To Make A Storm Worse

The rain was exciting at first. 

The forecast had been the talk of the town for days leading up, and a nervous anxiousness descended upon the people like the clouds that would soon come in. At first, it may not have sounded like anything far out of the ordinary – heavy rains with the potential for storms.

But this desert town hasn’t seen a drop of water from the sky in years, let alone a storm, and for many of the hundreds of thousands of people here, this would be their first.

They prepared for it like a blizzard. In the days before, thousands of people sucked their local Walmarts and Targets dry of survival essentials like toilet paper and chocolate blueberries, tragically only leaving them behind with the piles of money made as profit. Suddenly, gasoline was the hottest commodity on the block with long lines forming at each station, everyone making sure they had enough to travel nowhere.

It wasn’t all just a panic however. Many saw this as a chance to slow down and enjoy the indoors, purchasing board games and hot drinks in the hopes they be allowed a cozy night. For the towns craziest, they bought buckets and rain shovels to bake and sell mud pies or practice their construction skills building mud castles.

A cozy night in was the hope for Morton and his friends, whose attentions were now briefly drawn to the sound of the first taps of light droplets on the window. The three of them were seated on the floor around an opened but not yet set up game of Risk, which they would get back to doing, as for a moment they were distracted by the affirmation that water could fall from the sky. 

“You know, I’ve seen rain before.” his friend Johnson said a tad ominously, “It’s really not as bad as they says.”

“Everyone’s seen rain before.” Charles, the third (not as in III but the third person), replied, turning back to the box and taking the board out.

“Not like this they says,” Johnson responded, his eyes still glued to the glass while lighting a cigarette, “Not like this in the desert they says…..”

Morton looked at Charles and put his hands up, confused, to which he got a similar response back.

“Okay first of all, like I’ve said, no smoking inside my house,” Morton answered to Johnson who didn’t look thrilled at that, “And second why are you talking like that.”

Johnson groaned and rubbed his cigarette into his pants, putting it out before it really got a chance to live.

“You always know how to be a buzzkill Morton,” he replied, grabbing the red pieces like he always did,  “Okay, let’s just play the damn game.”

Tonight’s round of Risk was a hotly contested match, which is a shame to see for a game that no one has ever finished and would likely have no resolution. The situation had gotten particularly hostile over South America, with Johnson looking to break Charles hold for the fourth time in a row.

“Bro, can you attack Morton!” Charles shouted in frustration, pointing at Morton’s strong presence in Australia and Africa.

“Why the hell would I do that.” Johnson snapped back.

Morton saw this as a good time to get up and make some hot tea to hopefully diffuse the intensifying game. He opened the new box of earl gray that he’d bought earlier and placed the bags into three separate mugs.

Morton made his way back with three cups in his hands that he then passed out to the rest of the gang.

“Why don’t we chill out and play something else.” Morton suggested.

The rain, which had been steady for some time now, was suddenly slammed into the side of the house from a gust of wind. Right on queue, the intensity of the storm picked up with it. The guys looked at each other worried for a moment, but then immediately proceeded to act nonchalant like they didn’t even care.

Morton, however, offered to put the news on the tv, to stay updated of course, to which no one objected. He flipped to his favorite weatherman on channel 7, who was now broadcasting live from closer to downtown, standing in pretty heavy downpour. 

“As you can see,” the weatherman struggled to get out onto his microphone with the heavy winds occasionally overpowering his voice,  “It’s pretty rainy out here!”

“To my left there’s some pretty significant flooding on the streets,” he pointed over to the bottom of a hill where you could once see road, “Unlike what I’m doing, I’d suggest staying at home tonight!”

At that moment, a crack of lightning lit up the dark night outside quickly followed by what sounded like an explosion, immediately shutting off the tv and lights and causing the brave friends to scream in terror. 

“What the!” Johnson cried.

“Did we just get bombed?” Charles shouted.

Morton, the quickest of the bunch, hopped to his feet in a flash and looked around his house.

“I think I have some guns somewhere if we need them guys-”

He was cut off by the sound of the tv starting up and the lights deciding to come back again. The boys breathed out a sigh of relief, but they realized that whatever was going on, this wasn’t the time to mess around anymore. They agreed they should take some small safety measures against this storm, just in case.

Johnson came up with the brilliant idea to barricade some of the walls, in order to provide more structural integrity against the high winds. They got right to work on the main floor, pressing and spreading out chairs against what felt right. They figured the door could be one of the weakest points so, combining their strength, they pushed one of the sofas up to it. They brushed off their hands and stepped back to admire their work.

“Wait, but the flooding!” Morton said out loud, remembering that poor street that was God knows how many hundreds of feet under the water. They collectively decided to reinforce the cove joints, and moved any absorbent enough looking carpets and rugs up to the floors baseboards. Morton grabbed nearly all the towels he could find in his linens closet, and with those they were able to nearly cover every joint of the main floor. He breathed a sigh of relief. The power was back, the lights were on, he was technically still winning in Risk – everything was gonna be alright.

They made their way back to the living room when an unusually fidgeting object just outside the window caught Morton’s eye. He quickly made his way up to the glass.

The pouring buckets of rain mixed with the pitch black sky made it difficult to make out, but with intense focus, he was able to notice that an arm of one of his cactus’s seemed to be violently waving  to him just a little too uncomfortably much. 

In a split second, its arm was ripped off its body and flung straight towards Morton’s house. He flinched as it left a noticeable thud off the panels of his home, just barely missing the window, before hitting the muddy wet dirt and tumbling off with the rest of things the wind had decided to take for itself. 

The other two looked over, startled.

“Holy! That was close.” Charles muttered, visibly shaken up, “Imagine if that hit the window.” 

“That easily could’ve,” Johnson said strongly, facing Morton, “And there’s many more projectiles out there that can.” 

He paused for a moment, in thought.

“We need to open the windows!”

“Are you crazy?” Charles cried.

“No he’s right…” Morton said in realization, a bit awed by Johnson's genius, “Shattered glass is way more dangerous than just a single object. We need to get these windows open now.”

Charles wasn’t heavily on board with this, but watching the other two snap into action left him feeling like he didn’t really have a choice. Reluctantly, he made his way upstairs.

Morton quickly switched open the two locks on the window he’d just witnessed the cactus tragedy and slid the glass up.

He was instantly assaulted by hundreds of sharp rain drops, propelled at full force thanks to the howling wind. They cracked against the hardwood floors like little marbles. Sure the house was going to get wet, but this was definitely better than shattered glass. And anyway the house was already getting wet on the outside.

Johnson was a workhorse. He was cracking open windows like he went to school and had no problem getting  into even the worst placed spots like the one over the sink. In just a few minutes, he’d blown through most of them on the floor.

Morton pushed over a bin of dirty clothes in the laundry room to slide open his final one and then made his way back to the living room to where Johnson was already standing. 

Specks of water were flung all throughout the house like mist followed closely by the angry roar of the wind. It was growing difficult to hear and harder to see from the stinging of the rain. Morton and Johnson hurried into the kitchen where they would be less affected.

Charles, who had disappeared for longer than expected, managed to rejoin them. He confirmed he’d closed everything upstairs, but he was looking around at the scene worriedly, regretting that. 

It was getting cold, for reasons no one could figure out why. The three friends had thought about opening the fridge to get something to eat, but they didn’t want to release any of the frigid air out and risk hypothermia.

Johnson, the group mastermind at this point, came up with yet another incredible plan to save the day. They needed to make a fire, just like their ancestors used to back many trillions of years ago, and thankfully he had just the perfect tool to do so. 

It couldn’t have been more conveniently timed for the power to suddenly go out – and this time for good. They screamed like they were babies on an airplane. Mind you, these were grown men in their mid 20’s, so you can imagine how bad this storm was.

Like Batman with his batarang, he whipped out his lighter and barked at the others to quickly find anything flammable. Charles and Morton helplessly stumbled through the pitch black house, bumping into walls and finding nothing of value. 

A lightbulb may not have lit up in real life, but one suddenly did go through Morton’s head who remembered he had an entire closet of clothes upstairs. It was gonna hurt to burn a collection he’d been building up for a while now, but there was gonna be no one to wear those clothes if he didn’t make it past this night.

In a flash he was in his room scooping heaping piles of shirts and pants, before he charged back down and dumped them onto the island countertop. The others applauded his brave sacrifice. Johnson then wasted no time kicking off the several attempts it was going to take to get them lit up.

Shockingly, the clothes caught fire on the first try, and a small blaze rose up from the sacrifice, delivering some much needed warmth and light back into the home.

Morton looked around. The whole scene felt like it was out of the Titanic. To his dismay, pools of water had developed on the floors of the sides of the house, and the flooding was quickly spreading towards the center of the room. Streams of water were cascading down the steps like rushing waterfalls onto the hardwood, veering off into various directions.

“Oh my god! Where do you think the flooding’s coming from?” Morton cried, rooted to his spot in his disbelief. Him and Charles both turned to the voice of reason and the only person who could save them in this moment.

Johnson couldn’t lie to himself, he was scared out of his pants but took deep breaths and began scanning his surroundings.

“The baseboards….” Johnson slowly realized, “Guys the towels weren’t enough! The water’s coming through the baseboards and parts of the walls that are closer to the middle. We need to reinforce them somehow.”

Morton thought for a second. There was wall over the place that wasn’t doing anything, now that Johnson mentioned it.

“What if we tore out drywall from the areas that are pretty geometrically reinforced, like the corners, and we patch extra dry walls on the parts that aren’t!?”

“That would work…” Charles thought out loud, which meant a lot coming from him since he had taken a physics course in college.

Like with all the other tasks, not a second was wasted getting straight to work, punching through the drywall with their bare hands, occasionally eating reinforced beams here and there which of course was a low price to pay to survive. 

Morton sprinted upstairs, leaving the other two to take care of the disaster below. He stepped into the hallway to find himself ankle deep in rain in the complete darkness. The wind was so loud now he could barely hear himself think. Slowly, he felt his way towards one of the walls and punched a hole a karate coach would’ve been proud of right through it. Blindly, he pulled out bits and scraps of wood, whatever would do, and then spun trying to figure out where to put it. 

Frantic shrieks from below sent the material flying out of Morton’s hand who nearly jumped the entire way down the stairs in a panic. He sprinted through what felt like a river at this point to the source of the screaming.

Somehow, despite there being more than enough water to sink a cruise ship at this point, a massive fire was blazing through the kitchen showing no fear of the flooding it was growing towards. Morton nearly fell over in shock, thick black smoke mercilessly filling the air inside. 

“What the hell!” He cried, “Call 911!” 

“I’m not on the wifi!” Charles cried back, to which Johnson said the same thing.

Morton grabbed his phone out of his pocket and began to look up the number for 911 when his heart sank. He didn’t have wifi either. Something must’ve happened to the router.

“Holy crap I think the routers messed up!” Morton shouted through the chaos, praying somehow it’d come back.

“Well can someone call?” Johnson yelled out desperately, “This doesn’t look good…”

“I don’t have unlimited data!” Charles screamed.

“Me neither.” Morton replied dejectedly. 

Amazingly no one had unlimited data and even more incredibly no one was willing to make the sacrifice to pay extra, so they needed a new plan.

“The smoke is going to get to use before anything else does,” Johnson coughed, pointing towards the bathroom, “We need to lock ourselves in there now if we wanna live.”

“Are you crazy!” Charles cried, “We’re gonna die in there!” 

“Well we’re gonna die out here!” Johnson shouted and with that he ran into the bathroom and looked behind him, “Well? Whose gonna live with me?”

It was hard to see as the acidity of the smoke was causing Morton to tear up, but for a moment he caught Johnson's eyes.

“Johnson, I'm gonna put the fire out. If I don’t make it, tell my family I love them!” Morton shouted heroically.

“Sounds good man.” Johnson said and with that, he slammed the door shut and was now completely 100% safe from any consequences.

Morton turned to Charles who was now frozen in fear.

“Snap out of it!” he yelled, clapping in his face to make sure, “Cup your hands into the water like this,” he motioned, grabbing a big scoop, “And throw it at the flames like it’s out for your life. Because it is!”

Side by side like two chefs in a restaurant, the pair heaved and fired rounds of liquid that to their despair only seemed to further piss the blaze off as a gust of wind helped it jump and ignite the ceiling. 

Bits and pieces of the floor above them began to fly off, quickly creating a debris field and more importantly an aerial hazard to the two friends. They gave up on the fire and instead intended to make a run for it upstairs but it was too late.

A groaning noise that sounded like King Kong was waking up from hibernation thundered through the home. Horrible cracks rang through the air as a symphony of splintering wood beams broke together all at once. Suddenly, the walls exploded.

Morton, Charles, and probably Johnson screamed as the entire foundation of the house they’d worked so hard to protect came crashing down.

A beautiful sun woke up the town the next morning, scaring off every single cloud within a hundred miles and giving way to the brightest blue sky and most stunning rainbow, setting the scene like it was straight out of a children’s show. Sleepy citizens slowly made it out of their homes to witness some light flooding on the roads and pay their respects to any cactuses that lost their footing to the wind. 

Morton’s neighbor put on his bathrobe and slippers, grabbed his morning coffee, and made his way to the front porch to breathe in the fresh air a nice rainy night can carry into a place as dry as these parts. 

Suddenly, the cup dropped out of his hands and cracked onto the sturdy wooden ground, his jaw dropped nearly as far with it. It was a shame since that was his favorite mug too.