“Oh hell no,” I said. “I’m not going to sit here like some numptie while you go doing all the manly things to save us. What are we going to put over that window?”

“I’m not sure of that part yet,” Jaden said.

I pointed over to the door that separated the kitchen from the hallway.

“If we take that down off its hinges, we can probably cover that little window up. Do you have nails? We can nail it right to the frame.”

We went into a closet off the hallway and found his tools, taking out a hammer, some nails, and two screwdrivers. We took the door down while the wind whipped in through the broken window, making the closed bedroom door shake. When the door was down, we carried it toward the bedroom. We opened the door, and the wind whipped our hair back and pulled our clothes tight against our skin. The rain was coming in, too, making the wooden floor slick. We almost slipped, and we dropped the door damn near on my foot in the process. Luckily, I jumped back in time. With the storm busting up the city like it was, I would have been hoddered with my foot broken.

Jaden shoved the tree branch back out the window, and I had my first look outside. Trees were broken and fallen all down the street, and the water was picking them up and moving them along with it as it went. The wind was whipping the rain around like whirlpools in the sky. You could barely see beyond them. Street signs and stoplights were lying in the street, being picked up and carried a few feet by the wind before coming crashing down again. The streets weren’t flooded, but the rain was still coming down like mad.

“Come on, let’s get this thing up,” Jaden said as I stood there staring. The wind was blowing at us like we were on a roller coaster.

We slammed the door up against the wall over the window like we were in a horror movie and it was keeping the zombies out of the house. Jaden held it as I moved around it hitting nails through it into the wood of the window frame. For a minute, I thought how pissed off Jaden’s rentbosses were going to be about us damaging the wood, how they would take it out of his security deposit someday. Then I remembered that they were going to be doing a lot more work than puttying up some holes.

When we had the door up over the broken window, the rain stopped coming in except for a trickle. We looked around the dark room at the mess they had left—wet clothes, papers, bags, and leaves scattered everywhere.

“Should we clean this up?” I asked.

“We don’t even know if this is as bad as it’s going to get.

Let’s get back in the living room and turn the TV on.”