The Tempest

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Boost me in,” she said and watched as Jerry laced his fingers together.

  While that normally would have been a good lift, his hands weren’t too much higher than where she already stood.

  “Wait, sorry.” She turned around, stepped down, grabbed Toto one more time and stuffed him in her pocket. He wiggled around a little bit, but he didn't try to squirm his way out. She wasn’t going to leave him behind but she had to get into the crawlspace.

  So she put her foot backward into Jerry's hands, feeling bad about putting her butt in his face, and boosted herself up and through the hole. Her fingers bit into the dirt, but not far enough for purchase. “Sorry! Push me?”

  Joule straightened her leg, making it stiff so Jerry could do just that. She was shoved ungracefully into the gap.

  Well, she almost coughed, the dirt down here was dry. Whatever water systems they’d installed at the farm worked. They funneled the water away from under the house. Reaching up to wipe at her face, she stopped herself just in time. She’d only make it worse.

  Joule had just enough space to crawl on her hands and knees, if she kept her head low. So she did exactly that.

  She reached out the hole, for the phone. “I need the light. I won’t put the flashlight on, though!”

  She added the last part to reassure him about her energy usage. As she slowly turned like a mastodon and crawled away, she whispered wryly, “If only we had solar…”

  She crawled through the space for another interminable eon. According to the light from the phone it took her a good forty-five minutes, but it felt like forever to check the entire boundary of the foundation.

  The place wasn't large, but the foundation was shallower in some places, deeper in others as it followed the dips and curves of the earth. In each spot, Joule stopped and pushed against the wall. She couldn’t remember from when they’d plowed their way up to the house, but she was beginning to think the entire skirt was bricked in.

  There would be no getting out from the inside. Though there were vents in place, they were too small for her and definitely too small for Jerry to climb through. In another circumstance, she might have tried to push her way through, find someone to help, and come back for Jerry. But she wasn’t going to leave him at the mercy of the Larkins.

  When she'd circled the whole perimeter, pushing on everything and deciding that it wasn't much hope, she headed back. The phone lit up Jerry's face as he stood in the exact spot she'd left him in. Maybe he’d been standing there the whole time.

  “I don't see anything,” she reported. “I think the entire base is bricked in. There aren’t any gaps, no access doors, and no weak spots that I can find. The only way out would be brute force. I think we have to go up.”

  “Okay,” he readily agreed.

  “That means you hand me the tools and we go in together. We’ll use the flashlight to find a spot and bust our way up through the sub flooring.”

  “Okay,” he said again. “Which tools?”

  She realized then that Jerry was doing something extraordinary given what she’d expected of him: He was letting her be in charge.

  “Let's bring them all up.”

  “Won't that be evidence that we were here?’

  “Yes.” She was more content now, but still. “We’ll also leave a hole in the floor of their house that they’ll probably notice.”

  “Good point.” He didn't seem to catch on any more than that, and she let it go.

  Once they’d gone through the laborious task of getting all the tools handed up, Joule had braced herself and offered a hand out to Jerry. She’d been careful not to be in a position where she could roll over and squish Toto, who was still sleeping comfortably in her pocket.

  Together, she and Jerry started the survey. It was harder for him to maneuver than it was for her, and even she was cramping up. But they had to find the best place, or they’d cost themselves extra work and maybe a failed attempt.

  This search took just as long as the first one she'd done. She checked the phone, and sure enough, it was the middle of the night already. Luckily, the Larkins still hadn't come home and the battery on the phone still hadn't died.

  “I think this is the best spot,” she offered. She’d knocked upward on the floor a few times, noted the construction, and tried to figure out where the overhead walls would be. It would have been much easier if she’d ever been inside the house.

  In the spot that she'd chosen, the flooring was already starting to rot out a little bit, which would make their job much, much easier. She had no idea what she'd hit once they passed the sub floor, though—tile? Carpet? Hard wood?

  “Wait,” She turned and asked Jerry. “What kind of floors are these?”

  “Wood floors,” he told her with confidence. Then with less, he added, “I think they got rugs in some of the places. Nice ones with lots of color.”

  Okay, she thought, but those were details she didn't need. “Wall-to-wall carpeting, or throw rugs?”

  “Not to all the corners. You know, just in the middle of the room.”

  That’s better, she thought, but didn't say. Then she made her way back to the tool pile and grabbed what she could, taking the square headed hammer for herself and another ball peen hammer and a wood wedge for Jerry. It was a bitch crawling these things back and forth. But Toto rolled over in her pocket and the warm feel of him, probably asleep, was comforting. She needed that.

  Together, she and Jerry started chipping away at the subflooring. It flaked and cracked relatively easily until they’d carved the layer away. Reaching up, Joule pushed against the next layer above it. Wood flooring, she thought, just as Jerry had said. But it gave relatively easily against the pressure she applied. Cheap wood flooring.

  That made her happy and gave her swings of the hammer renewed energy as they cracked at it. They had to make a hole big enough for Jerry because, while she was the least devoted member of his fan club, she wasn't going to leave him here for the Larkins to discover.

  When fragments of the ripped-up flooring littered the dirt around them, she tackled the carpet. It should be the last, easiest layer. Joule wondered if she could just push it out of the way.

  She tried and though she could push it up into a tent, it was clearly anchored by furniture on several sides. They’d need to cut their way through.

  Lord, she was destroying the home of drug runners. Not her finest hour.

  “The hacksaw?” she said to Jerry before heading back to the tool pile. Grabbing two of the little saws—one of them with a perfect pointy end—she positioned herself on her butt, directly under the hole. She could only hope this gave her the most forceful position as she pushed the hacksaw up into the carpeting. It gave, rather than cut.

  “Let me,” Jerry told her, and she felt a moment of gratefulness that he was here as her partner. She watched as he neatly forced the end of the saw through the carpeting above.

  If someone was up there, they were watching the craziest cat burglars ever break up into their home. But so far, no one had complained.

  Jerry cut a slice into the carpet but it only let in a little more light than what the phone offered up. The dead of night part was woefully accurate right now.

  “We need to cut a T,” she told him. “It'll make the hole bigger faster.”

  She grabbed at the carpet, anchoring one side while he again pushed against it with the saw. This time, at least, the cut went quickly. The relief that bloomed through her chest was short lived as the light suddenly changed.

  Joule froze.

  Through the small front vent she could see headlights coming up the driveway.

  51

  Cage woke to the smell of eggs and toast.

  “Whahhh?” The sound was Deveron coming awake—an odd noise that Cage had become familiar with over the past weeks. Cage opened one eye to see his friend roll over cautiously in the bed of pillows and blankets.

  They’d slept on the floor in front of the fireplace with Sarah taking ca
re of them. She’d gotten up every few hours to stir the ashes and throw another log onto the fire. Though it wasn't horrifyingly cold in the fall in Alabama, at night it was colder than they wanted to sleep in. Having a chunk of the wall missing didn’t help.

  Anyone getting sick right now ran a much greater risk, with the hospitals already overloaded and the power out. They probably also ran greater risk of illness or infection, Cage thought, simply because of what they'd been doing: overexerting themselves, handling all kinds of strange materials, and being exposed to every person in the community.

  But he was excited about real food and wanted to ask where it came from. He sat up to watch the food reach its spot at the coffee table and the entire center of him sank as he counted plates. Sarah only carried three.

  For a moment, everything had been okay. He was on the floor. He was warm. There was the smell of food. He saw his friend. He knew now that the activity he’d heard from the kitchen was Sarah cooking breakfast.

  But where was his sister?

  The morning soured in his mouth, but he threw off the covers anyway. If he wanted to fix the problem, he had to move. The slightly-too-cool air hit his legs as his heels slapped the floor, and he did his best to push to standing without swaying.

  “How did you cook that, Sarah? Do we have power?” But he looked up and the lights were still off, although daylight streamed through the windows.

  She shook her head. “We have gas.”

  He must have frowned at her, or Dev must have, because she talked as she delivered glasses of water to go with the eggs and toast. “I got under the house yesterday. So I first turned on the stove, and then went down and crawled around. I took a bucket of soap solution that I had dyed red and painted the gas line with it. I didn’t see anything. So I’m cooking with the range.”

  Cage nodded but Dev frowned. “Why red soap?”

  Cage answered, “If the gas is leaking, it'll create bubbles in a soap solution and you can see where it's leaking from.”

  He watched as his friend grew a bit wide-eyed at the prospect. Dev was an engineer, so Cage was a little surprised his friend hadn't heard of any of this, but maybe he hadn’t grown up with a gas line. Turning back to Sarah, Cage asked, “Do you think it was enough of a check? I mean, surely you couldn’t examine the whole line?”

  And with only one good arm. But he didn’t say that part. Sarah had done it and done was done.

  She shook her head. “No, but I did get to most of it—at least the exposed parts, and it doesn’t matter if it leaks outside the house. At least not right now. I checked the tank out in the back while it was still light yesterday, and I didn't smell propane while I was under the house.”

  Sarah did have a good sense of smell, he thought.

  “So if it is leaking, it's not leaking enough to blow us up. And we have eggs.” She had been pleased when they moved in and she saw the gas range. At the time, Cage hadn't thought much of it one way or the other but now he, too, was pleased at the rural set up with the big propane tank out beyond Squirrel Log.

  He sat on the couch next to Dev, while Sarah automatically took the floor. Maybe she understood they would feel the hard wood like old men this morning. Cage tried to ignore the empty space on his other side. Joule would have sat on the floor without compunction. As he and Dev wolfed down the eggs, Sarah commented, “We have gas and water, just not power.”

  When she was met with silence, she explained further. “You can shower.”

  Cage only then noticed that Sarah herself looked relatively clean for having been in the ditch yesterday and surviving a tornado. He and Deveron were much worse for the wear. “Oh God, yes. We're horrifying.”

  “I'll get you guys clean sheets for tonight,” she told them and motioned with her empty glass as she stood to head back to the kitchen. She was still favoring the one arm and for that he was grateful.

  “You two finish eating, get showered and dressed…” She trailed off. But Cage understood. Sarah would stay here and clean up after them so they could get back on the road quickly.

  “Can we listen to the radio?” he asked into the space of the room. He didn’t want to listen, but he needed to.

  Sarah simply fetched it from the kitchen, where she must have been listening to it while she cooked. Placing it in the center of the table, she added, “You might want to hit the community center first. See if they're there. If their names are on the list.”

  The two men looked to each other and agreed. The list had become everything, and he could only hope Joule’s name was on it. He shoveled in the rest of his hot breakfast like it was the first food he’d had in a week.

  It was an hour later, after pedaling back to the bicycle shop and making the tough decision to trade out the bikes for the car, that they were finally headed for the community center. Cage wasn't sure if they'd wasted time picking through the empty sports store and snagging the bike rack for the trunk. Or maybe it was brilliant.

  Either way, when they arrived at the community center, people were still milling around. Apparently, a crowd had been there all night. The crew was still checking people in. As the two climbed out of the now-battered sedan, he saw a huge red truck pull up and he recognized Boomer and Bob. This time, the load of people they brought in was only five.

  Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe it meant that the need for rescue was diminishing. He had faith that Boomer and Bob would find everyone eventually. Heading over to talk to them, the hope on his face must have shown through, puppy-like. Boomer seemed to clearly understand that he was dashing the young man’s hopes as he solemnly shook his head.

  Did the man really remember Joule and Izzy’s picture? Their names?

  “No Joule, no Isabelle.” The words were a soft, but stark, blow. Yes, Bob and Boomer remembered everyone they were looking for.

  Cage only nodded, but the man said, “Be sure to check the list. They still might be there.”

  That was the hope he and Deveron were still holding on to. He left the conversation without having said a word. But he clung to his hope. They hadn’t heard about anything during the night—the radio hadn't gone off, and the storms seemed to have finally abated. Sarah had even charged Dev’s cell phone off a battery. The radio announcer hadn’t commented about any new storms. If more had happened, they should have heard.

  Cage was counting that as a win. He had to.

  It took some jostling and then waiting to get to the list, printed and posted on the wall of the community center. A young woman stood by with a badge around her neck and a clipboard in her hand. The clear symbols said she worked here.

  She was answering questions, but Cage didn't have questions. He’d known when he saw the ever-expanding list, that his sister's name wasn't going to be on it.

  “Izzy’s not here either,” Dev said, tapping into Cage’s thoughts as surely as he was tapping his finger on the list.

  They stepped back to get out of the way for the next desperate searchers. Cage knew that the longer they went without finding Joule, the more likely it became that they never would.

  52

  Joule woke up warm, but when she rolled over, she crinkled and it smelled far too earthy to be home.

  She wasn't home.

  Not yet, she told herself.

  She moved a little more and felt a sharp jab in her side that reminded her she was sleeping on hay bales under a stolen horse blanket. The scent around her bloomed into easy recognition beyond animal to horse, hay, barn, loft.

  Slowly, she reached out and felt around her. The hay extended a little beyond her head but was too narrow to hold even her tiny traveling companion. Where was Toto?

  Her initial assessment of the space didn’t find him. She would have scrambled to search and call out, but she couldn't be noisy. There had been no way to corral him at night, nothing she could safely put him in. Had he wandered off?

  Slowly, she sat up, listening to the horses shuffling in their stalls below and waiting. As she moved, she spotte
d Jerry tucked up against the wall on his own hay bale bed. The blanket over him didn't move, but there was enough light in the barn that she could see his eyes were open.

  “Toto?” She mouthed the name to him and was relieved when he pointed toward his feet. It took a moment, but she spotted her kitten attacking the corner of his hay bale. It was absolutely not the time to play, but Toto was romping about, squatting down, wiggling his butt until the wave followed all the way to the end of his tail. He went in for adorable hay bale murder before romping off to tackle something else that caught his eye. Joule didn't know what he’d seen—a grasshopper? Hell, it might be a roach. She didn’t want to think about that.

  They both watched the kitten for a few moments and again, she realized how much she needed this. She needed the injected humor of a kitten at play. She needed the small, soft, warm body curling up next to hers. She put her hand down, dangling her fingers quietly near the floor and watched as Toto romped over, stopped, and dropped into tiny attack mode to get her fingers. He did so with such a gentle bat of his paw that Joule felt her smile form at the soft touch.

  She and Toto and Jerry had made it this far.

  In the dark of night, they'd run from the Larkin farm. At the first flash of the headlights, she’d busted up through the carpet, leading Jerry through the unfamiliar living room and out the back door. They’d bolted across the yard, protected from view by the bulk of the house.

  With only the dimmest light from the sky to navigate by, they'd moved as quickly as they could, but not fast enough. They’d still been close enough to hear every word as the Larkins arrived at the house and discovered things were very wrong.

  A woman’s voice had screeched with anger and fear. “Somebody was in the crawlspace! They saw it!”