by Megan Hart
“There’s nobody. How many rooms were occupied, do you know?”
“No. The Vacancy sign was on, I remember that. So maybe not all of them. But…some of them. And the people from the office…” She swallowed, hard. “Maybe they got out all right.”
And maybe they had, but there was no sign of it now. There was nothing but the two of them in the demanding sunlight and breezeless air, and finally, the far-off sound of sirens. Cal looked out across the stripped-bare fields, toward the highway.
“I need to go find my wife.”
3
It probably wasn’t the first time she’d slept with a married man, but that didn’t make the news any more palatable. Abbie shrugged. “Not my business.”
“My ex-wife,” Cal amended. “She lives between here and Ada. I should make sure she’s okay.”
Ada was a town, not a person. She remembered that much. Cal turned without waiting for her to answer, still shading his eyes. Last night’s journey across the street was hazy, but she did remember that they’d walked. He must’ve left his vehicle in the bar parking lot, and now there was little there but buckled asphalt.
Abbie wasn’t accustomed to the protection of a hat the way Cal probably was, but this morning’s sun was so vehemently brutal she also shaded her eyes to search for her car. A battered, dusty Volvo held together with spit and hope, it had seen her halfway across the country. It had brought her here. Once, its complicated system of airbags and seat-belts and reinforced steel had saved her life.
She hated that car, but she loved it, too.
She’d left it parked in front of her room, but it wasn’t there now. She found it on the other side of the lot, skewed across three parking spaces but not on its side. She ran for it, heedless of broken glass, live wires, whatever dangers were in her way. Behind her, Cal shouted, but Abbie ignored him until her hands were flat on the Volvo’s hood. The metal was hot even this early in the morning. She pressed her face to it, hugging the vehicle like a crazy woman.
This was the car in which she’d lost everything, and it was all she had left. She didn’t care about the stuff in her demolished motel room — she could replace underpants and her toothbrush; she could buy a new pair of shoes. But this car was irreplaceable and precious for that.
“I guess this is yours?”
The fact he could manage to sound amused even amongst all this destruction gave her the strength to lift her head. Her cheek felt welted. Abbie found a smile. “Yeah.”
“Don’t suppose you have the keys.”
She held up one finger before ducking to run her hand along the back bumper. She pulled out a small black container backed with a heavy duty magnet. Inside, a key.
She held it up, triumphant. “I do.”
Cal shook his head, tilting it to look at her with one squinted eye. “Lose your keys a lot, do you?”
“Have had them taken away enough times, that’s all.” She straightened, looking him in the eye. This wasn’t the time to share her personal history, but it wasn’t the time for lies either. She turned the key over and over in her fingers. It opened the trunk. She had clothes in there, she realized, some things she’d been meaning to take to the laundromat when she found one. She could really get dressed. “Give me a few minutes, okay? I want to put on something a little more…substantial.”
In the light of day after a night of drinking and fucking, soaked from an icy shower, hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed, there was no way she should have earned the sort of appraising look he gave her now, but that’s what Cal gave her. “If you have to.”
Abbie laughed. The short, sharp bark of it startled her at first, but then she dissolved into giggles so fierce she had to put out a hand against the car to keep herself upright. She looked up at him through the fringes of her tangled hair. Somehow, no matter what destruction had swept through here, she had the feeling everything was going to be okay.
Too much laughter could be as bad for her as too many tears, so she held herself back. She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth. Then, impulsively, she pushed up onto her tiptoes to kiss him. Hard.
“Thank you,” she told him.
He didn’t ask her for what, and that was just fine, since she couldn’t have said what she meant. Abbie pulled open the trunk, sifted through the duffle of her dirty clothes. She pulled out a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, plus a sweatshirt that didn’t smell too bad. There wasn’t much she could do about panties or socks, but at least she’d be more covered up. She stripped down quickly with no more than a glance from side to side to see if anyone was there. Nobody was.
“Christ, it’s like something out of the Twilight Zone.” She yanked the jeans up over her hips and buttoned them. The t-shirt over her head. “Like…we’re the only ones left.”
Cal looked into the distance. “I hope not.”
Abbie, on the other hand, kind of did. Only for a moment, though, because if they were truly the only ones left in the entire world, that would mean Ryan and the boys were gone too. And that, she thought, would be an unbearable knowledge.
She gave Cal the key. “You drive. But I’m coming with you.”
She thought he might balk, taking a one-nighter to visit his ex, but Cal nodded and unlocked the doors. If the interior of her car disgusted him he didn’t show it, though it was obvious he noticed the layers of fast-food wrappers and and other garbage the way he’d noticed everything else. Truth was, the trash repulsed her too.
Maybe, she thought as Cal turned the key and the Volvo’s faithful, loyal, unfaltering engine started up with a sputter instead of a roar, she would clean out the car.
Abbie had no idea where Ada was, but no more than five minutes after they’d left the Sentinel Motel parking lot, they had to take a detour. “At least we know we’re not the only ones who made it out okay,” she said as the uniformed cop waved them to the left from his place next to his car, lights flashing.
Cal pulled up beside him. “Gotta get to Dogleg Lane, Eddie.”
“Checking on Marnie?” Eddie nodded and stood straight to look past the detour. Then bent back to Cal. “Everything’s tore up that way, Cal, maybe if you had a four-wheel drive…”
“The Volvo has all-wheel drive,” Abbie offered, not sure why she did. It made no-nevermind to her if they had to take the long way around.
Cal glanced at her, then at Eddie. “How tore up?”
“Trees down. A tractor trailer’s on its side. I can’t officially let you go this way, Cal…”
Cal nodded. “Gotcha.”
Then he pulled around the cop car and kept going. Another two miles down the rural highway, they saw where the tornado had torn through. Trees had been uprooted and tossed like toothpicks. The tractor trailer looked like a metal pretzel, on its side and blocking most of the road. Cal eased the car around it, tires crunching on the shattered contents of whatever had been in the trailer.
Abbie looked out the window, saw the ditch. She wondered somewhat idly if they were going to make it, or if the Volvo was simply going to go two wheels deep into the mud. Would the car tip? Would it topple?
She’d braced herself without thinking, and Cal noticed. Of course. He didn’t let go of the wheel, didn’t even glance at her. He kept his eyes on the thin sliver of road between the truck and the ditch. But he noticed.
“C’mon, now,” he murmured to the car like it was a woman. “C’mon baby. Just a little more. A little more.”
The car inched along, tires so close to the edge Abbie couldn’t see anything of the road when she looked out her window. She kept her eyes ahead after that.
It would be okay. Even if he rolls this car into the ditch, we’re going so slow it will be okay. The car can take it. It made it through worse than this.
It wasn’t until all four tires were fully on the pavement again that she realized she’d been holding her breath and gripping her fists so tight she cut her palms. Cal noticed, and he reached a hand to take hers, smearing the tiny half-moons of crimson. Fin
gers linked. He pulled her hand to his mouth and brushed the knuckles with his lips.
“Okay,” he said, not a question. “You’re okay.”
In another life, a man like this would’ve made her heart sing, but all Abbie could think was — why now? Why here? But she didn’t let go of his hand until it became apparent he needed both on the wheel in order to navigate the debris on the road.
They’d gone only another mile or so, creeping along at ten or fifteen miles an hour, when they reached another spot where the storm had obviously come through. Cal stopped the car and left it idling, but got out to stare out at the devastation. Abbie got out too, her steps wobbly and uncertain on the buckled concrete.
She didn’t know much about tornados other than what she’d seen in the movies, but this looked…bad. Horrific, as a matter of fact. Her stomach tumbled.
She’d thought there was nothing left back at the motel, but here, truly, the storm had come and taken everything. What must’ve been green fields were now nothing but torn and muddy spaces littered with debris. Dead spaces had taken the place of living.
“Jesus,” Cal said.
“What was here before?” She was almost afraid to ask, afraid he’d say it was his ex’s house or something.
Cal just shook his head and spread his fingers. “Everything. I mean…there were some houses. A convenience store.”
They stared in silence for some long moments. The far off sound of sirens came, lifted on a breeze that sent a shudder all through her. Abbie wondered if she’d ever feel the wind again without remembering how its caress could become a punch.
Back in the car, they drove no more than another five minutes when they found out what had happened to all the buildings.
The tornado had lifted them, torn them to pieces, and dropped them all over the road. And not just buildings — cars, trees…people.
Oh, the people.
The bodies of the injured, dying and dead littered the ground. Abbie saw a mangled corpse draped over a peaked roof, separated from the rest of the house. More lay in the fields and among the wreckage, piled like the dolls of some giant child who’d grown tired of her game and tossed them all aside.
“Everyone?” Cal said in a low voice. “Oh. God.”
She became aware of motion between two house-sized piles of rubbish. A figure in white, stumbling. No, not stumbling. Lurching. A man in a white suit lurched toward them, getting closer, and it wasn’t a siren she was hearing, but his high-pitched keen.
Cal stepped up next to her, one arm out in front in a position she recognized from many years of crossing streets with her boys. Warmth trickled through her, a reminder he was a gentleman, even as she wanted to shrug off his concern.
“You okay?” Cal shouted to the weaving, moaning figure.
These flowers were blooming all around her, more pushing their blue and purple heads up through the stinking mud and unfurling small crimson tendrils that grew long and longer until they drooped into the ground and then…like…what were they called? Runner beans? Maybe like bamboo shoots. The red threads dug into the ground and travelled underneath to shoot up a few inches beyond and sprout another set of blue and purple flowers, another bright red string.
She looked up, and half the distance she could see, earth that had been freshly turned by whatever had ripped through here in the night, ground that had been nothing but mud and destruction…all of it was covered in a carpet of flowers.
They covered the child.
“The voice of my fathergod came last night in howls and shrieks, the voice came out of the darkness and the force of it made the world tremble! People need to listen to me now. They’ll have to listen to me now. They’ll all have to learn how to listen.” Ice Cream Suit lifted his shaking hands to the sky, face upturned and alight with an ecstasy that made Abbie more uncomfortable even than the prayers had. This guy was fucking crazy.
Cal looked upward too, though of course there was nothing there. “What’s your name, buddy?”
“Renton. Renton Foster. The voice of my fathergod —”
“Yeah, we heard it too. Sounded like a freight train,” Abbie interrupted. She got to her feet, unsteady, her hands black with dirt, decorated with the blossoms.
The smell was…incredible.
Sweet, light, haunting. It was like every good thing she’d ever smelled. And yet the undertone was of something rotten. Of indulgence and gluttony and greed. It was too many pieces of birthday cake and half a bottle of really good scotch, coming up again without warning. Delicious and disgusting.
Foster’s delirious gaze spun to snag her face for a second or two before he looked at her feet. His mouth opened. “There. Is. The. Sign.”
It was a sign of something, that was true. A sign of some kind of fuckery, which was typical for anything having to do with religion, as far as she was concerned.
“A sign!” Foster lurched forward again, toward the edge of the road. He tripped off the mangled concrete and into the mud. Went sprawling. He gathered handfuls of the flower buds and swept them toward him, covering himself. He looked at Abbie, gaze rapt. “The voice told me there’d be a sign. And that people would have to listen to me now.”
He pointed to a tattered construction of canvas and poles that had been turned inside out. A tent of the sort she’d heard about but had never seen. Foster’s arms swept wide open before he brought his hands together, fingertip to fingertip.
“What the hell?” Cal bent to look at the ground.
Something moved, something inside the flowers covering the child. No…the child itself. Horrified, Abbie back away, mouth open. The flowers were consuming the body, another time-lapse site but this time in reverse. Not creating, not blooming. Breaking down. Destroying.
“Cal. Get away.” Her voice sounded steadier than she’d expected it to, but Cal didn’t move. Abbie said his name louder.
Both men turned to look at her.
Everything in front of her exploded.
Every blossom had opened. A cloud rose and spread. It engulfed Cal and Renton like a million tiny black flies, mosquitos. Motes of dust. No, that wasn’t right, not insects Abbie’s mind insisted even as she clapped a hand over her mouth and nose and the swirling cloud surrounded her.
Seeds?
And just like that, they were gone. The pretty blue and purple flowers had already begun to turn brown. The child’s body had vanished, nothing but a scrap or two of blue pajamas left to prove it had ever been there at all.
Abbie breathed in, blinking, the smell gone and the taste of something sour on her tongue so brief it was possible she’d imagined it. She coughed into her fist. Cal had doubled over, coughing, and so had Renton, but the preacher stood up first. Dark flecks speckled his face but disappeared when he swiped at them.
Cal stood too, looking like he meant to say something, but though his mouth opened all he could do was shake his head. He looked around at the destruction. His eyes closed. His shoulders drooped.
It was hardly her place to comfort him, but Abbie figured if she could have an orgasm or two with him, she could at the very least offer him a hand on his shoulder. Her fingers squeezed. He put his hand over hers and looked at her.
“What was that?” She asked in a low voice, though the only person who could possibly have heard them had stumbled off to keen and pray over another corpse. “I mean…I never saw anything like it.”
Cal shook his head again. “There’ve been stories, you know? Frogs raining from the sky because they’d been sucked up by a tornado and released miles away. Stones. There’ve been instances of infectious or airborne bacteria kicked up by storms. Maybe the flowers were something like that.”
She could see no sign of them now, but that bittersweet taste remained. More a memory than anything else. She rubbed her tongue over her teeth as though she could scrape it off.
“I need to get to my ex,” Cal said. “There’s nothing I can do here for anyone. I have to make sure she’s okay. She’s pregnant.”
He hadn’t mentioned that before, and Abbie’s hand fell from his shoulder. He gave her a small, strained smile. “Not mine. But that doesn’t mean I can’t make sure they’re all okay.”
Abbie thought of her own two boys. Ryan had a girlfriend angling to become a stepmother. He had a new life. They all did, without her. She’d always been the bad that happened to them, yet…wouldn’t she have gone through anything to get to them, to make sure they were all right, if she knew something like this had happened to them?
Of course she would.
“You can still come with me. I mean, I need to use your car. If we can get through here.” Cal looked again at the debris strewn over the road.
Renton turned toward them. His white suit was filthy, but he stood up straighter than he had before. He lifted his eyes again toward the place he believed held heaven. Then he toppled over.
“Oh, shit.” Cal sighed and took off at a trot. “Now what?”
Renton’s face had gone white except for dark circles under his eyes and his lips, which were as purple as though he’d painted them with lipstick. He clutched his head as his back arched and his feet drummed a pattern into the mud. Then he went still.
Abbie watched them, frozen, as Cal knelt next to him and listened first with an ear pressed to his chest. Then he tipped the man’s head back, put his hands on his chest. Began to push. Abbie’s hand pressed over her heart, the other to her stomach. Those were just two of the scars. Once, someone had worked over her this way. They’d saved her life. But it didn’t look like there’d be any saving of Renton, the Ice Cream Suit preacher, no matter what they did.
Cal panted and sat back. If he was annoyed or angry she hadn’t jumped in to help, he didn’t show it. He swiped his hand over his forehead. “Shit. He’s not breathing. Shit. I don’t know. Maybe he had a heart attack. Or a stroke. We need to get him to a hospital.”
She winced and pointed all around her. “Cal. They’re all dead. There must be a dozen bodies here. Just…maybe you should leave him.”