Page 47 of Into the Tempest

Ugh.

I unwound my arm from around him and he rolled onto his back with a groan. I sat up and realised what I was hearing...

The wind and rain. Howling so constantly it sounded like brown noise.

“Holy shit,” I said, almost having to yell. “It’s loud.”

“Creeps up on ya, don’t it?” Doreen said. “Until you get so used to hearin’ it you don’t even hear it no more.”

Suri reappeared with two fresh coffees. I stood up and took one, and she handed the other to Tully, who was still sitting on the floor, trying to come to terms with the world. “’S time?” he asked.

“Six o’clock,” Suri answered.

I sat in my seat and took in the dash, the radars, the data, the warnings, the alerts, the non-stop beeping and flashing lights. How had I managed to sleep at all?

The darkness of our boarded-up office was deceiving because daylight had broken. I looked up at the screens above the panel. One was from the top of the news station building. It was looking pretty wild out there.

Seeing the radars and knowing what those numbers meant was quite different to seeing the live feed.

Palm trees were leaning at angles, fronds strung taut in the wind, small debris and rubbish swept along flooded waterlogged streets. Water from the bay was ebbing onto the road, the shores and sand no longer visible.

The foreshore and CBD were close to going under as the tide came in.

And the cyclone hadn’t even started yet.

The low-lying areas to the west, into Kakadu and Arnhem Land, were flooding. Heavy falls continued to batter them.

Tully opened his laptop and went straight to the breakfast news channel. He turned up the volume.

“All eyes in the country are on Darwin this morning as daylight breaks and we can begin to see the size, the monstrosity of what is yet to come as Cyclone Hazer bears down on an already battered city.”

There was a news reporter standing out in the street, like an idiot. She looked vaguely familiar as one of the reporters who Tully had told to take a hike. She wore a yellow raincoat, spoke to the camera, having to yell to be heard over the noise. She was being spattered by rain, the view behind her was of the street fronting the foreshore, barely recognisable.

I sighed. “She’s an idiot for standing out there.”

“They make them do it,” Doreen said.

“Well, any producer who makes their reporters stand in harm’s way for good ratings should be fired.” I shook my head. “The ratings will be awesome when she’s speared with flying debris live on morning television. Great family viewing.”

Doreen snorted, and Tully sipped his coffee. “I think she’s the one I gave an earful to the other day.”

“We’ve had non-stop reports coming in from the weather bureau overnight,” the reporter said on the screen. “Now, we know that station has to be controlled manually, so I’d like to give a shout out to the hardworking team that gives us the information to keep us safe.”

“Woo-hoo!” Doreen hollered and whacked my shoulder. “She made us out to be heroes.”

I rolled my eyes. “I still don’t like her, and she’s still an idiot for standing out there like that.”

Tully shrugged. “Well, at least she’s not here, annoying us.”

That was true. “Fair point.”

“Gonna call my fam,” he said, quickly hitting the FaceTime app. In just a few seconds, the screen filled with a bunch of faces. “Hey, guys,” he said.

“Morning, Tully,” his dad said. Others chorused in as well.

Including Ellis. “Hey, dick bag.”

Then Rowan and two women I’d never seen before—maybe Zoe and Rowan’s wife—shoved him out of the screen, admonishing his language in front of the kids.

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