AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She sighed and jerked her thumb at me. “Outta the chair.” Then she aimed it at Tully. “You too.”
He didn’t need telling twice, and given she was clearly not a morning person, I didn’t either.
“I’ll make some coffee,” Suri said, disappearing into the small kitchen. The light from the open doorway allowed me to see where I could lie down, and even though I doubted I’d be sleeping at all, I knew resting my body was a good idea.
Tully took a quick look at the laptop, and his illuminated face showed shock and disbelief. He turned the screen around so I could see, and despite it being pitch-black and rain slanting into the balcony, lightning lit up the harbour like a horror strobe light.
It showed how truly big the storm was, how dark the clouds were, how tumultuous the water was already. And the rain on the wind... God help us.
He closed the laptop and pushed it over near the wall, then manoeuvred my arm so I was his pillow, and he sighed against me.
Suri turned the light off, though I could smell the coffee she’d made. The sounds of the storm were loud, and the booms of thunder crashed in time with the flashes on the screens above the control panel. There was zero time differential, meaning the storm, the lightning, was directly on us.
The city of Darwin was getting a light show so constant and severe it almost made it look like daylight.
But the weight of Tully on my arm, his body against mine, his warmth, were like a weighted blanket, and the sound of heavy rain, thunder and lightning, were oddly comforting. And, by some miracle, or a testament to how exhausted I was, my eyelids closed.
I could have sworn I only blinked.
But soon Suri was gently shaking my shoulder. “I’m sorry, sweet boys,” she said. She glanced back at the control panel, at the radar showing the cyclone had finally crawled the final inch home. “It’s game time.”
Tully was now facing me, his face buried in my chest, his hair messed up. I think he’d drooled down my armpit.
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 east, 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.”
