Year's Best SF 17

Kaylee snatches up her backpack and runs down the basement stairs, then isn’t sure what to do. Jane’s house is set into a slope, so half the basement is underground and the other half isn’t; you can walk straight out the patio doors, climb a ladder kept out there for the purpose, and check on the phoebe’s nest perched like a pillbox hat on the light fixture. It’s pretty crowded down here; the basement is the size of the house, tiny, and piled with boxes containing mostly books. But now Jane’s hurrying down with Roscoe the beagle behind her, leading the way into what looks like a closet under the stairs, but turns out to be a kind of wedge-shaped storm shelter. Fleece is already in there, lying on a mat and panting. Roscoe flops down beside Fleece; they must be used to this drill. There’s a folding canvas chair in the shelter too. Jane says, “I guess you’ll have to squeeze in with the dogs. Or maybe just sit here on the mat next to them. I have to take the chair or in five minutes my back will be screaming worse than the radio.” Which, Kaylee sees, she’s brought down with her, and which she now switches back on.

But the robot voice is only repeating what it said already. Jane turns down the volume. Kaylee sits cross-legged on the edge of the mat and consults her SmartBerry.

When she first started working on the nesting project with Jane, she’d kept the SmartBerry in her jacket pocket or in her hand all the time; but when Jane noticed, she’d made her put it away. “You can’t do science like that, hon, texting seven of your friends while checking out a nest. Good observation requires all your attention, not just some of it.” Kaylee doesn’t see why; she’s always doing half a dozen things at once, everybody does. It’s actually hard to do only one thing. She tried to argue that she could record the data directly onto the NestWatch site from her SmartBerry, skipping the note-taking and data entry phases completely, and take pictures. But Jane doesn’t trust her not to spend the travel time between nest sites chatting, instead of listening and looking around, which is smart of Jane, Kaylee grudgingly admits. They’ve compromised: she can use her smartphone during data entry time, but not while actually monitoring nests. It makes Kaylee feel twitchy, all that time hiking between sites and trying to identify bird songs, not knowing what’s going on everywhere else.

Now she says, “I should probably call my mom so she doesn’t worry.”

“Good idea.”

Nobody answers at home. Kaylee’s brother Tyler always drops her off at Jane’s on his way to work his shift, so he’s at work, and her dad picks her up on his way home, but her mom must be out. When the answering machine comes on, Kaylee says, “Mom, did the siren go off? There’s a tornado warning, I hope you’re someplace safe. I’m down in Jane’s basement till it’s over, so don’t worry. See you later.” Then she rapidly texts safe in basement @ janes dont worry and sends that to her mom and dad, then sends im in janes basement where r u? to all her best friends at once, Hannah, Tabby, Andrew, Shannon, Jacob, Morgan, Macy, and waits for somebody to text back. It takes her mind off being scared, not that she’s all that scared really. There are tornado watches and a few warnings every spring—more and more of them in the last few years—her mom is always complaining, but they’ve never actually come to anything around Lawrenceburg, though she’s seen the TV shots of other places, even in Kentucky, where whole houses got turned into piles of rubble in a few seconds. The worst watches are the night ones, when you can’t see what the sky looks like.

While she waits—in the circumstances Jane can hardly object—she gets on Facebook and posts, “I’m in a tornado warning in Jane’s basement!”

She’s reading Tabby’s text—me + my mom + the twins r in the city hall shelter—when Jane puts her hand on Kaylee’s arm. “Listen. Do you hear that—like a freight train?” Something does sound like a freight train, getting louder and louder. She feels a thrill of serious fear, which spikes into panic when Jane says urgently, “Better get down low.”