning, the dust still hadn't let up but the wind wasn't howling as bad as before. Alana had moved back to her place at the kitchen table, where another candle was flickering. It did little to chase away the dingy brown glow coming in through the windows.

  "Is it brighter out there today?" I asked.

  "A little," Alana said. She stared into the candle as if it held some answers.

  "I'm starving," I said. "Let me open the door and see what's out there."

  I grabbed the safety blanket, wrapped it around my body, and crept to the back door. I opened it and wind and dust blasted into my face, but the wind itself didn't threaten to knock me over and it didn't threaten to rip my skin off as bad as before. I could see into the neighbor's yard now, but not the one after that. Things had improved a little, even though dust had settled in little hills around our houses and had drifted in places. I closed the door and put the curtain back over it, which had fallen off. "It's better," I confirmed. "Maybe by tonight, we can go out. I'm so hungry that my limbs are shaking."