Storm Blown by Nick Courage

Author:Nick Courage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2019-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

“This is as close as we can get without landing!” the helicopter pilot yelled.

His hair whipped in the cross-breeze as he twisted to face the cabin, but nobody looked up. They were too busy staring out the open doors, transfixed by the wreckage below. The pilot shook his head, then turned back to the cockpit. Warning lights flashed orange and yellow across the dashboard and the needle on the altimeter seemed to be stuck at zero….

But they were still airborne.

The pilot tapped the glass gauge of the altimeter with a gloved knuckle.

When the needle refused to budge, he cursed beneath his breath.

It was the pressure systems throwing everything off—he knew that, but there was no avoiding it. Even though conditions inside the eye of the storm were crisp and clear, he was flying blind, and there was no way he’d be able to punch the helicopter through Megastorm Valerie. The bowl of the storm had only grown more defined since they’d taken off, and even if he could somehow weave his way through the updrafts without crashing, the wind shear alone would rip them apart. The pilot craned his neck, scanning the horizon for an exit that didn’t exist. The sloped walls stretched into the upper atmosphere, thinning but never quite disappearing.

Unbreachable.

He’d have to tie down back at the base and evacuate with the rest of them.

If they still had time to evacuate.

The pilot watched the cameraman strain against his webbed shoulder straps in the rearview mirror. He was hanging halfway out of the helicopter, his video camera wedged into the crook of his shoulder as he filmed the ragged coast. The pilot shook his head, then cranked the volume on his monitors. “You want me to try to put us down or what?” he asked, his amplified voice crackling loudly in their headsets. “We have ten, maybe fifteen minutes before drop-dead go time.”

The cameraman shook his head, his camera still trained on the ground below. His eyes were watering from the wind as he squinted through the viewfinder into the waves, his vision blurred. From so high up, La Perla was just a grid of rooftops. Islands in a gently frothing sea. It looked kind of pretty. Like Venice, the cameraman thought. But without the gondolas.

Up close, it would be another story….

A story they wouldn’t be able to tell.

Not yet, anyway.

The helicopter weighed at least five thousand pounds, not counting cargo, and there was no telling what kind of structural damage the houses below had already sustained. To the pilot, they might look like a hundred little landing pads spread out beneath them, but the cameraman had seen enough disaster areas to know that any one of them could crumble under their combined weight.

The cameraman wasn’t willing to take that chance.

Every heli and medevac in a hundred-mile radius was already working overtime—and even with an entire fleet running twenty-four hours a day, the first responders wouldn’t be able to save everyone in Valerie’s path. The numbers just

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