Sample Chapters

 Book of Storms

Prologue:  June 29, 2027, Dominican Republic

Unseen in the howling darkness and a slashing plasma of rain mixed with earth, plant and animal matter, a deep crack opens on the bare hillside above the Jose Ramirez Eco-Lodge.  If anyone could see without being flayed alive, the movement would be perceptible.  Within a few minutes it widens from inches to a foot.  The time from one foot to a meter is just seconds.

Inside, Antonia Hudson and her grandparents, Dean Hudson and Lina Hassan Hudson, huddle in a corner, holding each other tight, their hearts pounding and mouths open, gulping for air to meet the physical demands of fear.  The impact-resistant windows have been smashed and sucked out of splintered holes in the walls of the supposedly-stormproof building.  Unidentifiable objects fly into the space at impossible speeds, and the three people make themselves smaller, hoping they will be harder for these lethal missiles to hit.  All three are cut and bleeding.

Antonia is sobbing in terror, her eyes open wide, staring at her grandparents, beseeching them to re-establish reason and sanity.  She senses death coming for her, and does not want to go.  She is only twenty-two, already a well-known and respected artist, with her whole life awaiting her.  She wants to live it.

She is too terrified to think any more, but hours earlier, when they could still hear and speak, she said to her grandparents, “Oh, the irony!  Of all families to get trapped like rats in a lousy, stinkin’ hurricane.”

She didn’t have to explain in more detail.  Dean and Lina understood perfectly, and the three of them laughed, albeit sadly, one last time.

Lina Hudson, her once-long and silken copper hair now grey and spiky-short, was still beautiful, and her husband, Dean, admired her despite the thundering chaos outside the walls.  She gave him a look in which the love and gratitude for a life well-lived were palpable.  The grandparents were ready to die, if need be.  But after all the happy years of raising Will, and then helping him raise Antonia, in the last act it will have been a failure.

How can they let Antonia be taken with them?

What can they do to stop it?

The answer was unequivocal: nothing.

“I am so sorry,” Dean said.  He has said it many times already, but needed to say it again.  Tears welled up, as they did every time he issued this apology.  “I am so very sorry.”

And Lina responded, as she had before, “It is not your fault.  We were given bad information.”

“Then why did we stay when the rest of them left?  That is my fault.”

Antonia said, “Grandpa, we all agreed we would stay.  Even Dad told us it looked okay.”

“Thank you, Sweetie,” he said.  “That forecast came from the Senate’s own branch of the National Weather Service.  It is the best forecasting in the country.  I have no idea where this came from, or how it got by them.”

“But it did,” said Lina, “and now we just have to deal with it.  We’ll be fine.  The building is on concrete pilings that rest on bedrock.  The walls and windows are hurricane-proof.”  They had reminded themselves of these statistics several times.

“Well,” said Dean, “hurricane-proof to certain specs.  Anything above those specs and the materials fail.  We just need to hope for the best.  But I don’t have a good feeling.  We’re only a few hours into it and the lodge anemometer registered 160 miles per hour, then quit working.”

“Grandma, tell me the story you started a couple of hours ago,” Antonia asked, with a young adult’s sense that the grownups needed to be redirected.  “About the time in Mali, when you came upon that huge plantation of child slaves working at gunpoint for a couple of American corporations.”

“Oh yes,” she said, with a distant smile.  “Nestle and Cargill.  Those bastards…”

She started by explaining her role in Doctors Without Borders, which Antonia already knew well, but before the tale was halfway told, a window exploded and in an instant the storm was inside the room.

 

As the crack in the hillside widens enough to swallow the family’s rented Land Rover, the lodge itself heaves and trembles to a different set of movements, and an amplitude that does not belong to the storm.  Flat chunks of ceiling plaster fall into the maddened winds in the room around them.  The floor undulates, bamboo planks splinter, and the building tilts downhill.  The concrete pilings, which had never been resting on bedrock at all, but had just been driven into the hillside, offer no resistance as the entire slope, saturated with water to the consistency of jelly, slides down into the Rio Yuna.

The downhill end of the building collapses inward, and a seething welter of black water, mud, trees and boulders engulfs the lower half of the lodge.

Still fiercely clinging to each other, Antonia and her grandparents lose their footing on the steep slope of polished floor.  On instinct, they let go to seek a handhold in the floor, grasping and tearing their hands on ragged splinters and clawing out their fingernails in a futile attempt at survival.

Antonia screams, “Daddy!”

The lodge smashes to a halt.  At impact, they tumble like lonely, disjointed puppets into the apocalyptic torrent.

 

 

 

2.

Seven years later.

August 6, 2034.  Gracemont, OK

 

Will Hudson is always the first person on the scene after one of his tornadoes.  He is anxious to retrieve the recording sensors—literally black boxes—that document temperature, wind speed, atmospheric pressure and rainfall during the violent storms he has been paid to forecast.

They can be hard to find, now that GPS is no longer reliable.  He picks his way through pieces of walls, sections of roofs, splintered two-by-sixes, and shattered chunks of concrete block along what must have been a pleasant, tree-lined suburban street, with lawns, tidy houses and fences between neighbors.  Scanning, listening for the locator tone.  The stillness of the midday is an overbearing presence.  There are none of the everyday sounds of a town.  Not a bird, rumble of a garage door opener, mother talking to her kids, not an airplane overhead nor hiss of car tires interrupts the silence.

He is wearing a straw cowboy hat because the early summer sun in Oklahoma is already brutal.  Hotter and more piercing, somehow, than the sun of his native Florida.  His own pulse is the dominant sound, punctuated only by the soft creaking of mangled, settling building materials.  His Wranglers are hot, his Dunham boots heavy, but he is glad for the protection they offer against the hellish disarray of razor-sharp and gritty surfaces that a tornado, especially an F7, leaves in its path.

He imagines Erin by his side, crunching across the ruins and cursing like a trooper, carrying their child, the one she instinctively knew he was ready to welcome into the world without resenting it for not being his beloved daughter, Antonia.

He smiles.  And her presence, imagined, carries him smiling through the destruction.

Every few minutes—the cautious passage over and around the lethal mounds is exhausting—he pauses to catch his breath and listen.  In one silent moment, he hears a sound so faint that his own breathing would have obscured it.  A voice.

He holds his breath, cups his ears and swivels his head like a radar antenna, getting a fix on the voice’s location.  It seems to be coming from one kinetic pile that was a house an hour ago.  He clambers like a spider over heaps of debris; slow going.  One slip and he could be dealing with a fracture or pulling a massive shard of glass out of his leg.

The few trees that are left standing are skeletons, stripped of all but their largest branches.  Will estimates that this storm might have spent ten minutes, at most, over any given point.  Ten minutes.  He wonders, as he has so many times, what the damage would be like after fifteen hours?  Forty-eight?  Longer?

Someday it’s going to happen.

The voice gets louder.  “Help!” a man’s quavering voice is yelling.  “Is anyone out there?  Help!  Help!”

As Will gets closer, he can discern characteristics.  Scared.  Male.  Midwestern, hence a transplant.  Retiree, probably.  Why would someone retire to Oklahoma?  Just the tornadoes, swarms of them, all year-round, now, should be enough to discourage anyone from living here.  But that’s not human nature.  The moment the sun comes out, the angels sing and everything is normal again.  Like now.  The sun and sky are ablaze with glorious, life-giving light, as if the tornado had never existed.  The ephemeral, transitory character of weather, however intense, has intrigued him since he was an adolescent, scrambling for his life from a flash flood in a New Mexico arroyo that had been dry minutes before, and was bone dry again in less than an hour.

“Hey!” Will shouts, as much to stop the wailing as to let the unfortunate person know that help of some sort has arrived.  “Are you okay?”

“I guess so,” says the voice.  “Yeah.  I think we’re okay.”

We?  “Who’s in there with you?”  Will is conversing with a shapeless heap of destroyed building materials, feeling a little crazy.  A red pickup truck, battered almost beyond recognition, lies on its side atop a mound of debris nearby.

“My daughter and I.”

“Hi Mister,” says a female voice.  Will freezes.  His heart stops.  It is Antonia’s voice.  “Can you help us get out of here, please?”

Will is paralyzed.  It cannot be.  She sounds how old?  Maybe sixteen?  The same age as when the family took two weeks in Maine to view a near-total eclipse, and she was marveling at the crescent-shaped shadows of leaves cast on the dirt road.  When Will pointed out that it wasn’t the shadows, but the light passing between the leaves that shone in crescent shapes, she had been spellbound.  For months afterward, she had obsessed, through her art, about the interplay of light and abstractions of the crescent in nature.  Some of her paintings from that era had found their way into museums, he knew, their curators hedging on acquiring the early works of an artist who seemed destined for greatness.

His rational mind knows that it cannot be Antonia.  This is not the first time he has heard her voice, or caught a glimpse of her in a crowd.  He knows his mind is playing tricks, and he knows that since he didn’t actually see Antonia’s body, his mind is refusing to let go of her.  It happens.  They say it does.  Sometimes he suspends disbelief, and allows himself to half believe that she is still alive, just out of reach.  It both troubles and comforts him.

The pickup truck suddenly unsettles him.  It is a Dodge, an old one, possibly the same year as the truck Bill Paxton drove in Twister, a film he and a very young Antonia must have watched a hundred times, vying only with The Wizard of Oz for most-watched.

“Where are you?” he says.  “What’s around you?”  He navigates carefully over to the truck, and pushes on it, to do a threat assessment.  It rocks much too easily, accompanied by splintering, crushing sounds from the pile.  It’s a threat.  He backs away.

“We’re in the storm shelter.”

“Oh, okay,” says Will.  “Hang on.  Let me see if I can dig you out.  They’re working their way in with the machines, but they’re a long way off.  There’s a lot of debris on top of you.”

“Is there anything left?” the voice asks.

Will looks around.  “Left of what?”

After a pause, the voice says, “Oh.”

He pulls worn leather gloves out of his back pocket, sets the hat aside and works methodically through the rubble.  First, he picks up anything light enough to lift and throw.  He saves an intact two-by-four to use as a lever for prying, and then lifts corners and edges of larger sections, standing them up, toppling them over and out of the way.  He hyperfocuses on this work with the intensity only a person with ADD can muster when doing a task so important, so engrossing that any other thought or distraction is driven out of his mind.  Sex has that effect, too.  He flashes back to a series of encounters with Erin, then dismisses them.  Time enough for that when he gets home.

After half an hour, he is drenched with sweat, his shirt is in a small, sodden pile atop a mailbox that is still standing, unharmed, nearby, its red flag still up.  He is hungry and dehydrated, but oblivious to those signals.  For the hundredth time, he pulls off a glove and runs his fingers through his long, wet hair, combing it away from his face.  The moment he goes to work again, it will fall back, but the ritual is so ingrained that not even the scientist questions it.  His shoulders and back muscles ripple, the veins on his corded arms stand out.  There is not an ounce of fat to be seen.  He is fifty-five, and there were times when the fat was there: times of drinking, times of despair, times of intense work and no play, times of eating because there was no other sensual pleasure to be had.  There are a few faint wrinkles, but beneath Will’s tan and leathery skin they are hardly noticeable.

“Okay,” he says, “I think we’re getting there.  Can you open the door?”

The handle turns from horizontal to vertical, and the door cracks open an inch, two, maybe six, and then stops.  Will sees the man’s hand, nose, mouth and unshaven chin through the opening.

The lips move.  “That’s as far as I can get it.  Can you clear away more stuff?”

“Dad wanted to ride out the storm!” says Antonia’s voice, except Antonia would never say such idiotic things.  “I told him we needed to evacuate.”

She pronounces “told” as “toad.”  I toad him…

“You got the evacuation order?” says Will.  Those who know him would recognize an ominous tonelessness in his voice.

“Yes, we did,” the father’s mouth says.

Will, holding a section of wall upright, takes off his gloves one at a time and tucks them into his back pockets.  Let these people wait in their shelter a while longer.  It might make more of an impression.  “So what, may I ask, are you doing here?  I consult with hundreds of towns and counties and cities around the country.  They pay good money for it, and use it to save lives.  In fact, I haven’t lost a single life in four years.  So by God, when you are told to leave, you need to leave.  Otherwise, if you die, you make me look bad, okay?”  His voice is rising.  “Why in hell didn’t you leave?”

“He wanted to see what a storm is like on the inside,” says the girl’s voice.  “We watched Twister four times!  Dad used to be an engineer with NASA, and he wanted to see.  I told him we should just listen to the evacuation order and leave.”

More Twister people.  “Is that true?” says Will.

“Yes, sir, it is.  Can you get the rest of the stuff off the door now?”

“Then you should have known better.  And you exposed your daughter to that?  Ground zero of an F7 tornado?  What were you thinking?”

“I wanted her to have the experience.”

“Really?  So how’d you like it?  Was it just like Twister” asks Will.  He sees that there is a framed needlepoint sampler still attached to the wall he is holding upright, saying, There’s no friend like an old friend.  Indeed, he thinks.

“Was it fun, Mr. NASA engineer?  Exciting?”