Page 81 of Freedom Fighters
“Tidal wave,” Garrett said shortly.
“Oh Jesus, Mary, Joseph…” someone muttered.
There was more muttering as the word passed.
“Silence!” Duardo roared.
Immediately, the shed fell still. Then they heard it.
To Carmen, it sounded like morning trafficshe used to listen to through the closed windows of her apartment in Boston. A low murmur, made up of thousands of vehicles moving all at once.
The sound grew louder. It became a roar and now she could hear that it was water. Roiling, rushing water.
She turned her head against Garrett’s shoulder, glad that the dark hid her face and the fear that must surely be showing on it right now.
The wavehit the walls and she could feel the impact through the ground, which trembled. The shed doors, held down by dozens of men, groaned and shuddered. Water squirted in underneath them. It gushed through the gap between them, a raging wall of it, reaching up to their shoulders.
Garrett held her against him, his arm like an iron band around her shoulders. She didn’t mind the pain it caused.
Seawaterlapped around her ankles and the brine smell was sharp.
After what could have been only a minute or two, but felt like hours, the water belching through the doors with fire hydrant pressure diminished down to a trickle, then halted altogether.
The sound of dripping and running water was loud.
People stirred, making the water ripple as their feet shifted. Someone laughed and shouted “Yee-ha!”
Everyone spoke at once, in tight, high voices, celebrating.
“Get the door open!” someone called. “With caution!”
The steel doors rattled as they slid back. Cool, fresh air brushed her face. It told her how stuffy it had grown in here. She struggled to her feet. “I have to go outside,” she told Garrett. “I’ve got to walk around.”
“Let the Army go first.”
They made themselves wait until mostof the big shed was empty, then sloshed through the water toward the doors. Already, the level of the water was lowering as it found holes and cracks and channels to pour into.
The general and the colonel were both standing in the doorway, looking out. As Carmen reached them, the colonel nodded. “Okay, it’s clear.” He stepped out himself and the general followed, moving with an odd, stiff gait.
Carmen and Garrett stepped out behind them and breathed in deeply.
The air was still. She looked up into the sky. Overhead, the stars twinkled like any ordinary night, but all around them, on every horizon, were banks of cloud that glowed with ghostly light.
The water was everywhere. It was barely higher than her boot soles, yet it covered everything.
Garrett stepped up beside her and stretchedhis back, his hands on his hips. “My head is throbbing.”
“It’s the air pressure in the eye of the storm,” Carmen told him. “That’s why our voices sound muffled.” She looked around.
“No bodies,” Garrett said. “There were plenty of them lying on the ground when we stepped in here. Now, they’re all gone.”
“The wave took them,” Carmen said. Pity for them touched her. She reminded herself sharplyof the cruelties and horror the Insurrectos had delivered upon innocent Vistarians since the revolution had begun…and for months before that, too.
“How long will this calm last?” Garrett asked, eyeing the cloud bank to the south-west. That was the oncoming second half of the storm.
Already, the tiniest of breezes brushed Carmen’s hair into her eyes. She pushed the tendrils away. The wind wascoming from the opposite direction from before. “It’s nearly here already,” she said, looking to the south-west, too. “The eye is tiny and the pressure is high. This is a bad storm.” She glanced toward the smelter shed. The soldiers had thrown the doors fully open and many of them were walking about the flat ground in front of the shed, stretching and chatting. Their talking sounded subdued, althoughthat could be the air pressure and her battered hearing.
“I guess we should head back inside,” she said with a sigh and turned toward the shed reluctantly.
