Heat flared at the back of her head—not quite pain, but definitely a little off. She possibly had a concussion. But being alone, she had nothing to compare to but the kitten. She paused to let the feeling pass and her mind wander.
In her memory, there had been at least three twisters. The two they’d been warned about—the F2 in Horton and anther F2 in Arab—and then whatever the hell had plowed through here. She had no idea what F-scale rating this one was. She was going to be very disappointed if she’d been plucked away by a 1 or 2.
But none of that gave her any idea of the time and distance between there and here.
She stepped a few more feet, but still didn't see the kitten.
Maybe he was gone. Stopping, she tried to think back and see if she could remember anything helpful. She wished she could remember being hauled away. She had memories of her feet lifting from the ground, but she’d still been holding on to Cage. She had memories of grabbing his hand and being yanked at, but she didn't remember letting go. And she didn't remember flying through a damned tornado. She didn't remember getting dropped out of the sky, or how far up she might have gone before she fell back to earth.
Had she been flung around and dropped, or had she been gently laid in the grass with the trash bag for a pillow? For a moment, Joule wondered if she had died. Was this heaven? It was beautiful. Clear sky, white, fluffy clouds, trees everywhere. The huge rut caused by the tornado made her confident that wasn’t the answer.
Was it hell? Because it was empty. She could wander alone, starving to death, dying of thirst, maybe even walking in circles. She told herself she was smarter than to do that. So, maybe it was purgatory—a dear little purgatory containing only herself, a cute kitten, and fifteen deer.
She stood quietly.
The kitten might be gone, but she still had to find water. She couldn't bank on the fact that she was dead and would survive forever without it. How would she find water?
Though she looked around to assess the landscape for anything helpful, she couldn’t help but think of her brother. What was Cage doing? Had he managed to stay tied to the pipe? If he and the others had even survived the twister, they'd gotten thrashed around quite a bit.
Joule remembered clearly that she and Izzy had bumped heads and arms more than once. Her foot had gotten stuck and she’d been tossed the other way and her ankle had twisted. If the others had come through, they might not be in good enough shape.
But they were gone—or she was.
She could hear her own breathing. The day was that quiet. And it had gone from being merely strange to becoming eerie. So Joule closed her eyes, pressed her hands against the sides of her pants, and held her breath. If she shut out all the other noise, she might find something useful.
There.
Maybe to her right.
Did she hear it?
30
The noise was close to deafening.
Cage stood in the parking lot, crowded on all sides with moving bodies. Frantic people trying to do the same thing he was. Too many questions and not enough answers.
He’d thought he would be tall enough to see over most heads, but not in this wild, squirming crowd that seemed to have a life of its own. Boomer and Bob had dropped them all here before heading out to fetch another round of survivors. But “here” was even further from what Cage wanted to be doing than the ditch or the back of the truck had been.
The other survivors had disappeared, blending into the writhing crowd, and he was left trying to stick with his friends. Sarah held both his hand on one side and Deveron’s on the other, unwilling to let them go. Cage wondered about her bad arm and told her, “Let me stay in the middle.”
But Sarah just shook her head and squeezed his fingers tighter. Maybe she was feeling better. Maybe her arm wasn't broken, just bruised. But Deveron seemed to be thinking the same thing as Cage.
“We need to get you to the medical tent.” Dev moved as though to nudge her but stopped himself at the last moment. He was on Sarah’s right, the side with the injured arm.
But again, Sarah shook her head. “People here are way more injured than me. All I'm going to do is wait in line. I’ll be sure to get it looked at when things die down.”
But that wouldn’t happen for a long time. Cage scanned the crowd again. The line they were in seemed just as long as when they’d joined it. It seemed to be the most popular one. They were constantly being jostled by new joiners as the crowds inflated before their eyes.
It was too big. How would anyone get help?
He had one goal: find Joule.
He needed to find Izzy as well, but hoped he’d find the two of them together. As much as he hated to admit it, he could admit that his only real goal was to find his sister. But everyone insisted that they first report the women to the current missing persons list.
That’s what they were waiting in line for. But Cage was doubting that anyone else could find Joule before he did. He pushed up on his toes to see over the crowd again and spotted a woman walking down the line with a clipboard clutched to her chest. She wasn’t writing anything on it, but her purpose became clear when she opened her mouth and called out, “This line is for missing people, people you were with when the tornado hit. People who—due to the direct actions of the tornado—lost contact with you!”
She moved a few feet further and repeated the words almost verbatim. But as she moved one more step, Cage turned away, until he heard that she was giving out a new message.
“If you have family members that you were not with at the time of the tornado—people that you can't say for certain are missing, but are maybe just sheltering in a different location—you need to move to the other line. That's the Reconnection line!” She took a deep breath and kept going. She pointed with her free hand as she talked, as though anyone could see her. She was short. But at least she could make her voice carry.
“That line over there is Family Reunion. That’s for families with children that were in a different location when the tornado hit. In all lines, priority is given for missing children first and missing adults second.”
He watched as she took a deep breath, her caramel-colored ponytail bobbing as she geared up for another yell. “The Reconnection line is there. Yes, you can use Reconnection resources to check for friends who aren’t answering their phones—” She pointed again, and Cage thought, That’s dumb, no one’s answering their phones.
As he looked where she pointed, Cage saw what the ranking system was. Family reunification was orange. Missing Persons was red. Reconnection, green.
The woman took another breath, but this time she paused enough to gather everyone’s attention, at least as much as she could in this crowd. “Make sure you're in the correct line. If you're trying to reunite with your family, you need to be over there. This line is to report missing persons. If you don’t have an actual missing person, you will get turned away. You will have to start over in the reunification line!”
It became clear to Cage that this was not their first rodeo.
The local community center was set up for exactly this. They had tents and tables out. People with clipboards or an open laptop or tablet filled two seats at each table, three tables at each tent. A generator sat behind the three tents and each device was plugged in as it was being used. They were organized. They knew what they were doing.
It seemed they’d had this set up for some time, though the crowd felt as if it had doubled in just the time since he and Sarah and Deveron had arrived. The line had moved, shuffling forward while the woman warned them about being in the correct place. He could now hear chugging from the machine, though just barely over the sound of everyone talking at once.
Voices were frantic, mothers listing information about their children, husbands looking for wives. Despite the clear organization, there were no uniforms. Cage suspected that was more an issue of budget in a town this size. The only way to identify if anyone was officially working, was that they carried a clipboard or walk
ed around asking people if they needed help.
As his little trio shuffled forward in the heat again, a short, round man with the ubiquitous clipboard in hand spoke to them. He made quick motions and asked what they were looking for, and in a moment determined that Joule and Izzy did qualify as “missing persons,” since the five of them had been in the same location and the two had actually been pulled away by the twister.
It took another fifteen minutes to reach the front of the line. As time passed—far too slowly for his liking—Cage grew more tense. He wanted to believe he would be better off out looking for his sister himself, but he wouldn't.
He didn't have a car. They'd have to get back to the house first for him to find out if he had a car at all. It was plausible that one of the tornadoes had run through the yard again and ripped up the carport and stolen his car. In fact, it could have ripped apart the entire house. Desperado’s Hideaway might be no more.
Lord knows, as he’d bounced along in the back of the truck with everyone else, grateful that the bouncing didn't exacerbate his injuries, he'd seen enough homes damaged. One would be perfectly intact and the one next to it blown to pieces, with just a foundation and a chimney left, if that. Or—almost worse—one half of a house would be chewed through. The other half still standing with a gaping wound open to allow the passersby to see everything inside. He’d spotted couches and armchairs, the occasional TV, or book face down on an end table sitting unaffected.
“Isabelle McAlister,” Sarah stated, cleanly listing off Izzy’s height and guessing at her weight. They’d reached the front of the line while he mused about tornado damage.
“She was wearing jeans and an army green tank top. Gray hoodie.”
Cage almost laughed. It's what Izzy could have worn any day, just the same way as if Sarah had been missing, they would have said ‘overalls, white t shirt,” and so on.
“She was wearing work boots,” Deveron added. “She has her hair in a ponytail. At least she did.”
That simple phrasing that his friend tacked on brought Cage to a stop.
He listened as they filled out the report for Izzy, and he thought so much of it would just be repeated for Joule. She was wearing the same work boots as Izzy. Same as all of them. But it was his turn and he gave her name adding, “blond hair, shoulder length.”
Cage moved his hand, indicating her hair as though they might not understand otherwise. “Curls.” He fought to keep his voice under check. Because what he wanted to do was yell, “I don't want to give you information! I want to go look. I want someone to find her!”
He explained again how she had disappeared, once again having to tell how her hand had been in his and then she'd been gone.
When he finished everything, he was asked, “Do you have a picture?”
Damn phone. He shook his head, wondering if there was anything he could have done to keep the phone safe. But he turned to Deveron and Sarah.
“Yes!” Sarah said, holding her phone forward to show the picture. “It's the same one I just gave him for our friend Izzy.”
In the picture, Sarah stood in the middle of the other two, one arm slung around Izzy, and the other around Joule.
“She's on the left,” Cage told the person as Sarah texted the photo to a new number.
When the man had recorded Sarah’s number, he made her text Joule’s name and case number to him as well, so it would load when the towers were back up. Then he snapped a picture of her phone picture.
Cage was handed a carbon copy in pink of the form he’d filled out for his sister. And that was it. The city had her name, height, weight, hair color, and a picture that they couldn’t attach to the documents. The three of them had Sarah’s and Dev’s phones, which at least still came on, even if there was no internet or towers for them, and they had his number, which was thoroughly pointless. They could show people Joule’s picture, but that was it.
He’d waited in line and all they could do was call him to identify fifteen blond young women at the morgue with that. No one was going to actually help them find Joule. The place didn’t have the manpower, and he could hear other people crying over lost loved ones.
There would be no search party. Just him and Deveron and maybe Sarah, depending on how her arm felt. The people at the desk motioned for them to move away and let someone else step in.
Pushing their way through the crowd, the trio tried to get out of the way and away from everyone else. He needed some damn space to breathe, he thought.
But as they neared one side, the noise level began to rise at the other end of the lot. Excited sounds came from the edge, and everyone turned as one to see the newcomers.
31
“We got more!” Boomer called out the passenger window as Bob pulled the truck into the middle of the crowd.
His brother was already out, boots on the ground and heading around to the truck bed. As the crowd surged, Bob hopped up on the now-open tailgate and held his hands out. “Back it up.”
His voice was calm, but it carried far and clear enough to reach Cage, who once again stretched up onto his toes. Was Joule in the bed of that truck?
He couldn't tell from here. He wanted to push forward, to be the first to look at the faces, worn and weary, still huddled in the truck bed. But the crowd was surging and he couldn’t get ahead of them. In fact, he could barely keep up.
Bob was still warning everyone back. “There's three kids here.”
Not Joule, Cage thought, and he stopped pushing. Bob was right. Kids first.
He felt Sarah squeeze at his fingers, as they waited, though she was likely waiting equally for Joule and Izzy. While Cage wasn't proud of himself, and while he would be happy if they found Izzy, his sole focus was his sister.
Five minutes later, the truck bed had been emptied and one person—pretty banged up by the looks of it—had been carried from the back seat via stretcher. The team carrying her was cutting a path directly to the medical tent.
Again, Cage nudged Sarah. “You need to go to the medical tent and get your arm looked at.”
“I do!” she was quick to agree. “But look at them.”
She motioned in the direction of the crowded tent with only her head, apparently not willing to let go of either man's hand. “They're very busy right now, and I won't get in.”
He wanted to tell her she was wrong, but she wasn't. She had a bruised and maybe broken arm. But it wasn’t even at an odd angle, just causing her pain when she grasped something with that hand. On any other day, he would have been driving her to the ER. But he needed a car and a clear road for that. Hell, he needed an ER, and no one had mentioned if the hospital was still standing.
Cage needed to get out of here.
As the crowd pulled back, releasing the stranglehold it had on Boomer and Bob and their large red truck, Cage had an idea.
The truck was empty now. They had space.
Pushing forward himself, he pressed into the opposing rush of the crowd, he fought to catch the truck. It was like running in Jello.
“Bob! Boomer!” he yelled over as many heads as he could, grateful when he managed to get one brother’s attention, if not the other.
“Hey!” Boomer lit up as he spotted Cage, recognizing one of their earlier rescues. “How you doing?”
As Cage got close, he realized the plaid shirt was the only way he could tell this was Boomer and not Bob. If they changed clothes, he was going to be screwed. He left Sarah and Deveron to catch up and ran to meet the man who’d helped him before. “Where are you headed next? I was curious if my friends and I could catch a ride?”
The two brothers looked at each other cautiously, obviously not used to being a taxi service in this scenario.
Cage held his breath. The chances the truck was going near their house were slim to none, but he needed to get to their car if they were going to have any real chance of searching for his sister.
Boomer rattled off, “We’re headed over toward Horton.”
“That'
s us!” He tried to keep his voice calm, but Cage found it hard not to jump forward, grab the door handle, and shove himself into the backseat without an invitation.
His friends had caught up and Sarah had caught on. She quickly rattled off the address of Desperado’s Hideaway. “You don't need to get us there. Honestly, if you can get us even a little bit closer, that would be great. We can hitch the next ride until we get there.”
Cage felt his breath catch. Sarah might not be safe hitchhiking, but the three of them together? In the middle of a disaster? They should be okay.
“We're likely going to end up close to there,” Bob said, still sitting behind the wheel, leaning over and talking out the open passenger window. He tossed a sharp glare to his brother that Cage couldn't decipher. But he added, “We're here to help. Getting you home and to a car is helping.”
Boomer took his brother’s decision as gospel and opened the back door, waving the three of them into the backseat before climbing in himself. It was Bob, one hand on the wheel, elbow perched on the back of his seat, who turned around and made himself clear. “We're not trying to drive you home, though. We’re running a rescue mission, and it may take several hours to get close to your place, depending on who we find when we stop and what help they need. But having extra hands would be a blessing.”
Caged nodded. It had to be faster than walking.
Two hours later, the trio had helped the brothers rescue five people.
The first was a woman by herself, who’d woken up in the ditch with no idea where her car or her toddler twins were. She’d done a search for the car, but her memory was too faulty to make that worthwhile for the group. She climbed into the back after being convinced that the best chance of finding her children was getting to the community center.
The Tempest Page 13