Feet, don’t fail me now.

Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.

Don’t forget to click the link to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.

Your character is being faced with an evacuation from a natural disaster. What are they taking with them? (Based on an idea from Lena.)

This week, I’ve turned to my stable of characters for inspiration. I asked each of them what they would do, if such a situation were to befall them.

I thought that I would pick the most interesting response.

After getting a few ideas (which I’ve saved for later use), I decided that this was a job for Captain Starlight, Housewife Superhero.

As followers of her exploits will know, Winona (a.k.a. Captain Starlight) has been living a secret life in the America of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, keeping her superpowers hidden from her husband, Jervis.

An impending peril presents her with that very dilemma.

This is what happened.

Jervis couldn’t move. The fallen tree had pinned him to the ground. Around him, the wind howled like a banshee and objects, dislodged by its force, whizzed about through the air. Their collisions added punctuation to the noise as they struck houses and cars.

How had things got so bad, so quickly?

They had been loading the car, ready to evacuate their home in Cable Bay. The place that never gets a hurricane, thought Jervis. Winona had rushed back inside just before the tree had fallen, she had shouted about saving something important. Jervis knew he had left it too late to leave.

Now they were both going to pay.

He felt the position of the tree change, it was moving. Was it going to roll and crush him? Then he saw a flash of blue. Captain Starlight had arrived. The person he’d seen so often in news reports had come to save him. He watched as she grappled with the tree trunk, fighting its weight and the elements.

“Don’t worry,” the Captain shouted. Her voice carried above the wind’s moaning. It was a good voice, thought Jervis, a focus of calm in the madness of the hurricane. Hearing her gave him confidence, he would be alright now.

“We’ll soon have you free,” she added. As he watched, spellbound, she lifted the massive tree and Jervis found that he could move. “Can you slide clear?” she asked.

He shuffled backward until he was able to stand. “Thank you, Captain Starlight,” he said, as she came over to stand beside him.

“Come on,” she grabbed him around the waist. “Put your hands around my neck and hold on.”

Locked together, they rose into the sky. Jervis started to panic as he remembered Winona. She was still down there.

“Wait,” he said. “My wife, she’s in the house.”

The Captain, her face inches from his, looked at him through the mask she always wore. her blue eyes radiated calm and, dare he say it, love.

“Don’t worry,” the Captain said. “She’s already safe,”

Sometime earlier.

Winona had sensed the change in the weather, long before anyone else. Pressure was dropping, out over the ocean. A hurricane was coming to the quiet Florida town. Within the next week, too. It was September, so perhaps it shouldn’t be unexpected but the local T.V. and radio hadn’t picked up on it yet.

She mentioned it to Jervis at breakfast, before he went to work. She had to be careful, he wasn’t supposed to know that she could sense such things. So far, she had kept her secret from him, he had no idea that the blue-suited, masked woman saving all those people was sitting in front of him, sharing his life. But this was serious, he was in danger this time and it worried her.

“Is a storm coming?” she asked, over the grapefruit and toast.

Jervis lowered his newspaper. “I don’t think so,” he said. “People at work say that Cable Bay has never been hit by a hurricane. They always recurve and miss, it’s something to do with the local geography.”

I’m not so sure,” Winina said. “I’ve just got this bad feeling. Perhaps we should think about leaving for a few days?”

Jervis could tell from her voice that she was anxious. He got up, walked around the table and hugged her shoulders, kissing her blonde hair. “It’s not like you,” he said. “I’ll ask around, see if I can’t find some way of putting your mind at rest.”

Winona spent the day in nature, walking beside the sea, which lapped gently on the beach. She still felt uneasy, she could sense that the wildlife was agitated, more and more signs pointed to bad weather. In her mind, she rehearsed how they would leave, where they would go and what they would take with them.

Jervis arrived home, at dinner, he looked at Winona. “You were right,” he said. “I don’t know how you knew it. There is a hurricane on the way, but everyone’s saying that it should miss us.”

The next morning, she met Marie-Elle, the wife of Jervis’s work colleague, for coffee. She said the same thing, “You’re safe here, Winiona. We’ve lived here for years. Cable Bay never gets a hurricane.”

If it was intended to reassure her, all it did was get her angry, she knew she was right.

“But what would you do?” she asked, “if we were told to evacuate. How could you decide what to take and what to leave?”

The women sat, silent for a moment. “I guess you just have to save whatever can’t be replaced,” she finally said.

You can find more of Captain Starlight’s adventures on my Medium profile.

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Until next time.

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