The last storm, p.6
The Last Storm, page 6
It had been exactly what Jesse sought, a home out of the way and hidden in the hills, and a large refurbishment project to keep him occupied. Making money and exchanging favours doing small building jobs in and around Blueton, he had slowly made the cabin safe, repaired it where necessary, and done what he could to proof it against whatever the increasingly unpredictable climate threw at it. He’d shored up the barn and made it as weatherproof as possible, and he now used it for storage and as a garage for his old truck. The old timber garage had undergone the most extensive transformation. He’d removed much of the outer walling and roof structure and replaced it with heavy double-glazed units incorporating blackout blinds. He’d installed a third-hand cooling plant as well as two large oil heaters, dug an irrigation and watering system, and just outside he’d excavated a compost pit. He had created a growing space for seedlings and fruit in which he could maintain almost complete environmental control. In a world where humankind had comprehensively fucked the climate, in this small space Jesse could still master the seasons.
This place was his small effort to adapt, survive, and face the future prepared and unafraid. And all of this work needed protecting. The looming storm might bring heavy rain and dangerous floods. Sometimes freak hailstorms could swoop down from the mountaintops and drop six inches of hail the size of golf balls in a matter of minutes.
He set to work locking down Hillside, and this was what he loved—working with his hands, outside, with Rocky by his side—because on the best days it took him away for hours. The greenhouse was the most important part of his oasis. He fitted preformed timber shutters to protect the glass walls, hanging them on hooks already screwed into heavy wall struts and locking them closed with chains and padlocks. He used a small stepladder to climb onto the shallow pitched roof and did the same there, weighing down the locked shutters with bricks to give added heft to the protection. He slung rolls of heavy tarpaulin across the wired fence surrounding the vegetable plot, weighing the ends down with more bricks then screwing long planks across the top, spanning the few metres between fence posts on either side. That would in theory keep the wind and rain out of his vegetable garden, but floods were a different matter. His solution had been not only to attempt to redirect any water that flooded down the hillsides, but to retain and store it.
The two large tanks had taken him weeks to dig out, even with the use of the small, tracked excavator he’d borrowed from a builder in town. He’d cast concrete raft footings, then built timber formwork to hold back the dried soil, against which he’d constructed brick-thick walls and an internal coating of thick waterproofing. Finally, another brick wall had completed the buried structures. Topped with a roof of heavy timber planks, the buried reservoirs could hold almost four thousand gallons of water each. It was unclean and untreated, but he had other means to do that when he used it for drinking or cooking.
Using that same excavator, he’d dug a series of drainage trenches all around Hillside, and a good way up the slopes behind. There was no way to stop a truly catastrophic flood, but in most cases he hoped his drainage system should steer enough down-flow around the edges of the property—and some of it into the storage tanks—to avoid catastrophic damage.
With the storm drawing nearer, he inspected the closest drainage channels, pulling out branches that had fallen in, flattening where walls had collapsed, opening them up to increase the flow as much as possible. They were barely half a metre deep and wide, and already nature had started to refill and reclaim its own. He berated himself for not inspecting them more frequently, but there was no time for regrets. They’d handled the several big storms that had hit since he’d been at Hillside; they would handle this one, too.
“You think we’ll be okay, Rocky?” he asked. The dog tilted her head and whined. “Yeah, I know what you think. Feed me, play with me, throw me a stick.” She froze at that word. “Stick? Stick?” Jesse snatched up a stick and lobbed it long and hard, then watched the dog chase it. He liked having the time to play with her. In his late fifties his life had become less cluttered, and he liked that as well. He made what money he needed odd-jobbing around town and working on the local farms come harvest, when the farmers worked twice as hard to save what crops they could. Some years were better than others, but for Jesse it worked. The shadow of his daughter, dead by his hand, loomed over everything and dulled his world, but he did what he could to move from day to day, year to year. It wasn’t moving on. It wasn’t living. It was merely existing as time went by.
Wind was starting to gust, whipping up dust. The air had cooled and tasted metallic. He called the dog indoors and closed the door, slumped on the sofa, and reached for the bourbon bottle he’d placed on a side table ready that morning. He’d known what was to come. This was his other way of passing time, and he made no excuses.
It was barely 1 p.m. when he took his first drink, but the clouds rolling down from the mountains and blotting out the sun made it feel like dusk.
* * *
Jesse knew that he had to stay awake and alert. He should make sure the shutters remained closed, the fire in the wood burner low but alight, and now and then he could peek out to make sure the rest of Hillside was safe. He could see several of the drainage trenches from the back and side of the cabin, and he wanted to check they weren’t overflowing. If they did, there wasn’t much he could do. But at least he’d know.
By three o’clock the wind was up and he heard the first frantic footsteps of rain across the roof. He rested his head on the back of the sofa with the fifth bourbon in his hand.
I need to stay awake. He probably spoke out loud, because Rocky shifted on the sofa beside him, whining softly and thumping her tail against the cracked leather.
A heavy gust of wind struck the cabin. The timbers groaned and creaked. It sounded like the impacts of something solid, as if the breeze that rolled down the mountainside had picked up a wave of debris along the way.
Jesse closed his eyes in a gentle blink, and when he opened them again the light had changed. Some of the candles he kept burning on the low table in the centre of the room still burned, but three of them were out.
Rocky snored and twitched beside him, chasing dreams.
His gaze rested on a few dozen books piled on the shelved alcove in one corner of the room. He’d read them all twice. He took another glug of bourbon. Also tucked away on the top shelf was the old wooden case containing his apparatus. He hadn’t taken any notice of it in a long while, but he saw it now, the thin edge of the case just catching a flicker of candlelight. He recalled the intricate inlaid tree design on the lid and felt a peculiar sense of shock that he hadn’t laid eyes on it since he’d first shoved the case up there. It was a shame to hide such beauty away.
I should bring it down and open it again. It was an idea that occasionally haunted his drunken moments. He never pursued it to its end.
Lightning flashed outside, outlining the edges of windows and the door. A few seconds later a roll of thunder came in. It sounded like boulder gods waking and grinding high up on the mountainside.
The trenches will catch them if they roll down here.
Rocky slept on beside him.
He blinked again, and this time when he opened his eyes only one candle still burned, and Rocky stood barking at the door.
The storm thudded and thundered around the house. Lightning burned bright and continuous around the shutters and the closed door. Rocky barked again and Jesse stood from the sofa, wiping his eyes and gathering himself, seeing away the dregs of troubled dreams. Eight months before, Rocky had warned him of a grizzly approaching while Jesse was sitting in a shaded yard chair, reading. He trusted his dog.
The lightning never ended and he realised it was not lightning at all. It was a set of headlights glaring at the cabin.
Someone had come to him through the storm.
KARINA
It’s almost like he knows I’m coming, Karina thought. Ever since she’d started up into the hills from Blueton the rain had been falling, the skies darkening, and the sense that she was drawing nearer to Jesse than she had been in over nine years closed in on her like darkness striving to smother a candle. The symbolism of the storm smashing down around her Jeep was so obvious that she chuckled as she drove. Or maybe that was nerves.
The mountains loomed like ragged teeth each time the lightning thrashed. The trees beside the road performed a chaotic dance in time with the wind. Several gusts rocked the Jeep as she followed the rough road sloping up into the foothills, and sheets of rain fought against the headlights, dulling the light and allowing the dark to loom closer. All the way from Blueton, knowing that Jesse was at the end of this journey gave the storm a personality. Angry. Dark. Dangerous.
As she followed the GPS and left the main road for a rutted, flooded lane, she thought, He can’t know I’m coming. She’d had to ask around in Blueton to find out exactly where Jesse lived, but the reaction from most people had only reinforced her conviction that he had shut himself off from the world.
She wasn’t sure whether that made her intentions here easier or even more difficult.
The Jeep jolted across a pothole, tugging the seat belt across her chest and winding her. The track rose suddenly, and in the poor light and pouring rain it gave the impression of an almost vertical wall. The four-wheel drive hauled the vehicle up the slope, dashboard lights illuminating and dimming again in warning, as if the Jeep itself were as worried as her.
Karina wasn’t accustomed to this. The places she inhabited now, the landscapes she had travelled through, were dry and arid and dead, cracked ground and ghost-trees witness to the extremes of climate that had devastated swathes of the country over the past couple of decades. They called it the Desert, but that was an ignorant catch-all name for a shattering loss. Some people had left. Others remained, hostages to finance or circumstance and given no chance to make a home elsewhere. Many had died. Society regressed. Place names changed, communities shrank, rules were made and broken. Wider awareness closed in, because sourcing the next meal or drink was all that mattered. Survival pared existence down to its basics. And everything was cooked by the sun, starved by famine. Humanity dehydrated, and wider histories and personal tales turned to sand.
Rain like this was what many people in the Desert might pray, wish and dance for, in the hope that it would bring some reprieve and a return to kinder times.
The trail wound and twisted for what seemed like miles, and Karina began to worry that the GPS had sent her along the wrong track. She was used to sleeping wherever her journey ended for the day—she’d slept in hotels and barns, abandoned houses and broken-down cars, in underpasses and culverts, and sometimes out beneath the stars. She had her backpack in the Jeep, and it contained everything she needed for extended periods on the road. Clothes. Sleeping bag. Food. Money. Her gun.
But the last thing she wanted today was to sleep in this car, in this storm. Moving was fine, because her muttered curses were accompanied by the soft whisper of the electric motor, the breath of the car’s heater and demister, and the radio station that dropped in and out of reception. If she got lost and the storm grew worse, she’d have to park and camp down. Then it would be the outside sounds that would accompany her, not those inside.
Such storms had become her nightmare years ago.
A few more minutes passed, and then, as the Jeep mounted a rise and its headlights swept down and ahead, she saw the bulky outline of a building. Steering left to splash the area with light, she realised just how dark it had become since she’d left Blueton. She was not used to seeing a night sky without stars, and the torrent caught in headlights made it seem that a million stars were falling.
“Jesse,” she said, and her heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t seen him for so long. That had been down to her, and coming here to see him now was also her choice. That should give her a sense of control, and if he didn’t know she was coming, all the better.
She drove towards the small scatter of buildings and came to a stop with the headlamps bathing the log cabin. She turned the engine off but left the lights on. She sat there. All this way, all this time, and she didn’t have a clue what the fuck came next.
She reached into the backpack on the passenger seat, grabbed the gun, and slipped it into her jacket pocket. It felt ridiculous, but also a comfort. During her years on the road it had become her friend.
The cabin door opened, just wide enough for her to see a faint light from inside, and the silhouette of the man she had once loved. She hated him now, probably.
For another few seconds she remained in the Jeep, keeping herself a mystery, holding on to control. Then she opened the door and jumped out into the rain. She kept her hood down so he could see who she was.
“Karina!” His voice was almost lost to the storm.
Karina hadn’t planned this at all, but she gave it to him all at once.
“Hello, Jesse. Ash is still alive. And she’s trying to make rain.”
JESSE
Jesse had often imagined what it might be like seeing Karina again after so long apart. Sometimes he saw her smiling and raising both arms in greeting, ready to gather him into an embrace. Other times he wondered what would happen if he glimpsed her across the street or behind the window of a cafe, and he caught her eye, and she turned away as if she no longer knew him. Once, sleeping halfway into another bottle of cheap bourbon, he’d dreamed of coming across her close to Hillside, in the woods where a bear prowled and wolves sometimes stalked, and her raising a gun and shooting at him. He woke before the bullet struck. He’d spent that day mourning the past more than usual, and he’d made several calls and surfed the net trying to track her down. All to no avail. The infrequent phone contact they’d had over the past nine years had always been on her terms, not his, and had never been fulfilling. The few times she’d phoned, he’d wondered if she was drunk.
She held no gun now. There was no arm lifted ready to hug him close. But there was news about Ash that tilted his world on its axis.
Ash is alive?
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“Oh, nice,” Karina said. “Great to see you, Karina? Would you like a steaming hot coffee, Karina?”
“I’m sorry. Coffee.” He headed to the kitchenette, glancing back as she dropped her backpack, shook off her coat, ran her fingers through soaked hair, and wiped water from her face. “She’s really—?”
“Coffee. Then we talk.”
He took a deep breath, gripping the edge of the work surface. “You look well.”
She didn’t even look at him. “You don’t.”
“Thanks. Make yourself at home.”
The cabin was split into the open plan living and kitchen area, and his bedroom and bathroom. It was far from grand, but he’d made it home and he was proud of it.
Brewing coffee on the wood burner, he watched as Karina looked around, assessing his life. He remembered that look, even though he hadn’t seen it in almost a decade, and prepared himself for whatever was to come.
And all the while his heart thudded and he processed the shock of what she’d said. Ash is still alive. And she’s trying to make rain. He’d lived with the deep guilt at causing his daughter’s death, because what had happened to her, how he’d seen her react after injecting her, had convinced him that she had run away and died. Her friend Jonny had told them both that someone had seen her falling into the river. He’d carried on looking along the course of the river, even after Karina left him and disappeared on her own search, which he had always considered hopeless. But from that first moment he’d been filled with the conviction that Ash was dead, and even though her body had never been found, he had effectively killed her.
It was such guilt for a father to live with, and on a few occasions he’d wondered whether he should continue living. But Rocky and Hillside nursed him through a dull form of life, and drinking blunted the sharp edges of some realities.
“So this is what you ran away to,” Karina said.
“Soon after you left,” Jesse said. “I like it. I’ve made it home.”
“I guess this is Rocky.” The dog pricked up her ears and Karina gave her a scratch. “You got too comfortable.”
“You really believe that?”
Karina looked around the cabin but did not reply.
“You still got the farm?” Jesse asked. Their old home had not come up in their brief, awkward phone conversations.
“Never went back. I sold it years ago.”
He found a second mug for her coffee.
“What, you want your share of the money?” she asked.
“I’m doing fine here. Got no needs I can’t meet for myself.”
“Good. ’Cos there is no share. What’s left of the money I’m still using to look for her.”
“What about our things? Photos. All that.”
“I had Jonny put our personal stuff in storage, but I’ve never gone back for it.”
“So where do you live now?”
“Here,” Karina said, and she paused long enough for him to pause also, hand halfway to the coffee pot. “There. All over, really. I’ve been on the road, on and off, for nine years.”
“I knew you were travelling,” he said. “You never told me much, those few times you rang. But I speak to your dad every Christmas. It’s the one time of year he answers when I call.”
“I know, I’m sometimes there. He always did like Christmas. He misses spending it with his granddaughter.”
“But I never thought you were baseless.” He poured coffee, and its warm aroma filled the cabin. He took in a deep breath, letting it flow through him and fend off the fuzziness of his impending hangover. He’d probably measure way over the legal limit if he was tested, but seeing Karina on his doorstep, he’d never felt so sober.
“Looking for my girl is my base, and I’ve found her at last. She’s still alive.” Her voice broke a little on that last word, and Jesse wasn’t sure whether the moisture on her face was left over from the rain, or new. “I never gave up, even though… you have no idea how difficult it is trying to find someone in the Desert when they don’t want to be found. But I always knew she was still out there.”
