Chapter 8 - Reid #2
Her name is the only thought that survives in my head, Luna.
I claw my way across the heaving pavement to where she's sprawled on the boulevard grass and cover her body with mine.
Jules comes down half across the both of us a second later, his arms bracketing us, his heartbeat slamming against my back.
Through the gap under my arm, I can see Gage down on the road with Elenor and Kara hauled against his chest, trying to hold them both steady as the ground bounces under us.
Mars is braced over Torrin with shadows spread wide around them both in a ragged dark canopy that catches a rain of glass pebbles from somebody's window.
The shaking doesn’t stop. It goes on past the point where I stop counting seconds and past the point where my clenched teeth start to ache.
Somewhere in there I become certain the ground has simply forgotten how to be still and this is the world now.
Luna's fingers are wound through mine hard enough to grind bone.
I press my lips to her hair and hold on, and distantly I realize the awful keening sound threaded through the roar is every dog in the neighborhood howling.
Then, with a last rolling shudder and a groan from deep underneath us, it stops.
The silence afterward isn't really silence. It’s just the absence of that roar that hit us.
Car alarms wail up and down the block, glass tinkles down from broken frames in delicate little afterthoughts, and my own pulse pounds loud in my ringing ears.
Nobody moves for a long moment, all of us waiting flat on the ground for the world to change its mind again.
"What the fuck," Jules finally rasps from on top of me. "Seriously, what the actual fuck was that?"
"Is everyone okay?" Gage is already up on one knee, head swiveling, counting us the way he does. "Sound off for me. Is anybody hurt?"
Voices come back shaky but whole. There are scraped palms and a bloody knee for Kara that she declares a crime against her favorite pants, but nothing worse.
I help Luna sit up and run my hands up and down her arms twice before I believe she's in one piece.
She catches my fingers and squeezes, and her hands are shaking as hard as mine.
"That wasn't just an earthquake." Torrin's voice sounds dazed. "The boom came first. Explosions boom, earthquakes don't, and there's nothing around here that could..."
"That was Yellowstone."
Elenor speaks from where she's still sitting on the pavement, and something about the flat, certain way she says it drags every head around.
My grandmother-by-choice is the least serious person I've ever known.
There's no trace of that woman in her face right now.
She looks old, and she looks frightened, and both of those things scare me more than the shaking did.
"You mean the super volcano? The one in Wyoming?" Kara stares at her. "Gigi, that's over a thousand kilometers away." That fact that Kara calls her Gigi instead of Elenor tells me just how scared my sister is right now.
"I know exactly where it is, and I know what it can do, and this is what I've been afraid of since the quakes started.
" Gigi climbs to her feet, waving off Gage's offered hand, and dusts her slacks with brisk motions while her eyes track south along the horizon.
"Alberta doesn't shake like that. This province sits about as far from a major fault line as God could put it, so when the ground here starts dancing, it means something enormous is moving, and there's only one enormous thing in that direction.
If that's what just let go, then what we felt is only the fist part of the problems coming our way. "
The words drop into my stomach and keep falling. "What does that mean," I ask her nervously, "for us?"
"It means we get inside, we take stock, and we make a plan tonight, not tomorrow.
" She turns from the horizon and there's steel in her now, the same steel that held Luna together after the accident took everyone else.
"I'll explain the rest inside, but I'll tell you this much out here.
The sky is going to change in the next few days, and we don't want to be standing under it when it does. Now move those young legs, all of you."
Nobody argues with Elenor when she uses that voice.
We stagger down the middle of the street in a ragged clump, stepping around fallen fence boards and a brick chimney that now lies scattered across the Pattersons' lawn.
Every house we pass wears at least one blank, glassless window.
Luna's porch is still standing when we reach it, the house solid even with a new crack running through the front walk.
She cuts through the side yard and grabs the garage door handle of the man door, hauling it open.
We all follow her into the garage that now looks like a grocery store staging area.
She walks past it all to open the house door and barely gets it open before seventy pounds of golden retriever comes rocketing out.
"THE SKY brOKE, THE SKY brOKE AND THE GROUND WAS ANGRY AND I WAS ALONE, I hid under the big table and I was very brave but also I peed, and the boom was SO LOUD, and then the whole house shook and nobody came, and I thought my girl was gone forever, but now MY GIRL IS HERE, MY GIRL CAME BACK, and the tall one is here, and the sad-smelling new one came back too, and EVERYONE IS HERE, this is the best worst day that has ever happened to anyone. "
The voice slams into the middle of my skull at a volume that makes Torrin's command power feel like a whisper. My knees actually dip. Penny bounces off Luna's legs, ricochets to Gage, spins twice, and jams her nose into Torrin's dangling hand, and every single second of it comes with narration.
"My girl smells wrong, she smells scared and like strangers and smoke, but underneath she smells like MY GIRL, and the big one is patting me, the big one gives the best pats, and the tired one is here, he shares his toast when the others aren't looking, I love him, I love the toast, I LOVE EVERYONE, is anyone going to acknowledge that I guarded this entire house alone, I also chewed one shoe, we don't need to discuss that though. "
"Somebody's happy to see us." Jules laughs as Penny blurs past him, and the sound comes to me from a long way off. Her voice keeps climbing over itself in my head, louder and faster, joy and leftover terror running over each other with no space between the words.
"The curly one, THE CURLY ONE IS HERE, he's my favorite, don't tell the others, wait!
" Penny skids to a halt in front of me with her tail mid-wag, and her brown eyes lock onto mine with sudden, terrible focus.
"You can hear me. YOU CAN HEAR ME. I always knew you were the smartest one, I have SO MUCH to tell you, first there's a squirrel that lives in the front tree and he is my enemy, second the mailman stopped coming and I have theories, third the sky broke, we covered that, fourth... "
My hands are on my head. Some distant part of me knows I'm swaying on my feet in front of everyone, pressing my palms against my skull in a useless attempt to hold her voice out.
It doesn't help, nothing helps, because her love and her leftover terror pour through my brain at full volume.
There's no way I can find to turn it down.
"Reid, look at me." Luna's worry cuts through, her hands grasping me near my elbows and immediately the pain receded and Penny’s voice seems to dim as Luna asks, "Hey, hey, what's wrong?"
"It's my head." The words grind out through my teeth. "Just from the blast, that's all, I just need... can somebody please put the dog in the yard?"
Jules swears but doesn't ask a single question.
He scoops all seventy squirming pounds of Penny up against his chest and carries her through the garage door into the house, aiming for the back yard.
Her voice thins out even more with every meter of distance he puts between us.
"The loud one has me, this is fine, I like the loud one, we're going somewhere, is it dinner, IS IT DINNER... "
Then the volume drops to a distant murmur behind the walls of the house, and I can finally hear my own thoughts again. I stand there in the garage breathing hard while my family watches me with worried eyes and no idea at all what just happened.
They can't know, not yet, not tonight, not on top of a broken sky and whatever Gigi is about to tell us.
But as Luna slides her arm around my waist and steers me toward the garage, one truth follows me in through the door.
It's cold and certain under all that golden retriever joy.
Every animal in this world has a voice now, and every one of them is going to be screaming after today.
If I don't find a way to block out the noise, it's going to drive me insane.