Page 19 of Evolved

I grab my backpack and step outside into the gale.

It’s falling sideways, charging in thick currents down the sides of the roads, which are made slick with sodden leaf litter.

The rain soaks my hair, dripping blindingly cold down my neck.

We pass two storm drains clogged by weeks of uncleaned debris—suitcases, trash bags, branches, leaves, bicycles, once a corpse.

The water forms wide, powerful eddies that surge down the road, forming rivers that run to pop-up ponds around the blocked-up storm drains.

Repeatedly, we have to slow to step around fallen tree limbs, trash cans, bikes, suitcases, dog cages, and, twice, corpses. It’s not long before my coat, not wool like Gran’s or Gore-Tex like Knox’s, but nylon designed for insulation over water resistance, is soaked through at the shoulders.

My teeth are chattering so forcefully it’s more of a clatter.

I’m right behind Gran, who stops abruptly just before a crossroad to step around a fallen branch. I sidestep to avoid running into her, moving off the road and into the street.

What I thought was a cobblestone road turns out to be a pothole somewhere under the river of water running along the roadside by the curb.

My foot plunges down into frigid water that soaks me up to the knee, filling my shoes.

I lose balance, my ass plunging into the rushing water that hugs the curb to find the pavement below, and the motion of the current drags me several feet down the road to a massive pool ofwater circling a backed-up drain.

I’m soaked to the skin as thoroughly as if I’d jumped into a swimming pool, clothes heavy, making movement hard. The water is only a foot or so deep, but it’s strong. And it’s cold enough to make me shriek, sputtering and gasping to get out of it.

“Tilly!” Gran cries out.

“I’m okay,” I gasp, twisting to get as much of me out of the rushing water as possible.

A set of warm hands drags me bodily out of the water and carts me back to the curb.

“Can you walk?” Knox asks, dragging me bodily up the hill.

“Yes.” My teeth chattering painfully, I charge forward and nearly stumble again, but he slips his arm under mine. My legs feel like they’re made of splintered glass, every step as painful as if they were slicing apart my bones and sinews. “Let’s just … get Gran out of the rain.”

Water pours off of me, sloshing out of my sneakers, weighing down my clothes, so it’s like carrying fifty extra pounds, and my legs don’t want to work normally.

I keep up my momentum as best I can.

“She’s soaked,” Gran says, rushing in to catch my other arm.

“It won’t kill me,” I say, my voice little more than a breathless gasp as they tug me faster up the hill.

“Move,” Knox says tersely and I know we’re all remembering the dashboard reading in the car. It said 34 degrees Fahrenheit. So close to freezing.

By the time we get to the Alweston’s driveway, my teeth have quit chattering, and my feet don’t want to move.

They talk but I mostly tune it out.

He picks me up.

Because I guess at some point I quit walking.

“Staying awake. Fuck.”

Fuck.

I wriggle my toes, but I don’t think it works. They feel like potatoes. My fingers, too. Hard, painful, little lumps that don’t belong to me, bumping against my coat sleeves, which don’t even feel cold anymore. They rattle as Knox jogs up the driveway with me in his arms.

Under the small overhang at the front steps, the wind and the rain die back, then inside, the sound of it lessens, and the silence is restful, peaceful, as is the sway of his body as he carries me.

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