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“Nice,” Suri said, looking around. “It’s actually a lot cleaner in here now too.”
“Heyyyy,” Doreen grumbled again.
I chuckled. “Well, I cleared out some of the old gear today. I set up the camera on my balcony. It faces the ocean, so we should get a front view of Hazer comin’ straight at us. And that old anemometer that was on the shelf, I set it up at my mum and dad’s place. Oh, as well as the camera feed, I have one of those video doorbells. We should take a look.”
I grabbed my bag and took out my laptop. It took a little while to get it all up and running, but soon enough we had a video feed from my balcony, lookin’ directly out toward the gulf and Timor Sea, and the doorbell’s street view from the front of the house.
The view lookin’ out to the ocean was dark and foreboding, while the view at the front of the house looked like a beautiful sunny day. It looked like two different locations, worlds apart.
Suri moved a few things in the office, creating a safer place for her and me to sit against the wall and to make objects less of a missile should we lose windows or worse, the roof.
Then she plugged in some power boards and made sure everyone’s phones and my laptop were charging. “We don’t know how long we could lose power for,” she said, pulling out two power banks to charge as well. “Fingers crossed we don’t need them.”
“You sound like you’ve been through this before,” I said.
She shrugged. “I grew up with monsoons. But I’m from Banda Aceh.”
Banda Aceh...
Oh my god.
Oh my fucking god.
The entire province in Indonesia had been almost wiped off the planet back in ’04. I’d been only a little kid at the time, but peoplestilltalked about that tsunami. It had killed over 160,000 people in Banda Aceh alone...
Jeremiah turned his chair around so he could stare at her, his mouth open.
Yeah, he knew of it too, which wasn’t at all surprising given it was one of the most violent weather events of our time.
She smiled when she saw the recognition on our faces. “I moved here after that.”
I couldn’t even imagine...
“Jesus. And now you’re facing another natural disaster.”
She nodded with a long sigh. “What else can we do, huh? We just have to do our best.”
“Have you been through a cyclone before?” I asked.
Suri nodded. “Yes, but smaller. Not as big as this one.”
That didn’t instil much confidence in me. But the truth was, not many Cat 5s had ever touched down in Australia, and until they’d changed the rating system, there had beennobigger cyclones than Hazer.
And Doreen had lived through Cyclone Tracey. Together they had some experience and neither one seemed the type to panic, so maybe Jeremiah and I were in great company.
The video feed looked ominous though.
“Okay, here it comes,” I said, turning my laptop around so they could see the screen. “Here’s the rain.”
And sure enough, like any beast of that size, dark clouds crept slowly toward my balcony. Wind and a wall of rain marched right at us. Widespread and low, the sheer size of the front of it...
Jeremiah’s eyes met mine, solemn and sorry. “Hazer’s here.”
I gave Suri’s arm a squeeze. “You okay?”
She gave me a grim nod. “It’s not so much the rain that falls that scares me,” she said. “But the water that rises.”
Christ.
