The heat hit Felice like a punch in the face, a wall of seething fury. She started sweating as soon as she stepped onto the smooth panels of her balcony, felt it prickling across her brow, and a few moments later trickling down her ribs. The city lay shrouded in early morning darkness, the night sky humming with the faint susurrations of a city still sleeping, its industrious millions almost entirely unaware of the vast disaster that was falling on them from the uncaring heavens.
As she pulled the doors open she could not decide if she wanted it to be unusually hot, enough to justify this lunatic trip, or a typical Houston summer morning, confirming her foolishness and offering her one last chance to acknowledge her own stupidity and back out of this whole thing. When she woke, dragged out of uneasy slumber almost as soon as she had gone to sleep, she had thought of calling the whole thing off, her stupid escape plan from a creeping disaster that almost no one in that wide, sleeping sprawl even knew was coming. Her boyfriend's final text had not helped to assuage her self-doubt, four separate messages delivered after midnight in response to her final uncertain pleas, short and sudden rejoinders like stabs:
This is crazy girl
I can't believe you're gonna break date night for this shit
I ain't gonna go with you on this dumb-assed trip
Those crazy hippies have got to you. We're talking about this when you get back
Not really the best thing to have read as soon as she woke up, so to bolster her waning confidence Felice took out her phone and flicked down to the last texts from Raven:
It's a good plan Felice. Please don't back out this morning. You know what's coming.
And then:
We don't do addresses. But if you want to check in, head north up the 83 after Junction till you see this
Followed by a picture of a tumbledown shack, half-hidden in tangled shrubs, connected to the highway in the background by a short, uneven dirt path.
So, neither her boyfriend nor the source of the warnings Felice had received about the coming disaster trusted her. But Raven's caution made sense given how Felice – well, Felice's colleagues, mostly – had treated them. Jared's viciousness was a little surprising, but at least her mad fancies about this trip had brought that to the fore.
She stared out across the eastern expanse of the city that had been her home since she started college, frustrating and complicated and unsuited to her in so many ways but still the place she had lived these last eight years, the place where she had learned the law, learned love and loss, and gained this tiny glimpse at a terrible future. What would it be like by tomorrow? She wondered if anyone else in the city was standing outside now, contemplating the same flight as her.
Probably only she could be this impressionable. She again thought of calling the whole thing off, retreating to her bed and forgetting the whole crazed fancy. But as she stared out at the city, gripped by the self-doubt of the loner, the isolation of Cassandra, the heat sank into her bones, and she began to feel it: not the mere discomfort of sweat and stickiness but a vague animal fear, a current of visceral, physical uncertainty flowing in the opposite direction to all her civilized doubts. It should not be this hot at 4am. In her instinctual self she expected sun, the rippling hazy air and scintillating brightness of midday, not the darkness and silence of deep night. Run, her instinct warned her, someone has stolen the sun. How could it be this hot before the sun had even risen?
Shaking her head, she retreated from the heat into the relative cool of her living room, her regrets tempered by animal wisdom and the sure knowledge of the shame she would face if she canceled now. She had a room booked and friends to collect, precious paid leave already taken. She had set herself this stupid quest, crying wolf for a week, and now she had to go through with it. With a sigh she collected her coffee and began checking the things she needed for her trip: clothes and make up for a couple of days in a small sports bag, and in her backpack her driver's license, national ID card with proof of citizenship (just in case), state ID with proof of gender (just in case), her bar certification, spare charger for her phone, sanitary products and painkillers, print out of her hotel booking with clearly visible Texas address (just in case), and a few snacks. She was ready to go.
Ten minutes later she was in the basement car park, slinging her sports bag into the trunk of her car, placing an icebox on the floor of the rear passenger seat, backpack next to the driver's seat. The underground car park was already uncomfortably warm, and she was sweating by the time she started the engine and immediately turned on the aircon. She wondered if the aircon of her cute little urban runabout would cope with the heat aboveground without a head start in the relatively cooler carpark. Her car was a gasoline vehicle, of course – electric cars now were just expensive, inconvenient oddities for collectors – and running it in the underground parking space would stink out the elevator and draw complaints if anyone noticed. Still, it was very early, and better safe than sorry … she decided to run the aircon and take the risk of complaints.
While she waited, she turned on the radio, already tuned to Raven's channel and broadcasting the first of the day's emergency warnings:
EMERGENCY! PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT! A HEAT DOME IS COMING. TEMPERATURES ACROSS THE ENTIRE TEXAS BASIN WILL BE FATAL. RESIDENTS OF SOUTHERN TEXAS, YOUR POWER GRID WILL FAIL BY MIDDAY AND YOU WILL BE TRAPPED UNDER A FATAL HEAT DOME. GET UNDERGROUND OR GET OUT BY MIDDAY.
This repeated a few times, a strong, urgent woman's voice building to a peak of alarm at the end of the last sentence, reassuring Felice that this crazy evacuation was the right decision. Raven had warned her about the heat dome a week back, with more urgent messages a few days ago. Their first communication in months, leading to this unexpected and uncharacteristic evacuation. Felice was a lawyer, not a panic-merchant. But here she was, sitting in her car with the aircon running full blast, listening to alerts from a barely legal underground radio station, possibly ending her relationship, on the advice of an activist she barely knew.
She sighed, pushed the car into drive, and headed towards the exit. Some kind of road trip, this.