by Schow, Ryan
For that very reason, she’d limited her friendships, refused to go to high school parties that her on-again, off-again friends had invited her to, and tried to always follow her uncle’s lessons in situational awareness.
Now she was thinking of the Hayseed Rebellion, a vicious group of rebels, anarchists, self-described change-agents. The mere mention of them irritated her. Americans don’t harass other Americans to this degree for this long, which caused some speculation as to whether they were a spontaneous activist group or a covertly-funded insurgency.
“What reason would they have for coming here?” she asked her father. She didn’t let him answer. “Dad, what’s happened to you? Is this about me? Are you still worried?”
She understood the current landscape of the nation. The violence that rattled the big cities to their core had become a national mainstay, the permanent backbone of a mismanaged revolution. The right-wingers called the breakout anarchists running these operations “domestic terrorists,” while the staunch left-wingers were furious that their otherwise noble movement had been hijacked by thugs who only seemed interested in rioting, looting, burning, and killing.
As it were, societies all over the nation now found themselves held captive by a handful of violent factions posing as revolutionaries. In North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, one such faction called themselves the Hayseed Rebellion, as if these would-be Rednecks were honest-to-God, flag-loving, red-blooded Americans. They weren’t.
Not even close.
“It’s not you, Leighton,” her father said. “I just have…I have a lot of things going on. Some tough things to think about.”
“Is it your retirement? Is that it?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. There was so much tension in his voice. Why was he being so ambiguous? He was never like that. “I guess maybe you’re right. I have a lot more time to worry about you.”
“Can you split your worry between me, Rowan, and Marley?”
Her father laughed, the sound surprisingly warm, more relaxed by the minute. “I’ll try. I can’t make any promises, though.”
“Dad, I have to go. I have an Accounting test I have to get to.”
“Watch the weather. And watch your six.”
“I already am,” she said, thinking of Aaron. Whatever had gotten into her father, whatever he was hiding, it wasn’t about his retirement. She was sure of that. “I’ll talk to you later?”
“Love you, kiddo,” he said.
“Love you too, Dad,” she replied as she stood and headed to class.
Chapter Two
Leighton McDaniel
Leighton arrived to class late, picked up the test booklet from her Accounting professor, then sat down and slid into a test-taking mode. Halfway into the exam, she forgot all about her father’s weather warnings, the strange incident with Aaron, and Chandra’s riotous snoring. Leighton did not forget her lack of sleep, however. She could hardly keep her eyes open! But then her phone vibrated in her backpack. She glanced down at it, then up at her professor. He was checking his phone as well. Others were checking their phones, too.
Her professor sat his phone back down on his desk, meandered over to the wall of windows, and took a long look outside. She followed her professor’s gaze, saw the gathering skies. She shook with an involuntary shudder, goosebumps pebbling the tops of her forearms. There was very little chance the storm would pass by them.
She returned to her test, finished around the same time as others, then handed it to her professor and left class. She made a bee-line straight for the cafeteria to get something to eat. Breakfast was an egg and sausage burrito and an iced cold-brew coffee. She drank the coffee too quickly while wolfing down half of the burrito in record time. The whole time, her eyes were monitoring the large clock. The minutes were ticking by too quickly.
With little time to spare, she stuffed the other half of the burrito into her bag, stood up, and saw Aaron. She froze. He was sitting nearby, his brooding eyes on her, a plastic bottle of orange juice in his hand.
Caught in his gaze, she couldn’t look away, couldn’t blink, couldn’t stop her heart from pounding a hundred miles an hour. The second he glanced down, she felt untethered, freed from his orbit, but frightened nevertheless.
For the first time since she stepped foot on campus, Leighton McDaniel wondered if she should be afraid.
Not wanting to find out, Leighton hurried to the nearest exit, grateful that Aaron wasn’t in either of her next two classes. If she never saw him again, that would be too soon. Or maybe she was reading him wrong. Was it possible? Maybe. He could have done well on the Accounting test, finishing as quickly as she had. Or perhaps he hadn’t eaten before class and, like her, he’d taken the opportunity to get a late breakfast.
Her phone buzzed again. It wasn’t the same buzz the phone made when she was receiving a phone call or a text. To her, the alert felt like something else entirely. She swiped her thumb over the keypad, tapped in her code, then saw the severe weather alert.
She logged into her weather app, read the details of a thunderstorm warning, saw there was a strong possibility of hail. Putting her phone away, Leighton figured she’d be back in the dorms by then. In addition to the half-burrito in her backpack, she had food stashed in her dorm room, just in case.
Biology 120 was her favorite class, despite the challenging workload, but Entrepreneurship 201 was her second favorite class. All throughout Biology, she kept glancing out the windows, noting the darkening skies and the sudden changes in temperature. After Biology, as she was walking to her Entrepreneurship class, she felt the presence of someone beside her. She turned and saw that Aaron had come up behind her.
Before she could blanch or grab her pepper spray, he held up a hand and said, “I’m so sorry for coming off like a creep.”
Her chest tightened to the point where she couldn’t breathe. He seemed to sense this, worry contorting his features.
“Oh my gosh, I didn’t mean to scare you if that’s what I did.” He frowned. “I scared you, didn’t I? The look on your face says…oh, jeez. I’m really sorry, Leighton.”
She couldn’t speak. Then slowly, his efforts began to reverse some of her earlier concern. If he was trying this hard to set her at ease, she told herself there was no need to be scared.
“It’s okay,” she heard herself say.
He smiled, and it was a handsome smile. Full lips, straight teeth, no hint of malice. How is this even the same boy? She felt herself blink as though it was the most profound gesture in the world. Where, before, she had been overcome by his aura of nastiness—an ugliness emanating from somewhere inside of him—she now felt those sinister waves receding.
Is it safe? she wondered. Am I safe?
“I should have minded my own business this morning,” she said, regretting having confronted him.
He looked completely normal now. Had she misjudged the situation? Had she misjudged him? As she stood there talking to him, she couldn’t help thinking he was an attractive boy, nearly a man. But she already had a man of her own, Niles.
“I’m sorry for being rude,” she said. “My dad just worries a lot, and so…”
He interrupted her. “It was my fault. I was so stressed out about the Accounting test. I didn’t sleep well, and then this weather…”
“Did you see the severe weather warnings?”
“Yeah, I saw them,” he said. “Where are you from, by the way? I’m from Beckley, West Virginia.”
The name rang a bell in her head. From what she remembered, Beckley was not a nice place to live.
“Nicholasville,” she replied. “Here in Kentucky.”
He said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m really glad to be here. Beckley’s not the safest town in the world.”
That’s when it hit her. Beckley was not just a tough place to live, in some publications, it was widely considered the most dangerous town in West Virginia. From what she knew about the state, it was already dangerous
if you got stuck in the smaller cities, especially when it came to meth addicts and meth dealers.
“How long did you live there?” she asked.
“All my life. My mother and I live on acreage. Well, she lives there now. Thank the Lord, I found my way here.”
“What about your father?”
His face twitched—a touch of sadness, a deepening of shadows. There it is, she thought, the source of agitation, that hard darkness. A flicker of concern churned through her as she witnessed the transformation. He had practically changed before her very eyes! And then the beast slid back into hiding. What in the world was that?
“He tried to kill my mother,” he said with a tremor in his voice. “I…I had to…I stepped in to protect her.”
She was taken aback.
Thinking of her own parents—how their story was the classic tale of boy-meets-girl, boy-sweeps-girl-off-her-feet, boy-marries-girl—she couldn’t imagine her father trying to hurt her mother or vice versa. A slight gust breezed past them, the air damp, cold. She pushed a few strands of hair out of her face, strands the gust had pulled loose a few minutes earlier.
“How old were you when this happened?” she asked, lifting a hand to block the breeze.
“Twelve. But we’re fine. This is her dream. Me heading to the university so I can get us out of there.”
“I can’t imagine,” she said, feeling for him.
She wondered if all that sadness was no longer something he carried as much as it was something he’d become. Did he kill his father? Is he a murderer? Or is he still alive, just out of their lives, or in jail?
“Thank you for apologizing, by the way,” she added. “That means a lot to me.”
Another alert hit both of their phones.
Aaron glanced down, swiped the screen, and said, “They’re warning about a potential tornado.” The weather was shifting, the clouds above them starting to churn in wide circles. That was not a good sign. “When was the last time Highland Heights had a tornado?”
“I don’t think it has ever sustained a direct hit,” she said. “I’d be more concerned about the hail.”
“Hail?”
“It’s a high risk here.”
“Yeah, but what about tornados?”
“It’s a moderate risk, I guess. I’m not really familiar with the area, not like I am with my home town. One or two tornados might’ve hit this area in the last year, or whatever, but I think only nearby. If this town ever took a direct hit, I don’t know about it.”
“We don’t really get tornadoes in my part of West Virginia, at least not that I know of. We get the weather warnings, but not necessarily the weather. Maybe it’s like that. A warning. Then again, I’m not really a weather guy, so I could be off completely.”
“If we are going to get hit, it’s usually later in the day, after the sun’s heated both the ground and the atmosphere. That primes the skies for thunderstorms, which is what I think we’re about to get.”
“So not a tornado then?”
“Tornados occur when warm, humid air collides with cold, dry air. The more dense air pushes over the dry air and that’s what creates your normal thunderstorms. It’s when the warm air pushes up through the colder air, creating an updraft, that things begin to turn.”
“And that’s how you get tornados?” he asked, interested.
“No, not yet. You need a rotating updraft, called a mesocyclone, which draws in more warm air from the moving thunderstorm. This increases rotation speed. The jet stream then feeds in more cold air, which produces a ton of energy.”
“So that’s what happens?” he asked nonchalantly as he stared up at the sky.
A few occasional gusts threatened to become steady winds. But then the whipping air suddenly died down. She looked up, expecting the sky to break open at any point. She breathed a sigh of relief. The clouds weren’t menacing-looking enough.
“That’s most of the story, but not all of the story,” she said, a chill snaking down through her back and arms. “Water droplets from the mesocyclone’s moist air creates the cone that becomes the funnel cloud. You can see it reaching down from the skies, and when it finally touches the ground, when it starts to rip up everything in its path, that’s when it has become a tornado.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked as they approached her classroom.
“My dad retired from the Nicholasville Water Treatment Plant when my grandpa died. He took over my grandpa’s house which sits on thirty acres a few miles outside of town. We have pretty good instincts about two things: water and weather.”
“You’re on thirty acres?”
Aaron opened the building’s main door for her. She thanked him.
“Do you have class in here?” she asked when they were inside the building and no longer subject to threats from the elements.
“Yeah, a couple of rooms up from yours. So you said you’re living on land that belonged to your grandfather?”
“Yeah, he was a farmer. His garden was big enough to feed our family and supply more than a few local restaurants with fresh fruits and vegetables. That was his business. As I’m sure you know, an integral part of farming is understanding the weather. But look, I have to go or I’m going to be late to class.”
“Are you deaf?” he asked.
She smiled uncomfortably, then said, “Yes, technically.”
“I saw your hearing aids,” he said. “I mean, I know you’re not trying to hide them. It’s just, I mean…”
“It’s okay, you’re not making it awkward or anything.”
“I think it’s hot,” he said, but then he flashed his eyes, almost like he didn’t like the way that came out.
“Okay,” she said, dragging the word out.
“There I go again.”
“Yeah, there you go again,” she replied. “I’m going to class now. Nice talking to you.”
He nodded and smiled. She walked inside, then turned and waved him off with an uncomfortable laugh when she saw he was still staring at her.
“That guy you were talking to,” whispered the girl she sat down next to as the professor walked into the classroom, “is he your boyfriend?”
“Hardly,” she said.
“He looks like a total creeper,” the girl said. “The stalkerazzi.”
“I know, right?” Leighton said as the class got started.
“At least he’s kinda hot,” she replied. Leighton didn’t know the girl, but when it came to questionable guys, girls either stuck together and protected each other, or they tried to steal the other girl’s boyfriend. In this case, if she wanted, this girl could totally have him.
“Hot or not, something’s off about him,” Leighton finally whispered. “Trust me.”
Their teacher, Professor Hatton, had been a successful entrepreneur during the first half of his life. Apparently, he had done so well, he thought he’d give back to the community he had practically transformed. His gift to Northern Kentucky University and his students was Entrepreneurship 201. When he first introduced himself in that exact way, the class graced him with a conciliatory laugh. Within weeks, he had become Leighton’s favorite teacher. It also became clear that Professor Hatton wasn’t an egomaniac and she didn’t think he was fishing for compliments, he was simply a skilled entrepreneur looking to give back, precisely as he’d said.
Leighton started college with the idea that if she understood both business management and entrepreneurship, she could help her parents monetize their grandfather’s property in ways they might not have thought possible. She loved the land, but she also wanted to help her parents in their early retirement. With her father approaching fifty and her mother three years younger than her father, they still had time and energy on their side. But with Leighton helping them, maybe they could actually make something of their family name.
Her older sister, Marley, laughed when Leighton confessed this to her, but Marley held the title of Deputy Chief of Staff of Communications, so she was constantly remi
nding Leighton that she was the right-hand woman to the White House Chief of Staff. In so many words, this meant Marley’s dream life was so much bigger than any of the family’s dreams combined, which was why she probably distanced herself from them so long ago.
They were halfway through Professor Hatton’s latest slide presentation about business valuation models when her phone vibrated again. Another emergency alert? The classroom was dark, so she kept her phone low on her thigh and tried to shield the glow as she read it. Apparently, tornadoes were touching down nearby. Did she need to be concerned? Her father was right, so the answer was clear. Of course, she had to be concerned.
Two minutes later, the slide projector failed and all the power shut down. Something worse than that happened, though. The steady buzz of white noise fell so flat, she knew her hearing aids had failed. The classroom had been swallowed into complete blackness.
Leighton took out her hearing aids, flicked them, thought maybe she’d gotten too much wax on them, but it wasn’t that. They were expensive hearing aids—Phonak’s Naída Marvel, the M90 Premium version—which her mother claimed were the top of the line.
They should be working!
But they weren’t.
She tried unlocking the phone to check the weather because maybe the tornado was already tearing through town, but her phone’s screen was unresponsive.
What the…?
Looking around, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, all she knew was a heavy, stifling silence. Panic shot through her. Losing one of her senses was bad enough, but losing her sight, too? Leighton had plenty of anxious moments since the accident that took her hearing, but this one topped the charts.
Right then, someone fell into her, pushing her upper body into the aisle. Some kid bumped into her, not caring that his or her hips kept knocking into the back of Leighton’s back and head.
“Hey!” she finally said, not sure how loud she was speaking because she couldn’t hear a thing.
The last body then pushed off of her and she was able to sit upright, pulling her hands against her sides as chaos surged through the darkness.