Year's Best SF 17

where you are. We just have to hunker down and wait.”

Kaylee pictures KY 44 as it looked before the tornado, two lanes, no shoulders, a steep wooded bluff on one side and Indian Creek on the other, with another wooded bluff across the creek. The road follows the creek. If all the trees on both sides of the valley went down the whole way to town, like they did here, she can’t imagine how they’ll ever get the road open again. Worst of all in a way, her wonderful new SmartBerry, her Christmas and birthday presents combined, that keeps her continually connected her to everything that matters, is useless. She’s worried to death about her family and friends, and there’s no way to find out if they’re okay. From being in constant touch with everybody, suddenly she’s out of touch with everybody! It makes her feel lonely and frantic, and furious with Jane, because of whom she’s stranded in this war zone. “How can you stand living out here all by yourself?” she yells. “Something like this happens and you’re stuck, you’re just stuck!” When Jane reaches toward her she jerks away and takes off running, crying hard, down the mowed path to the garden where things still look almost normal, away from the wrecked house and jagged devastation in the other direction.

She’d changed out of her sneakers into flip-flops after visiting the nests. Running in flip-flops on a path grown up thick in clover and scattered with broken branches doesn’t work, so she’s walking and crying when she gets to the path box, which is down on its side, metal post bent and half uprooted. It’s empty, the baby bluebirds fledged over the weekend, thank goodness. The box in the garden has been knocked over too—but that one’s not empty, Kaylee remembers now, there were six new hatchlings in that one this morning. She shakes off the flip-flops and runs to the gate, left open in Jane’s haste. The latch on the box popped open when it hit the ground; the nest has fallen out, scattering tiny pink bodies and loose feathers on the grass. Quick as she can, Kaylee stands the nest box up and steps on the base with her bare foot, to jam it back into the ground. She picks up the nest, built entirely out of Jane’s straw garden mulch—square outside like the square nest box, a soft lined cup inside—and fits it back in. Then, one by one, with extreme delicacy, she picks up the fragile, weightless baby birds, puts them back in their cradle, and latches the front. She can’t tell whether the tiniest are even alive, but a couple of others twitch a little bit when she’s handling them. It’s a warm day. Now, if the parents come fast, most of them ought to make it.

But then Kaylee thinks, Where are the parents? She’s never once checked this nest, not while it was being built and not while the eggs were being incubated and not this afternoon, when the parents weren’t carrying on something terrible. There’s been no sign of them. With a sinking feeling she faces the truth: They were almost certainly killed in the tornado.

She hears footsteps swishing through the clover and starts to explain before Jane even gets to the gate: “The garden box was down and the nest fell out, and I was trying to put everything back together, but the parents haven’t come back—what should we do?”

Jane comes in carrying Kaylee’s flip-flops, looks into the box, then scans the sky, then shakes her head. “I doubt the parents survived. These babies won’t either unless we hand-raise them, which is a big job under ideal conditions and right now—nature can be ruthless, Kaylee. You did the right thing, and if the parents had come through, they could take over now. But as it is—”

“You said we could hand-raise them? How?”

Jane makes a pained face. “I’ve never tried it with swallows. With robins or bluebirds you make a nest, using an old bowl or something lined with paper towels. Then you soak dry dog food in water and feed them pinches of that every forty-five minutes, for a week or ten days. You have to change the paper towel every time you feed them, because they’ll poop on it. When they get bigger—”

“Do we have dog food?” Kaylee says. “I want to try! I’m sorry I behaved like such a creep,” she adds contritely. All at once she desperately wants to try to save these morsels of life, helpless and blameless, from the wreckage of the world. How badly she wants this amazes her. She can see Jane thinking about it, wanting to refuse. “Please!” Kaylee says. “I’ll do everything myself, well, I will as soon as you teach me how. Do we have paper towels? Please, Jane, I just have to try this, I just have to.”

With a rush of relief she sees Jane make up her mind. “Well—we do have dog food. Very expensive, low-fat dog food. No paper towels, but toilet paper and tissues. We can manage. But Kaylee, listen to me now: even experienced rehabbers commonly lose about half the baby birds they try to rear, more than half when the babies are so young. You can see why, when they’ve been stressed and banged around, and gotten chilled—I don’t want you to set your heart on this without understanding how hard it is to be successful.”

Kaylee nods as hard as she can. “I understand! Really, I really do, I won’t go to pieces if it doesn’t work. Oh, thanks, Jane, thank you, I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d said no.”

“But if we’re going to do this we need to act fast. We’ll take the whole nest,” she says. “Back to the house. It takes a little while for kibble to soften up, so we’ll start with canned; these babies need to get warmed up and fed ASAP.”

“How come you’ve got all this stuff stashed under the stairs?” Kaylee asks Jane, when the little swallows are safely tucked into their artificial nest (Roscoe’s bowl, lined with Kleenex).

First she and Jane had to hold the hatchlings in their hands, three apiece, to warm them up enough so they could eat; Jane said little birds can’t warm up by themselves when they first hatch out, which is why the mother has to brood them. “Normally we do this with a heating pad or a microwaved towel or something.” Then she opened a can of Mill’s Wet/Dry Veterinary Diet, under the intense scrutiny of Roscoe and Fleece. “Watch this time, then next time you can help. Their gape response isn’t working, but it should come back once we can get a bite or two down the hatch,” Jane said. And sure enough, when Jane carefully pried a tiny beak open and pushed a bit of canned food as far back as she could with her little finger, and closed the beak to help the baby swallow, the beak opened again by itself.

Now they had all been fed. (They hadn’t pooped, which probably just meant they hadn’t eaten since before the tornado.) And Kaylee, yearning over their bowl, thought to ask Jane about the supplies.

Jane sits back in her chair, then stiffens. “Oh!” she says, “That’s what I cut myself on, that bracket on the shelf there. Wedged between paint cans. Can you push it back out of the way?” Kaylee gets up, holding the bowl carefully, and tucks the bracket out of sight; she is helpfulness itself. “Last summer,” Jane says when Kaylee sits back down on the mat, “after I’d been down here with the dogs three times in about three weeks, I started thinking, What if this was the real deal? All I’ve got in the way of emergency supplies is six jugs of water!” So I took a weekend and made a list and went shopping. Good thing I did.”

“Are we getting more tornadoes than we used to? My mom keeps saying that, but my dad thinks she just doesn’t remember.”

“I don’t think anybody knows for sure. But a lot of information about climate change passes through this house,” Jane says, and pauses, and Kaylee can tell she’s thinking, used to pass, so she hitches forward and looks very interested, and Jane catches herself and goes on: “… and I’ve seen several articles about the effect of climate change on weather lately, and quite a few climate scientists seem to be leaning that way. The argument goes that warmer ocean temperatures mean more storms. Heat is just energy, and heat affects how much moisture there is in the atmosphere.”

“So more heat and more moisture in the atmosphere means more tornadoes?”

“It means more frequent and more violent storms in general, apparently. There are computer models that say so, not that that proves anything necessarily. Tornadoes are complex, lots of things affect their formation—but it is true that they’ve been occurring earlier and farther north than they used to. Unusually high temperatures, unusually frequent tornadoes, so the thinking goes, and it does make sense. Though actually,” she adds, “there’ve always been more tornadoes in Kentucky than people think.”

“We had something last year in science about Hoosier Alley,” Kaylee chimes in. “It was something about a new definition of Tornado Alley—if my SmartBerry was working I could look it up! But anyway, there’s still Tornado Alley but now they’re talking about Dixie Alley and Hoosier Alley and something else.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Jane winces and shifts in her chair.

Pleased to think there was anything she knew that Jane didn’t, Kaylee says, “Hoosier Alley, that’s Indiana and the western two-thirds of Kentucky, and pieces of a couple other states too. So what all do you have here?”

“Besides what you see?” Jane considers. “Mostly food. Cans and PowerBars. Dishes. Spare clothes. Tools. Stuff to clean up with. Also cans and kibble for the dogs—birds too, as it turns out.” Kaylee grins happily. “And speaking of birds, before it’s time to feed them again, would you mind helping me with this cut? I can’t see the darn thing, and I want to pour some peroxide in there to clean it out and bandage it with something less, ah, bulky. It’s going to need stitches but we’ll let a professional handle that part.”

Kaylee does mind, quite a lot really, but she takes herself in hand and acts like she