They decided to make their camp in the middle of a stand of oak trees.
“Can you explain this to me?” Shelby asked. “These trees are not damaged at all, but fifty feet away, everything is…it’s…everything is gone.”
“Hey.” Max stood directly in front of her, waiting until she looked up into his eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I am. I think I am, which means yes.”
“We’re bound to be in shock, all of us.”
“We don’t have time for shock.”
“Doesn’t matter if we have time for it.” He jerked his hat off his head, surprised to find it was still there, dusted it against his pants, and put it back on. What he wanted to do was pull Shelby into his arms again, but the look on her face told him that would be a very bad idea.
“I don’t understand why these trees are still standing and those are gone. It’s a simple question.”
“If you need to take a minute, Shelby, then do that. Take a minute. Don’t push yourself.”
“I’m fine, Max. Let’s just…figure this out.” Her eyes jumped to the left and the right, passed quickly over his face, and then focused on something past his shoulder.
He didn’t need a paramedic to tell him what was going on here. They’d had a near-death experience mere moments ago. When the adrenaline left their systems, they were going to be exhausted, hungry, and bewildered.
But he didn’t try to explain any of that.
Instead, he followed his initial instinct—wrapped his arms around her, pulled her tight against his chest, and held her.
At first it was like holding a surfboard. Her arms remained at her sides, her posture rigidly perfect, her breathing tight. But inch by inch she relaxed, until at long last he felt her arms encircle his waist. Her words were muffled as she pressed her face into his shirt, but he could still make them out.
“We’re going to be okay, Max. I don’t know how, but we’re going to be okay.”
THIRTY-SIX
Shelby pulled herself together.
She stepped away from Max, carried her pack to their makeshift campground, and helped Patrick to determine where the two best locations would be for lookout shifts—basically, to the right and left along the road.
Lanh and Carter found firewood that was only marginally wet and broke it into small pieces. Then they proceeded to make a pit of sorts with rocks that they gathered from the lane leading into the property.
Bianca had finished wrapping a bandage around Gabe’s head.
Gabe and Max stood in front of the pile of tangled trees, trying to determine their plan of action.
“I think we should scout the road,” Bianca said, looking at her friend.
“Agreed.”
The women told the rest of the group where they were going.
“We can take the south,” Carter said, motioning toward Lanh.
“All right. We’ll go north.”
Max and Gabe and Patrick were pulling on a giant oak tree lying across the front corner of the debris pile.
“Should we stay and help?” Shelby asked.
“No. Go before we lose the light.” Patrick grunted as they dropped the tree, which they’d managed to move less than an inch. “We won’t make any real progress on this until tomorrow.”
“Fifteen minutes and then we turn around. Agreed?”
Carter muttered, “Aye, aye, Captain,” and Lanh saluted.
“Their sarcasm is comforting,” Bianca said.
Shelby stared after them. “Do you think they’ll be all right?”
“I think that what we just survived is something they’ll tell their grandchildren about.”
“Assuming they have grandchildren, or children, or a spouse.”
“This isn’t the end of the world, Shelby. It just feels like it.”
They hiked north on the two-lane road, which was the direction they’d come from. Shelby thought she’d been paying attention at the time, but she didn’t remember passing through so much nothingness. The area was dense with trees and cedar bushes. No roads intersected theirs, though an occasional dirt track cut through the brush. The road rose gently, so that they didn’t actually realize they were increasing elevation until they stopped at the top and looked out over the surrounding area.
“I didn’t imagine it.” Shelby could feel her pulse accelerating, and it wasn’t from the hike. It was from the destruction all around them. “The funnel cloud did split into two.”
“Looks like the larger one went in a straight line—”
“Over us.”
“And the smaller one crossed the larger. Turned back south. It almost looks like it—”
“Hopscotched.”
Which described what they were seeing perfectly. Pockets of destruction. The sun had come out to the west, piercing through the clouds, bathing them in warm light. How was that even possible? She was standing on the top of a hill, in a patch of sunshine with blue skies to the west, and thirty minutes ago she’d nearly perished in a tornado.
She put her hand over her eyes and stared west, straining to see where the tornado had first touched down, but she couldn’t. She could only see the path of destruction left behind.
A farmer’s barn reduced to a pile of sticks, his house next to it untouched.
A windmill dangling from a tree.
A semi’s tractor-trailer sitting in the middle of a pond.
Spring crops that were knee high, yet in places that reminded Shelby of a pebble skipping across a pond, there were patches of bare ground where the crops had been ripped away.
“You know what we don’t see?” Bianca gathered up her hair and pulled it through the back of her baseball cap.
“People. We don’t see any people.”
They turned and began walking back toward camp.
“I was terrified,” Shelby admitted. “I couldn’t even pray. All I could do was think, God, please don’t take my son. My mind was in a loop, and it was the only clear thought I had, so I just clung to it.”
“I thought Patrick was going to crush me.”
“He was protecting you.”
“He was trying to, but how do you protect someone else against…nature? No, that’s not possible. All we have is our faith, Shelby.”
“But probably someone died today. Died in this storm.”
“Then it was their time.”
Bianca reached out and squeezed her hand, causing tears to prick Shelby’s eyes. She felt raw. Maybe it was the shock that Max was talking about, or maybe it was adrenaline. Maybe it was just the exhaustion of dealing with so many life-and-death situations over the last nine months.
They were nearly back at the camp when Bianca nodded toward the tower of debris covering their vehicles. “God will show us a way through this, I’m sure. We didn’t survive that kind of tornado just so we could die trying to walk to Kansas.”
It was with that reasoning in her ears that Shelby turned and walked back into camp.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Carter was relieved to walk away, to put a little distance between them and the scene of their near death.
“That was intense.” Lanh kicked a fist-sized rock that had landed in the middle of the road.
“I thought we were dead.”
“I thought my eardrums were going to burst.”
“Guess that would have been the least of our problems.”
“Yeah, if we’d been in that house…” Lanh glanced sideways at him. “Dude, your mom totally saved us.”
Carter didn’t know how to answer that, so he didn’t try.
They walked for fifteen minutes and were just about to turn back when they came around a bend in the road and stopped short.
“Am I imagining this?” Carter felt his mouth sag open, his eyes widen, and still he couldn’t believe what was in front of them. “I’ve got to be imagining this.”
“Not if you’re seeing what I’m seeing.”
In front of them was the house that they’d first tak
en shelter in, sitting in the middle of the road. Most of the roof was gone, but there was no question it was the same house. The window frames were the same Pepto-Bismol shade of pink.
Carter and Lanh looked at each other, nodded in unison, and then they walked over to the house, hopped up into the front room because there was no longer a front porch, and stood there, staring, turning in a circle.
“This is freaking me out,” Carter admitted.
“Me too.”
“How did it…how could a tornado pick up this house and set it back down?”
“I don’t know, but it happens. I used to watch that show…what was it called? Storm Chasers.”
“Anyone who chases a storm like we just went through is out of their mind.”
“Exactly, and there was always a camera guy right behind them. A couple of times they would show houses that had been picked up and set back down again. One episode showed a house that had been moved, and there were still dishes in the kitchen cabinets.”
But this house hadn’t had dishes. It had been dilapidated to begin with, and dilapidated it remained. The only difference was that now it sat in the middle of a two-lane highway.
It took only a moment to walk through the rooms, which were as empty and decrepit as before. They walked back outside and around the house.
“Hey.” Lanh jogged to the side of the road, reached up, and pulled down a shoe. “This yours?”
“It is not.”
They walked a little farther, found more items that had been whisked out of someone’s possession to land along the road: a skateboard, an old person’s walker, a leather jacket.
Lanh tucked the skateboard under his arm.
Carter held the leather jacket up in front of him. One sleeve was missing entirely. He tossed it onto a red wagon that had no wheels. “Too small anyway.”
They pawed through another quarter mile of wreckage and came away with a six-pack of Coke, a bucket, a single leather work glove, and a shovel that had been embedded into a tree but came away when they both pulled.
“Not bad for a short walk,” Lanh said.
“Think someone will be looking for this stuff?”
“Dude. I think whoever lost this stuff is probably dead.”
It was a sobering thought.
As they walked into camp, Lanh looked particularly pleased about the sodas. He’d been craving sugar ever since Carter had known him. When he was younger, Carter would have dialed in a little extra insulin and enjoyed one of the Cokes, but he wouldn’t be doing that tonight. He understood all too well that the insulin they had was probably all they were going to get.
Still, as Lanh had pointed out, there was a good chance that whoever had purchased the sodas was now dead. He or she had walked into a store and bought them a year ago, or traded for them more recently. They’d taken their drinks home, only to be killed by a random freak of nature before they could enjoy their spoils.
The way Carter saw it, he could live one of two ways.
He could spend his days worried about his diminishing supply of medication—something he could do absolutely nothing about. Or he could appreciate the evening around the campfire with his friends and family, grateful that he had survived what had to have been an F4 tornado. He hadn’t watched Storm Chasers, but he’d been subjected to enough of the Weather Channel over the years. In fact, he remembered quizzing his mom about the difference between an F4 that caused devastating damage, and an F4 that caused incredible damage.
His mom had said something like, “Let’s hope we never find out.”
They had sort of found out, and they’d lived to tell about it. Which just reaffirmed in his mind that rather than worrying about insulin and next month or next year, he’d be better off being grateful that they were still alive tonight.
But he still passed on the soda. No sense being foolish about it.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Things looked worse to Max in the morning light.
The pile of debris on top of the vehicles was unbelievably tall and heavy. How would they move trees with trunks as big around as a man? They needed equipment and pulleys and people—lots more people.
“We’re not going to be able to move those larger trees.” Max sat down beside Patrick and accepted a hot cup of coffee from Bianca.
“Maybe we should walk out.” Shelby sat up, patted down her black curls, and looked imploringly at his coffee.
“You have to get out of bed if you want this.”
“You’re such a taskmaster.”
“I have a badge in that…taskmastering.”
“The two of you are very strange.” Lanh tipped the Coca-Cola can up, hoping to find one more drop in it. Shrugging, he stood, flattened it with his foot, and stuffed it into his pack.
“Souvenir?” Gabe asked.
“Absolutely. The day I survived an F4 and found a Coke. Mrs. S, be sure and write that in your journal.”
Shelby gave him a thumbs-up as she breathed deeply of the mug of coffee Max had passed to her.
“Do you think she’s addicted to that?” Patrick asked.
“It’s a good possibility.” Max poured himself another cup from the pot sitting on top of the makeshift grill.
Gabe chimed in. “I’ve seen her without coffee—once. It was frightening.” He shuddered, and everyone, including Shelby, laughed.
No one spoke for a few minutes as the sun rose properly and bathed the area around them in a soft light. The sky was partly cloudy, but there didn’t seem to be any impending weather approaching.
“I don’t like sitting in one place,” Max said. “I feel like a duck in a barrel here.”
Shelby glanced up quickly. “We didn’t see any signs of people when we went north.”
“No one to the south either.” Carter pulled a granola bar out of his pack.
“Max is right, though.” Gabe fingered the bandage on his head. “We need to move out of here as quickly as we can. People will come—that’s one thing you can always count on. They’ll come to see what the storm has dumped, what they can find of use, and they’ll take whatever they can.”
“Not everyone is a criminal.” Bianca crossed her arms. “It’s possible that someone would come to help us.”
“It’s possible,” Gabe conceded. “But not likely. The good folks? They’ll be helping their neighbors or taking care of family. This is a pretty isolated stretch of road. Anyone coming this way will be looking for trouble.”
“So we station guards on the main road to the north and south.” Max tilted his head toward Bianca and then Shelby. “The rest of us will work on freeing the vehicles.”
“Wait. Why are we the guards?” Shelby asked. “Because we’re women? Are you saying that we’re not strong enough to be of any help…”
“Don’t go there, mi amiga.” Bianca stood and stretched. “I’ve seen you stuck in a store because you couldn’t push the door open.”
“That hasn’t happened in a long time.”
“Western Wear…the week before the flare.”
“I swear that door was locked.”
“It opened for me.”
“Which still seems very strange.”
Everyone began moving at once—ready to jump into the day, ready to leave this place of destruction behind them. Shelby and Bianca checked their water supplies and their weapons.
Honestly, Max did not want them out on the road, but they were both fairly good shots, and Shelby had an uncanny ability to whistle loud and long. They were the right choice for guards.
“One more thing,” Gabe said as the two women started toward the road.
They turned back, waited.
“We give this four hours. If we’re not making any progress, we change plans and walk out. Might be the best way across the Red River anyway. Might be the only way.”
They began working at the back of the debris pile—the side facing the road and what should have been the back of the vehicles. The shovel the boys had found actually came in ha
ndy. They were able to use it as a lever, and once they freed some of the smaller tree trunks, they created a kind of ramp. Then it was a matter of rolling the trees down, which was much easier than trying to pick them up. It made for a large pile of logs, but if they could get the weight off the top, there was a chance they could drive forward.
The first vehicle they found was the front bumper of the Mustang.
“Come to Papa,” Patrick crooned.
The paint was scraped and the driver’s side mirror was missing, but the main body was in remarkably good shape.
“Now if it’ll just start.”
He wedged himself in through some remaining branches, hauled the door open, slid in, and put the key in the ignition. Miraculously, the engine turned over on the first try.
A shout of victory went up, but that was all the celebration they allowed themselves. They had two more vehicles to uncover. They pulled the Mustang around so that it was free of any falling limbs and also so it was facing the road. They probably couldn’t all fit inside it, but it was best to be ready in case they needed to make a quick getaway. Or as Patrick was fond of pointing out, “A bad plan is better than no plan at all.”
THIRTY-NINE
Carter had worked hard before. He’d always worked diligently at school, and then after the flare, he’d learned what real work was. Digging a latrine had tested him in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Central Texas wasn’t known for its abundance of topsoil. Instead, there was a thin layer of dirt covering white rock. They’d hammered their way through. Building the outdoor toilet had taken time and teamwork, which was exactly what they needed now.
They ate lunch standing beside the giant pile of debris. He and Lanh relieved his mom and Bianca so they could grab some lunch and rest for thirty minutes before resuming their posts.
No one had passed by. No vehicles on the road. No sign of life along the tornado’s corridor—at least not that they saw.
Maybe they were lucky, or maybe Gabe’s predictions had been a bit dire, or possibly God was watching over them.
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