I didn’t answer, though I knew exactly what they were. My mind whirled. “We’re not too far behind them.” But the message was only days old, not months.
I slumped in my seat and turned my face to the window as this realization settled over me like a suffocating plastic bag. Dad could be anywhere by now. He hadn’t come for me in all this time, so why would he still be there now?
“You okay?”
“No.” I bit my lower lip. “I heard my dad’s message three days ago, but it’s older than that.”
He breathed out, like he was glad I’d figured out the bad news for myself. “Okay, so how old?”
I shifted on my seat so my back faced him. No crying. Don’t you dare start crying. “I think he left it the day everything happened. I didn’t have my phone with me until... until the other day.”
Cole didn’t say anything, but Callie leaped over the back of my seat and curled herself in my lap.
“Hmm... I can see where that could get you down, but honestly, does it change anything?”
I turned my head enough to see him without looking at him straight on. “It changes everything.”
“Oh, really?” He yanked the charger from the cigarette lighter and let it dangle from his fingertips.
“What are you doing?” I snatched it from him, plugged it back in, and checked that the battery had begun charging once more. What was he thinking?
“Just what I thought. It doesn’t change anything. Okay, sure, the message is older than either of us would like, but that’s not going to stop you from checking it out, is it?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He started thumbing through the cassettes once more until he found one he liked. “Oh, a mixed tape! This should be good.” He slipped it in the player and turned up the volume.
A country singer sang about her cheating lover and slashing his truck tires.
I couldn’t help but think I hadn’t seen Dad or Toby in almost three months. I’d never been without them for longer than a day or two. Would I ever see them again?
“Hey, buck up.” Cole tapped my chin lightly with his fist. “You’ve got a message to listen to, remember? That’s nothing to pooh-pooh.”
I glanced at Cole. “But he’s probably not there anymore.”
“Probably not.” He kept his gaze on me and turned the volume up a little at a time. “But we definitely have a place to start.”
Cole flew upright in his seat, and I straightened in my own.
“What’s wrong?” I had no idea what had freaked him out, but his strange behavior had me on edge.
He raised his arm across me and pointed out the passenger window. “That’s what’s wrong.”
My back had been pressed against the door while I waited for my phone to complete its charge, but when I turned around, I could see what had made Cole’s eyes wide with fear. I was quite certain my own eyes held the same look—pure and utter horror.
In the distance, but growing closer with each passing second, a darkness, several miles wide and several miles high, rolled over homes and buildings, engulfing everything in its path.
Lightning zigzagged like a fourth of July fireworks display, highlighting shapes briefly before the giant black mass enveloped them.
Rumbling caused the car to tremble, and Callie disappeared under one of the back seats, tangling her leash in a spider-web pattern as she darted for safety.
My hair slowly rose, standing on end, touching the roof of the car. I reached up and tried to smooth it down to no avail.
Tornado? Electrical storm? How could that be? This wasn’t Kansas! We didn’t have those kinds of things around here.
“Cole, what’s going on?” This couldn’t possibly be happening, but the black mass continued toward us whether I believed it possible or not.
My words seemed to snap him out of his trance, and he threw open the car door without saying a word. What? What is he doing?
I opened my door, figuring I should follow his lead, and tugged on Callie’s leash, but she’d dug her claws into the floor. “Where are you going?” I yanked on the leash again.
“Get back inside, Tess!” He started heaping items from the cart into the back seat. “Get inside now!”
What was he doing? The water, the toilet paper, the waffle iron—we wouldn’t need any of those things if we died in the process!
I glanced over my shoulder at the darkness approaching. Ho-ly crap!
Cole’s hair began to stand upright too. I jumped back inside the car and slid to the floor with my face pressed against the seat, as if not looking would change the course of our fate.
Holy crap, holy crap! What is happening?
In all my seventeen years of life, I’d never seen or heard of a tornado or electrical storm in this part of the States. Lightning, sure, but it was regular old lightning—tame enough to be pretty—but this, this was of the devil. It had to be. Nothing else could explain it.
My ears began to buzz as the droning sound of the storm drew closer.
Cole threw open the driver’s side door, and slid into his seat. It felt as though the air inside the car had been sucked out and replaced with something else entirely—breathable, but not air. He slammed the door shut, and looked down at me. “You better hold on. This is going to get interesting!”
Hold on to what?
He put the car in reverse and glanced over his shoulder as he pressed the accelerator. The car skidded backward, and I heard the crunch of metal carts as the station wagon plowed into them, scattering most of the things we had taken such effort to pack.
I clutched the seat as best as I could, and kept my eyes on Cole.
There was nothing confident about the way he stared out the front window, or how he glanced behind him every other second.
Was that thing gaining on us? Could we outrun it?
I tried to climb back up onto my seat, but the car bounced and swerved, and I was forced back to my spot on the floor. My back slammed against the passenger door when he took a sharp left turn, and the force caused the door to fly open and snap off the frame. It hit the ground with a metallic thud, shooting up yellow sparks, but lay there only an instant before it flew upward, spinning in a circle, and soared backward.
“Cole!” I grappled to find a handhold as my fingers slid over the plastic surface of the seat. Oh, to have claws like a cat! The storm sucked at my body, extracting me from the car inch by inch.
One of my feet slipped and dangled in the open, being whipped by the increasing wind. I felt as though I were riding an amusement park ride, as my stomach pressed tighter and the inertia pulled on me, stretching me like taffy.
I was going to fall out of the car!
Cole kept one arm on the steering wheel and used the other to clasp my wrist. “Hang on!”
Easy for him to say! He’d buckled himself in!
I positioned my good foot against the wall, and pushed myself forward enough to draw my dangling foot back inside the vehicle.
“Get in the backseat!” He tugged on my arm.
“I can’t!” If I let go, for even a moment, I was certain I’d be sucked out of the car, and just like the door, I’d hit the ground before shooting upward and away.
“You’re going to fall out!” He glanced over his shoulder once more.
“I know!” I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing, I knew that, but I didn’t want to hasten being sucked out of the car either.
“Get in the back!”
“I can’t!” My toes ached as I pressed my feet against the floor.
“Well, I can’t drive the car and hang on to you at the same time!”
“Don’t you dare let go!”
“Get in the back or I will be forced to make a hard decision!”
I shook my head. No, no, no.
“On the count of three, Tess. You dive for the backseat. One, two—”
He didn’t wait till three, but jerked my arm with such force, I had no choice but to follow his lead and shoot my
body over the backseat or have my arm ripped out of its socket. His muscles strained and the veins of his upper arms bulged under his skin. He never let go, not even after I’d made it over.
He yelled at me to put on a seatbelt, and only when I was strapped in did he remove his hand from my arm. He shifted his entire focus to the mess of a road ahead of us. For the first time since I’d met him, he’d become serious—very serious.
He weaved in and out of cars, dodged fallen trees and random debris. Sometimes he would take a left turn or a right turn that not only left the wheels squealing but had me squealing too.
I glanced behind us, but quickly turned around in my seat once more, face forward, eyes wide. The monster of a cloud was catching up.
Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap.
“Cole?”
“Not now.” He swerved the car down a side road to avoid the huge parked semi stretched across all four lanes, blocking our path.
I fell to my left, nearly floating, but the seatbelt kept me from hitting the roof. “It’s gaining on us, isn’t it?” I didn’t want to look anymore. My heart couldn’t handle it.
He didn’t say anything, but glanced in the rearview mirror. He pressed the accelerator even more. My answer. If the cloud of death didn’t get us, speeding at over eighty miles an hour down a littered residential street would.
Everything Cole had tossed inside the car—toilet paper, the George Foreman grill, the bottles of water—slammed against one side and then the other with every chaotic turn. All I could do was duck and throw as much as I could into the very, very back, praying none of it would come careening forward and smack me in the back of the head.
It didn’t matter that electric-tornado-demon clouds shouldn’t exist—because they shouldn’t—all that mattered was that one now grew ever closer in the rearview mirror.
Cole bounced the car up over the cement gutter and through the parking lot, past car vacuum machines and the little store selling various tree car fresheners.
What in the—
He drove the car straight into the automatic car wash. The large brushes and hanging strips scraped and slapped against the metal frame, but Cole kept going, driving the car along the track, forcing the tires over the dividers.
A tire blew, then another, but Cole continued to drive the slowing car into the middle of the building. When the station wagon ground to a stop, he leapt into the back and shoved me down against the seat, covering me with his body.
The seatbelt cut into my shoulder, my chest, my waist, but I didn’t say a word. The air around us seemed light, like helium. An intense roar filled my ears, echoing off the cement walls surrounding us, louder than anything I’d ever heard before.
The car vibrated and glass exploded, causing me to shake all over. Cole held me closer. Darkness cloaked us, covering us in black so thick I couldn’t even see his face next to mine. No light shone, not even a sliver, but the incredible, deafening noise threatening to pop my ears made up for it.
A lion roaring at my left, a train horn blaring at my right—both within inches of my ears—would only be a fraction of the noise.
One sense replaced by a monster of another.
I coughed and choked on the dust and dirt swirling around us, sweeping in through the open car door. Cole drew his coat over our heads, tucking it in, which helped some, but didn’t ease my rising panic. I wasn’t good in these kind of situations, and in the past couple of months, I’d been dealt more than I thought was fair.
We were being engulfed by the dark mass, bit by suffocating bit, like everything around us.
I tried to focus on Cole’s breathing to give my own a sense of direction. Easy, no deep breaths, just simple and shallow. Less dirt to scrape my throat as I swallowed.
Everything happened so fast. There hadn’t been time to decide if driving a car right into a dry carwash was the best option, or if the building was even stable.
There had been no time at all.
All we could do now was wait.
The storm now hovered directly over our building, tugging on our bodies with such suction and grip it threatened to rip us out of the shaking car. It popped my ears and filled my head with ringing. I could only assume Cole experienced the same.
The car moved, not much, but it jolted my senses, and I realized the car was inching backward toward the opening. A little here, a little there, bumping over the way we had come. Whenever I thought it had stopped moving, it would shift again. The brushes of the carwash scraped against the sides.
“Cole!” I could hardly hear my own voice—whether because of my buzzing ears or the loudness of everything around us, I had no idea. If he heard me or answered back, I couldn’t hear...
Neither of us could stop the car from being sucked away into oblivion. Climbing from the car would prove deadly, even if staying in it might kill us. We could only hang on and hope.
I shoved the fingers of one hand into the crack of the seat, gripping it, and wrapped the fingers of my other hand around the metal frame under the front. Cole’s hold on me tightened, as his body seemed to lift away. My seatbelt grounded us both.
Please, please, please. I pressed my feet against the front seat, fighting for leverage against the whirling darkness, and just when I didn’t think I could hold on any longer... everything stopped.
It stopped.
The rain, the wind, the thunder, the lightning, the blaring noise, the hum of electrical currents, even the darkness, lifted, graying ever slowly. Shadows appeared through Cole’s jacket, but even that little bit of light felt like a lighthouse beacon. Fantastic.
Cole’s body fell heavily on mine, as though the beast had let go of its hold and he’d come crashing down with his full weight. He didn’t move. Only his warm breath against my ear let me know he was alive. I didn’t budge or push him off, but waited. We needed a moment to collect ourselves. Had we really lived through that? Really? It seemed surreal.
“You okay?” he whispered. The jacket still covered both our faces. His whiskered cheek rubbed against my forehead.
“I think so. And you?”
“I about crapped myself for a minute, but I’m good.”
“Do you think it’s over?”
He was silent.
“Cole?”
“I say we give it a moment before going to find out.” He removed the dusty jacket from our heads, but continued to lie on top of me, listening.
I’d never seen his face so serious. He stared upward and tilted his head as if in complete concentration. I listened too. Deafening silence replaced all of the terrifying sounds from before. The light and lack of noise seemed like a good sign to me, but I had no idea if it was only temporary. We could be in the eye of the storm, for all I knew. I kept my fingers wrapped in place, gripping whatever I could.
I followed his lead and remained quiet, like him, but scanned the roof of the car, the dirty interior, and him. When my eyes fell on Callie’s limp leash, I shoved him forcefully.
“Get off me!”
He didn’t budge. “Not yet.”
“Callie!” In all of the commotion and near death experience, I’d forgotten about her. I pushed against him again, and this time he rose to a sitting position.
I unhooked myself from the seatbelt and fell to the floor, squeezing myself between the sections of seats, not caring that the silence and calm may only have been a trick.
“Callie!” I grabbed on to her leash, drawing it toward me. When I held the long strap and the empty harness in my hands, I couldn’t speak.
I couldn’t do anything.
I pressed the harness to my chest, holding it. I was already on the floor of the car, but had I been able to sink lower, I would have.
“We’ll find her.” Cole placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure she’s here somewhere.”
There was no way that could be true. Between racing down streets and taking sharp turns, not to mention the insanity of the suction power which held all of us in its grip, my kitt
en could be anywhere.
Anywhere.
“I... I should have held onto her. I should have—”
“You were doing everything just to hang on yourself. This isn’t your fault.” He squeezed my shoulder. “It’s not.”
Then whose was it? She was my cat, my responsibility. She was all I had had left, and now I had nothing. I’d failed.
“Hey, let me check if things are safe and then we’ll go looking for her. Okay?”
I didn’t answer.
He seemed to take my silence as acceptance and slipped out the side door.
I continued to sit on the floor and cradle the empty leash. I couldn’t have grabbed her, a large part of me knew, but I should have at least tried. I hadn’t even made any attempt. Not one. So selfish.
Some could argue she was only a cat—dispensable, replaceable, just an animal—but she held me together when the world seemed to fall apart. I placed my head against the back of the front seat, resting my forehead against the plastic. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I bit my lip to keep it from quivering. I could smell my stinky cat on the leash.
“Tess!”
Whatever Cole wanted, could wait.
“You’ve got to come see this,” he called again. “Seriously.”
I continued to hold the leash and the harness, and slid out through the open door. I pushed my way past vertical spin brushes and hanging strips and made my way toward the opening where Cole stood.
He glanced over his shoulder at me then looked outward again. “This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”
It wasn’t until I stepped outside myself that I realized what held him so captivated. I drew in my breath and without really thinking about it, I slipped my hand into his.
I needed to hold on to somebody.
Everything to the left of us lay flattened. Timber, bricks, and lots of glass. Homes. Stores. Buildings. All rubble. To the right, things looked pretty much the same. Hours before, the place had been left untouched—almost perfectly untouched. Spring blooms had poked through wet dirt. Grass had needed mowing. Wind chimes had hung from front porches and sales banners had clung from storefronts.
Anyone? Page 10