Free The Hurricane by Hugh Howey Page B

the
wind and rain had him anxious—he felt like a thing constantly under assault and
from all directions. But he knew his mom was right. If they were sailors at
sea, riding out a terrible storm, they couldn’t survive if all of them stayed up
for nothing. In shifts and whenever they could, they needed to get some sleep.
He moved back by Zola, who had lain down on her side, facing the wall, and had
arranged one of the many pillows now piled up on the crowded bathroom floor.
Carlton adjusted the extra blanket and pillows he’d grabbed from the bedroom,
and their mom blew out the last candle.
    Daniel lowered his head. He could feel the cool wetness in
his jeans from the water that had spit through his cracked window. He ran a
catalog of his stuff through his head—the things in his room that could get
ruined if they got wet. For once, he was glad his parents kept the home
computer down in the nook attached to the kitchen. All their pictures,
documents, emails, home movies, everything was on that computer. He had
an idea to go out and grab the tower and bring it into the bathroom with them.
He was imagining curling up to the unit, keeping it safe, when exhaustion and
the late hour won their battle over his racing heart.

14
    A great noise had startled Daniel awake the first time—an
eerie silence pulled him from his slumber hours later. Daniel sat up and saw
that his mom and Carlton were gone, their blankets folded back away from their
dented pillows. Zola was making sleep sounds beside him. He rubbed his face to
remove the fog from his brain and got up quietly to go search for his parents.
    The first thing he noticed was that it was light out, the
pale glow of dawn filtering through the windows. Daniel went around the corner
and saw that the front door was wide open. He crossed the living room and
stepped outside into a different world.
    “Holy shit,” he whispered, which drew looks from his mom and
Carlton. They stood together on the front stoop, her arm around his back, him
clutching her shoulders. They had been looking toward the massive tree leaning
askance across the front of the house.
    Out in the front yard, it was a tangle of limbs. Piles of
broken branches formed vast dunes and disjointed heaps of greenery. What was
odd was the lack of sound. Not even the birds chirped; there didn’t seem to be
any fluttering about. Daniel hurried down the steps to look back at the house.
The tree that had gone through the roof was one of the biggest in the yard.
Three people couldn’t have reached around it holding hands.
    “Don’t go far,” his mom said. “In fact, I’d rather you stay
in the house.”
    “Why?” Daniel looked around, his arms raised. “It’s over,
right? Man, we’re gonna be picking up limbs for ages. And how do you get a tree
like that off your roof?”
    “It’s not over,” Carlton said. He shielded his eyes and
looked up at the brilliant blue patch of sky overhead. Gray clouds stood in the
distance. “I’m pretty sure this is the eye. Storms don’t end this suddenly.
There’s just as much wind and rain on the back side of the storm, if not more.”
    Daniel looked up at the sky. He could see clouds off in one
direction, but the house blocked the other. It didn’t look like the solid wall
of a hurricane’s eye like he imagined it should, but then, the woods hid the
entire lower half. He was just seeing the dark tops of the storm.
    “Are you sure?” he asked.
    “Pretty sure,” Carlton said.
    “The worst part was the last hour,” his mom added. “It
sounded like the house was gonna blow over. And then it just went dead quiet.”
She snapped her fingers.
    Daniel spun around and took in the utter destruction of
their front yard. He heard a cat mew pathetically in the distance. He couldn’t
see past the tall walls of fallen limbs to see how bad off the rest of the
neighborhood was.
    “How long do we have?” he asked.
    Carlton ran his fingers through his hair. “Depends on how
large the