At last, the noise died down. But still, she held her breath.
Surely it was coming back. Surely, it couldn't be over. Surely another funnel would form and chase her to another ditch, another cellar. Who knew where or when, but she was willing to bet this wasn’t the end.
The eerie silence was almost more disturbing than the noise had been. She couldn’t place anything, and the disquiet wormed its way into her bones.
Did tornadoes steal the birds and toss them away to distant places? She didn't know.
Was the wildlife gone? Either run off or scrubbed by the beast… She didn't know.
But at last it became clear that sitting here was hurting more than it was helping. If someone was driving by on the road outside, she and Jerry had missed them. It was time to get out and see what the damage was.
She carefully slipped Toto into her pocket again and stood, realizing as she did, that she'd either been there much longer than she thought, or was much more tense than she’d thought. Her knees screamed at her as she tried to unfold them. The pain in her lower back as she stretched upright told her all she needed to know. But she didn't want it to stop her. It was going to hurt anyway.
So she slowly shuffled around, hands out, until she hit the bottom step with her lower shin. She muttered a curse word.
“You hurt?” Jerry asked, followed quickly by, “What are you doing?”
“Checking the doors,” she said. She reached up as she climbed the steps slowly. Her hands were out in front of her, crawling upward on all fours. Slowly, she reached up over her head each time she made a move, in hopes that she wouldn't first bonk her head. Joule slowed down as she remembered the short crowbar that held the doors together. It was old and rusted, but the pry edge was still relatively sharp. She moved her hand around above her head again before moving slowly up another step.
This time when she reached up, she felt her fingers slide along the elastic of the bungees, as she felt for the hook at the end. Jerry had wound it tightly and it took a few moments in the dark to get it undone. Behind her he’d stayed quiet. So he'd either stayed put or had skills she didn't know about.
She unwound the bungee cords slowly with her right hand, one by one putting them into her left to hold onto. When she had all of them off and the pry bar was the only thing holding the handles together, she grabbed it and twisted it over her head until she got it oriented the right way and it slid free.
With a deep breath, she grabbed the handle of the cellar door and pushed upward.
It didn't give.
She tried again.
Nothing.
Then she wised up and tried the other handle. But it also didn't budge.
“Jerry?” she asked. “The doors don't move. Do you want to try this?”
He was larger than her. He had to be stronger. At least this made Jerry useful. She heard him moving around behind her and then felt the steps flex under her feet as he stepped on the bottom rung.
“Hold on, let me get down the steps first,” she told him, shuffling her way backwards. At the bottom, she brushed past him, not quite gauging how close it was. With her feet on the floorboards, she could feel the equipment in her hand, feel the soft weight of Toto sleeping in her pocket, and she could hear Jerry going up the steps. But she couldn’t see anything, just the ghost edges of lines teasing her in the dark.
Before she'd watched the ladder-style stairs sag as he stepped on them. Now she heard them creak in protest under his weight. She wondered what would happen if he broke through them. How would they get out?
She heard the banging sounds of him pushing upward on the doors, again and again, until he declared, “They're blocked. I can't move it.”
Joule’s shoulders sagged with the news. Her breath huffed out in a half-hearted “shit.”
But then Jerry turned to her and said, “This is all your fault.”
44
Cage stood back, letting William Butler direct a few of the men he knew to unbolt the lid to the shelter. It slid back on creaky hinges, making a slow arc into the open air above them.
Holy shit, Cage thought as he looked up and saw only a blue sky.
It was possible that part of the house was still standing. But he could see that at least a good chunk of it was missing.
“Well, fuck,” Butler muttered, issuing the least likely curse Cage had expected of the older man. Now he motioned to the others to stay as he passed them, walking reverently up the stairs and into the space beyond. It was his house and his shelter, after all.
Cage could see Butler’s feet, standing on the floor just beyond the door. He gave a little bounce, as if testing the integrity of the floor, before turning in a full circle.
His feet returned to the opening, shiny black shoes making a statement as he walked back down. He carried himself like an actor or politician coming to address the people below. But then he pulled up short, as if coming back into the shelter was simply too much for him.
Leaning over, William Butler placed his hands on his knees, bringing his head into sight to those waiting below for his proclamation. The position looked awkward, but no one cared. They all hung on the silence waiting for any announcement.
“The house is completely gone.”
Gasps greeted him from the people in the corner, who hadn't seen what Cage had. He worried about his car, and his first thought was shoving his way up the steps and past the older men, onto the surface of the foundation to see the yard. But in the same heartbeat, it occurred to him that everyone here had a car to check on, if not a home or a family member.
Even as he thought that, Butler began instructing them. “Let's all make a nice, orderly exit. These are your neighbors, so be kind. Before anyone moves, who has family they need to find?”
Butler had clearly thought this through before, but it was the wrong question. All but five of the hands went up.
“All right,” he backpedaled a bit. “Who's missing small children?”
Only two hands raised up this time. A couple, it looked like.
“Come on.” Butler waved them up as the first ones out, reaching toward them as though he was going to hold their hands and direct them up the stairs. The two other men still standing on the staircase took that upon themselves.
“Who has teenagers to find?” Butler asked. This time four hands went up, and they were escorted up.
“Is anybody willing to wait and go last?” he asked next.
Cage and Deveron weren’t in this category either. However, the mother with the two small kids pointed out that they were asleep—sweaty and breathing raggedly, but asleep. She motioned that she was willing to wait right where she was, as did several other older people. So did the woman who was there with her father. They would be happy to go slowly and be last, she told them.
Cage and Deveron awaited Butler’s motion for their chance to go, though it was hard to wait patiently in the small line and try not to push their way forward.
When he reached the top, Cage saw that people hadn’t scrambled off in different directions. They’d been stopped by what they saw. Some were still standing on the foundation of the house, which was truly all that was left. Some of them looked out or up in awe, turning and taking in the world scrubbed free of so many things that it had had before: houses, trees, fences, outbuildings, and more.
They'd come up first to find family, but now they were struggling to even find focus.
Others were picking through the debris that littered the floor of the once-stately home. One man was walking the edge of the foundation and yelled out, “Here! This is probably the safest place to climb down. Did anyone find steps?”
But no one had.
In a flash of memory, Cage remembered the wooden front deck. As he turned and looked in what he was confident was the right direction, he found there was no deck at all. No sign of it.
Thank God for the cinderblock shelter. And for William Butler, not only letting all of his neighbors in, but standing on his doorstep a
nd calling out for passersby with a bullhorn at the ready. If Cage had ever doubted that preparedness paid off, this would have turned the tide.
“Car looks good,” Dev told him, and Cage whipped around, realizing he'd been facing entirely the wrong direction.
While Deveron was right, and the car seemed intact, they were far from ready to resume their search. A huge tree had fallen across the driveway. He wasn't even sure he'd be able to pick a path around it.
So he still had the car, but it didn't look like he could get to a road. As his eyes tracked further beyond the car, Cage realized he couldn't even see the road. Or could he?
Trees were down, pieces of homes littered the area, and he realized that he could see bits of tarmac through the debris. The road was still there. But it might be a while before a car could pass it, so it probably didn't even matter if he could drive around Sanders’ tree.
He'd never wished for a monster truck more in his whole life. As he surveyed the damage, his heart fell. This looked worse than the last one, though he really had no real frame of reference to gauge by. Maybe it had just hit a little closer. He was sure the radio announcer would tell him everything as soon as he could get the station dialed in.
Maybe it got better once he got beyond this area. Maybe this one had simply taken out more trees and the damage looked worse. He hadn't even seen the funnel this time—not close, not as it went by. He'd seen the other one, but this one he’d only spotted in the distance.
The shelter had made everything so much easier. He hadn't been whipped back and forth, had his head cracked against Deveron’s, his arms and legs threatening to form hairline fractures or even full breaks each time the wind grabbed and yanked at him.
As he thought about it now, he and his roommates should have all been checked for mild concussions back when they were at the community center. But as Sarah had rightly complained, the line was too long.
He turned now, looking to Dev and shaking his head. Was he even thinking clearly? And how would he know?
“How do we get to Joule and Izzy now? How do we get back to Sarah?”
45
Joule felt her head snap back at the accusation. Despite the fact that it was still pitch dark, she blinked hard. “This is my fault? Me personally?”
She sounded incredulous even to her own ears. And she felt that was the right reaction to have. She heard the stairs creaking under Jerry's weight as he moved downward, and she waited for him to poke her in the chest to make his point.
“You people.” He ground out the words. “You come in here and you screw everything up.”
She was frowning, her head moving forward with a look on her face that suggested he was being a dumbass, despite the fact that he surely couldn’t see her. She didn’t try to put on her friendly face but released at least some of her sudden tension by letting her expressions loose.
“Did you really just ‘you people’ me? And what did we screw up?” He had to be talking about the Helio Systems solar array.
“You walked in here like you own the place and you stole our jobs!”
“But don't you still have a job?” she asked. Seriously, he did. Radnor had checked after Jerry had made such a big splash in the protests.
“Well, not for long.”
“So you do still have a job?”
“Not for long,” he repeated. “My family's going to starve!”
Interesting. She didn't know he had a family. For a moment, she wondered who would have him? Horrible, uncharitable thoughts, she knew, but the man had just blamed her for basically everything.
“Why would you starve? Helio Systems offered you a job.”
He didn’t reply, but she could hear his angry breathing and wondered if she was far enough away to duck a punch she couldn’t see coming. She tried again, this time shifting the topic just a little. “How much are you making now?”
“That's none of your business!”
Fair, she thought, but didn't say.
She was still standing in the dark, still wondering how the hell they were going to get out if even Jerry couldn't budge the cellar doors. But it seemed like convincing the only other person down here that she wasn't responsible for all hell breaking loose was maybe the first task.
“Helio Systems is offering jobs to anyone who's been displaced by the solar array coming in. For anyone losing some of their work from coal. They start at a good rate.” She rattled off the opening pay, remembering it from Dr. Murasawa’s comments at the town hall. “Can I ask if that's more or less than what you're making now?”
“I don't want to retrain! I work coal!”
His angry response almost surely meant the offer was more than he was currently getting. If it was less, then he had a valid complaint. But he sure wasn't saying that.
“I'm sorry that you don't want to retrain, but it’s paid training. Don’t you also want to leave your mountains intact for your future generations?”
For that family he was worried about starving?
“Coal is what my family has done for three generations!”
She didn't have a response to someone so entrenched and unwilling to budge. She understood family loyalty. Her family were scientists. Joule felt that research and building were in her blood. Her grandfather had been a Navy CB—construction batallion—a coveted spot. Her great grandfather on the other side had been an engineer in World War II. So she understood the idea of generations following in footsteps. But a four-generation chain didn't seem that long. Was three really a full “family tradition?”
“Well, if your family is in energy,” she tried again, “you would still be in energy. You’d still be providing power to the community.” She almost added, It’s a noble position, but she'd really had enough of Jerry. She tried to change the topic once again. “We need to get out of here.”
“It's your fault. All these tornadoes. You people brought them here.”
“What?”
“This is what happens when you mess with God.”
Joule shoved her hand into her pocket, stroking Toto for the requisite help to her bite her tongue and not lash out the way she wanted to. “This is a tornado. It’s a weather system, a meteorological event, not revenge.”
“So, you’re one of them atheists, too?”
“No!” she blurted out, quickly and handily. “I just don't believe in a God who takes revenge on his own people! And I don't believe in a God that gets mad at us for trying to do better by the earth He gave us.”
“He gave us coal!” Jerry replied.
“Well, he gave us the damn sunlight, too! And we're supposed to be the stewards of the earth, aren't we? Strip mining the mountains hardly seems like the right way to do that.”
She wished she'd had something better. But her chest was heaving with anger, and her short temper was keeping her from her best thinking. Joule didn't have a place in her heart for people who thought like Jerry. She fully understood, particularly in agricultural systems, that deities often took the place of meteorological systems. But she wasn't going to take the personal blame for it!
“We have to get out of here. Should we try pushing on the doors together?”
Only silence greeted her in return.
Joule waited a moment, hoping to simmer down and thinking Jerry would come around. When he didn't, she added, “We can die in here together, or we can get out of here together. Should we push on the doors or not?”
“Fine!” He bit the word off, and she wasn’t sure about getting close enough to him to help push on the cellar doors. But the only way away from him was out of here.
It took a moment in the dark to maneuver both of them up the steps, with her on a higher step than him because she was shorter. With one foot low and one foot up a step, she tried to brace herself for a good upward shove.
“On three,” he said, and she was more than willing to let him feel like a big man by running the count down.
But when they pushed, they only managed to budge the doors a litt
le. All that effort for nothing.
“Feels like something's across it,” he said.
Something big, Joule thought, and heavy.
She felt around to the sides of the doorway, wondering if the hinges hadn't given way. Had they maybe borne out her theory that they weren't sturdy?
She wondered if she could pry them off. If so, then they could pull the doors down in. Maybe they could squeeze through whatever was blocking the doors from opening.
“Can you grab me the crowbar?” she asked. “It’s down on the floor, to the left of the steps.
Below her on the stairs, she heard and felt him move. Even through the flexing of the old staircase, she could feel his irritation.
But a moment later, he said, “Here. I'm holding it out.”
Joule waved her hand slowly and gently through the air until she grabbed it. It took another few moments to locate the hinges and to line the sharp edge of the bent end of the crowbar under the metal.
She leaned in, putting everything she had into pushing. Then she tried pulling town on the bar. The hinges didn't budge.
Now, when she ran her fingers over the pieces she could feel the bolts themselves. They seemed to have unusually large heads for a job like this. She wondered how long they were and why someone had felt such a need to protect their rutabagas?
She had a sinking feeling that they were in more trouble than she'd realized.
46
Cage and Deveron dropped over the edge of the Butler house foundation, leaving the steps at the back for those who needed them.
He clicked the button on his key chain, happy when the car beeped back at him and the lights flashed. He opened the back door and spotted the food bag. He must have been looking for it without realizing it, because he was suddenly ravenous. If the feeling was because he was actually hungry, or because he'd finally seen food, or because he was nervous and needed to fuel it in some way, it didn't seem to matter.
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