The last storm, p.7
The Last Storm, page 7
“You hoped,” he said. “Everything pointed to her being—”
“Dead,” she said. “Everything pointed to you having killed her.” That bit in, sharp and cold. It always did.
“We both searched the riverbanks for her.”
“You stopped. I’ve been searching those banks ever since.”
Jesse closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Pressure built in his throat. When he opened his eyes again his wife was looking right at him, and he saw no hate. He wasn’t sure what he saw.
“None of that matters, Jesse. She’s still alive, and she’s trying to make rain again. I heard about it on the net, a sighting. Just a few whispers on more obscure sites, rumours passed from mouth to mouth.”
“Where is she?”
“Where do you think? The Desert.” It was a catch-all name people used to refer to the vast swathes of the Great Plains scorched dry and dead by drought, the places that used to be farms and fields for as far as the eye could see, woodlands and forests, rivers and green valleys. Many people didn’t like the name because it implied acceptance and a loss of hope.
“How successful?” he asked. It wasn’t his real question. He felt sick with the pressure of what he really wanted to ask. He’d come to a terrible acceptance with the idea that Ash and her ability was dead at his hand, but he’d always been afraid that if he heard news to the contrary, his greatest fears would rise again. His fear of her rainmaking, and what she might bring down.
“Not at all, I don’t think. Just a mad young woman, but there are pictures. It’s… I’m pretty sure it’s her.”
Jesse handed her the coffee and sat down on his sofa. Karina sat on a dining chair as far from him as she could.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“I ate in town, trying to find out where you lived.”
“Jenny?”
“Yeah, nice woman.”
“She’s just a friend.”
“Do you think I give a fuck if she’s more than that?” Karina said. “Me being here is nothing to do with you and me, Jesse. Only Ash.”
“So you’ve been looking for her all this time, and now you think you’ve found her, you decide to find me too.”
“I knew roughly where you were. You told Dad. I’ve come because I think I’ll need your help.”
“She probably hates me.”
“Yeah, but the only reason I’ve found her is that she’s trying that thing again. Your thing.”
Jesse rubbed his jaw, stroking the artificial bone through the stubble and skin.
“Something I never told you,” he said. “I didn’t want you to think I was trying to justify what I did. She was the most powerful Rainmaker. Much more than me, my mom, and her father and great-uncle before her. Even young, with her first apparatus, the energy in her was… staggering. I think that made it even harder for her to control and master, and when she started to go wrong—”
“That was all you.”
“No! It wasn’t me. I’m not sure what started it, though I have ideas. For a while I thought I was guiding her the right way, but when she started bringing down those things, so early and at such a young age, and what happened to Teddy… it made me terrified of what else might come. What if it got much, much worse than anything I was ever capable of? What if she did that in a city?”
“You could have taught her to control it.”
“I tried! I told you at the time, I’ve tried to tell you so many times. None of it was about me. She would have gathered the parts and built her own apparatus without me laying a hand on it, and done her own rainmaking. After what happened to me, I was doing my best to make sure she dealt with it safely.”
“She’s your flesh and blood.”
“Her talent isn’t. That’s all her own.”
“Talent?” Karina said. She didn’t quite spit it.
“Want of a better word,” Jesse said. “It was the fear of what she might end up doing. I killed three people when I brought down a few dozen scorpions.”
“Drug dealers.”
“Imagine if I’d left her,” he said. “Imagine if she’d grown, built more apparatus, lost control and got worse and worse.”
“You could have given her a chance.”
“I did.”
Karina blinked at him over her coffee.
“She was far more dangerous than me, even at that young age. What happened to me was worse than anything my mother brought down, and her father before her. It’s a pattern, a degeneration that seems to follow what’s happened here to the climate. The effect we’ve had on the world. I believe it was reflected in my place, The Shore. Maybe Ash’s Skunksville is even more affected. And no one can control that.”
She blew on her coffee and took a sip.
Jesse went quiet, because vocalising these fears of long ago had seeded new ones. A chill went through him, an infusion of ice injected into his heart. It reminded him of being plugged into his own device—the addictive rush, and then the fear. His vision swam and pulsed, and he felt his looming hangover surfacing again.
“But you stopped all that,” Karina said. “That stuff you gave her, you said it’d stop it once and for all.”
“I thought so, too,” he said. “I’d researched it as best I could, took advice, bought the drug online. It looks like it worked, for a while at least. She’s been missing for nine years with no sign of rainmaking. But nothing about that day went as I’d thought. What if, in the long run, I’ve made her worse?”
Karina glanced around the room, her eyes resting on the highest shelf of the bookcase. She looked back down at Jesse, cup halfway to her mouth.
“I haven’t touched it since…”
“Still kept it, though.”
Jesse took a drink of steaming coffee without replying and they sat in silence for a while.
“Storm’s getting bad,” Karina said after a minute of awkward silence.
“We’ve got to find her, and help her, or stop her trying again.”
“That’s why I came to you.”
“Now.”
“In this?” She nodded at the ceiling. The cabin creaked and groaned with each howl of wind, and the windows and door surround flashed with a fusillade of lightning. Thunder rolled directly overhead. Even Rocky whined, and Rocky was a dog of the mountains, familiar with blazing days, sudden storms, and flash floods.
“We’ll dodge the floods,” he said, standing and draining his coffee. He paused, looked at Karina’s wide-eyed expression. “You’re not used to this.”
“Of course not.”
“We’ll be safe. Let’s get ready. We’ll take my Land Rover. It’s old but looked after.”
“Can you drive?” She nodded at the half-empty bourbon bottle.
“I’ll be fine.” Jesse turned away before she could pass more comment on the liquor. He started moving around, thinking about what he should take, what must be done to lock up the cabin for a while. He could contact Jenny and ask her to tend the place, water his crops after the storm had passed, make sure Hillside was secure. And he’d take Rocky with him.
Karina used the bathroom while he gathered his stuff, and as he heard the toilet flush his eyes rested on his apparatus. It was the one thing that linked him to everything happening today—Karina arriving with the storm, Ash, and the storm itself. He took down the case and placed it on the low coffee table. The inlaid tree design, though faded and with missing parts, was as striking as ever. He passed his hand across the surface, sweeping a clear path through the collected dust of years lost to grief, guilt, and the bottle.
He noticed Karina standing in the bedroom doorway, looking at the case. Despite everything that had happened and the distance that had grown between them, he loved her. He always had, always would, and his love was a solid centre to his world, anchoring him in the storm that had buffeted and bashed him his whole life.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said, and he could have sworn he saw the ghost of a smile.
“I didn’t kill our little girl.”
“So let’s go find her.”
KARINA
While Jesse prepared to leave the cabin, Karina placed both of their backpacks beside the door, ready to be loaded into the Land Rover. She worried about leaving her rented Jeep behind but saw the sense in it. The storm was growing louder and more violent by the minute, and Jesse was used to moving in these conditions. Though even he appeared slightly unnerved by the ferocity of the wind and rain.
“Rocky’s lead is hanging with the coats,” he said. At the sound of her name Rocky’s ears pricked up, and she trotted across and prodded Karina’s hand with her nose.
“You’re sure?” Karina asked.
“Sure.” The weight of the world was hammering down on the cabin, but though it was late afternoon he still wanted to venture out in this and start their journey. She was glad of his sense of urgency, but it couldn’t cancel out the years he’d spent here, doing nothing. She watched as he closed off the air to the wood burner, blew out candles, shut the bathroom door, and generally tended his home, preparing to leave it for however long he might be away. He cared about this place, and it must be nice having somewhere like this to return to. She’d been on the road for so long and had met so many wanderers, some like her with a purpose driving them, most simply adrift. The happiest people she met were always those who had roots, however far from those roots they might have travelled. A base or home gave the world a centre. She’d meant it when she’d told Jesse that she was not baseless, but in selling their farm she had made herself homeless.
She envied Jesse this place, but it was also strange seeing him at home somewhere she did not know.
Rocky nuzzled her hand again and looked up at the coat rack beside the door. She rummaged beneath a couple of jackets and found her leash.
“She need this on?” she asked.
“Just roll it up and put it with my stuff. There’s a bag of dog food in the cabinet under the sink.” Jesse was in his bedroom, messing with an open box on the wall that might have contained fuses and a distribution board for the cabin’s limited electricity.
“Right,” she muttered. “I’ll get your dog’s food then.” As Rocky followed her into the kitchen, a burst of wind struck the cabin, rattling shutters, creaking timbers. Karina froze by the small table.
“Woah,” Jesse said from the bedroom doorway. “That was a big one.”
“You’re sure we should be travelling in this? You’re used to this, right?”
“Haven’t seen a storm like this in three, maybe four years,” he said. He gave a lopsided, nervous smile. “But we’ll be fine. This might be in for a couple of days. We can’t wait that long.”
Karina nodded her agreement. The trail to Ash was cool when she’d found it and was growing colder, and just by diverting here to find Jesse she’d wasted more time. Maybe coming here hadn’t been one of her best ideas after all. She should have gone after Ash on her own, because alone was how she’d been searching for the past nine years.
Karina picked up Rocky’s food and followed Jesse to the front door. They had never legally divorced, but she had stopped thinking of Jesse as her husband years before. He was the father of her child, but there was so much more to being a partner than that. She didn’t know him anymore. He looked different. He’d lost weight, his hair was greying rather than brown. His eyes were haunted by the past and the memories conjured by his last bottle of liquor. He hid the drinking well, but there were signs he could not disguise—the eyes, the lethargy, the weary way he bore his own weight. His short beard might have been a sign of being comfortable in himself, but she thought it more likely an attempt to be someone else. Even Jesse didn’t like who he’d been back then. He smelled different, too. He smelled of the wild, the woods, and the food he grew and ate out here had changed his physique to slim and gnarly. He even sounded different, his voice lower and gruffer, as if time weighed heavy.
But she had changed more. If he looked different to her, she must have been like a stranger to him.
At the front door he paused, looked down at his bag and kit ready to load into the car, and he turned back to the sofa and coffee table.
“I didn’t want to touch that,” Karina said.
“That’s okay.” He picked up his apparatus and held it beneath his left arm.
“Why do you even need it?”
He shrugged. The box moved beneath his arm as if containing something alive. “It connects me,” he said. “To Ash, to this. To everything.”
Karina nodded and opened the door, and the storm came inside. It snatched the door from her hand and slammed it back against the wall. The gale blasted rain against her face, stinging darts against her skin and eyes. She squinted and covered her face. The noise, the sensation, and the smell of the storm were overpowering, and she took a few deep breaths, reversing back into the cabin. She bumped into Jesse. He squeezed her shoulder, and she realised it was the first physical contact there’d been between them since she’d arrived.
“It’s okay!” he said. “Straight over to the barn, my Land Rover’s inside. Come on, Rocky!”
Rocky barked once and edged outside ahead of them, looking left and right as if expecting something to come at them out of the storm. Karina followed the dog, then she heard the cabin door slam closed behind her. Jesse locked the door and pocketed the keys, and Karina thought, This is harder for him than it is for me. He pointed past her at the barn.
The feel of cold fresh water on her skin was amazing. The breath of the storm, its violence and fury, started to excite rather than frighten her. If only I could take this to the Desert. She’d been in countless places over the years that would have welcomed such a downpour. Even a haze of rain became the talking point in some places for weeks. But this…
…this was, she realised, as much a part of things now as the Desert. This was no normal storm. One tree was already down, leaning drunkenly in the woods to the east of Jesse’s home, rocking back and forth as if eager to continue its final journey to the ground. Its creaking was audible even above the rain. Streams flowed across the gravelled yard, carving new routes where too much surface water coursed down from the hillsides above. A tarpaulin had come loose, snapping in the wind like a series of gunshots.
“It’ll be fine,” Karina shouted.
“Doubt it,” Jesse said. “But we can’t fight the weather, even if we made it.”
By the time she reached the barn, Karina was soaked. They entered through the large open front door.
“Isn’t that what you Rainmakers have always done?” Maybe that was harsh. She didn’t care. Years in the Desert had knocked all the niceties out of her.
“Let’s get the stuff in the car,” he said. “Longer we leave it, the harder it’ll be to get to Blueton.”
“Harder?”
“Trees down, mudslides, new streams. Subsoil’s weakened and lots of the topsoil’s already been washed away. The wild forests here have changed, become more dangerous.”
“You really don’t think we should wait it out?”
“How long ago was this sighting of Ash?”
“I saw it two days ago, and it was posted a few days before that.”
“Then no,” Jesse said. “No time. You got more stuff to get from your car?”
Karina touched her backpack’s strap, saying nothing.
“Travelling light,” Jesse said. Rocky jumped into the Land Rover’s rear seat, and he shut the door behind her. “I know these woods. We’ll be fine.” More lightning flashed and thunder rolled overhead, and Karina thought it might have been the wild objecting to Jesse’s misplaced confidence.
They climbed into the vehicle, and for a few seconds there was relative peace and silence as Jesse strapped himself in and readied to drive out. Neither of them spoke. As he drove past Karina’s rental, he threw another concerned look back at his home.
Karina couldn’t feel sorry for him. Her home, and his real home, was wherever Ash was now, and they were on their way.
The windshield wipers flicked back and forth at top speed, sweeping aside torrents of rain and revealing blurred snapshots of the surroundings. Headlights cut shimmering patterns through the downpour. It was late afternoon, but the storm gave the impression of twilight. Shapes danced and jigged in the beams as wind surged through it, making waves in the water before it even hit the ground. The gale struck the Land Rover, and Karina felt the impact and saw Jesse gripping the wheel as he aimed the vehicle between the first of the trees.
The track down to the surfaced road was so different from when she’d driven up just an hour previously that Karina wondered if Jesse had taken a different route. Water flowed across it in many places, carrying leaves, twigs and branches, filthy brown sludge moving like thick soup. The vehicle jerked left and right as it bounced over water-filled potholes. Jesse veered back and forth across the track, concentrating, avoiding the rough areas he knew about and finding new ones.
“You sure this thing’ll hold together?” she asked. The vehicle was old, the dashboard cracked in places where the leather had dried out, seats creaking.
“I look after it well,” he said. “So what have you heard about Ash?”
“It’s like I told you. Online whispers. Rumours on a few obscure websites. There’s one about you.”
He snorted.
“There’s so much bullshit to trawl through online. Conspiracy theories, all that sort of crap, you know?”
Jesse didn’t answer. He didn’t know, she realised. He’d cut himself off from the world and everything he had done and been, existing without the internet. His phone was basic, not smart, almost a museum piece. Most of the time when he needed something he drove down into town, or sometimes he hiked. He liked to fill his days, his friend Jenny had said. From Hillside to town and back again was almost eighteen miles of tough terrain, enough of a challenge even in a car.
