Moved by her weeping, Ros opens the covers and makes room. “Come on. Get in.”
Amaia curls up tight against her sister, making herself as tiny as possible. Ros is talking to her from somewhere far away. “But you’ll have to go back to your own bed before Ama comes to get us up, because she’ll get mad if she sees you here. Amaia? Are you listening?”
Amaia doesn’t hear her. Safe now, she’s sleeping deeply.
Then . . .
Her eyes fly open. Instead of the deep silence she expects, there is a loud pealing in her head. The bells continue, reverberating, ding-dong. She sits up and looks at her sisters, amazed that the deafening clamor hasn’t awakened them. She realizes that behind the tolling, there’s a furious roaring, like gusting wind or a house on fire. She senses something close by; she turns to look at the doorway and glimpses the pearly silk of her mother’s robe, billowing as she walks down the hall. Amaia slips out of bed, and her bare feet encounter the floor, now cold; the house is freezing. She peeks out and sees the amber-colored light reflected from the living room. Her mother is still visible, far away, her back turned to Amaia. The rear hem of the robe floats after her, a ghostly wake. Ding-dong! Amaia tells herself that it has to be a dream. No one in this house, no one in all of Elizondo, could sleep through this tolling.
The ominous insistence of the bells shocks her. She puts her hands over her ears, trying to shut out the sound, and she becomes aware of an evil portent—a loud, dreadful breathing that fills the intervals between the peals. She stares about her. Blood streams from the bedrooms, pooling in the living room. Shaking with cold and fright, she goes slowly down the hall.
She finds an entire family laid out on the floor, first the adults, then the children from oldest to youngest. The littlest one is her own age. Ding-dong! The horrid, deafening tolling erupts from the walls of the music room in an evocation of Judgment Day. Amaia is shaking violently from the cold. The arms of the dead lie lax along their bodies; she avoids looking at their hands. Each head in that precisely laid-out line is oriented toward the river that Amaia knows is north of them. Small-caliber bullets have left a dark circular mark in each forehead. She’s terrified because she knows their wounds are impossibly deep. The hair of the littlest boy, the one closest to her, is tousled and tangled as if he’d squirmed and thrashed under the covers in his sleep. Blood from his broken skull has gushed out and soaked his hair, turning it into a dark, sticky mass that looks like molasses. The blood puddles next to him, slowly oozing toward Amaia. Her heart breaks. She feels an irresistible urge to stanch the flow with her own hands, even though she knows she shouldn’t.
She opens her eyes and sees that Rosario’s face is inches from her own. Her mother’s expression is one of absolute disdain.
“Maybe you think it doesn’t matter when? One night is the same as another?” Rosario asks with contempt written across her face. “You think none of this matters?” Rosario makes a grand gesture, her arms encompassing the living room, the bodies, the music. She comes closer, so terrifyingly close that her hot, sour breath stirs Amaia’s hair across her brow. “Maybe you think I’m crazy? No . . . Ama isn’t going to gobble you up tonight! Go to sleep, you little vixen.”
Amaia bolted upright as if erupting through the surface of a frozen lake. Trembling in terror, she was drenched in perspiration and cold dread. She fought for breath and looked around, hoping she hadn’t screamed, knowing she hadn’t slept, certain she’d closed her eyes for only a few seconds.
Do the dead stand at the foot of your bed, Salazar? Dupree’s voice berated her in her mind. It’s a goddamn hallucination, for fuck’s sake! Stress, fatigue, worry, and a half-waking dream. Just a goddamn hallucination.
“The dead are . . . just dead. That’s all,” she whispered, trying to convince herself. She realized she’d said that aloud, and she whipped around to make sure the other team members were still asleep.
They were.
Groggy, she got up and fumbled her way to the door. In her confusion she thought that maybe the roar of the storm would help fend off her nightmare. Maybe you think I’m crazy?
Almost instantly, the wind seemed to double in strength. It became a howl almost human. Amaia pressed a hand to her chest, shaken suddenly by an obscure shudder, and she followed her instinct to seek the light. There had to be distinctions; it wasn’t true that one night was the same as another. There was no such thing as chance, and when her mother came gliding silently to her bed, it wasn’t to grant her another night’s sleep. Ama wasn’t sparing her life; she was confirming a death sentence. Just as Martin Lenx had done.
The operations center was boiling hot, even though the air-conditioning was turned up high. In the blue glow of a dozen flat screens hung from the ceiling, Amaia saw images from traffic cameras. Rain and wind swept along deserted streets. The furious blast propelled branches, signs, plastic sheeting, boards ripped from windows, and gutters torn away from roofs by the impact of the hurricane. More than half the screens showed nothing, for the storm shaking the cameras reduced the images to gray, unfocused blobs.
The high temperature was due both to the lack of windows and to the combined body heat of all the people in the room. Thirty operators sat at computer screens, and a dozen assistants moved from workstation to workstation. The supervisor stood at the central desk next to his deputy, the woman they’d briefed about how to identify an attack by the Composer. She beckoned to Amaia. She poured iced coffee into a paper cup and gave it to Amaia. She didn’t get up; instead, she pulled another chair close to her workstation so Amaia could join her.
“Sit here, sweetie. This place is a madhouse.” She pointed overhead to one of the monitors showing surging gray sheets of rain whipping through the darkness. “Katrina’s in Louisiana; she came ashore over Buras, in the western Mississippi Delta. That’s a traffic camera out on the interstate. That’s all we have. All the other lines are down. The hurricane center’s talking about a twenty-eight-foot hurricane tide.”
Amaia stared at her, impressed. “Twenty-eight feet, that is . . .”
“Honey, it just is.”
Amaia saw that the woman was terrified.
“We have no way to confirm the reports. Most of what we’ve got is rumors passed along from 911. Communications are down all along the coast. They say Gulfport and Biloxi are underwater.” She took a shuddering breath. “I have friends down there.”
Amaia saw the glint of tears in the woman’s eyes.
“And here in the city?” Amaia asked, wanting information but wanting just as much to change the subject.
“Some places have been without power since it went down this morning. Lucky for us, the phones are still working. What we’re really worried about is that when the power came back on, some of the pumps along the main drains failed. They’re dead. The hurricane center says the flood tide is going to push water from Lake Pontchartrain toward the coast. It’s already over the banks and flooding the nearest houses. In fact, it’s right downstairs, outside this building.”
Amaia found that incredible.
“But it’s not the lake we’re worried about. Those floodwaters won’t move very fast. This has happened before. But if the hurricane winds push the Mississippi waters upstream, like with Hurricane Betsy, they might crest above the levees. In some spots, the city’s six feet or more below sea level, so if those pumps don’t start, the streets’ll fill up. And it’s going to keep raining. Central City has just started to flood, but water’s flowing in torrents out on Highway 90.”