Cease Fire

by Janie Crouch

  “Keira, I’m so sorry. I know you wanted to talk to Roman. But an emergency weather report just came on the radio. The storm they were predicting has gotten much worse.”

  “How much worse?” Keira asked.

  “They’re calling for a whiteout by later today,” the woman with the baby said.

  “The weatherman said people should expect to lose power and make sure they are stocked up on food.” Annabel looked back and forth between Keira and Roman, worry clear in her expression.

  “We have plenty of food and water. I already made certain of that,” Keira assured everyone. “I just wish we had a generator in case we lose power.”

  Roman wanted to pack Keira up and take her over to his house. He had a generator. He had everything they required to wait out the storm.

  Not to mention they had quite a bit they needed to talk about.

  But he knew that Keira wouldn’t leave the other women, particularly not the quiet one with the infant held so close to her. Right now, these women were looking to Keira to take care of them, and she was not going to let them down.

  Whatever weakness she’d been feeling on the couch, whatever personal difficulties she might be going through, Roman could see Keira push those aside. These people needed her and she was going to step up.

  Roman knew he could either get out of the way or he could help, but he wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of it. So unless he wanted to move however many women were currently staying at the shelter, he needed to bring the assistance to them.

  Because there was no way in hell he was leaving Keira alone. He didn’t know exactly what had happened with the attempted vandalism, but the timing with Freihof was too suspicious to be glossed over. Roman would get the police report and double-check everything. But even if he found out it was some twelve-year-old, he still wasn’t leaving Keira alone.

  “It’s too late to buy a generator now,” he told them. “All the stores will be sold out. Not to mention it will be a madhouse.”

  Keira looked disturbed at that news, but didn’t panic. “What can we do? Do you have any ideas? It was stupid of me not to purchase a generator before now.”

  “I’ve got one at my house. I’ll take my truck, get it and bring it back here. As long as you don’t mind me staying during the storm.”

  Annabel clapped her hands together, a huge smile breaking out on her face. “Yay! Now we have someone here who can kill the spiders!”

  Roman looked over at Keira, one eyebrow raised. She just shrugged.

  “What are you waiting for, Weber? Go make yourself useful.”

  Chapter Ten

  Keira spent the next couple hours making phone calls to clients to reschedule appointments due to the storm. She checked the kitchen pantry and refrigerator to make sure that they did indeed have enough food.

  Like many stoves in Colorado, the ones in the apartments were gas-based, so losing power wouldn’t make a difference for cooking. But she had to admit that having a generator would be a big help when it came to keeping warm.

  She refused to give much thought to the results of her pregnancy test. After all, there wasn’t anything that could be done about that right now. There would be plenty of time to freak out later when a storm wasn’t coming.

  Right now, she was just trying not to panic that Roman seemed to be back in her life with a vengeance. She had no idea how he felt about the baby. She’d been so busy reeling from her own emotions that she couldn’t even remember what sort of expressions had crossed his face. Panic? Happiness? Probably not. She doubted they’d have any time to talk about it over the next day or two, or however long the storm lasted. That generator was going to allow them to keep only one room warm if the power went out. Which meant everyone would be crowding around.

  The “hey I’m pregnant and we haven’t talked for two months and I’m not sure that we’re compatible with each other but we may be tied to each other for the rest of our lives” conversation was probably not best done in front of other people.

  Keira was back in her apartment when she heard a tentative knock on her door.

  She knew right away it wasn’t Annabel, who had a habit of knocking loudly as she walked in. Which had caused Keira to start locking her door if she wanted any privacy.

  She crossed to the door and opened it, to find Heather and baby Rachel there. The other woman looked like she was going to start crying any second.

  “Heather, what’s wrong?” Keira wrapped her arm around the woman’s shoulder and pulled her into the room.

  “I’m sorry, Keira.” She shook her head rapidly.

  “For what?”

  “I—I was hoping I could borrow your car.”

  “Right now? It’s already snowing pretty hard out there.”

  Now Heather began to really cry. “I forgot to buy formula. I only have one can left and I’m afraid if the storm hits I’m going to run out. It was so stupid of me. I should’ve just gone to the store yesterday. I never plan right. I always screw up.”

  Keira knew there was much more going on here than just concern about not enough formula. She wanted to pull the younger woman into her arms, but knew that a move closer might throw her into a panic.

  “Heather.” Keira kept her voice as soft and even as she could. “None of us knew that the storm was going to grow with such intensity.”

  “I should’ve made sure I had what I needed. It was so stupid of me.”

  Keira reached out to touch her gently on the shoulder, but dropped her hand when Heather flinched. Keira didn’t take offense at the other woman’s reaction. It had been drilled into her psyche by years of abuse.

  So now the woman was terrified on two levels. First, afraid that she had screwed up and that Keira was going to be mad at her, but also afraid that her infant daughter wasn’t going to have enough food during the storm. The first issue would take years to address, but the second Keira could alleviate right now.

  She led Heather over to the couch and handed her a tissue so that she could wipe the tears from her eyes.

  “Heather, we can fix this problem. Don’t worry. Okay?”

  She at least looked less distraught at that. “Really? I can borrow your car? I promise I won’t be gone very long.”

  Keira shook her head. “No, I don’t want you to take the baby out in this weather. How about if I drive to the grocery store to get the formula and a couple other things we need?”

  Heather looked worried again. “I hate for you to have to go out in this storm. This is my screwup.”

  “Really? You’re responsible for all that snow coming down outside? Do you know some sort of magic snow dance I’m unaware of?”

  Heather smiled just the slightest bit. Keira sat next to her on the couch, thankful when the woman didn’t flinch away again.

  “You’re right. And yes, if you wouldn’t mind, that would be great. I didn’t really want to take Rachel out in the snow, either.”

  Keira stood up. “It’s no problem, but I want to go ahead and leave now before it gets any worse.”

  Heather showed her the type of formula she needed, and Keira did a quick sweep of the pantry and refrigerator again to make sure there wasn’t anything they were particularly low on.

  They really were pretty well stocked, and Keira had snow tires on her car. So even though she was kicking herself for not having a generator, all in all they weren’t in bad shape.

  When she got to the grocery store, about a mile and a half away, it was a madhouse. Someone would’ve thought they had announced the upcoming apocalypse by the way every single food item had disappeared from the shelves. Keira made her way back to the baby section, hoping for the best, but wasn’t surprised when she found that all formula, every single brand, was gone.

  Damn it. She couldn’t go back to the house without some formula. She grabbed some diapers that wo
uld fit Rachel, just in case, and some snack foods being sold at the register.

  Keira didn’t want to have to go to the supercenter, another five miles away, but didn’t see any way around it.

  Actually, maybe she could catch Roman in time and see if he could stop at the store on his way back. He was already out, had a lot more experience driving in this weather—because damn, that snow was really coming down—and was going to pass a lot more places on his way back to Fresh Starts.

  She grabbed her phone, glad she hadn’t deleted his number like she’d sworn to herself she would do five thousand times two months ago, and pressed the send button.

  It went straight to Roman’s voice mail. She left him a message telling him what she needed, but the message seemed to break off in the middle and she wasn’t sure if it went through. She tried again, but this time the call didn’t go through at all.

  She texted him with the info about the formula and cursed when her phone gave the “message not sent” alert.

  Looked like she was going to have to get the formula herself, since she couldn’t take a chance that he hadn’t gotten the message. And there was no time to dawdle.

  She drove as quickly as she safely could to the supercenter. Visibility was terrible, but at least there weren’t too many totally insane people like her out on the road in this weather.

  The scene inside the supercenter wasn’t any less hectic than the grocery store had been. Most of the food had been picked over. Unless someone was looking for cans of Spam, they were pretty much out of luck.

  Keira wasn’t that desperate, thank goodness.

  She kept her fingers crossed as she headed back to the baby section, hoping there would be some formula. Relief coursed through her when she saw there were multiple cans left. Keira grabbed three, not wanting to take too many in case someone else was in the same dire straits.

  She grabbed a couple gallons of water near the cashier’s station. Just in case.

  If the pipes froze at her house they wouldn’t be able to get water from outside. The bathtubs were already full at home and she had a filter that could be used to make that into drinking water if needed.

  But a couple extra gallons never hurt.

  When Keira had paid and walked back outside, she stopped for a second, aghast. The temperature had dropped just in the fifteen minutes she’d been inside the store. The snow now was so thick it was difficult to see three or four feet in front of her.

  Keira rushed to her car. She needed to get home. Now.

  The car started without any problem and Keira slowly made her way out of the parking lot. But once she wasn’t around any parked cars, she realized she could barely see the road at all. Seeing any buildings or getting any visual clues was completely impossible.

  She grabbed her phone and entered her home address into the maps application. Without it, she didn’t think she’d ever find her way to the salon. In the blinding snow, she could drive right by it and not even know where she was.

  Keira fought to keep from panicking. It was like she was wrapped in a blanket of white. Blind, but not surrounded by black.

  Her phone spit out directions to her, which made her feel a little bit better. She was glad she had turned to electronic help, because evidently, she’d been going the wrong way completely.

  Scary.

  Keira crept along at a snail’s pace, glad she was only a few miles from the salon. After about twenty minutes, she knew she should be coming up on the traffic light nearby.

  Although seeing it would be almost impossible.

  But when the map app started telling her to make multiple turns, Keira got very concerned. She shouldn’t have to make any turns, unless there was some sort of road blockage that the map app knew about and she didn’t.

  She decided to trust her phone and took the left and then a second left before turning right.

  She was so lost and truly starting to panic now. If her phone didn’t lead her in the right direction, she was never going to find Fresh Starts in the storm.

  The app told her to take another left, which she did, almost positive this couldn’t be the correct direction.

  When she finally saw a building, her eyes almost bugged out of her head. This wasn’t the salon, it was the old abandoned church on the other side of town.

  Keira drew in a desperate breath when she realized the app had taken her completely in the wrong direction.

  She fought to not allow panic to swamp her. She was at least five or six miles from her house, basically in the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t just stay here; she needed to get inside before this storm got any worse. There was no way she could make it back to her house, not right now, not while her phone was obviously giving her directions to some other county.

  She gently turned the car around to head back toward civilization. She would stop at the first building she came to. Even if it meant she had to wait out the storm at a gas station.

  She pulled onto what she hoped was the road and began to drive in the opposite direction from where her useless map app—which had never given her a problem before today; great timing—had taken her.

  A few seconds later, a car heading in the opposite direction seemed to come out of nowhere. Keira cursed when she yanked the steering wheel to the side, then overcorrected, causing her back wheels, despite the snow tires, to spin madly on the snow and ice.

  She glanced in her rearview mirror, but the car had already disappeared in the whiteness behind her. No help would be coming from there.

  She almost had the car back under control, still having gone only about ten yards from the abandoned church, when the back wheels went off the side of the sloped ledge. She hit the gas harder, to try to keep the car from slipping, but a pickup truck appeared suddenly out of the enveloping snow and smashed into the front of her car, sending it crashing down the embankment at a terrorizing rate.

  There was nothing Keira could do but hang on as the vehicle careened down the hill. Her body slammed up against the driver’s side door as her car hit a tree, stopping its forward motion. Upon contact, the airbags deployed loudly.

  Keira sat in the unnerving silence that followed, trying to take physical stock of herself. She was alive. She was able to move all her fingers and toes. She didn’t seem to be bleeding, except from where she had hit her head slightly on the driver’s door window. The engine had already stalled and Keira knew there was no way she was driving out of here.

  She tried to use her phone, but it wouldn’t call out at all or allow her to send a text.

  She had no idea what she should do. Should she stay in the car? She didn’t think there was any way she could walk into town. Being out in this storm for too long would mean death. Of course, staying in this car if help didn’t come would probably mean death, too.

  Her only good option was that abandoned church across the road. Maybe she could at least get a fire going there. Because it was going to be a long time before anybody could find her in this weather.

  She grabbed the snacks that she’d bought at the stores and one of the gallons of water. She bundled herself up as best as she could, said a prayer and headed into the white.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Roman arrived back at Fresh Starts, he expected Keira to rush out and try to help him carry the heavy generator. He had specifically not allowed himself to think too much about her condition—about the baby they’d made—while he was grabbing the supplies from his house.

  To say they needed to have a really big talk was the understatement of the year.

  But he definitely wasn’t going to allow her to carry anything, no matter what she said or how strong she seemed to be.

  But it wasn’t Keira who rushed out into the snow. It was Annabel. And the young woman’s face was full of terror and disappointment.

  “I was hoping you were Keira.”

&nbs
p; Roman stopped what he was doing. “Keira’s not back yet?”

  “How do you know she’s not here in the first place?”

  “I got a voice mail and a text from her asking me to pick up some baby formula for Heather and her daughter.” Roman looked at his watch. That had been way too long ago. “Keira should’ve been back a while ago.”

  Annabel shook her head. “She’s not here. I’ve been trying to call her for over thirty minutes. She was just supposed to go to the local grocery store.”

  Roman grimaced. “Her voice mail told me they were out of formula and she didn’t want to go to the supercenter. That’s why she called me.”

  Annabel bit her lip. “Then why isn’t she back yet? It shouldn’t have taken this long.”

  Roman checked his phone to make sure he hadn’t missed any more messages from her. But there was nothing.

  A panic began to bubble in his gut, but he tamped it down.

  “Okay, I’m going to get this generator into the building, and I’ve got the formula Heather needs. Make sure everyone has their phones on them. Keira will call.”

  Roman carried the heavy generator into the salon and the women helped him get it up the stairs to Keira’s apartment. Every few seconds somebody would look at their phone.

  She still hadn’t called.

  By the time the generator was in place, Roman knew something was definitely wrong. The way Keira felt about these women, how important they were to her, how responsible she felt for them...she would’ve called.

  At this point, even if her phone had died or broken, if Keira was somewhere safe she would’ve gotten to a phone and called someone. Or at least the salon.

  “Keira’s in trouble, isn’t she?” Heather asked softly.

  Roman didn’t try to deceive her. “She would’ve called by now if she was somewhere that she could. She wouldn’t want you guys to worry.”

  “She went out to the grocery store for me.” The woman’s face was pinched. “For formula.”

  Roman nodded. “I understand. But Keira is smart and resourceful. Let’s give her a few more minutes and see if she contacts us.”