“There's a tornado behind us!”
There was no other reaction but to hit the gas, and Joule passed the sign without any more hesitation. She was tense in her seat as though she controlled the gears and axles herself. Though she should have trusted her roommate, Joule turned her head and looked behind them.
Sure enough, following the path of the road was a gigantic, gray whirlwind.
Unlike the ones she'd seen as a child, this storm wasn't a whimsical twist of floating leaves twirling its way down the street. Her memory floated back to her mother showing her how to feed different colored leaves into the swirl to mark their paths. She’d been a tiny tornado scientist watching in wonder that day.
This wasn’t that.
This was a funnel with distinct edges. No one needed to throw a car into it to see where it went. This one was a massive, dark gray column, ominous and loud.
Joule pushed the gas pedal as far down as it would go, but even the sudden burst of speed wasn’t enough as Sarah yelled at her. “Faster!”
There was no “faster.” Still, she jammed the pedal harder.
“Shouldn't there be a siren?” Deveron was asking in her rearview mirror.
Joule didn’t know. There had been no warning, only Sarah being smart enough to read the weird weather and check behind the car. Joule could see both her rear passengers had turned and were staring out the rear window now. Their hands gripped the back of the seats like small children on a road trip, but this was anything but.
Breathe, she reminded herself. But it only resulted in one deep gulp that she then held tightly, using the pressure to fuel her brain.
“There aren't sirens out here,” Sarah answered. “People are too far apart. It's too expensive.”
More expensive than replacing all the homes? Joule thought, even as she realized that Sarah’s voice was now calmer… now that her own reaction was blowing up.
She took a curve in the road and then, once again, pressed the gas pedal down as far as it would go. These roads were not made for speed. They'd not been kept up—old country roads with the paving only in random spots, if they were paved at all.
The car bumped and swerved as she tried to maintain speed and yet miss the potholes. The open space behind them let her know the tornado still chased them. It lagged for a moment but then sped up. Suddenly, it loomed close behind her, taking up most of the rearview mirror. She would have been shaking were she not locked so tightly into position.
Her brain raced, watching the road in front of her. Her eyes darted back and forth, tracking the beast that tracked them as if it were hunting.
Joule thought back through everything she’d been taught. It didn't sound like a train. Though it was noisy, it roared like wind. Like a white noise machine with the switch changed from “gentle” to “horrific.”
Maybe it was too far behind them.
She was putting space between it and the car again, though whether that was from her skills in outrunning it or because the gray beast itself had backed off, she didn’t know.
Joule hated not knowing. If she didn’t know what she’d done, she couldn’t repeat it.
She flinched as another noise came, her whole body jerking—along with everyone else in the car—as something else screeched across the side of the car.
Though she managed to stay on the road, she felt the car take the hit. Forced to lift up on the gas, she to take the harsh turn without running up on two tires. That was a win in itself.
The road itself challenged her with hidden turns and uneven pavement. The last road had been straight and easy by comparison. Her heart pounded in time with her hands jerking the steering wheel side to side, as if it knew she would function better fully in sync.
She gulped another lungful of air and held it again.
And the Twister disappeared from the rearview mirror.
“Where is it?” she demanded. “Where is it?”
Her heart pounded in her ears. And maybe that was why she could no longer hear the sound of the tornado.
“It's small,” Sarah said as she put her hand on Joule’s shoulder. As if that might make her calm her shit down. It wouldn’t. “It might die out.”
That was small?
But Joule realized that, while Cage and Deveron were still shouting about where it might be, Sarah’s voice sounded almost relaxed. Honestly, once Joule had started driving away, her roommate had sounded as if everything would be okay. Joule tried to take that in. If Sarah could keep her shit in her basket, so could she.
“Where am I going?”
They were the only car on the road. As if everyone else was local, and far too smart to be caught out when there was a tornado about.
“Where is it?” Deveron pressed, still twisted around in his seat.
Cage, too, was turning all directions, acting as tornado spotter but failing to find anything. “I don't know. I'm looking for it!”
“Head home.” Once again, Sarah was a calming voice of reason.
Joule knew where “home” was. Desperado’s Hideaway was where she would drive on autopilot now, and she knew all the roads around her. She swerved again, knowing that the pothole was just over the small rise, and automatically missing it.
“Is home safe?”
She was thinking it as Cage asked. Just like a twin. She was once again grateful they were still together.
“And where do we go at home? There's no basement,” Deveron pointed out, though neither of them was looking at Sarah. They were still trying to figure out where the tornado had gone.
The lack of it was more nerve-wracking than seeing it had been. Now Joule felt as though it would pop back up at any moment, ambushing her rather than giving a solid chase.
“No basement,” Sarah said, “but there is an interior closet.” Again, her voice was measured while the other three were flipping out.
Joule scrambled far too fast for the road. Gravel kicked as her nerves made her speed climb higher and higher, until even Deveron was telling her slow down.
“If we go in a ditch, we’re completely screwed.”
That much was true.
The roads sloped off steeply to either side. Whether there was water in the runoff ditches, she didn't know, but she didn't want to find out. And she sure as hell didn't want to discover it by being nose down off the side of the road.
“It’s over there,” Sarah said, and Joule tried not to jerk the car as she looked.
Even before she said it, the others in the car were feeding her information.
“It’s a waterspout now,” Cage told her. “It must have gone out over the lake.”
They couldn't see the lake from their home. But it wasn’t far away as the crow flies, hidden from their back window behind the large, beautiful, and mostly serene hillside that flanked the small house. Joule had liked the landscape—both the hills and the lake. Maybe only until today.
Knowing she shouldn't, she turned her head, watching over the trees as the water climbed into the sky.
Now the spout was no longer gray. It was white. As if the water had cleaned out the debris the twister had picked up.
And it still didn't sound like a train.
She raced down the short road leading toward the house. The car fishtailed as she hit their turn, but she didn’t care. She offered a glance as they passed the only other house on their drive.
There wasn’t any movement inside—nothing obvious through the large windows—and she wondered if the couple who lived there had already hunkered down in their bathtub, or their closets, as Sarah had suggested.
Gravel kicked and sprayed behind her, as her wheels dug ruts in the road. Right now, she didn't care. The underside of the carriage pinged from the rocks she kicked up, but it barely registered in her brain.
As she took the last turn into the driveway, she could see the waterspout still hovering over the creek.
“Don't they die out over water?” she asked, pulling the car into the carport and slamming it into pa
rk.
“Sometimes,” Sarah said, though just “sometimes” wasn’t reassuring.
Whatever else her roommate told them was lost in the wind as the four of them opened the car doors and let in the full extent of the whipping white noise.
Joule felt her hair leap up, as though the wind was trying to tear it out of her scalp. Her clothing pressed against her, flapping in the gale. And for the first time, she realized it was raining, too. With the wind throwing the raindrops around, they hit with a zing.
“Inside!” Sarah pointed and demanded as though she’d given them this instruction before and they simply hadn’t paid attention. Her own hair was blowing wildly around her head as she grabbed at the edges of her jacket to keep the wind from stealing it.
Cage ducked suddenly to avoid something flying past. It moved too quickly to properly identify it, but seeing it sail by made Joule’s heart kick, when she would have thought it was already beating far too fast and hard for that to be possible.
He grabbed her arm, tugging her behind the other two. Only then did she realized she’d stopped. She’d been standing in one place, peering out at the backyard and over the hill, her instinctive human need to watch the devastation.
But intelligence won out over curiosity and she followed Sarah up the tiny stairs that led to the side door. It had bothered Joule before that the screen door opened out and there wasn't even a porch to stand on. Now it seemed a ridiculous arrangement when they were struggling to get four people inside.
Once all of them were in, Deveron turned and threw his weight against the door, pushing it until it fully shut. He struggled to get the bolt closed and tested it, since it never seemed to want to stay clicked on its own.
“Bathroom closet!” Sarah said, leading them toward the hallway and keeping the foursome centered in the bulk of the house.
The main room that Joule and Sarah shared had an attached bath, but it also had a window. The hallway bath had a separate room for the toilet and the tub and a door that closed it off from the sinks.
Slamming the doors and giving away the impression that maybe she wasn’t as calm as she seemed, Sarah shut them into the small space that was far too tight for four.
“We can shove in by the washer and dryer,” she offered.
Though Joule was tempted, shoving herself into a closet to escape danger was a place she'd been before—and one she didn't want to return to.
The four of them now stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Supposedly safe, they looked at each other as if to ask what next? Sarah was the only one with any experience at this.
But Joule found no answers on her roommate face either, so she put voice to what they were all thinking. “What do we do now?”
15
“No, I don't know where the radio is,” Joule snapped back to Sarah, as the two men looked at her roommate with the same crazy expression. “I also don't know where the crank is to start the car engine.”
Sarah gave her a deadpan look before sweeping her gaze around the small group. Apparently, they were all found equally lacking. “Stay here.”
Before they could protest, Sarah had dashed into the hall—the space she’d just declared unsafe. Shaving the door closed behind her, she left Joule, Deveron, and Cage looking to each other as if to ask, What just happened?
Though she couldn't see anything from their windowless space, Joule couldn’t avoid hearing the rage of the wind outside. It slapped at the house with whatever debris it had picked up and whipped around. She wondered if there was a whiteout of cotton in the air, and she fought down the prickling of anxiety. All they could do was sit in the safest place in the house. And wait.
But Sarah—who’d been adamant that they hunker down and wait—wasn’t doing it herself.
It was Deveron who first put words to Joule’s thoughts. “Look, she's the only one of us who seems to know what she's doing.”
Even as he finished saying it, the door flipped open and Sarah, keeping her body limited to the lower half of the open space, duck-walked through and quickly shoved it shut behind her.
Why not just stand up and run through? Joule thought that would be quicker, but Cage managed to voice the question.
“Keeping myself low in case a window goes out,” Sarah explained. “Don’t want to get hit by any flying debris.”
Though the explanation made sense, Joule had been avoiding thinking about the tornado getting into the house. Sarah was still offering up her impromptu tornado safety lessons. “If you're exposed, you get down and you crawl around. It protects your torso, too.”
Jesus, Joule thought. For all the wind and the noise that sounded like someone had left a massive grinder on high, this storm still didn't sound like a train. In fact, every time she'd heard a train, it had been a train. And now that she'd actually seen a tornado, it didn't sound like a train at all.
She was super salty that her limited information had turned out to be incorrect.
But Sarah was already fidgeting with the dials on a small radio she had grabbed, and Joule didn’t have time to remain angry at whomever had sold her that useless bit of goods. The radio wasn’t old-timey, as Joule had anticipated. It was sleek, black, and high end.
“This is our lifeline.” Sarah held it up for a moment. “We don't have tornado warning sirens out here, but we do have access to updates even in a power outage. In fact, we should probably keep it in this room, since this is where we'll come if we see another one.”
If we see another one, Joule thought. That was something she didn’t want to contemplate. Being chased down the street had been heart-stopping enough. She didn’t want to become jaded to them the way Sarah had.
Or maybe Sarah was just handling the pressure well and she’d freak out later. For the moment, her roommate played with the knobs and found the emergency broadcast station. The voice came through loud and clear, updating them on what was happening and where.
At first, they listened with rapt attention, but after a while, Joule started to tune it out. The information repeated and only a few useful bits drizzled in over the next hour or so. None of it changed anything for them. They simply sat on the floor, waiting it out. Joule was grateful that she was too uptight to have to use the bathroom or get hungry, but she decided she was going to lay in supplies for “the next one.”
Mentally, she made a list of good things to have—snack bars, crackers, some bottles of water. She’d want a coloring book and some crayons maybe. Puzzles, something to damn well do.
If we see another one. The words ran through her head in a sarcastic loop.
“This was supposed to be a low-tornado area!” she complained aloud, as if the weather should understand where it was and wasn't supposed to go. But it certainly hadn’t understood that this last decade.
Sarah shook her head at Joule. “This is low tornado.”
Joule and Cage blinked at each other as the words processed.
It was Cage who spoke up this time. “I've seen exactly zero tornadoes in any of the other places I've been—until today. I might not have lived here very long, but I've now been chased down the street by a tornado. It doesn't feel low to me—”
“Listen!” Sarah interrupted, jostling the radio a little bit as if to draw their attention.
The voice over the system let them know that this twister was currently being classified as an F1.
“F-1?” Joule cried out. “That was huge!”
“You won't think so once you’ve seen a bigger one,” Sarah told her, still remaining outwardly calm. Too calm.
“I hope I never do. This is supposed to be a low tornado area!” She reiterated the clearly incorrect idea.
“But there's no part of Alabama that's a no-tornado area.” Sarah sounded like she was trying to be comforting, as if anything she said would calm the other three down. “In fact, there's no part of the US that's a no-tornado area. They can happen anywhere. It’s just a matter of how frequent they are.”
“Well, I'm with Cage. I've seen exac
tly zero of these fuckers before now.” Even as she said it, Joule noticed that some of the noise outside had died down. But the voice on the radio crackled back to life, and this time they listened as it told them where a funnel had been spotted. In fact, there were two.
Christ. Joule sighed, but didn’t say it. Why should there just be one?
They had apparently seen the larger of the two. The other was also classified as an F1, but wasn’t quite as big.
Another hour of staticky updates passed before the voice declared the danger gone.
“That's it,” Sarah said, standing. “We are now free to roam about the house.”
They all stood up, stretching their legs, and following her lead. But Joule still asked. “I can use the bathroom now?”
“Good idea,” Deveron replied, clearly having been needing the facilities himself.
But they still waited for Sarah to nod before Joule headed out to the bathroom attached to her bedroom.
“Be careful out there,” Sarah cautioned. “Our first job is to assess the damage.”
16
Cage looked over his shoulder, but nothing was chasing him. He told himself to calm down, but his alert system wasn’t getting the message. He knew about adrenaline, about parasympathetic responses and all the hormones and messenger systems involved… and he still couldn’t turn it off.
He was walking through the field again, the sunshine feeling deceptive on his shoulders now. As if it were just waiting to pounce, to toss a tornado at him. He should be comfortable with traipsing his collections across the open grass to the tent, but for the past several days, he’d fought the urge to flee.
Today, for the first time, the specimens he was carrying weren't fauna, but flora. Beside him, Leah carried her own stack of small boxes with clippings. Seeming to read his mood, she told him, “It's not tornado weather.”
But from the other side of him, Micah added, “But we don't always get them with weird weather. Sometimes they come out of nothing.”
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