Storm Read online

  “I never meant it like that,” Jackson wheedled, unexpectedly sweet, nibbling my ear. “You know I didn’t. Come on, Brook. I want you. I need you. I so fucking need you, you have no idea. You’ll love it—”

  “Looking forward to saving a round robin for another night then.”

  “Brook—”

  “Brook, oh, fuck!” Trent cut him off. “I’m coming, Brook, I’m coming in you, filling you up—fuck…”

  He sent me over, thrusting his semen into me, again reminded that we were being irresponsible. Or were we actually being responsible? Isn’t the end of the world kind of made for unsafe sex? Continuation of the species?

  I cried out, gripped his head like a vice while Trent bit my throat and swore and fucked me. Jackson was all but yanking us apart, wild with his own need, telling Trent, “Okay, you’ve had her,” while Trent was still ejaculating.

  Finally, Trent was beaten down. While he was still clinging to me, stretching out his pleasure, Jackson wedged between us, forcing Trent back by strength. Trent’s dick jerked away with a shock to equal his pushing in. An instant of cold, reaching for him, then Jackson entered me as quick as if his erection had eyes of its own.

  A series of fast thrusts brought me right back, riding out one high straight into the next, but I still wasn’t fast enough.

  “Yes, yes, Brook, fuck yes—” Jackson was already there.

  “More, Jackson, give me more—”

  He pumped his hips in rapid, shallow thrusts, passed his own pleasure, and there, perfect…

  “Thank you…”

  Chapter 5

  I thought it was more thunder. Or had that ever been thunder? Then, no, it was memories, nightmares, the crack of the Megaquake, the roar of water. Or was it one of the guys moving around?

  Nestled in warmth of the night, close skin, arms about me, sensations of the night were returning. Someone had gotten up and was blundering in the dark, that was all—up to pee or get another blanket. Go back to sleep…

  Brrrrooom-brrrr-boom…

  Far, far off dreams; water in my ears, rumble of the earth, vibrations through the bed.

  No, just go back to sleep. Don’t think about that.

  Brrrrr…

  Rumbles of thunder, rattle of ground.

  Someone sat up with a jolt beside me, allowing a blast if frigid air to strike seemingly all of me at once. I gasped, curling down tight in warmth.

  “Is that another earthquake?” Then Trent also gasped. “Hey? Hey, guys?” Shaking my shoulder. “Brook, Jackson, wake up.” Urgent, even scared.

  Jackson sat up. “Holy fuck… What is that?” He scrambled out of bed while I rolled over, fear in their voices finally rousing me.

  I blinked to discover the room was not totally dark. Nor was the faint light through the broken window a silver-blue glow of starlight reflecting off snow. It was…

  “Infernal,” Jackson said as he pushed his feet into shoes to cross to the window. “Does someone have a fire out there? Other refugees?”

  “Get up!” We all jumped. It was Ramak’s voice from down the hall. “Brook, Trent, Jackson, let’s go!”

  The bed shuddered. Far off thunder rumbled. I didn’t feel sleepy anymore.

  We’d packed before bed, knowing we’d be groggy and dragging ourselves out early in the morning. I had no idea what time it was now, still dark, but at least we’d had a few hours of sleep.

  Clothes, shoes, coats, grabbing bags and backpacks, stuffing away sleeping bag, in a near-blind whirl with only a couple of flashlights to guide us. It wasn’t until we were outside into the night, mix of high clouds and silver stars, that I even realized what was happening.

  We were so many miles from the volcano, with so many mountains between, I’d never really thought we’d know. Maybe a distant noise, but no more. Certainly never considered that we might actually hear and feel the eruption, that it would be so big and so loud and so violent the ground would shake dozens of miles away. Much less glimpse those distant clouds lit up with a vivid glow that was indeed the most infernal thing I’d ever seen. We couldn’t see even the faintest tip of Rainier from here, but that didn’t turn out to matter. The mountain reached out for us all the same.

  It wasn’t danger from lava or lahars causing us to panic. It was the realization that we really had run out of time to travel in clean air—that we shouldn’t have stopped for the night after all. My fault. How long would it take the ash to hit? And how long would it keep hitting?

  If I’d known then what I do now, if we’d had a map to look at and really appreciated the course I-90 takes and where the mountain stands, I’m not sure we’d have done what we did. Maybe we’d have been better off to barricade a hotel room with blankets nailed over the windows, and hunker down—although it might have meant starvation.

  But we all thought if we could just get to Cle Elum, sheltered on the other side of the Pass, we must find relief. And I didn’t know then what I do now. None of us did. That part, the figuring out, not knowing part, is called life. And sometimes death.

  Chapter 6

  We jogged with our bags, flashlights leading us down I-90, past miles and miles of empty vehicles, while a deep red glow filtered across clouds, not behind us, but ahead and off to the right.

  “This is crazy!” I called, panting, stitch in my side. “We’re heading toward the mountain!”

  “We have to!” Jackson called from just behind, bringing up the rear like the sheepdog driving the flock, while Ramak led the way. “We have to reach the base of the Cascades before we really start going east.”

  “How far is that?”

  “I can’t remember. A ways. What does it matter? Just keep going!”

  No, it didn’t matter now. There was nowhere else to go. But I more bitterly regretted not choosing north in the first place than at any other point so far. Until the ash hit, when I regretted it even more.

  My lungs were burning with cold air and exertion, able to keep up a slow jog only because we were traveling downhill—and terror helped. While sweat broke out at the same time, desperate to take off the coat, but not wanting to carry it anymore than wear it. Then, what was that? Prickles and wisps, fat snowflakes flashing like ghosts of moths through flashlight beams.

  “Fuck!” Jackson shouted behind me.

  “How did it get here so fast?” Trent sounded more breathless than bothered as he jogged just ahead.

  “No idea,” Jackson called. “It’s not a strong wind.”

  More flakes, drifting and swirling about us. I almost asked what was the big deal. This didn’t exactly look like the killer of the century. Hard to compare against a viral pandemic taking over the world, the Megaquake, and the biggest tsunami ever known to man. I pretended they were moths and kept going.

  Then they started to thicken, grow finer, denser, like sawdust in the air, more and more profuse, and hot. How could they travel so many miles, through cold mountain air, and still be hot? It must have been the sheer mass, or maybe they started their journey so boiling, so much flame and sulfur, plant and mineral matter liquified with heat, this was very much cooled down—and still jerk-your-hand-away hot.

  We had kitchen towels and microfiber travel towels ready to hold over our faces, though struggled to as we all began to cough. We went on and on through darkness in a blizzard of ash, thicker and hotter, gluing itself to our sweaty hands and faces, snagging our eyes, seeking our throats, filling hair, coating clothes, burning, smoking, swirling, and I realized we were going to die.

  This was not a bit of ash. Not a passing moment to go with the eruption. This was the final blow, wiping out the rest of the Pacific Northwest just in case any stragglers like us thought they could beat Mother Nature at this game.

  Loser, big time loser. I saw Jamie and Kimberly and me teasing each other, thumb and forefinger out, back of hand to head, “Loser!” And later, thumb down, middle finger down, index finger up, hand to head to make 3D loser.

  But I’m still alive. We hav
en’t lost yet.

  I squinted my eyes almost shut, cloth over my face, fighting to breathe through it, lungs burning worse than hands, entirely covered in a coat of hot ash, unable not to cough, eyes streaming, yet also unable to cough in the microfiber.

  How ironic that the whole world was on lockdown over a virus that attacked the lungs, made people cough, led to pneumonia, and now we, healthy, were going to die the same way—by suffocating.

  No, we weren’t. Still alive.

  I could see only the faintest jolts of light, as if running through a corn maze with a firefly to lead the way, stomach twisting as my body fought against being pushed this hard, legs ready to snap, sure a heart attack would stop me if suffocation didn’t.

  Why couldn’t we have stayed in North Bend? Why couldn’t I have died in the flood? Surely that would have been better, quicker. None of these claws ripping through my chest, sensation of broken ribs, every limb as strong as autumn leaves.

  “In! Go on! Get in!” Hand grabbing me, stumbling, heaved sideways, crash into something hard. Ramak’s voice, and that metal, fabric surface was a car he was pushing me into. He must have been yanking door handles, seeking a vehicle left unlocked.

  I scrambled and fell in, dropping light and cloth, thrashing off the backpack to chuck across the headrests into the open SUV back. Doors slamming, voices of others, but I was all coughing, choking, burning. Scramble, everyone trying to get doors shut as fast as possible, everyone coughing.

  “Clean it off—” Ramak choked beside me. Lights flashing in all directions, overhead light in the SUV coming on. Ash everywhere, swirling, fine as smoke, smelling the same—heavy black burning.

  Ramak grabbed at me while I could do nothing but cough and gag. The coldness of the cloth made me jump. He wiped over my face with the wet towel, clearing off much of the ash, cooling what remained in an instant, then my hands, before I even realized what he was doing.

  “I’ve got it—” Choke and cough, shoving him back, making him brush at his own hands and face instead of mine. He left me with the towel, wet another, and pushed the water bottle up front to Jackson and Trent.

  I wiped down my hands, my eyes, coughing so hard it seemed I would cough up my spleen, spit out my lungs, retch on my own kidneys. Crawled all the way across the seat, I had to shove my door open, no matter ash pouring gleefully inside, bombarding my freshly dampened skin, to vomit on the road that was already coated in hot ash like powdered sugar on a jelly doughnut.

  Ramak crushed me as he leaned over, swearing, jerking the door shut and pulling me back at the same time, yelling at me to just throw up in the car if I had to. Sure enough, the fresh cloud went everywhere at once, while the ash covering our bags and clothes and hair was already dancing in every direction.

  Still gagging, so weak and burning, so breathless and unable to catch up, covered in sweat, shaking from head to toe after jogging downhill for miles with a backpack on when I’d never jogged over a mile at once in my life… Stars exploded in my eyes, shrieking white noise blasted my ears, and I thought one second before it happened, This is what blacking out feels like.

  Chapter 7

  “I thought we’d have so much time—the rest of the night to get down the road. No idea—” Ramak had to stop as he coughed.

  “Christ, man, so did we, or we’d have stayed put. The fucker must have been spewing that shit for a while before it woke us.” Jackson coughed.

  “It’s getting worse. Look.” Trent coughed.

  So did I—cough and gag on ash and acid in my throat, slumped over, clutching door and towel, Ramak still partly on top of me, brushing off my face.

  Sharp light glowed into the windshield, reflecting back because the windshield now looked like it was made of concrete.

  It seemed I’d only passed out for a minute, maybe less. The three men hadn’t even noticed. This relief eased the bubbling sense of shame—not to be the fainting damsel on this expedition. At the same time, I was extra embarrassed to know that I also wished I’d been gone for a few hours, or a few days.

  The guys were yelling at each other, or it sounded like yelling, crammed in the small SUV, which turned out to be a twenty-year-old Honda CR-V, according to Jackson.

  “I’m fine, sorry. I won’t open it again.” Coughing, I shoved at Ramak and he sat up, setting off another shower of ash. I squeezed my eyes shut against stinging grit and focused on nose and mouth first, having to spit onto the floor mat, taking a rationed sip of water and spitting again, blowing my nose into the cloth, finally able to breathe, then scrub my eyes with another wet corner of cloth.

  “We need a map,” Trent coughed. “I had no idea we were so close it would actually be hot.”

  “We need to get the fuck out of here.” Jackson spat and reached around the back of the driver’s seat, swatting blindly toward me. “Brook? You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I caught his hand and pressed. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking—”

  “Cut it out, okay? All of us. We’d have hunkered down if we’d known, but we didn’t. I thought we’d be better off getting out. Apocalypse happens. We were wrong, all right? Everyone stop apologizing or blaming or whatever.”

  “I meant the door,” I gasped. “About opening the door.”

  “Oh, yeah… Don’t do that.”

  “For how long?” Trent asked. His tone gave me another little jolt along with the words themselves. My skin crawled. I tried for a deep breath but only coughed more.

  “We can’t stay here long,” Ramak said. “We’ll run out of food and water in a couple days at best. Once the worst of it settles, we’ll be able to go on with our faces covered.”

  “Middle of the day?” Jackson took the light from the dashboard and checked out the windows. “It’s not even dawn. Catch up on sleep after all? Move on in daylight?”

  “You really think daylight is coming back?” Ramak asked, rather coldly.

  A long pause.

  “Fuck it, man,” Jackson said softly. “Don’t say shit like that. It’ll pass on. What it’ll do is end up being like smog, you know? Or when they got all those forest fires in B.C. and all around a few years back? Smoke and fog, all gloomy and getting in your lungs for a while? But it wasn’t like you couldn’t tell when it was daylight out.”

  No one said anything.

  “If we’re going to sleep here, think we could move some junk?” Trent asked.

  After assessing the space we had, the back already partly filled by a couple of tote bags and a small cooler, we decided to leave the seats up and divide the bags so we all had a nook to cram into. The owners had thrown some clothes and small electronics, snacks like dried fruit and turkey jerky, and dog food into the totes, but the cooler was sadly empty of everything but canvas shopping bags that weren’t even allowed into grocery stores these days. Must be a permanent fixture in the back. When the people in the CR-V had to stop, they’d taken the dog and all they could carry with them, leaving these leftovers and an unlocked vehicle behind. All of our gear with theirs would have neatly filled the back.

  To say the rest of our night in that car was uncomfortable would be a wild understatement. We wedged what suddenly seemed like a bunch of useless junk all over the place, stirring up more ash and coughing all the time, used the coats and a sleeping bag in my case to snuggle down in the freezing car, and no one complained. We couldn’t do much about shifting places. Jackson and Trent stayed up front, reclining their seats some. I climbed into the far back because it actually ended up being much more cramped than staying on the bench seat and I was the shortest.

  But worse than the ash, cold, cramped up legs, or whatever was digging into my back and arm and hip no matter where I shifted, was the increasingly serious issue that I’d downed a lot of snow hot chocolate last evening and we hadn’t stopped for a pee while running from a volcano in the middle of the night.

  Don’t think about it.

  After we’d lain/sat there, wide awake but mostly silent for at least an hour, pr
etending to sleep, Trent had the incredible gall to crack open the passenger door to pee onto the road, adding insult to injury by mentioning his own overindulgence in snow drinking.

  I’ve always been comfortable in my own skin, never in my life feeling so deeply dissatisfied with my body as that moment.

  Don’t think about it.

  Finally, at what must have been around dawn, I drifted off, praying silently, not that I would survive this trial, but that my bladder would.

  Chapter 8

  They told me to pee into the cooler.

  I won’t dignify that with exposition.

  Let’s just say I did not. Let’s just say if I’d had a pistol to wave around, it would have been waved in three faces as I got that car door open.

  Cloth tied around my face, slip out the door with the smallest opening possible, close, then returned all in a minute, and everyone survived.

  The ash fall slowed by late morning—barely. The light in the CR-V was haunting, like that light you get in a car with windshield and windows piled in snow, dull and gray, as if underwater. The windshield was a smooth heap of ash, while we watched the stuff drifting past out the windows—all hypnotic slowness, fluttering and settling.

  Ramak and I traded places once I’d disrupted us anyway, both achingly sore and struggling to straighten our knees. We had sips of water, nibbled dried apricots, and watched, transfixed.

  Have you ever stepped out into a fresh snowfall and paused a moment, silent, listening to the sound of whispering cold and nothing else? It was like that feeling, that sort of aloneness in something very big and very much beyond our control.

  It had to stop, had to clear up. It was just one volcano, after all.

  It didn’t stop. As Jackson pointed out, maybe it was still erupting. Maybe it had been seeping out smoke and ash for days, ever since the quake, calling scientists attention to it, then a big bang, but now another day of whatever it is volcanos do when they’re cycling in and out of the pièce de résistance. We didn’t actually know what a Megaquake might do to Mount Rainier. Even if any of us had been armchair volcanologists, no one had ever studied such a thing because, as Ramak told us, the last suspected Megaquake to hit the current site of Seattle took place in or about the year 1700.