Chapter 8 Cora
The storm caught us in Missouri.
We had pushed the Oklahoma corridor for the next eight hours after Drew's reading.
Into Tulsa, around the south edge of the city, where a Bay-aligned cohort with a small radio relay had cleared us through the Tulsa fuel-deserts on the third truck's bandit-bike fuel, then east into the broken farmland west of Joplin where the post-invasion climate had been most chaotic.
The barometer had bottomed out at noon. The front had arrived at four.
By six we were driving through rain that the windshield wipers could not keep up with, in a corridor of state road that the post-invasion maintenance had reduced to a slick gray streak through grass that was twelve feet high in places where the soybeans had escaped the post-invasion farms and had gone feral.
We made it to the Joplin cache by midnight.
We were going to ride it out in the basement.
Drew set the camp. He did this without being asked.
The post-engagement-protocol thing he had learned from Renn, the cohort thing he had absorbed in the Oklahoma corridor and was now expressing in the camp-setup procedure.
He set the perimeter at three angles using the trucks themselves, parked Cruz's third truck across the basement entrance, ran cable from the lead truck's spotlight to the basement so that we had light without running the cabin batteries, and put Cruz on the south perimeter with the SAW broken down and in the dry.
Cruz let him do all of it. Cruz did not give him notes.
Cruz watched him set the camp and then nodded once and said good, and Drew nodded back, and that was the end of the conversation.
We were in the basement by twelve-thirty.
The basement was forty feet by sixty. Cement floor, half-collapsed staircase at the south end (Drew had braced what was left with two of the four salvage-lumber sections he had pulled from the second truck), one functional drain in the northeast corner.
The rain was loud through the broken roof of the Cracker Barrel above us.
The wind sounded like something living and angry.
We set the cots.
Sylvia did a medical sweep. Five minutes.
She inspected wrists, ankles, the soft tissue behind ears.
The post-engagement check for the small injuries that a person did not feel until forty-eight hours later when the adrenaline had cleared.
She found one fresh bruise on my forearm I had not noticed (carbine recoil; she handed me an analgesic).
She found nothing on Drew (he had not engaged Verel with anything that left him bruised, because the cut had been clean and the cohort sweep had been clean).
She found nothing on Cruz (Cruz had been on the SAW; SAWs left no signature on the body).
She did not check Renn (Renn had told her not to check Renn; Renn would check himself in privacy).
"Sleep," Sylvia said. "Storm is bad. We are not moving until it passes. Two-hour rotations. Drew first."
Drew nodded.
He went up the half-collapsed staircase. He took the storm-watch from the partial cover of the Cracker Barrel's surviving roof beam. He would be in the open, which meant he would get wet, which Sylvia did not say anything about because Drew had decided. She had let him.
I did not sleep for the first hour.
The storm was the storm I had not heard since the year-three Oklahoma cohort had been wiped out in a supercell that everyone in the alliance had been talking about for six months afterward.
The wind was the same. The pressure was the same.
The drop was the same. We were in the south edge of the system; the eye of the storm was forty miles north of us and moving east at twenty.
We were going to be in the storm for another six hours.
The basement was dark except for the spotlight wire Drew had run.
The light was a small pool at the center of the room.
The cots were arranged around the light in a hex pattern.
I was on the north cot. Sylvia was on the east cot.
Cruz was on the south cot. Renn was on the west cot.
There was an empty cot in the southwest corner, which was Drew's.
I lay on the north cot and listened to the storm.
I listened to the wind.
I listened to the rain.
I listened to the rate of the rain on the half-roof above us, which was slowing, then faster, then slowing, in pulses that I had stopped being able to keep track of after the first forty.
The barometer on the second truck dashboard had been below the calibration line for the last hour.
I had not slept in twenty-three hours.
I should have been asleep.
I was not.
At the eighty-minute mark of the first rotation, Sylvia got up. She walked to the staircase. She went up. She came back two minutes later, soaked, with a small bundle in her arms.
"What is that," I said.
"Drew. He took off his coat to wrap something. He is in the rain in his t-shirt with the rain hitting his skin. He is too cold."
"What did he wrap."
She held up the bundle.
It was the Steinbeck.
Wrapped in his coat. The coat had the inner-pocket where he kept the stone, and where the carving had been.
The carving was on the lead truck dashboard, so the coat pocket was the stone and now the book.
Drew had not gotten the book inside before the basement was set up — by the time the basement was ready the rain had been heavy enough that bringing the book down would have meant losing the cover.
So he had taken his coat off. Wrapped the book.
Tucked the bundle under the partial overhang of the Cracker Barrel roof, the driest part of the watch position.
And stood in the rain in his t-shirt to keep the book dry.
I sat up.
"Sylvia."
"I am going to put the book in the lead truck's cab. There is a dry shelf above the dashboard. The cab is sealed. The book will be fine."
"I'll go."
"No. You sleep. I will go. I have already been wet."
"Sylvia."
"Cora."
I lay back down.
She went out.
She came back four minutes later. The book was no longer in her hands.
The coat was in her hands. She walked it to the staircase.
She went up. She gave Drew the coat. I heard the half-Vampyren clinical-observation voice say thank you twice, the second one quieter. She came back down. She lay on her cot.
She said: "You and I are going to talk to him about this when the storm is over."
"Yes."
"You first."
"Yes."
She slept.
I did not.
I lay on the north cot for the rest of the first rotation and listened to the storm and listened to Drew above me, on the staircase landing, breathing the way half-Vampyren breathed when they were cold and were not letting themselves shiver, and I thought about Ellen Reyes in a half-collapsed apartment in Phoenix in 2018 reading the Joads to a four-year-old half-Vampyren who twenty-one years later was standing in a storm in his t-shirt to keep her book dry.
I closed my eyes.
I did not sleep.
* * *
The storm broke at six in the morning.
The wind dropped in five minutes. The rain became less than a deluge and more than a drizzle. The temperature came back up by ten degrees. The barometer on the second truck (Renn had brought it inside) clicked up two points in the first fifteen minutes after the front passed.
We came out of the basement.
The Cracker Barrel lot was a lake. The convoy was wet. The trucks were intact. The basement seals had held; nothing inside had taken water. Drew was on the staircase landing, soaked through, the coat now back on, his hair flat to his skull. He looked at me.
I went up the staircase.
"Drew."
"Cora."
"Tell me about the book."
"I did not want it to get wet."
"You stood in a supercell in a t-shirt for six hours."
"I would have stood in it for twelve."
"Why."
He was quiet.
"Drew."
"Ellen's marginal notes were in pencil."
"This isn't Ellen's copy."
"I know."
"You stood in a storm to keep a copy of a book that is not the copy with the notes."
"Yes."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Why."
He looked at me.
"Because Ellen's copy is at Mojave. I do not have it.
This copy is the copy I have. The copy I have is.
Cora. I have been carrying Ellen's copy for eleven years without opening it.
I have been carrying it. The carrying is what mattered.
I did not open it because the opening was the cost. This copy I opened.
I read the first chapter to you in the cab yesterday.
I opened it. I have not closed it. The opening is.
Cora, the opening is a thing I did not know I could do.
I do not want to lose the opening. The opening is the new thing.
The book is the new thing. I stood in the rain because if the book got wet the opening would be wet and I would have to dry the opening and the drying would take a week and I do not have the week.
The book is fragile. I am not. I stood in the rain because I am the version of the two of us that the rain can take. "
I looked at him.
"Drew."
"Yes."
"You just talked for almost a minute."
"I know."
"That is the most you have said to me in one breath in nine months."
"I know."
"Are you okay."
"No."
"Why not."
"Because the opening is new. The new is hard.
The new is the part of me that I do not yet have a shape for.
The shape will arrive. I will live with the new until the shape arrives.
I am asking. Cora. I am asking the new to wait until we have brought Deedee home, but I do not control the new.
The new is happening at the rate it is happening.
I am not in charge of the rate. I am just trying not to drop the book in the meantime. "
"Drew."
"Yes."
"You will not drop the book."
"I might."
"You will not. Sylvia and I will not let you. Cruz and Renn will not let you. The book is in the cab now. It is dry. It will stay dry. We will get Deedee home and we will get the book home and you will not have to be the version of us the rain takes again. Are you listening."
"Yes."