Stormbreak (The Serenity Strain Book 1) Read online

  Part 1

  Hurricane Party

  Chapter 1. Tuesday, morning.

  The sex had grown stale.

  Perfunctory even. Two people scratching an itch, and scratching lazily at that. What started as playful debates sometimes bordered on arguments over who would be on top. Disconnected, infrequent sex had been, ironically, the best part about their life together at the end.

  That was the first, obvious sign to Mark Hughes that his marriage to Lauryn was going bad. And he hadn’t even noticed it happening till he could look back and marvel at the length of time that such had been the case. Roommates with benefits. And a distant memory of something deeper.

  He looked at the clock: 6:26. Four minutes until the alarm woke up Iris. At least she’d get up after it went off a second time. Lauryn had always been so exhausted in the mornings. And damned thoughtless. She had a three-snooze minimum, just one more thing that eroded his patience with her over time. Eventually, even a rock gets worn down by the ripple of a river—tired and accepting of its fate. One day you wake up with the alarm blasting for the fourth time in twenty minutes and wonder how anyone can be so inconsiderate of someone they claim to love. By the time you’re sitting in traffic on the way to work with your morning coffee, you might notice the irony mixed in with the venom of your own thoughts about her. No coffee? No give-a-damn.

  Mark reached over and lightly touched Iris’ stomach through the bedcovers. He liked touching her, knowing she was near. She was maybe a quarter of the way awake, and her body moved under his palm, accepting and familiar. Intimate and responsive. So different from what touching Lauryn had become. A necessary obligation on occasion. Unwanted by either of them most of the time.

  It seemed a totally new and wondrous thing to Mark, but he actually looked for reasons to touch Iris. A simple graze of his hand across the small of her back. A kiss for no reason on the nape of her neck.

  With Lauryn, he’d made a conscious effort to avoid touching her in the last few years. Not out of hatred or petulance, but because doing so reminded him of a time when touching her had been just as magical as it was now with Iris. What the hell happened to mess that up so completely?

  Iris turned her lips up at the corners in a half-dreaming smile. She began to stretch, arching her body into his palm. Electricity shot through Mark’s body. A carnal appreciation for the feminine form. A need to engage Iris sexually, to have her right then and there.

  Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.

  Iris stirred less sensuously, her dreamy smile quickly fading. Mark continued stroking her stomach, but he felt her pulling away, physically and emotionally. Her movements stopped rolling with his hand, as if she were annoyed by having to avoid being tickled. He stopped touching her and sighed.

  “I’m sorry, babe,” she said. “You know the traffic. If we’re not out of here by 7:15—”

  “I know the traffic. Hell I am the traffic. And so are you.”

  She smiled. Less primal. More pitying. “I know. Tonight, though?”

  Mark decided, in that moment, he’d take what he could get. “Absolutely tonight.” Then the words were out of his mouth before he even realized he’d said them. “You on top?” Inside, he cringed. His tone had been playfully hopeful. But he knew the question was a test, a gauge for him to see how Iris measured up on the Thoughtfulness Scale. You’re such an asshole, he thought to himself.

  But in the space of half a heartbeat, the wistful smile she’d awakened with spread across her lips again. “Honey, as you should be well aware by now, that’s where I like to be.”

  Mark grinned lasciviously as they locked eyes and shared the image of the two of them, right back here in this space later tonight, making love.

  “We’d better hurry up,” he said, “or we’ll never beat the traffic. There’re still leftovers from breakfast yesterday. That’ll be quick.”

  Iris winked at him. “I’ll heat up the sausage.”

  * * *

  The commute from North Houston to Mark’s office inside Loop 610 was frustratingly familiar. He hated the congested traffic but wanted to stay close to his daughter Megan. So he’d chosen to live in an apartment not far from Lauryn’s while they tried to sell their house and split the proceeds. Had he and Iris driven together, they could’ve taken the faster, carpool lane and saved themselves twenty-five minutes of bumper-to-bumper hell. But driving in together was out of the question. Somewhere in his head, Mark had convinced himself that no one at Houston TranStar, the traffic management center where they both worked, knew they were having an affair. So they took separate cars, doubling their ongoing and never-ending angst at I-10’s congestion.

  As soon as he walked in to TranStar, Vicky handed him a cup of coffee. He nodded thanks, sipped it without thinking first, burned the roof of his mouth, cursed, and walked over to his desk. Ten years, same routine.

  The center looked more like NASA with chin-high walls boxing in work stations. Mark’s position as an assistant agency manager with TranStar’s traffic unit rated him an office of his own, but his boss preferred him on the front lines with the troops.

  From his desk, Mark could access agency supervisors in the other units—emergency coordination, operations, and the others. As long as he was standing up, he could see the displays showing key traffic locations in Houston and their current traffic volumes. That was important, since he was one of several linchpins that helped coordinate efforts across units during emergencies like a hazardous materials spill or a hurricane. The latter had occupied the center for the last several days.

  “What’s Glenn’s current status?” Mark asked Frank Baines, the chief meteorologist on staff.

  “Still holding steady at a Category Two. About a day, day-and-a-half out in the Gulf. Latest projections have it hitting New Orleans.”

  “And Helen?”

  “Still a tropical storm. Still threatening Cuba. Looks like it might turn up the Eastern Seaboard.”

  Blowing on his coffee, Mark turned to Reynalda Vasquez. “What’s the status of the evac plan?”

  “In place,” said Vasquez, looking up. Her granny glasses had crept down her nose, their usual position. She was in her early forties, but her conservative dress and geeky fetish for traffic maps made her attractive, in a Tina Fey kind of way. Mark did his best not to notice. “As usual,” she said, “the mayor won’t even consider ordering an evacuation unless Glenn turns further west.”

  “Right. It’s a Tuesday. Too disruptive to the city’s economy to shut it down on a Tuesday.”

  “Right. If it were a Friday—”

  “Right. Well, if that thing slows down, we might get to test that theory. PSAs?” asked Mark.

  “Pre-recorded. But again—”

  “I know, I know. Glenn’s not aiming for Houston, it’s aiming for New Orleans. I sure hope the Corps of Engineers did a better job on those levies after Katrina than we think they did.”

  He cast his eyes across the monitors. The 610 loop around downtown was still clogged inbound. U.S. 290 inbound west, same thing. I-45 North was clear, but of course it was … that led out of downtown. Inbound was a different story. The same with 59, 69, Beltway 8. All the major arteries were jammed coming into the city. Would be till 9 a.m., at least, depending on the roadway.

  Mark imagined them clogged in the opposite direction, should the mayor order an evacuation. He didn’t have to imagine too hard. It’d been bad when Rita hit in 2005, just four weeks after Katrina. Motorists, many of them elderly, sat stalled for hours on roadways that normally ran at 70 miles per hour.

  Iris walked into the command center. He tried not to notice, in case anyone happened to be looking at him. She chatted up Vicky, took her own cup of coffee, and walked over to check in with the emergency management team. Her first stop was also Baines’ desk to get Glenn’s latest position.

  As she made the rounds, Mark made an intense show of studying an accident report inside the Beltway. At least the accident’s in the westbound m
ainlane, he thought, absently calculating its likely effect on overall traffic flow. He tried to focus on the math to distract himself from the competing thought in his head of Iris on top of him in about fourteen hours. Make that thirteen hours and twenty-five minutes.

  “Update from the Weather Bureau,” Baines chimed in.

  “Yes?” Mark and Iris said at the same time.

  Damn it, Mark thought. Their eyes couldn’t help locking together for half a second. Iris gave him a half-smile.

  Baines saw it and grinned knowingly. “Um, yeah. Glenn is slowing down a bit.”

  That focused Mark’s attention. “What’s a little bit?”

  “Moving at about five miles per hour, now.” Baines’ voice was cautious. A slowing hurricane meant delayed landfall, of course, but it also meant a stronger storm when it finally hit. Slower sounded better until you knew what it actually meant.

  “Direction?”

  Baines scanned the printout. “Still moving toward the Louisiana-Texas border. The Weather Service is still saying New Orleans.”

  Mark scoffed inside but kept his disdain to himself. He shared Bob Dylan’s appraisal of weathermen, namely that they were largely useless. For all their predictive algorithms and historical data, the Weather Service was still just a collection of meteorologists with advanced degrees. And when a weatherman predicted a 20 percent chance of rain, it was his way of covering his ass in case somebody important got wet. Unfortunately, city officials relied entirely on the Service to cue them as to when to evacuate.

  “All right. Keep me apprised. I’ll call Crawford, see if we need to pull the executive team together.” Mark reached for his phone to dial up his boss.

  “There’s something else,” Baines muttered under his breath. He stared intently at the printout, as if verifying it was written in English.

  “Well?”

  “There’s another disturbance.”

  “Right. TS Helen. You said it was threatening Cuba.”

  “No, not Helen.” Baines finally decided the printout was neither in error nor a hoax. He looked up at Mark. “A third storm.”

  Most in the room had only been half listening to the update, its routine a dull drone in the background of their morning. Now everyone stopped what they were doing. Even Alvarez, who pushed her glasses up on her nose.

  “What?”

  “There’s a third storm,” said Baines louder.

  Well, okay, that’s not unheard of, thought Mark. Unusual but not unheard of. He cleared his throat, feeling all the eyes in the room on him. “What’s the prediction?”

  “The Service is saying there’s a ninety percent chance it’ll form into a depression in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

  “Where did you say Helen’s current landfall predictions put her?” asked Iris.

  “Unknown. That close to Cuba, it could go either way,” reported Baines. “Up the Eastern Seaboard or—”

  “Or get sucked into the Gulf,” finished Alvarez.

  Mark looked over at her. Joining in conversation wasn’t her thing. She answered questions—usually in a highly technical fashion—adjusted her glasses, and put her nose back in her numbers. She must be worried. Time to calm everybody down, he thought.

  “Listen people, here’s what we know. Glenn will probably make landfall by, what, Thursday now?”

  Baines nodded.

  “Okay, Thursday. Helen might not even come up the slot and instead give our neighbors in the northeast a shower. As for this new thing—at the moment, it’s just some wind and rain and a half-assed algorithm prediction from the Service. No need to wad up any panties yet.”

  Mark flinched. Bad choice of words. The last thing he wanted them associating with him were panties. Even a turn of phrase mentioning panties.

  “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to run some system diagnostics?” asked a junior traffic planner whose name Mark couldn’t remember. He distantly recalled the young man was a recent graduate from the University of Houston. He was old enough to have the degree but young enough to still need answers handed to him by an all-knowing professor. “At least make sure we’re ready for the worst?”

  “Remind me of your name, son?”

  “Sam, sir.” Mark thought his voice actually broke pitch, but knew it must just be his imagination. “Sam McDonald.”

  “Right. I think those are very prudent suggestions. I’d like to see each of the department heads in the main conference room in fifteen minutes. Sam, I’d like you there too. Get someone to cover your station until 9:30.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Everyone, I’ll say it one more time. Let’s wait till we need to panic to actually panic, okay?” Mark grinned, scanning the room to give them some reassurance with eye contact. They nervously tittered laughter back at him, glancing at each other instead of directly at him. All but Iris, who winked in what she must’ve thought was an invisible fashion. Can this day go by fast enough? her eyes pouted.

  No, no it can’t, thought Mark, the time clock in his head chiming in. Thirteen hours and fifteen minutes.

  Chapter 2. Tuesday, afternoon.

  Lauryn Hughes made special arrangements with the Huntsville State Prison’s senior corrections officer to be off Tuesday afternoon. She’d traded shifts for a night tour on Saturday to make it happen. But at least now she could make her marital counseling appointment at two o’clock.

  The drive from Huntsville to the counselor’s office near TranStar, about 70 miles to the south, would take a little over an hour. Afterward, she’d be hard pressed to make it back to Twin Creeks Middle School in Spring, a suburb of North Houston, to pick up Megan. But the afternoon traffic would still be light then, and she thought she could make it.

  As she headed south on I-45, Lauryn wondered why she and Mark were even keeping the appointment. It certainly wasn’t from a realistic expectation they could fix their broken marriage. The court had ordered mediation, and the mediator suggested counseling. This was to be their fourth session, with time on the calendar for only two more. The date to finalize the divorce in front of the judge was scheduled for two weeks from Thursday.

  Her lawyer recommended seeing a marital counselor because it would look good to the judge when it came to deciding custody, though Texas rarely sided with the father in those cases. And Mark’s philandering would count against him. Lauryn hoped for a female judge when it came time for the final hearing.

  She bit her lower lip and focused on the road, acutely aware of a pickup truck riding her ass. Glancing down, she saw she was only going sixty miles per hour, well below the interstate’s speed limit. She was normally a speeder, but with Mark on her mind … Pickup Man passed her on the left, gunning his engine for effect.

  Same to you, Tiny Dick, she thought.

  The counseling sessions were useful, though. It’d become abundantly clear that both of them were thoroughly unhappy in their marriage. If you could even call it a marriage, she sighed. Before Mark moved out, their lack of connection had been most apparent in the bedroom. And not just by their lack of interest in having sex. A canyon of empty space can open up when two people turn their backs on one another and hug opposite sides of a king-sized bed.

  Until the counselor pointed out some things that seemed obvious now, Lauryn had no idea they’d both looked for ways to avoid spending time together. On most Saturdays, Megan would ask to go to a girlfriend’s to hang out, and Lauryn would offer to drop her off. More often than not, Lauryn wouldn’t return home for hours. On cool days, she’d drive to The Woodlands Mall, park near the theater, and walk around the waterway, enjoying the quiet of her own thoughts. On warmer days, she’d just drive around Spring or maybe head to Aerofit for a workout that was infrequent enough to be painful a day later. Anything to keep from going back home to Mark, she realized now.

  Lauryn glanced at the clock in the dash. Thirty minutes until she was late for the appointment.

  During one session, the counselor had noted this obvious distancin
g in their relationship, but she and Mark balked at that suggestion immediately. Mark had even reached over and taken Lauryn’s hand as a show of solidarity. For all the counselor’s experience and degrees, he seemed to be saying, she didn’t know shit from Shinola about this particular relationship. But then Lauryn proved her right by quickly removing her hand, as if Mark had just handed her the shit, not the Shinola. She knew where that hand had been.

  Which was the other thing. Apparently, he couldn’t keep his dick out of his co-worker, Iris.

  “Irissss.” Lauryn enjoyed hissing it aloud, as if calling the gods of old to mark the interloper’s name on a stone tablet and schedule her for a curse of frogs or locusts or something. Something biblical and bad for the skin. Maybe something to make her tits fall off.

  A motorcyclist zoomed by on Lauryn’s left at what seemed like ninety miles per hour. She barely noticed.

  Despite her own distancing in the relationship over time, Lauryn was devastated by Mark’s betrayal—at first. Later, mixed feelings displaced the initial shock. She was obviously concerned for Megan and how divorce might affect her. Their daughter had just turned fourteen and entered the hormone-driven, clique-joining, pimply faced reality of being a teenager in high school. And lumped on top of all that, she lived with the constant tension of clipped comments and poorly masked disdain between distant parents at home. And then Lauryn dropped the D Bomb.

  I guess we’re lucky she’s not on drugs or having casual sex with boys already, she thought, changing lanes. Then her mind wondered if all that was happening after all, and they just didn’t know it.

  “Goddamn Irissss!” she screamed at the windshield. The interloper had become the go-to scapegoat for everything lately.