The Tempest

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Here.” He’d torn open one of the granola bars and with the other hand held the bag out toward Dev, noticing that his roommate’s hand dove into the bag as quickly as his own had.

  Reaching into the second bag in the back seat, he pulled out the water bottles that Sarah had sent along. The first granola bar was gone within a second and he grabbed for a pack of chips and basically poured them down his throat. Crackers came next and then the water bottle was polished off. He couldn't comment about Dev doing the same thing because he was stuffing his own face so handily.

  When he finally stopped eating, he looked to Dev. “What do we do?”

  His roommate only shrugged as he looked around the ravaged landscape. “I think we're stuck.”

  Cage shook his head. He couldn't be stuck. He didn't know how to deal with being stuck. If something attacked him, he figured out how to fight it. In this case, though, nothing was actually attacking him. Nothing hunted him. He was fighting the vagaries of a weather system. And how could he fight something that didn’t think, didn’t need, didn’t hunt?

  A fist-sized fluff of cotton drifted past his feet, darting in and out of the tree branches. He wondered if maybe the answer was to be smaller, not bigger.

  “Bicycles,” he said to Dev.

  “Interesting…” He could see his friend thinking it through. “Easier to maneuver, with everything blocking the road—and, if need be, we can lift them and carry them over things.”

  “Where do we get good mountain bikes?”

  “There’s a shop on Buffalo Street,” a voice said behind them.

  Turning, Cage recognized the man only as having been down in the shelter with them. But that was enough. He said hello, introduced himself formally, and it took less than three minutes to strike a deal.

  All hands were suddenly on the tree that was blocking Cage's car into the driveway. With everyone pushing at it, the heavy trunk yielded. For a while, they used brute force and slid it back, scraping the gravel with it. Then they wised up and managed to hack at some of the branches and roll it a little farther.

  “I think that should do us,” the man, Carl, said as he looked back up to the house to wave to Butler. He called up, “Is it okay if we drive around on the grass?”

  Butler just laughed back at him. Cage had gotten the impression that grass down here was not a precious commodity. And, with everything else that was going on in this yard, a few tire tracks on Butler's wet grass wasn't going to make a difference.

  “Let's do it,” Dev said and he opened the car door for Carl's wife, Brandy, letting her slide into the front passenger seat.

  Cage was ready to climb in when he remembered Boomer and Bob’s directive. He could still follow it. Looking up, he asked, “Does anyone else need a ride down to the road? We're heading south.”

  It’s not the direction he wanted to go to find Joule, but it was the direction they needed to go next.

  Another couple replied quickly that they could use a ride, and Cage wound up with four people crammed across his back seat. But he was grateful to be doing the work the brothers had tasked him with.

  The driving was slow and arduous, maybe only a little faster than walking, given that they repeatedly got out to clear the road. Cage was once again glad that there were six of them as they pushed trees, branches, and debris away to make a path. Their numbers definitely made the work faster.

  He dropped two of them off roadside about a mile down the road, when they insisted they could walk from there. And then Carl and Brandy made it another mile before getting out. Brandy held the door open, leaned down, and looked in at him. “You're going to go another mile on this road. And you're going to hit a little section of shops, like, just three of them.”

  She emphasized how small the little strip was and motioned with her perfectly manicured nails. “But the last one is a sports shop. You wouldn't know it from the outside. But if you go in the back, there's bikes.”

  “How do we get in?”

  She looked at him, stood up, looked around, and bent back down to talk to him in the car. “I don't know for sure, but my guess is right now you can walk right through the front of the store.”

  Seeing the damage on the road in front of him, Cage guessed Brandy might very well be right.

  The couple thanked him again. But then she closed the door and she and Carl headed off to figure out what damage their own place had sustained.

  It was growing dark by the time Cage and Dev reached the store. With Brady's directions, it was easy to find and identify. Sure enough, the baseball gloves, bats, and golfing equipment in the front window gave no indication of mountain bikes. But in a stroke of luck, the front windows were, in fact, shattered wide enough for them to easily climb through.

  Along the back wall was a small selection of mountain bikes. They picked out two and grabbed tools for adjustment. Then they raided the store. Cage grabbed a basket and added a tire inflation kit, helmets, and lights. He headed to the other side of the store to look at the gloves. Finding a set he liked, he tossed a second pair to Dev.

  “Dude,” Dev replied, instantly tossing them back. “I'm going to be hard pressed for my half of what we already have.”

  “I've got it,” Cage told him.

  Dev raised one eyebrow. “I thought you were making the same as me.”

  “I am.” It was hard to say. Still, Deveron deserved a reasonable explanation. “Joule and I lost our parents just over five years ago. So we're making the same as you, but we have a bit of a stash from the life insurance. My parents would have wanted me to spend it finding Joule.”

  Dev, always smart, didn't ask how or why his parents had died, but merely nodded and said, “That explains a lot about you and your sister.”

  This time, when Cage tossed him the gloves, he grabbed them out of the air and added them to his own pile. It was easier to accept gifts in an emergency, and easier knowing that Cage was going to press Dev into service for finding Joule.

  A few moments later, they had everything laid out on the countertop except the two bikes. Dev pulled his cell out and took a photo. They left a paper message with both their names and phone numbers, and the address of Desperado’s Hideaway, not that they were sure it still existed. They taped the scrawled note down to the countertop and took a picture of that, too.

  They couldn’t send the photos to anyone yet. Dev’s cell bars were still nonexistent, the words “no signal” filling the space at the top of his phone. But at least they had the pictures as backup to prove they intended to pay for the equipment.

  Twenty minutes later, they were on the road, the thick bike tires eating up the distance. As predicted, the bikes maneuvered through the small spaces between debris much easier than the car ever had. Cage didn't say anything to Dev, but he understood they were headed back to Desperado’s Hideaway first. It was the only real option. But they had no idea what they would find when they got there.

  47

  It was full dark by the time they neared the house, and Cage was grateful for getting the headlamps and bolting them to the fronts of the bikes.

  They’d attached flashers to the back and had lights on the fronts of their helmets, too. Cage had thought it was better to be seen, even if nobody else was traveling the roads right now.

  As the evening grew darker, he’d discovered that the lights were less for others and more for them. The powerful beams were the only thing lighting the road for them.

  He'd also grabbed a small radio, which Dev insisted be attached to Cage’s bike. That had proved to be another smart installment. They’d listened to announcements, including long lists of names of people who’d turned themselves in at the community center. Others had been located by rescue teams. Some had simply gotten a handheld radio and contacted the station to let people know they were safe. The lists were long, but none had included Sarah Carter, Isabel McAlister, or Joule Mazur.

  There were also descriptions of small children. Those were the ones that broke Cage's h
eart and made him pedal harder when his legs felt like they couldn't go any farther. Despite all the work out in the fields, and his much-improved physique from it, biking was not the same as squatting and catching lizards, and his muscles were not pleased with him.

  Cage and Deveron were another mile down the road by the time the announcer began listing off happy reunions. At least, Cage thought, some people had found each other. That meant there was still hope for him.

  “Is that it?”

  Cage pulled to a stop. Behind him, Dev had his feet planted on either side of the bike, his finger raised. The blue gloves with white reflective tape were another strangely helpful tool in the dark. Cage had just been aiming at protecting their hands, but these, too, turned out to be more necessary than he’d expected.

  “Wow!” He'd almost been ready to bike right past it. Riding a human-powered machine made him very cautious about not making any unnecessary motions. “It is.”

  They’d almost missed the turn for the Hideaway. He frowned for a moment before realizing that he usually recognized this turn at night, directed by the streetlight at the corner.

  “Is the light out?… Nevermind,” Dev asked, the tone of his voice at the end of the sentence indicating he'd realized his mistake.

  Of course it was out. Everything was out.

  The only light they had came from the headlamps on their bikes and the ones on their helmets. Thank God they'd been smart enough to pick up every light they could. It must have been a new moon or too much cloud cover, because Alabama was pitch black.

  “Nah man,” Cage replied. “The entire streetlamp is gone.”

  If he hadn't remembered that he’d used the light as a landmark, he wouldn’t have known the light was missing. The ground was churned up in several places, and now there wasn't any real evidence a lamp post had once stood here.

  “Dammmnnnn,” Dev drew the word out as he got moving again and passed Cage, making the turn.

  The gravel was noticeably harder to bike on than the road had been. Another tree had fallen across their drive, this time a small sapling. Cage considered getting off the bike and moving it out of the path, but Dev waved him away.

  “There's no car here to clear the drive for.”

  They'd left his car at the bike shop. Sara's car was destroyed—whether or not anyone had towed it from a ditch yet remained to be seen. So they biked to the edge of the gravel and hopped off. Lifting the bike made his muscles protest again, but Cage didn’t say anything as they picked their way through the branches and then pushed the bikes the rest of the way up to the house.

  Halfway there, a light flicked on in a window. The building appeared to be relatively intact, or at least as intact as it had been the last time they were here.

  “Hello?” a voice called out. “Hello?”

  “Sarah!” they both cried out in unison, their pace picking up.

  “Cage! Dev!” The light danced around, moving closer. As it dropped several feet, Cage sucked in a breath for a moment, but realized it was simply Sarah with a flashlight jumping down from the edge of the foundation rather than heading around the steps to the front porch.

  As she got closer, he could see her face from the lights on the bikes and the relief that swept through him was overwhelming. She had been their first check for a number of reasons. The main one being that they knew where she was supposed to be. They could easily get a yes/no answer if Sarah was there. And if she needed help, they might be able to find it for her.

  Joule and Izzy were still unknown factors.

  He felt the hit as Sarah practically attacked him in a hug, her arms wrapped tightly around him. He hugged her back for a moment before pulling away and scolding her. “You're not supposed to use that arm!”

  But she was already hugging Dev. “I kind of worked it out. I took several Tylenol. Did some stretches. And it's actually feeling better.”

  “You cured yourself?’

  “Oh god, no. Look.” She aimed her flashlight down toward her arm. And he saw it was mottled blue and purple, bruised all to hell and back. “I probably bruised the bone. But I don't think I broke it. So I'm not putting any weight on it, but I can offer my returning journeymen a hug!”

  Despite everything, she was still Sarah, still efficient. She’d already turned around and was picking her way through the debris back to the house. “Follow me.”

  As Cage looked down, directing the helmet light toward her feet, he saw that the yard was worse than it had been before.

  “We got rain here this time,” she said over her shoulder as though she had read his thoughts. “Which means we got rain inside the house.”

  Oh, he thought, not good.

  “We have no heat, no power, but check this out.” She waved the flashlight beam upward and Cage wondered what he was supposed to be looking at in the dark night. It took a moment to distinguish smoke.

  “You have a fire?” Dev asked

  “I do!”

  They couldn't see it, but they could hear the grin and the pride in her voice. “We can sleep in front of the fireplace tonight. And in the morning, we’ll go looking again.”

  Cage hadn't considered that. His thought had been Sarah was first—they’d checked her off the list—and then he’d turn around and head right back out to continue the search.

  But as he turned and looked behind him, there was nothing to see beyond the small illumination of the headlight from his helmet. There was no way they would find Joule or Izzy tonight, and searching by bicycle in the dark wasn't safe. His body was now protesting as Sarah lithely used her good arm to help push herself up on the edge of the foundation and into the house proper. It was clear she’d been working the whole time they’d been gone.

  As Dev followed her, pushing the bike up before him, Cage thought he heard his roommate groan. Yeah, they weren’t going anywhere tonight.

  His heart crushed inside his chest. He wasn’t good with that, but what else could he do? The world was pitch black. His body was protesting from overuse. And he didn’t even know which direction to aim.

  So he closed his eyes and did the only thing he could. He hoped to any god who might be listening that his sister was safe. Then he turned and followed Sarah and Deveron up into the house.

  48

  “What are the chances that the Larkins will come back to the farm and find us and let us out of here?” Joule asked into the darkness.

  “Well, I mean…” Jerry somewhat hemmed and hawed at what should have been a very simple question. “They will come back. Eventually.”

  He’d let the words trail off, as if to imply that the Larkins might not let them out. She flashed back to earlier, when she'd asked him why no one was home on any of these farms. He’d told her they locked everything down and left.

  But was that really right? The tractor hadn’t been locked down.

  When she’d mentioned that, Jerry had quickly replied, “No one locks down tractors anyway.”

  And now he was acting as though they were stuck and the family that owned the home and the farm wasn’t going to come back or wasn’t going to set them free once they found someone had taken shelter in their cellar but had gotten stuck…

  What was here that was more valuable than the tractor they’d ridden up on? She wanted to know, because she sure wasn't seeing it. Then again, she'd never been an Alabama farm girl and hadn't recognized cotton blowing across the road the first time she'd seen it, either. She’d been fascinated by both the softness of the bolls and by the hard sharpness of the shells they left behind.

  Here, she couldn’t explore, touch, test, or see what happened. She was, unfortunately, stuck in a cellar, and working with Jerry's at least limited and probably biased information.

  “So what's our best option?” She tossed it into the middle of the space, thinking that maybe leaving her question open would make him more willing to share information.

  “I don't know.”

  He didn’t elaborate, and Joule grew more frustrated
. She might still be young, but she knew herself well enough to know that she didn't operate very well at all on “I don't know.”

  “Well, I'm going to try and get us out of here.”

  “It's night,” he protested. “We should try to get some sleep.”

  Her erstwhile partner couldn't see her roll her eyes. “Scarecrow, dude, have you looked around? It's always night down here. If we wait until tomorrow to get out, we’ll run out of food.”

  She’d taken only a few sips of her Gatorade. But she’d opened the second can of tuna for Toto when he whined and pawed softly at her jacket. It was the last can. Toto had quickly found the food in the dark and Joule was grateful that it was packed in water. He’d lapped that up. But where was his next meal coming from? There was no tuna left, and no water for him.

  “Can you put your cell phone on?” she asked.

  She could almost hear his facial expression as he protested. “You told me not to use up the battery with the flashlight.”

  “Right. So we aren’t going to use the flashlight. What you should do now is simply turn the phone on and change the screen brightness to as low as possible. We only need a very little bit of light to be better than what we have right now.”

  The ghosts of edges around the cellar doors and down the lines of the steps had faded some time ago, making her believe that either night had set in or a storm had. Since she didn’t hear anything at all from outside, she was guessing it was well into evening and maybe even later.

  “Fine,” Jerry huffed, but she listened to his shuffled movement and then threw her hands up to block her eyes as the light filled the room. The phone powered on in a preset pattern at full light.

  “Holy crap!” She saw from the corner of her eyes that Toto look startled, where he’d been sleeping on her lap. Reaching down, she put one hand over his little eyes.

  The phone beeped and whirred as it ran through its little startup routine. Then, as her eyes started adjusting, she watched as Jerry tapped and frowned at it.