Chapter Fifteen

The eye of the hurricane passed directly overhead. Around ten pm the wind, which had howled like a monster for hours, ceased. It dropped away to nothing within a minute or two. The silence throbbed.

Carmen lifted her head from Garrett’s shoulder and looked up at the roof. There was nothing to see. Not in here, anyway. Every available inch of concrete had been taken by Loyalist soldiers, who had filtered into the building in ones and twos not long after she had followed the colonel into the building.

Minnie’s husband. Carmen had to remind herself of that constantly, for Duardo was a stiffly upright machine soldier who didn’t miss a single thing. He led his team with fierce efficiency.

He’d rescued her and Garrett, too. Although they had broken out by themselves, Carmen hadn’t allowed for the strength of the wind. She would never tell anyone, even Garrett, that she suspected they wouldn’t have made it across the compound alive. Either the Insurrectos or the wind would have defeated them.

Forty minutes after Garrett had found the little tucked-away space behind the gantry that supported a catwalk and pulled Carmen down next to him, one of Duardo’s team had taken Garrett to the door to identify the rest of their unit, who had climbed up from the beach where they organized their demolition of the bridge.

“The Lieutenant wants you to vouch for them, as they’re your people,” the soldier explained to Garrett.

“Lieutenant?” Garrett questioned, for there had not been a lieutenant in the team that had found them in the building.

“Lieutenant Castellano, sir. He came in with them.”

That would be Nemesis, then, Carmen realized with a start. Nemesis was regular Army, too. So, his real name was Castellano.

Garrett returned five minutes later, settled next to her and drew her up against him, carefully avoiding jolting her arm and shoulder. “They’re all fine. Short on sleep like all of us, but I don’t think anyone will sleep until this storm is done.”

Night had turned the inside of the shed into a dark, warm and stuffy cave, filled with still and silent men. Carmen couldn’t sleep, because the sheets of tin on the roof rattled and stirred, thudding in the wind. She was confident that not even a hurricane could bring down the concrete walls, for they were over a foot thick. The roof was another matter.

Yet she had drifted into a doze anyway, only to be startled awake by the absence of wind.

She sat and looked at the roof once more. No banging. No shifting. No threatening to peel away and leave them all exposed.

“It’s over?” Garrett asked doubtfully. His voice was loud but flattened, as if she had cotton wool in her ears.

Carmen shook her head. “It’s the eye. We’re right in the middle of it.”

Others were stirring in the shed and the few who had flashlights or a cellphone with a charge had turned them on.

Carmen struggled to get to her feet. “It’s the eye,” she repeated. “Hell’s bells!”

Garrett read her mind. He jumped to his feet, bringing her with him. “Colonel!” he shouted. “We need to brace ourselves.”

Carmen stepped out around the steel superstructure they had been resting behind, searching for Duardo in the darkness. “Colonel!” she yelled. It sounded loud in the still silence.

From somewhere closer to the doors, Duardo spoke, snapping out the order. “Everyone up against the south walls. Brace the doors! Move it!”

Everyone in the shed scrambled, tripping over each other, grunting and protesting in the dark. Garrett caught her free arm and pushed her forward. “Come on.”

His grip on her arm stopped Carmen from stumbling over other soldiers’ feet and legs as they moved across the open area of the shed to the walls on either side of the big doors. Everyone pushed closer to the walls. They were two or three deep in places, although they obediently squashed themselves up against the walls.

A dozen men were standing by the iron doors, their backs against them.

Silence fell over the shed.

“How long?” Garrett asked her.

“I don’t know,” she confessed.

“You’re sure about this?”

She bit her lip.

“Sure about what?” someone asked in the dark.

“Tidal wave,” Garrett said shortly.

“Oh Jesus, Mary, Joseph…” someone muttered.

There was more muttering as the word passed.

“Silence!” Duardo roared.

Immediately, the shed fell still. Then they heard it.

To Carmen, it sounded like morning traffic she used to listen to through the closed windows of her apartment in Boston. A low murmur, made up of thousands of vehicles moving all at once.

The sound grew louder. It became a roar and now she could hear that it was water. Roiling, rushing water.

She turned her head against Garrett’s shoulder, glad that the dark hid her face and the fear that must surely be showing on it right now.

The wave hit the walls and she could feel the impact through the ground, which trembled. The shed doors, held down by dozens of men, groaned and shuddered. Water squirted in underneath them. It gushed through the gap between them, a raging wall of it, reaching up to their shoulders.

Garrett held her against him, his arm like an iron band around her shoulders. She didn’t mind the pain it caused.

Seawater lapped around her ankles and the brine smell was sharp.

After what could have been only a minute or two, but felt like hours, the water belching through the doors with fire hydrant pressure diminished down to a trickle, then halted altogether.

The sound of dripping and running water was loud.

People stirred, making the water ripple as their feet shifted. Someone laughed and shouted “Yee-ha!”

Everyone spoke at once, in tight, high voices, celebrating.

“Get the door open!” someone called. “With caution!”

The steel doors rattled as they slid back. Cool, fresh air brushed her face. It told her how stuffy it had grown in here. She struggled to her feet. “I have to go outside,” she told Garrett. “I’ve got to walk around.”

“Let the Army go first.”

They made themselves wait until most of the big shed was empty, then sloshed through the water toward the doors. Already, the level of the water was lowering as it found holes and cracks and channels to pour into.

The general and the colonel were both standing in the doorway, looking out. As Carmen reached them, the colonel nodded. “Okay, it’s clear.” He stepped out himself and the general followed, moving with an odd, stiff gait.

Carmen and Garrett stepped out behind them and breathed in deeply.

The air was still. She looked up into the sky. Overhead, the stars twinkled like any ordinary night, but all around them, on every horizon, were banks of cloud that glowed with ghostly light.

The water was everywhere. It was barely higher than her boot soles, yet it covered everything.

Garrett stepped up beside her and stretched his back, his hands on his hips. “My head is throbbing.”

“It’s the air pressure in the eye of the storm,” Carmen told him. “That’s why our voices sound muffled.” She looked around.

“No bodies,” Garrett said. “There were plenty of them lying on the ground when we stepped in here. Now, they’re all gone.”

“The wave took them,” Carmen said. Pity for them touched her. She reminded herself sharply of the cruelties and horror the Insurrectos had delivered upon innocent Vistarians since the revolution had begun…and for months before that, too.

“How long will this calm last?” Garrett asked, eyeing the cloud bank to the south-west. That was the oncoming second half of the storm.

Already, the tiniest of breezes brushed Carmen’s hair into her eyes. She pushed the tendrils away. The wind was coming from the opposite direction from before. “It’s nearly here already,” she said, looking to the south-west, too. “The eye is tiny and the pressure is high. This is a bad storm.” She glanced toward the smelter shed. The soldiers had thrown the doors fully open and many of them were walking about the flat ground in front of the shed, stretching and chatting. Their talking sounded subdued, although that could be the air pressure and her battered hearing.

“I guess we should head back inside,” she said with a sigh and turned toward the shed reluctantly.

Garrett caught her hand. “No, stay a minute,” he told her.

Carmen glanced at his hand, then at the soldiers standing nearby. She looked up at Garrett questioningly.

“There isn’t going to be a better time,” Garrett said, which told her he had understood her concern about eavesdroppers. Then he switched to English. “We’re always going to be surrounded by someone,” he added. “After this storm is over and after we get off this island and onto the main one, we’ll be living cheek by jowl with the rest of the unit. That’s situation normal. After the war…” He blew out his breath. “I don’t want to wait until after the war, Carmen. Wars change things. They change lives. I’ve seen too much of it and I know that if I don’t speak now, we could regret it.”

Carmen turned back to face him, her heart racing.

He held her hand between his and the pressure of his fingers on hers was hard. He wasn’t as calm as he appeared. Only, he was so good at keeping the neutral mask in place that nothing showed.

His gaze roamed over her face.

The hard lump in her chest hurt. “Just say it,” she told him. “Put me out of my misery.”

His eyes widened. “What do you think this is?” he asked.

“I don’t know!” she snapped back. “You’re bored, maybe. That all this is too complicated for you. That you’re going to live up to your unavailable status and kick me to the curb. I don’t know. You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s good to know I can scare you that way, Escobedo.”

“Sadist.”

“No, just all too human.” He touched her cheek. “Telling me you loved me…it caught me by surprise.”

Carmen dropped her gaze. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

“I guessed,” he said softly. “You don’t talk about your life much, but there’s a reason you’re still single despite being the most eligible woman in Vistaria. I think I’ve figured out most of that reason. I don’t think growing up being the most watched daughter in the nation helped much. Harvard must have been a relief. You would have been anonymous there.”

“Not so much,” Carmen said dryly. “They have the Internet in Boston, too.”

Garrett’s mouth quirked up in another lopsided smile. “You got to be yourself, really yourself—temper, smart mouth and all—when you walked into my camp. That’s the Carmen I love, not the one on the Internet.”

She caught her breath. Even her pulse seemed to pause. She stared at him, willing him to repeat what he had just said. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it.

“Yes, I mean it,” Garrett said softly. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking while the wind was too loud to hear anyone speak. It left me alone with my thoughts and made me think. So I’ve been thinking, possibly for the first time in ten years.” He raised her hand up, making her look at it and the grip his fingers had on her. “I don’t know where we’ll end up, Carmen, but wherever that is, I want you with me.”

“Live the life of a guerilla?” she asked. “Find a war and sign up?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Fighting wars, no matter how unfair they are, has lost its appeal for me. If it ever had any appeal. I can’t remember why I started doctoring in war zones. I’m sure one day I’ll figure it out, but only when there’s some distance between us and this one.”

“There are plenty of patients out there who aren’t war casualties,” Carmen told him. “Some of them are the neediest people on the planet.” She took a breath. “There’ll be thousands of them here in Vistaria once this war is over.”

Garrett nodded. “I like your thinking,” he said. “Only, I don’t want to lock us into any decisions. Nothing, for now. Not until the war is over and we know what it looks like on the other side. Can you live with that, Carmen?”

“Live with you, you mean? A day at a time?”

“Yes…I guess that’s what I’m asking. No commitments for now, except to stay with me.”

His proposal was the epitome of non-commitment, except that he was tying her to him in a formal way that would cement…whatever this was. She sighed. “I guess I’m expecting too much from an unavailable guy.”

Garrett’s eyes narrowed. “You would run straight back into that storm if I wasn’t,” he said. “If I dropped to my knees right now and asked you to marry me as soon as we found a chaplain, you’d bolt.”

Her heart did lurch. Just a little. She licked her lips, which were dry. “Are you asking?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I’d rather have you in my life, than destroying it.”

Relief touched her. Garrett knew her, better than anyone in the world. “We’re the same, aren’t we?”

“Unavailable, arrogant, stubborn and scared spitless of falling in love. I guess we screwed up the last bit.”

She nodded. “Would you…do you mind…” she began.

His brow raised.

“I want to kiss you,” she said, feeling absurdly shy. “Only it isn’t private here.”

Garrett wrapped his spare arm around her and drew her closer. “I guess we’ll have to get used to public declarations, won’t we?” He kissed her, right there in front of everyone.

Carmen didn’t notice the cheering and whistling and clapping until Garrett let her go.

Apparently, the Loyalist Army of Vistaria approved of her choice in men. The accolade warmed her and made her feel that for the first time, she was really and truly among people who cared.

The wind gusted, blowing her hair back into her face and Garrett pushed it aside once more. “Let’s head inside,” he said. “I want to grab that alcove again before someone else does.”

They turned and headed for the smelter shed door, as most of the soldiers scattered around the watery earth were doing. Garrett didn’t let go of her hand and Carmen had a hard time keeping the silly smile off her face.