by L. B. Carter
"Why wasn't she on the road?" Jen's shock was morphing into anger, and she sat up. "I thought the devil was slinging vehicles!"
Reed kept an arm around her. He didn't want to be near her brewing temper almost as much as he wanted to avoid a fire devil. However, he had to prevent her from barreling into Lindy. Mrs. Juarez could get caught up in the cat fight.
And without pillows and skimpy pajamas, girl fights were just no fun.
"My guess? She couldn't see the road. Or maybe debris had blocked it." Reed shrugged though Jen was watching the rapid conversation occurring between mother and daughter in Spanish. "Ask her yourself." He closed his eyes again, focusing on his hearing. The roar persisted. Unlike a second ago, it was more of a dull back-of-the-throat growl of a tense dog. Not the loud warning of Henley's homemade biodiesel engine.
Wait. There was another noise joining the racket. This one wasn't like a locomotive. It conjured memories of Jen's vengeance channeled into a baseball bat.
"The chopper." Jen jumped up and ran around to the truck bed, clambering in over jugs of saltwater that were no longer their most pressing desire and perching on the roof of the cab. She lifted an arm to prevent the spray of sand from penetrating her eyes then performed a three-sixty rotation.
Reed debated sitting and watching longer—it was reminiscent of a strange fashion show with her up on a platform, pirouetting. Efficiency won out. He got up and tapped her leg with his sunglasses.
"Thanks," she said, swiping them from him and sliding them onto her nose.
"Is standing on cars a habit of yours?" he asked mildly while she surveyed the domain in his shades. The lenses were overly large for her face, making her look bug-like.
"Haven't had the opportunity before, really. You're opening a whole new world of possibilities for me."
"I'm honored," Reed intoned dryly.
"There." She pointed up and over at the sky angled above the house. "Chopper at two o'clock."
"You know…" Reed rested an elbow on the hood of the car, facing Jen instead of their incoming visitors. He wasn't getting his hopes up for another potential rescue. "When you are constantly spinning around, clock directions become meaningless."
She pursed her lips. There was probably an eye roll to accompany. His shades handily masked that insolence.
"You killed Tio?" Lindy asked thunderously, marching over to them, a storm herself, one arm around her mother who hobbled. Reed was appreciative that she was coping enough to stand at all after his graceful stair descent.
Reed winced as Lindy faced him. "We didn't kill him."
"I told you to take care of him. That means keep him alive."
"Look—"
Jen cut Reed off. "Lady, you can yell at us all you want later. It won't bring him back. You couldn't have saved him either. He'd have died under your care, too. That man was practically having tea with the Grim Reaper before you even left. It's like selling a broken chair to a blind woman and claiming the leg snapping is her fault—sorry for the example, Mrs. Juarez—and frankly, we're all going to be dead if we don't find cover and soon." Jen used Reed's shoulder for leverage, hopping off the truck. "Because the house ain't in Kansas anymore, but BSTU is. And so is the dust devil."
"Fire devil," Reed corrected dispassionately. He crossed his arms, a little proud of Jen's outburst because it meant she wasn't blaming herself anymore. And a little turned on at her commanding tone.
"¿Donde?" Mrs. Juarez asked sounding shaken and distraught.
"¿Mi camion?" Lindy tossed out.
"Doesn't anyone watch natural disaster movies?" Reed asked Jen rhetorically. "No, getting in your truck is a direct route into the chute. A nice and neat package for the tornado to suck up and then toss into the next field. With our luck, we'd land ass-up, meaning, if you haven't gotten where I'm going with this yet, we get crushed by several tons of metal."
Lindy's hard angles sharpened as her face pinched. She withheld her retort, however. "Then where?" she repeated her mother's desperate plea.
"I have an idea." Jen was excited, a devious smile curling her mouth.
"Oh, no. I don't trust you one bit."
Jen waited, her beaming expression unrelenting.
"Fine. What is this idea? So I know what I'm vetoing."
"You mean seconding?" Her glee didn't budge from her face, undeterred by his distrust.
"I mean vetoing. I'm one hundred percent sure it's awful based on that grin." He folded his arms and legs, tipping onto the truck. It wriggled against his shoulder as it was buffeted around, reminding him that they didn't have time to toe around whose ideas were best. They needed to get out of there.
She shrugged. "Then stay here and do your own thing." Then, she zipped around and got in the truck.
"Hey," Lindy protested. She glared at Reed like he was the one who'd stolen the driver's seat. "I thought you said not my truck."
Reed nodded, watching Jen shift the truck into gear. "I did. This is Jen's brilliant idea, and let it be known I said it was a bad one."
"You'll see," Jen proclaimed, shouting through the passenger window she opened. "You're welcome in advance."
“You’re stealing my sunglasses,” Reed called in light frustration when the truck took off before they could join her, trundling through the corn.
He blinked down the path it left behind as it delved deeper. Gathering his wits and training mind, he darted back onto the driveway to jump on top of his baby, who was miraculously stationary. She was resolute, proving the success of all the hard engineering that went into her creation.
His mouth dropped open.
Not only was the landscape ravaged—a scene from a future dystopian warscape or the Green Solutions compound after... The house and barn were gone. Flat slabs of foundations and cobbled piles of wood replaced the original structures. They hadn't been hit directly, but the devil had come within licking distance. A meandering path of uprooted crops wound around the fields behind where the house stood with a curve shearing right within several hundred yards from Reed's usual pee spot just outside the back door. He cringed, thinking of the pee-soaked rag he'd mopped Tio's urine up with, which was now undoubtedly flung somewhere in the Midwest, hopefully on that scavenger dude's head.
Reed shifted his gaze to the rusted red pickup slicing through what was left of the crop fields. His eyes skipped ahead, anticipating its trajectory, trying to isolate Jen's target. What was out there amongst the nothing that could help them?
"Shit. She's suicidal," he muttered to himself, his head falling back on his neck for a moment.
Unable to look away for long, he returned to staring as the three unrelenting forces all closed in on each other: Jen was leading the helicopter on a chase. Probably that's how it'd found them, by following Lindy the whole way back. And both Jen and BSTU were aiming right for the devil, which was twirling happily in a field off to the northwest and had a lovely bright column of fire raring up its middle.
Reed's jaw clenched. "I was wrong. This is the worst threesome."
Chapter Seven
Valerie bent low over the steering wheel, pressing her breasts into the backs of her hands, ducking her head so she could keep an eye above her. She shucked the sunglasses onto the top of her head. She needed full vision and they kept slipping.
With the windows rolled down, the clamor seemed to come from the side instead of above, disorienting her. She had to time this perfectly in order for her crazy idea to work. Or else, she was just crazy.
She wasn’t a fan of the idiotic idea herself, even though she’d come up with it, but out here, she had to rely on herself. No underling employees to follow her orders right now. Even if her decisions seemed batty, she had yet to prove erroneous during her reign as director. That record was winning over those sceptics of her young age and lack of education in such a prominent position. They followed-through on all of them.
Although, some might second-guess this one. Understandably.
This was some hard-core, hand
s-on, literal-as-shit disaster management. Her job didn't usually include a field component. After this, none of her employees could complain that she never got her hands dirty as director.
If they'd let her have her job back.
If she survived.
The dust-and-fire devil moved fast. Valerie pressed her foot practically to the floor mat, the diesel engine groaning and vibrating the truck more violently than the vortexes outside. It was protesting the push, particularly given that it was currently running on Henley's homemade contraption of biofuel from the Juarez's last corn stocks and parts of BSTU drones that Val herself had been granted the pleasure of acquiring, to put it in pacifist terms.
She was hoping the tornado could do to BSTU's helicopter what she did to their drones with a baseball bat.
After learning that Jennifer had ... been killed up at Green Solutions, Val was so not allowing BSTU to trap them and use them as bait or ransom to lure Sirena back. That would be a waste of Val's doppelganger's sacrifice.
If she was caught in the middle... fuck it. Then she'd done her job. Sacrifice the few for the greater good. Her brother was taking Sirena to her mom. That part of the plan would be complete. The rest of the Acton family was smart enough to know what to do.
At last, Val pulled even with the tornado, watching the spiral swirling menacingly out her left window, racing her. The truck paralleled it, and Val kept an eye on its aim, noticing all the victims it had slurped up and was jumbling around in a blender of horrors. Mostly it was dust, but a few flames flickered in its midst, and the occasional tractor or plank of wood whipped around with reckless abandon.
As terrifying as the twister was in full force, up close and personal, Val sincerely hoped it didn't lose momentum anytime soon. If it lost power, those objects would quickly become projectiles, flinging off the column instead of remaining wrapped in its suffocating embrace. Valerie was having a hard enough time tracking the two dangers of which she currently needed to be aware. Dodging missiles as big as the truck she was in would be several things too many.
Val locked her arms straight on the wheel, holding it steady, and pressed up off the seat so she could stick her head out the window, doggy-style, and turn her neck to glimpse the helicopter trailing above and behind.
Once she confirmed it was still there, she sat back. Her foot sank the last few inches to meet the floor. The truck began to gain on the twister ever so slightly.
The fields were vast, stalks rapidly tipping under the truck’s grill. Val had tried to take a quick mental snapshot before she jumped off the truck roof, but going as fast as she was, it was impossible to measure the distance and angle she needed and to calculate how much time there was to overtake the twister, before any other farms or roads popped up in front of her.
A slight miscalculation and she’d go careening. If she survived her second car accident in about a week's time—she'd lost track of the days—then she wouldn't suffer too long before being claimed as the victim of either the drought, which was essentially the result of her piss-poor efforts at her job, or at the mercy of Boston Science and Technology University, which was the result of her freaking brilliant idea to deceive and steal from them.
In a way, she deserved to be eliminated.
But everything she did was for the greater good. That thought was what kept her driving in a somewhat suicidal mission toward her goal.
The funnel fell slowly behind, taking second place between her and the chopper. Val tried not to prematurely congratulate herself.
"Goodbye, sanity." Talking to herself really sealed that departure.
She tilted the steering wheel toward the tornado, keeping pressure on the gas pedal. The plume of dust and fire transferred from the left wing mirror to the rear-view reflection.
But just as quickly, it began to shift back. The twister was veering off course.
No, no, no.
Val cranked the wheel hard, turning to keep traveling in the same direction the death spiral was, but it was now in the lead. She'd lost the ground she'd gained.
A sharp exhale burst from her nose as her lips pressed together in frustration. Nature never made her job easy, always being freaking unpredictable. Even if her scientists could model the climate's evolution, the useful specifics were swathed in uncertainty. And weather was even worse than climate. What was that saying about a butterfly wing across the world causing a storm on the other side? Did she owe her impending death, as it now was, to a pretty insect? Usually, she blamed humans for all the destruction she had to mitigate.
And just like that, unpredictability struck again.
The devil slowed to a stop.
Jen mashed the brake pedal with both feet just as hard as she had been stomping on the gas. Nonetheless, the entire width of the spinning column filled the span of the windshield by the time the truck skidded to a complete stop with a sharp lurch.
From her front-row seat, Val could truly appreciate just how massive the thing was. Reed would make some comment there about how it had nothing on him. It had looked small from afar, and Val figured it had gained mass as it picked up more material and found room to expand in the sprawling fields of this area. The truck jostled in the outermost winds, and the roar blasted through the open windows.
Val hesitated, waiting to see which direction it would pick next as the faint whine of the chopper held in a hovering position above her, waiting to see which direction she would choose.
Val squinted, her heart rate crescendoing. Either the mother-freaker was getting bigger as it sat there. Or else it had picked its next path. And that path was back the way it came, directly toward the truck.
Not wasting time swearing, Val jerked the gearshift into reverse and stomped down. Eyes wide on the brown and flickering orange column, she panicked.
It wasn't shrinking in proportion in her field of vision, which meant that she was not moving any faster than it was... Unless it was indeed enlarging as if it were inhaling, ready to make its move and swat the pesky truck out of its way.
Val closed her eyes tight and tipped onto the passenger seat, wrapping her hands around her head to protect it in case anything came through the windshield, adding the passenger seatbelt across her lap. If she went airborne, she was safer in a semi-enclosed cavity. Her foot she kept to the floor.
Swearwords sped through her mind like a litany. She should've accepted Reed's constant invitations, even if they weren't sincere, so she could've had one last fling before her end.
If she was lucky—she ignored the blatant evidence that nothing was going in her favor—then at least it would take the chopper with her, leaving Reed to escape. Somehow. On foot? Whatever. He'd figure it out. He wouldn't give up with Lindy and Mrs. Juarez under his wing.
Val didn't have to wait long before there was an ear-splitting shattering crash and projectiles began to ding the car's exterior and smash off the windshield. Val cowered, ducking down, trying to make herself smaller. She had no way to know if she was airborne or if she'd just gotten within range of the outermost layer of debris slinging around the eye. She kept the ball of her foot on the pedal with a wisp of hope that it was helping. It gave her a minor sense of retaining some control.
A crick crack splinter was barely audible amongst all the whacking and the background growl as a fissure spidered across the windshield.
Val kept her face averted.
It wasn't the shattering of glass or anything piercing through the front of the truck that shocked Val into a high-pitched I'm-dying scream. It was the back of the truck smashing into something very solid.
She'd been tossed aside by the devil. On some level, it was a relief to be free of its clutches. She was alive.
Her foot slipped off the gas, and she fumbled with the seatbelts, her hands shaking in her rush.
Get out, get out, get out.
She shoved open the passenger door and literally slid from the truck into the corn and tried to roll beneath the chassis, finding her way barred with what felt li
ke shards of wood. Fine. She didn't need the cover. Just being stomach down on the ground was better than sitting in the vehicle that could easily be sling-shot again if the tornado felt whimsical.
Val slapped hands over her ears, shoved her face into the ground, breathing the earthy thick scents of decaying plants and soil. For the first time in her life since the day her father went off to fight the wildfire that disfigured and disabled him for life, she felt utterly helpless, out of control, completely at the mercy of her host planet like a parasite. She almost wished for death to relieve her of that feeling.
◆◆◆
"Jen!"
Val wasn't sure how long she stayed hidden before Reed's solid voice and strong arms pulled her free, wrapping her up in the concrete reassurance that she was alive. It had felt like eons.
"Reed? This must be Hell." They both knew she was joking because of her feeble tone and the fact that she didn't push away from his chest as he knelt, clutching her to him.
"Sure felt like it for a while there. Fuck, Jen." His voice was low and grounding.
Val inhaled his sweat, felt his protruding collarbones jamming into her forehead. She didn't move. "Where's—"
"It moved east. Far east. I think it's starting to die down, too. You think I'd come out here if there were a chance it was nearby?" Reed snorted. "Your ass is nice, but not worth giving up my life for."
A breathy laugh leaked from her. “I lost your glasses.”
He held her tighter. “An acceptable loss. So long as it’s not my baby.”
It felt like she was melting and remolding into one piece at the same time. She was safe. They were… "What about—?"
"You got it. Damn near gave me a heart attack with your fucking insane idea for a plan. But fuck me, it worked."
"It worked? Really? But... but the twister changed direction."
"You didn't see?"
She shook her head against his pecs. She may have done it a few times more than necessary. He was there. She was there. They were alive. It was gone if what he was saying was right. She was having a hard time convincing herself. Her heart continued to pound in a frenzy. Maybe that was his scent that shot into her mind and told her that her nerve-endings were all very much alive. "I ducked below the windshield as soon as I finagled the truck into reverse."