The first one took my mother. She was trying to save the garden—the last real soil for fifty miles. The wind didn’t get her. The water did. A wall of black rain that fell sideways for forty minutes. When it passed, she was just... gone. The tomatoes were still there, though. Tough little bastards.
And I keep breathing.
My name is Kaelen. I’m seventeen. I’ve survived four of them. survive torrentz
The first drops of rain begin to fall. They’re warm. Too warm. The first one took my mother
Rule three:
I don’t add their names to mourn. I add them to remember why I keep moving. The water did
The third one was a hailstorm. Sounds small, right? These weren’t golf balls. These were grapefruits. Solid ice with cores of black sediment—ash and something metallic I never identified. I hid under an overpass with a woman named Sora and her dog, a three-legged mutt called Lucky (the irony was not lost on us). The hail punched through the asphalt ten feet away. Sora held Lucky’s muzzle so he wouldn’t bark. Barking meant attracting attention. Attention meant the scavengers —not the storm, but the people who followed it.