Andrew

THE THUNDER CRACK THAT WAKES ME FROM a twilight nap is sharp and quick. I sit up on the cot and rub at my aching leg. It doesn’t ease the pain, since it most likely healed wrong after I broke it stepping in a bear trap near Jamie’s cabin, but I can’t help it. I glance around the gym, which is lit by small battery-powered lanterns. The kids are sleeping through it, but on the other side of the room, Daphne, Kelly, and Liz—the other members of Team Orphan—are all awake.

A few other people around the gym are as well. But not Jamie.

He sleeps through the storm, lying on his side facing me with his mouth hanging slightly open and his fists curled under his chin. The all-nighter he spent moving food into the cafeteria probably did a lot to help him pass out, because I haven’t been able to sleep well since we talked.

I really didn’t think we were on such different pages. Yes, I want to stay here, with this new family we’re making, but I had no idea he wasn’t torn the way I was. When we talked about the cabin, it felt like one of those fantasies we like to pretend are realistic. Like moving to Spain randomly. How are you planning to do that? Do you have any idea how much it costs to immigrate to another country legally? What are you going to do for work? Where are you going to live? And do you even speak Spanish?

We knew where we’d be living, but getting there was a whole other nightmare we never discussed. Because the plan was the boat. We’d take the boat up to Bethesda and then keep on walking, knowing everyone else would return to Florida without us for their happily ever afters and we’d go back to the cabin for ours. We’d completely avoid Fort Caroline’s authoritarian white supremacist colony in Georgia and we’d never run into the settlement near the cabin who stole most of our food and we’d be happy.

But that wasn’t the fantasy for me anymore. And when they kicked me off the boat, I realized we could still make it here. Jamie could go up and we would miss each other. And when he got back, I’d be waiting by the dock in a flowy caftan and floppy sun hat I could borrow from Daphne, and slo-mo run to the end of the dock as he hopped down off the boat and scooped me into his arms as a classic 80s-sounding slow ballad blared in the afterlife movie theater where I’d rewatch this scene over and over. The other Best Original Song nominees at the Afterlife Oscars don’t stand a chance, because there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house as Jamie returned home. To our home.

But to him, this isn’t our home.

Thunder rumbles again as I stare at him. Seriously, he can sleep through anything. He even almost sleeps through his nightmares.

I’ll hear him at night. Sometimes it’s just a quiet “nuh!” But other times it’s low, mumbled screams that progressively get louder and clearer until I have to shake him awake. I ask him what the nightmare was, and it’s usually about his mom or the guy he shot to protect me—Harvey Rosewood. Sometimes it’s Harvey’s dad, Danny, or someone else from Fort Caroline. Other times he’ll mumble that he doesn’t remember, but I’ll hear him tossing and turning the rest of the night. That’s how I know he’s lying.

But he seems to do fine with hurricanes.

Good for him.

Now that I think about it, though, it does seem awful quiet. No rain pelting the building. The wind and thunder quieter than they’ve been all day. I put my shoes on and walk out to the main hallway of the high school. LED lights are hanging on the walls, plugged into surge protectors and jury-rigged to car batteries. I wonder if we’ll be in the dark for a few days or weeks until the solar panels we’ve been using are repaired. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they won’t be damaged at all. They were probably created to withstand strong winds, right?

Sandbags have been placed at the entrance doors. Beyond them I can see the world outside, and the moon reflecting off the still surface of the water, which is almost up to the high school doors.

The moon?

Is the storm over? Maybe it was a tropical storm, not a full-on hurricane. Sure, the area seems to be flooded, but only a few feet.

Someone is whispering at the top of the stairs to my right. A door opens and then slams shut. I follow the sounds up to the second-floor hallway and onto an outdoor breezeway.

Outside on the hallway-slash-balcony, there’s a line of about ten people staring up at the sky. I step to the end of the line and look up, then almost gasp.

The storm isn’t over. And it’s a hurricane, all right.

The black clouds swirl around us for miles, and right in the center is the open, starlit sky and a bright full moon. Clouds spin into tendrils along the eyewall. The sky lights up with a line of lightning, which follows the path of the churning clouds.

Everyone “oohs” as though we’re watching fireworks.

It’s beautiful. Scary, but beautiful.

I head back down to the gym. Things may be awkward between Jamie and me, but this is something he needs to see. I shake him lightly.

“Jamie, wake up.”

He doesn’t wake, so I shake him a little harder, hoping not to scare him. But there’s no way I can describe to him later how cool this is.

“Hey! Jamie!”

He opens his eyes, then startles when he realizes we’re not in our bedroom.

“It’s okay! But I want to show you something.”

Jamie sits up—the side of his hair that he was sleeping on is sticking straight up and I can’t help but smile, feeling a warm pang of love in my chest. He looks around again and shakes his head. “No. Sleep now. Show later.”

“There is no later for this. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and you need to get your ass up right now before you miss it.” I pull his legs off the cot and start putting on his shoes. He groans but works on tying them. “I’m getting Cara, Daphne, and the others, too.”

I cross the room and tell them they have to see what’s going on outside. “The kids will be okay for a few minutes.”

Then we all head up the stairs. More people have woken their friends, and the number of people outside on the second floor has tripled. But we still have a great view.

“Holy shit,” Jamie says as the sky lights up blue again. Thunder rumbles as if in answer.

“Told you you didn’t want to miss this.”

“As usual, you are correct.”

“Usual?” Cara says under her breath.

I ignore her and pretend to hold a microphone up to Jamie. “Sorry, can you repeat that once more for the viewers at home?”

“Uh, sure.” He bends down, pretending to speak into my fake microphone. “Andrew once had a wet dream about Gillian Anderson.” Cara snorts.

“You said you’d never tell!” I throw the invisible microphone off the balcony.

After ten minutes or so, Jamie turns to me and says, “Thanks. For waking me up.” He says it like he would have expected me to let him sleep through it, and it makes me feel awful.

“Of course.” I hate this. How we talk in stilted, awkward sentences. Walking on eggshells. I never knew what that saying meant until we started arguing. Maybe that’s not even the right saying for us. We’re more like this storm, our past arguments and insecurities—hi, that’s me—swirling around us. And then moments like this, where we’re fine and there is no arguing. Just trying to keep up with the eye, avoiding the destruction that the storm causes.

Or maybe only I’m doing that.

The thunder gets a little louder as the eyewall approaches the shore. The wind kicks up and we head back inside.

Once we’re downstairs, I reach out and grab his wrist. “Hey, hold on a sec.” He stops and turns to me as Cara and the rest of Team Orphan continue into the gym. I motion toward the hallway at the end of the front hall. “Can we try again? Talking, I mean?”

He nods and lets me lead him to a quiet, vacant area.

I sit down against the wall, and he settles next to me. Maybe it’s easier to talk when we don’t have to look at each other.

“You were right earlier,” I say. “About me not wanting to go back to the cabin.”

I see him nod out of the corner of my eye. “I figured.” He still sounds disappointed, so I reach out and take his hand.

“I want to be clear. I don’t want you to go back either.” I turn to see that he’s looking at me now. But he still seems sad. “I like the home we’re making here.”

He stares at the floor as though it hurts him to look me in the eye.

Finally, I ask him what’s been on my mind since I first got kicked off the boat. “Why don’t you?”

“I like it here, Andrew—”

“Then why do you want to leave so bad?”

“Why do you want to stay?”

“Because we are making a life here. We have friends. I’d call them a family.” I turn my body toward him. It was easier to start this conversation not looking at each other, but I need to see him now, his face, his reactions. I need to know what he’s thinking. Or at least try to. “We lost everyone in our old lives to the bug, and now we have a chance to start over and make our own family.”

If he wants me to know what he’s thinking, he’s doing it all wrong because his face remains stoic and unreadable.

“We talked about this,” he says. “Every night for weeks we talked about this. The last time we found a settlement this big, they hunted us down and shot us. Cara ran away from them.”

“But she’s still here.”

“Now. She’s still here now. You think if the Keys turn authoritarian, she wouldn’t want to leave, too?”

“But this isn’t like Fort Caroline.”

“Right now it isn’t, Andrew. That’s what we talked about. What would happen if things went bad here or if Fort Caroline found this settlement? Yeah, Daphne, Amy, Rocky Horror, they would side with us. The people we like would obviously try to protect us, but aside from Cara, who would fight for us?”

I can’t believe he’s saying this. It’s so not like him, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. Jamie saved my life when I was injured, and he didn’t have to. He shared his medicine and took care of me. Then he followed me when I left. He leaves messages on trucks for passing strangers, letting them know there’s still supplies in there. He killed someone to protect me. He sees the good in people more than the bad.

“All those people you mentioned would fight for us. If we make this place our home, they will fight for us.”

“You’re wrong.” He reaches out and takes my face in his hands. “There are over two thousand people here—two thousand people who don’t know us. And the world has changed. We’ve been lucky down here, but all it takes is a bad couple of days and they could turn on us. I don’t want that to even be an option, so yes, I think we’re safer on our own at the cabin. Where we can take care of each other and make our own decisions.”

“What about the people who came to the cabin to rob us?”

His face darkens. “I told you I would fight for you.”

My stomach turns and tears burn my eyes. I open my mouth to tell him I don’t want that. To tell him his kindness is what I love. That here, we don’t need to fight for our lives, we can just live. But something cold hits me, sending a chill up my back. I cry out, sitting up as water floods past us.

Jamie jumps up, too, and we follow the flow to one of the doors leading to the school parking lot. The sandbags go halfway up the doors, but the floodwater must have passed that point, because it’s spilling through the cracks on all sides.

Behind us, toward the gym, someone shouts. Jamie spins and looks at me as though he’s asking permission for us to go check it out. If the water is coming through everywhere, we might need to get everyone up to the second floor sooner rather than later.

I nod and we head down the hallway.

Water flows through the seams of the school’s front doors. Outside, the rain and wind have picked up—if the eye hasn’t already passed us, it’s about to. I have just enough time to wonder how much pressure the glass doors can take when my thoughts are interrupted by someone shouting out orders near the cafeteria. More water flows from the caf, and the hallway is full up to our ankles. A guy I recognize runs past us.

“What’s going on?” Jamie asks.

“The cafeteria’s flooding,” he says. “We’re moving the non-canned supplies up to the second floor.” He continues into the gym, probably to wake people and get more bodies moving the food.

Jamie curses under his breath. “I knew it.”

We carefully splash through the floodwater to the cafeteria, where a group of people are already forming a plan. Cara joins us—silently listening. They tell us to go to the stairs and create a line to pass boxes up. Cara is heading for the stairs before we even move. Me, Jamie, and ten others form a line, each of us just an arm’s length from the next, and start passing food up the stairs, where Cara hands it off to people who run it down the upstairs hallways. More people arrive, and along with them, I see the Kid emerge from the gym door, watching us.

“Go find Ms. Daphne,” I tell him, taking a box from the guy next to me and handing it over the railing to Jamie.

But the Kid doesn’t move; instead he watches the assembly line passing box after box, then looks down at the water around his legs—now halfway up his shin.

“Kid!” I yell.

“Hey!” The guy next to me is holding a box out, so I take it and pass it to Jamie. Taylor also emerges from the gym, and as I pass another box, I glance back at her.

“Taylor, you and the Kid get upstairs.”

“What’s going—”

“Now!” It’s the most authoritative I’ve probably ever sounded. She rolls her eyes and, taking the Kid’s hand, walks up the stairs behind Jamie and the others. I’m about to open my mouth and scold her, tell her to take other stairs that aren’t being used, but the guy next to me seems to be getting impatient. So I pass the box he’s holding to Jamie, keeping one eye on them until they reach the top and are out of my sight.

Behind me, Liz emerges from the gym, holding hands with a group of the kids, including No-Filter Frank.

“Where’s Daphne and the others?” I ask.

“Hey!” the guy next to me says. “Focus!”

I hand the box to Jamie, ignoring him as Liz shifts her attention from the water spilling around the front door to me. “She’s getting the other kids together.”

“Upstairs” is all I have time to say. She takes a step forward but the guy beside me stops her.

“Use the other stairs!”

“Dude, chill,” I say.

“It’s okay,” Liz says. “We’ll use the ones on this side. Come on, kids.” She steers them away from us, down the hallway that Jamie and I were just talking in.

The wind outside kicks up, and there’s a loud bang and shouts from somewhere in the school.

“What the hell was that?” the guy next to me asks. I half want to yell at him to focus, just to be a dick, but I’m curious as well.

More screams, followed by another bang. The water around my shins begins to flow like a river. Behind us, Daphne emerges from the gym. She’s soaked, and so are the kids holding each other’s hands in a chain behind her.

She points into the gym. “The roof! The gymnasium—” If she has anything else to add, I can’t hear it because something snaps, and the wind outside is suddenly inside. The roaring storm has broken our shelter.

Daphne spins as wind and rain blast her from inside the gym. I jump out of line and grab her, pulling her away from the storm, trying to get the kids somewhere safe.

The rest of the line seems to have given up on the supplies and are running for the stairs. Jamie hops over the railing to me as I scoop up one of the smaller kids who fell into the floodwater.

The people in the line are trying to squeeze onto the stairs, pushing some over the railing into the water below.

“Andrew!” Cara yells down from the top of the stairs. I look up to see her pointing the way Liz and the other kids went. That’s right, there are other stairs. I nod to her and turn back to Jamie to tell him to go the other way, where we came from. But another crash kills the words in my throat.

And a wave of water rounds the corner of the hallway we were just in—a brown, foaming wall coming right at us.