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“He’s tracking east too fast,” Jeremiah said. “Once he touched land, he pinballed east.” He glanced back at Doreen like that wasn’t good news.
She got up and basically handed Suri over to me.
Poor Suri.
She looked unwell, stressed, and scared.
“You okay?” I asked her.
She nodded quickly. “I wasn’t prepared... I thought I was...”
I rubbed her arm. “You did good.”
She cradled Bruce and scrubbed a tear from her cheek.
“This has gotta be the eye, right?” I asked. Jeremiah gave me a nod, and I rubbed Suri’s arm again. “We’re halfway done. Just another half to go and it’ll all be over.”
I was still holding the towel with the bird in it—which was probably dead already; I wasn’t game to look—so I got up and found a box on the shelf. I tipped the contents out and gently put the towel in it and closed the lid. I put it down by Suri and she nodded.
“I’ll go out and see if I can fix the generator. Maybe it got disconnected from the mains,” I said.
Jeremiah was checking his phone. “No mobile service. Towers must be down.”
Fuck.
No power, no phone service.
“Can you try email?” Doreen asked.
Jeremiah quickly thumbed his phone screen, then looked up. “Cannot be sent.”
Jesus.
No internet meant major infrastructural damage.
Because Darwin wasn’t already isolated enough, we’d just lost all communication with the outside world.
I went to the door, almost hesitant to open it, but the silence on the other side gave me false hope.
I was expecting the wind to grab the door and I gripped it hard... only to find the world outside was calm and quiet. Hell, there was even a peek of blue sky.
“What the fuck,” I said.
It didn’t seem possible. Like I’d opened the door and walked on to the wrong movie set.
If it weren’t for the state of the yard, the water, the mud, the debris, branches, part of someone’s roof, I’d think maybe we imagined the whole terrifying thing.
I peered around the balcony, surprised to see the Jeep still there. The canopy was torn and hanging by two clips, there was a branch in it, and it looked like it had been towed out of a swamp, but it was still there.
I went down the steps, past the Jeep, and around to the back of the building. There was more debris at the rear of the yard, more roofing iron, a tarp, the plastic parts to a child’s playhouse. The kind Zoe’s kids had...
And the small concrete slab against the back wall by the ladder was still there, where the generator used to be.
The generator was just gone.
A rusted metal bolt stuck out of the concrete, bent and stripped bare.
Jesus.
