The Tempest

by A. J. Scudiere

  But the hair did.

  None of this was easy. He tried again, and walked to the other side of the body. Clenching his teeth against the churn inside him, Cage pressed hard with his foot, rolling the body up until it reached sideways and flopped itself over.

  His insides roiled for several reasons, only one being the way the corpse flopped down to the grass. He didn't recognize the face—and for a moment, that seemed as awful as if he had.

  It was some teenager, someone young, definitely.

  It only occurred to him now that he'd never questioned that the person was dead. He'd never once wondered if they needed CPR. Maybe that was a skill he had acquired from seeing corpses before. He could recognize that the dead were dead.

  Once again, he took a series of pictures. When they went back, they would stop by the community center and deliver this awful information. Then a team could come out and retrieve the body.

  Waving his friend along, and holding out the cell phone, Cage said, “I’ve done everything I can. Let’s go.”

  Though Dev pushed himself upright and schooled his features, he still held out a hand and refused the phone. “You keep it.”

  Not wanting to argue, even though he’d closed all the apps, Cage slipped the phone into his own pocket and picked up his discarded bike. He stood up on the pedals, pushing hard over the uneven terrain. It might have been easier without the debris littering the ground, but maybe not. He clearly wasn’t an off-road biker, and his muscles were already protesting a second day of this.

  With Dev quickly catching up, they skirted the edges of the path. It was rough going. No one had cleared anything in the field, and they had to slow down. He recognized a good bit of weird detritus, like the expected snapped and tossed tree branches, but he also saw pieces of homes that he couldn't identify.

  When they’d been on the freeways, he could see the neighborhoods and the spots where the missing houses had stood. His brain automatically assumed that the freshly snapped wood lying in the road belong to the nearby missing structures. But out here, there was nothing to tie the old pipe with the boiler tag to, or the three shingles that had somehow managed to stick together and make it this far from civilization.

  As they made their way through, they checked out everything they could. Cage tried to assess the damage to the trees. They picked up a few objects along the way, using the carry bags they’d stolen from the bike shop with everything else. Cage had now bungeed one teddy bear, a set of car keys, and an embroidered dog collar to the back of his bike. In his pocket, he had another cell phone he'd found dead in the grass. But it was blinged out with rhinestones and glimmer to the point that he knew someone would be able to identify it.

  Hopefully, it was someone who would say, “Oh, you found my phone. Thank you.” He was afraid someone would say, “Yes. That's our daughter's—and we haven't found her yet.”

  Given the looks of it, he didn't think the phone belonged to the teenager they’d found. The shine and purple glitter didn’t match her old, loose jeans and the Grateful Dead T-shirt.

  They were still to the left of the tornado track, not having needed to cross the rough ground yet. It was difficult going. Cage had thought for a while that they would simply bike right down the middle of the path the storm had cut, but the tires only sank into the freshly turned dirt. The rocks and debris churned in had forced them to stop every three feet. The grass, as difficult as it was, was still easier to cross.

  “What's that?” Dev asked, pulling Cage from his thoughts. He continued to scan the field in front of them, but he didn't see what Dev was looking at. He was grateful that there were two of them and that Dev was clearly catching things that Cage was missing.

  “I don't know. Where?”

  “Look.” Dev pointed to their left. “All this grass is even, and then nothing right there.”

  They turned their bikes, slowly pedaling through the mess, avoiding what had been dropped from the tornado as they approached the dent in the grass.

  It was another dead body.

  “Holy shit!” Dev muttered as Cage thought the same.

  He didn't like this. This one was face up. And the only saving grace was that he could quickly identify that it was neither Joule nor Izzy.

  “No!” The cry sounded like it was ripped from Dev’s throat.

  As Cage watched, Dev dropped the bike and ran the last few feet.

  “No!”

  When Cage looked again at the face, though it was gray and laid to the side, eyes closed, this time he recognized it.

  55

  Joule sat quietly tense, petrified that Toto would meow and give them away.

  Distinctly human shuffling noises broke the regular sounds of the animals … the noises Joule had become used to during her short tenure in the loft.

  Somebody was searching the barn. But why?

  There was no reason for a search, unless they knew that she and Jerry were up here, or at least suspected it. She waited for the ladder to the loft to creak as someone climbed it. But as she—

  “Mrrrwow!” Toto looked up at her, his tiny plaintive cry seeming to echo visibly in the air around her.

  Shit.

  She tensed every muscle, staying perfectly still except for her gaze, which flicked to the side to look at Jerry. She saw that he, too, had simply frozen, mid-move. The sound didn't seem to faze their searchers though. And Joule suddenly realized her foolishness.

  A cat in a barn meant nothing. There was no reason for them to suspect a mewing kitten meant human intruders were nearby. Toto hadn’t given them away; his was the only expected sound here. The shuffling below them continued, but now with a murmured conversation she couldn’t make out at all.

  Relaxing marginally as Toto meowed again, Joule put her finger to her lips and scooped him up. She would have made a hushing noise but was afraid that would have alerted the searchers to humans.

  Her heart stopped as she heard the thing she’d been afraid of—the creak of steps on the barn ladder. Someone was rapidly climbing up to the loft. Should she stand and fight? Could she plant her foot in their chest and send them backward off the ladder and probably to their death?

  She didn’t know who was coming up or who might be searching for them, though their face would clear the top at any moment. Joule would have to decide. And fast.

  Then other footsteps broke into the shuffled conversation. Her fingers dug into the hay and she heard it crinkle with her grip. Could they hear it below?

  “What are you doing in here?” the voice demanded.

  “We wanted to be sure you were okay.” The return answer rang insincere, even to Joule, who couldn't see the person's face.

  Jerry's eyes widened at the second voice, and Joule could only guess that it was either one of the Larkins or maybe someone worse who was speaking. Whoever it was, her partner in tornado refugee crime seemed to know them.

  “No, you're not. You're in my barn for, and I want to know why.”

  “No, no. No, we just wanted to know how you were doing after the storms.” The fawning voice hit the rule of threes—anything said three times in a row was definitely a lie.

  “That’s bullshit,” the voice replied, growing angrier.

  Though Joule desperately wanted to lift her head and peer over the edge of the loft to see what was going on, she didn't dare.

  “You assholes didn't come knock on my door, where you would have found me. I would have told you I was fine. No. You came straight here and crept into my barn. What are you looking for?”

  The silence that filled the space spoke volumes, dragging out until Joule heard it punctuated by the telltale ch-chunk of a shotgun being cocked.

  Her eyes flew wide, but there wasn’t much time to react, not for her and not for the people down below. As the man spoke, she imagined him lifting the butt of the gun against his shoulder and aiming it. “I asked you a question.”

  Somehow she felt better knowing it was the accusing man who held the gun. Still, she
looked to Jerry who shrugged and shook his head rapidly. Joule didn't know if that meant he didn't know what was going on or maybe if he didn't know what the noise was. But that couldn't be the case—the hard chunk of a shotgun being racked was an almost universally unmistakable sound.

  “I don't want you two here. Now get out of my barn.”

  Slow shuffling down below let her know that the two who had come in first were finally leaving, albeit reluctantly. She lifted her head slowly, ever so slightly, until she could see the top half of the opening the sliding barn doors left, revealing the world beyond. She could see the edge of the white, wood-sided farmhouse and one black shutter. She could see a corner of the paddock and one brown cow that seemed to have a tense need to push herself into the fencing. And she watched as one woman with caramel hair and a ponytail trailing over her denim jacket walked out the door. Next came a man in overalls, a cap on his head, his shoulders hunched in anger as he exited the barn.

  The older man followed behind them, holding the shotgun up and aimed, just as Joule had thought.

  She lowered her head. That had been a dumb move. She’d wanted to see what was going on, but she didn't know any of these people. Seeing the backs of their heads gave her no more information than listening had, and they could have looked up and seen her. But now she heard the barn doors being slid slowly shut as car doors—or more likely truck doors—slammed somewhere in the distance and an engine revved.

  Slowly letting her breath out, though she knew it wasn’t yet time to be relieved, she felt some of the tension drain from her muscles though she knew she shouldn’t yet relax yet. She figured her body might have surpassed its capacity to stay alert. Even so, she tried not to make a sound as she turned toward Jerry and saw that he, too, had lifted his head just a little. Maybe he could identify the intruders.

  As the second barn door slid into place and tapped the first, her lungs fully exhaled, her breath whooshing out. Her grip on Toto lessened just a little, now that they knew the old man was home, and that he didn't like the people who'd come looking for them. By her estimate, it had to be the Larkins, because who else would look for escapees?

  She was feeling a little safer with all three of the barn intruders gone—though she and Jerry were the real intruders. But she was also feeling a little more concerned. If no one had been home, it would be easier to get out of the barn. Now they'd have to make alternate plans. She didn't remember seeing another door to the barn, but didn't there have to be one?

  Then again, she had noticed that the Larkin’s house was older and hadn't really been built to code. Did this barn have to be? She had to follow rules and regulations quite precisely when designing and building; that was half of her job at Helio Systems, creating something and then being sure it fit into regs. But it seemed the further out into the countryside they got, the more things were overlooked or grandfathered in.

  Her stomach growled, interrupting her thoughts with the reminder of the necessity of nature. Toto meowed at her again, also hungry. And while she had a granola bar still waiting—probably smushed—in her pocket, she was out of tuna.

  She and Jerry stared at each other for a while. Joule didn’t know if he simply had nothing to say or if, like her, he was waiting out the clock to see if anything happened. Joule tucked herself low to the haybale and tried to remember any other ways out of the barn, but it had been dark when they’d come in.

  After an interminable wait, which may have been only a few minutes, she swung her legs over the side of the hay bale, feeling the poke of a thousand straws in the back of her jeans and under her butt as she did it. She was opening her mouth to ask if the barn owner was one of the people that Jerry might trust when she heard the sudden squeal of the door again as it flew open. Far too quickly for her to duck and hide. Below her, a horse whinnied at the intrusion.

  The man with the gun was back.

  56

  Cage wasn't ready to deal with what he saw.

  “Oh my God.” Deveron was still on his knees, his words almost slurring together as, this time, his hands reached out toward the body. He only made it halfway to touching the corpse’s clothing before he snatched his fingers back in close to his own body.

  Once again, it was clear there was no resuscitation to be done, no attempt at rescue. He wasn't alive. Micah Banner was lying on the ground in front of them.

  Had it just been yesterday that Cage and Micah had been collecting plant samples? They’d walked with their hands full of carefully stacked, eleven-by-fourteen cardstock pages, each with a plant sample taped to it and marked with the coordinates and details of where and how it had been found. His mind flashed to Micah’s neat handwriting and how he’d asked his friend to scribe the information—because his own awkward scribbles seemed so juvenile in comparison.

  They’d taken so many sample deliveries up to the tent where Izzy and Melinda cataloged them. Cage couldn’t say that he counted Micah among his close friends—he simply hadn’t had the time to build those relationships down here, not with anyone he wasn’t living with. But now he felt the sharp cut of the loss of even that possibility.

  That was a stupid thing to think about when faced with the body his potential friend had left behind … in a field.

  The group of them had run together as the tornado hit, dropping everything and linking hands, even though they weren’t supposed to. They’d made a chain for comfort, but Cage had read it as a gesture that they wouldn’t lose anyone. Yet here he and Dev were, trying to process what they’d found. Linking hands hadn’t been enough. They had lost one.

  Cage had initially dismissed the body. He hadn’t wanted to look any further than his original assessment. He’d seen it from a short distance, the brown hair meaning it wasn't his sister or Izzy. After that, he'd simply decided that since it wasn't who he was looking for, he needed to look no further. But as they’d gotten closer, it had become clear this wasn’t just the body of some random victim.

  Dev now walked a circle. They didn't need to flip him over. He was flat on his back, his face angled to one side. And though it wasn’t obvious, Cage thought he could detect the kink in his coworker’s neck that might have been responsible for his death.

  The contents of Cage’s stomach slowly congealed and turned hard. He tried not to extrapolate the meaning, but he couldn't help it. The tornado had come through here, and the tornado was leaving dead bodies in its wake. There was no way to avoid the calculation that the odds were now lower that Izzy had survived or—though he didn't even want to admit it to himself—that Joule had.

  For a moment, he wallowed in a bleak future. What would his life be like without his sister? What would he be if he were the last survivor of the original four Mazurs?

  While Deveron walked a circle around Micah's body, Cage stared blankly into the distance. There was nothing he could think of, no alternate future things he would do. There was no better life, even on the small scale, without Joule.

  Once, his father had gone missing for a day, trapped in a stalled subway train while he was out of town. Cage had asked his mother later what she would do if his dad died. She had plans. She’d get a cat—her husband was allergic and she’d always wanted a cat. She’d set the house temperature where she wanted it. Plant the pansies his father had vetoed. Small things, and nothing that would make up for the loss, but little things that she would do differently.

  Cage had no such fallbacks. Maybe because he hadn’t met Joule later in life but had never known a minute without his sister. So there were no things that he would do if he didn't have his sister holding him back, or if he hadn't compromised on certain decisions.

  Granted, he might not be here in Alabama now without Joule. He had originally chosen marine biology for his major, but after dealing with the things that might be found in the water, he’d changed to a more diverse bio major. So what would he do? Go scuba diving without her? It didn't change anything. He could just as easily go scuba diving with her. There was no job that he'd wanted
that he'd compromised on so they could stay together. He had been offered another position that would pay approximately five thousand more dollars per year. It didn't mean anything.

  He simply had to find his sister. And he didn't want to think about what his life might become if he failed.

  He already had one family member permanently missing. Though Joule had rattled him once and made it clear that she believed their father was not coming back, she wasn’t here to dish harsh truths now. He would have to be the one to rattle himself. And he wasn't up for it.

  The alternative was to simply find his sister.

  “We need pictures,” he told Deveron before remembering that he still had Dev’s phone. Pulling it from his pocket, he went about the ugly business of snapping a few shots. For one, he knelt down and got in close to Micah’s face. It felt horribly intrusive. Cage told himself that his vision wasn’t blurry and he didn’t feel that sharp squeeze at the back of his jaw. The picture was necessary for identification.

  “Where are we now?” he asked.

  “Another two miles, maybe,” Dev said looking around and, again, overestimating.

  Glancing back the way they’d come, Cage could see the track their bikes had made. If they needed to, they could turn around and exactly retrace their path.

  But how long would the banked grass stay that way? Not long, he thought.

  “We're near the path of the tornado, at least. So there is a relatively permanent landmark for us to follow.” Dev pointed to the unmistakable edge of the churned earth about forty feet away. He mentioned the marker as if he understood that Cage was struggling to pinpoint location without the ability to hook up to a satellite and get GPS coordinates.