May Day (The Erelong Trilogy Book II)

Deluge

"I don't want to fly the paramotor no more," Storm said as he walked into the living room.

The rain had stopped, and the stink was worse than when they had first walked through the front door. Only, this was not the rotting carpets. It was the smell of death drifting through from the open sliding doors to the porch. Hundreds of dead bird carcasses clogged the gutters and drains. When he had flown in, he had seen the small bodies from above. The gray clumps of lint littered the roads, sidewalks, rooftops, and backyards.

Storm expected to find Cameron sitting in a chair eating his breakfast from a can. He wasn't in the kitchen or the living room. He walked through the porch doors and found him.

The corporal was standing with his hands on his hips. He had a grim set to his jaw as he stared at a swimming pool surrounded by long grass. He was so fascinated by whatever it was that he saw he did not bother to look around as Storm joined him on the debris-covered porch.

The morning looked promising. The dark cloud mass was higher now. Perhaps the weather was going to settle down. The cloud cover might even break and let the Sun's rays through once again.

"I don't want to fly the paramotor again," Cameron said, finally answering the question Storm had asked. "But the rigs are all we have to get us back to Coona."

"It's too dangerous now," Storm replied. There were large milky-white bubbles strung across the surface of the pool. Plastic bags blown into the water and captured between the metal sides to skate across the surface whichever way the wind blew.

Cameron walked down the steps and through the high grass. When he reached the edge of the pool he started retching. Floating in the oily water were the decomposing bodies of two adults and a child. They were blown-up with gas just like oversized party balloons.

"They never left home after all," Cameron said, turning to face Storm. "Those are the poor buggers we should be thanking for our food and shelter..."

"What do you think happened?" Storm asked quietly.

"It looks to me like the kid fell in," Cameron replied. "They came to the rescue and jumped in too. Apparently, none of them could swim."

"The water wouldn't even be over their heads! Anyway, why have a swimming pool if you can't swim?"

"It doesn't make sense to me either," Cameron muttered. He was sure he did know though. There was a logical reason they drowned, only it really did not make sense. He watched their blown corpses shift as the wind whipped the surface of the water, and he took a quick step back to escape the smell.

From the house came the sound of glass shattering. The first lump of ice was the size of a baseball. It struck the lawn and bounced high above the grass. Then came another ice ball, and another. They reached the porch just ahead of the onslaught. They retreated into the hallway when in seconds the thunder of ice on the roof reached a crescendo. The deluge was over in minutes.

The stillness that followed fitted with the general pattern of the past few days. There was no telling how long it would last. Cameron knew there was never going to be a better time to get into the paramotors into the air. Reason might tell him otherwise, but since reason had failed him many times over the past week, he was going to go with intuition. So long as they kept their eyes open for signs of a vortex they would make it. To his relief, the boy didn't argue.

Storm was only too happy to be leaving the house and the entire suburb. The sooner they reached Alistair and gave the information needed to his organization, the sooner they could leave Sydney and return to the farm.