The Hurricane by Hugh Howey Page B

asked
Carlton.
    “Just ’till it blows over,” he said. “It could be hours, so
if you can sleep, you should.”
    Daniel leaned back
against the side of the tub and hugged his knees. He rested his chin on
his kneecap and watched the candles throw shadows everywhere. Upstairs, the
house creaked and popped as it moved around on unsteady joints. The wind was
whistling louder and higher. Daniel thought about his father, who had built the
house many years ago. He wondered if he’d fucked that up like everything else.
The thought made him suddenly fearful about the sturdiness of their shelter.
Still, Daniel had heard heavy storms assault the house before. It had always
survived. As Zola kicked his feet to the side, making more room for herself, he
thought about how ridiculous it was for the four of them to be crammed into a
single bathroom. He was thinking this as he drifted off to sleep—
    ••••
    There was a period before every hurricane where the only
things stirring in the air were excitement and anticipation. Daniel had grown
up with a series of near misses. He had watched news crews roll through town, had
spent entire days in front of the weather channel as track lines were plotted
and re-plotted. He had gone to the beach to watch the surfers in their wetsuits
paddle out through rushing walls of foam. He remembered standing up on one of
the many boardwalks that crossed over the grassy dunes to the hard pack of
Beaufort’s beaches beyond. The waves were crashing all the way up to the dunes,
slicking the sea grasses down like hair on a wet scalp. Daniel had stood at the
end of the raised wooden platform and held onto the rail as the angry ocean
leapt up, over and over, to crash across his thighs and knees, threatening to
sweep him off into the street.
    Another time, with the sea not so enraged, he and Roby had
tried to swim out through the storm-angry breakers. Even without surfboards in
their hands, neither of them had been strong enough to dive down and swim
through the powerful currents engendered by the curling waves and walls of
foam. There had been a moment during that exhausting swim when the fun and excitement
had taken a bad turn. The raw power of the ocean around him, the roar of the
foaming and spitting sea, the endless reserves of strength nature seemed to
possess as it sent one riled wave after the other, never letting up—Daniel
remembered the fun turning to panic.
    Swimming out of the ocean, calling for Roby, letting him
know that he was giving up, he had felt the largeness of the universe around
him. He knew, then, what it was to be a speck floating in the infinite. There
was no crying “mercy.” It wasn’t Hunter, who could be pleaded with. He couldn’t
change his mind, couldn’t beg the ocean to stop, to let up on the roaring foam.
As he swam back to where his feet could touch, straining on tiptoes to push
toward the beach, the piles of white froth on the surface of the water had gone
into his nose and mouth. The ocean was a rabid dog. But as he pressed further,
and the walls of crashing wave stopped spilling over his head, then crashing at
his back, then pushing against his knees, then lapping his running,
high-stepping, shivering ankles, Daniel saw it as something worse than an
enraged mutt. It was, instead, a destructive and unfeeling thing. It threatened
without knowing .
    Roby’s eyes had been wide and dripping with fear as he
joined Daniel high up the dune. They had laughed with nerves and shivered in
the strong, chilling wind. The ocean, meanwhile, kept thundering. It was a
dozing giant, a disinterested beast that could kill with a sneeze, rattle with
its exhalations, strike one down with its barest of shivers. And that, the
soulless impersonal giant Daniel saw that day, scared him more than the
anthropomorphized monster he used to liken to an angry Earth. He was an ant
underfoot. A fly flattened by a mindless windshield. A grain of sand plummeting
from a shrugged shoulder and