“Just checking,” he said. “You guys set here?”
“Are you leaving?”
“There are dozens of emergency calls coming in every minute, Jules,” he said. “I got a call from Charlie on my way out of town. I have to get back to the station. We’ll need every man we have at our disposal during a storm like this.”
“Trigger,” Matt said, looking up from the bed of blankets he’d worked haphazardly to create over in the corner. “You can’t go back out in that. You’re lucky you made it here in one piece. Didn’t you see Kara’s car on the way in?”
“Kara?” Luke asked, his eyes suddenly falling on her. He hadn’t even noticed her until that moment. He was in a rush, trying to get back to the station and obey the orders handed down by the chief. His attention to detail was severely off, and I couldn’t see what use he’d be out there in a storm like this.
“Luke, he’s right,” I said. “I know you feel you need to be there, but—”
There was a loud, deep hum of crunching all around us. All I could picture outside was piles of debris being swept up, tossed, and thrown against the house.
“Luke, please don’t go out in that.”
“Guys, I can’t hang around and argue,” he said, turning to me. He pressed a quick kiss to my lips and managed a smile. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, but—”
“Do not leave this basement until you get the all-clear from me or Charlie, understand?”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
With a quick peck to my lips, Luke started up the stairs and disappeared into the kitchen. Another loud howl of wind beat against the side of the house, and Matt, Kara, and I shared a worried look.
“Holy shit!” Luke yelled from the floor above us, and without a moment’s notice he was flying back through the door and locking it behind us. “There’s a funnel over the historic district,” he said, panting. “It’s headed straight for us.”
Chapter Four
Luke rushed down the stairs, his face horror-stricken by what he’d just witnessed. And in spite of the look of terror gleaming in his eyes, I fully expected him to snap out of it. Matt, Kara, and I turned to Luke, each of us waiting for him to flip into his protective mode, start barking out orders, and secure some kind of safety plan for us.
Luke, above anyone else, was the one person who would know what to do in an emergency situation like this, and yet he seemed to freeze the moment a potential threat had turned very real. He didn’t move; he was frozen there, looking as shocked as the rest of us felt. His face was void of any emotion, his eyes blank. It was almost as if he’d completely checked out.
“Luke,” I said, clapping a hand in front of him. “What do we do?”
He looked between the three of us, and I swear I saw his shoulders rise with a subtle shrug.
The wind howled louder, and I shivered as I turned to look at the others. Kara stood frozen in place, looking just as fearful as Luke. She still held onto the book of matches she’d used to light the candles at our feet. Matt was the only one of us who seemed to have any clue what to do.
“Kara,” he said, stepping into the leadership role that none of us wanted to take. “Kill the candles. We don’t know the severity of the situation out there, and we need to be as cautious as possible, especially if things start falling over or getting knocked around. Storms are bad enough; we don’t need a fire, too.” Kara did as she was told. Matt, armed with a flashlight, shot across the dark basement and toward the laundry station. He started tossing boxes out from underneath the built-in folding table, clearing a small shelter for us to hover beneath. He motioned for us to join him as soon as he’d cleared out the storage. The three of us squeezed in, leaving as much room as we could for the one person who hadn’t yet joined us. “Luke?”
His head snapped up, and he finally focused on us as we settled under the table. With a rattle of the foundation shaking above us, he seemed to pull out of his fog at once. He shot across the floor and over to the table, sliding beneath it to join Matt, Kara, and myself.
We sat that way, huddled together and quiet for a few seconds—our backs against the concrete wall, our heads protected by little more than a homemade shelving unit, and our bodies shivering with fear. None of us said a word, instead listening as the wind gained more and more momentum than it had all day. The gusts grew stronger, and the high whistling turned to low, threatening howls. It was close. Too close.
Luke grabbed my hand and slowly raised my fingers to his lips. He brushed a gentle kiss across my knuckles, and there was no mistaking the way his lips quivered at the touch of my skin. He was scared. Just like the rest of us, Luke didn’t have a clue what to do, what to say, or how to act.
Not knowing what else to do to comfort him, I nestled as close as I could to his chest. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me as if there was nothing in the world that could ever make him let go. I felt Kara shift next to me, and from the corner of my eye, I watched as Matt wrapped his arm around her and pulled her closer—and just like Luke and I had done, Kara and Matt fell even closer together.
As the wind grew louder, we all knew the tornado was imminent. It was close, and soon, if it didn’t change course, it would be right on top us.
There was a crash on the outside of the house, glass shattering above us in loud blows. One right after another, we listened as the windows were obliterated. Glass exploded and crashed, and we could hear as every board above us bent to maintain the original structure. Charlie’s old house was putting up a good fight against Mother Nature, but there was no telling what kind of fight she was throwing back.
There was another loud explosion above us, one that sounded eerily similar to the sound the pole had made against the top of Kara’s car. It hit the basement door, each of us jolting at the loud sound. Dust dropped from the ceiling, falling all around us. For some reason, none of us could close our eyes. We just kept watching, listening … imagining everything we knew falling completely apart.
After that one bang against the door, the strikes kept hitting every part of the house—loud, repetitive, and angry. The house rattled, shook. And what started as a loud roar of wind and a gentle shake, suddenly turned violent and aggressive. If at all possible, it seemed as though the basement had suddenly fallen even darker.
And then as quickly as it began, it was over. That fast—the crashes stopped, the shattering and the creaking ceased. I couldn’t hear anything but the loud breathing all around me. My stomach hollowed at the thought that we’d somehow survived something terrible, but until we got out of the basement there was no way to know what we’d just lived through.
Was that it? Had the storm passed and left Oakland for good? Or was that just the beginning of something much, much worse?
“Is it over?” Kara asked, and her voice quivered with those three small words.
“I don’t know,” Matt whispered.
I felt Luke’s grasp on me tighten, and he pressed a soft kiss to the top of my head. “Come on.”
Matt and Kara crawled out from under the table, leaving Luke and me plenty of room to scoot out after them. After the sound of some faint shuffling, there was a click, followed by a beam from a flashlight.
“Is everyone okay?” Matt asked. He shined the light in our direction, keeping the beam just far enough to the side that he wouldn’t blind us. Luke and I both nodded and pulled ourselves to our feet.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said, still listening for any remnant of those sounds. The silence scared me more than anything. If the storm had passed, and the tornado was gone, then why weren’t we hearing anything? There were no yells. No sirens. Nothing—nothing but silence. “Why don’t I hear anything?”
“I don’t know,” Matt said, starting toward the stairs. Luke let go of me and followed him at once, both of them eager to get out of the basement and find out what was going on in the world above us.
Kara and I both knelt to find the box on the floor, and each of us grabbe
d a flashlight of our own. As we worked to secure a light source, we could hear the rattle and the shake of the basement door.
“It’s jammed,” Matt said from the top of the stairs, his voice echoing down to the floor below. “Guys, I think we’re trapped.”
“Let me try,” Luke said, and then we heard him wrestling with the knob. He pushed, he shoved, he kicked at the door, but just as my cousin had concluded, he soon learned that Matt was right: we were stuck. We weren’t going anywhere, not until someone came along to let us out.
“Why would it be jammed?” Kara asked, calling up to the guys.
“It could be any number of things,” I said, musing. “The foundation literally shook. Anything could’ve fallen in front of the door and jammed it.”
“It’s gotta be heavy, whatever it is,” Luke said, walking down the stairs. Matt followed right behind him. “We’re going to be stuck here for a while, at least until someone finds us.”
“Do any of you have service on your phones?” Matt asked, looking at his. I could see from the twisted look on his face that he must not have had a single bar.
“I’ve got nothing,” I said.
“Same,” Luke and Kara said in unison as they both checked their screens.
“Cell towers must be down,” Matt added.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“There’s not much we can do, Jules,” Luke said. “We’re stuck down here until someone clears the door. There’s no way we’re forcing ourselves out.”
“What about tools?” I asked, looking to Matt. “Does Charlie keep any tools down here, anything that we could use to take the door off the hinges?”
“No,” he said. “Everything’s in the garage.”
The basement fell silent again as we all stopped to think of another possible plan. It didn’t settle well with any of us that we might really be stuck. We didn’t want to believe it. We just wanted to get out, to find out what was left for us to salvage. But Luke was right—that wasn’t going to happen. We were stuck there, and the sooner we accepted that the easier the next few hours were going to be.
###
Other than the obvious reasons—our safety and our emergency stash of candles, flashlights, and batteries (to name a few), I was thankful for one major thing: I’d remembered to bring the pizza. In times of fear and uncertainty, leave it to me to remember the one thing that no one else would grab.
Fortunately, like the four of us sitting there in Charlie’s basement, the pizza had survived the storm. The dirt and dust hadn’t gotten through the box, leaving our meal completely edible—not that a few dust particles would’ve stopped any of us from eating it if we’d gotten too hungry. There was no telling how long we may be stuck down there.
“Do you think Elvis is okay?” I asked, taking a small bite. I turned to steal a glimpse at Luke’s face, and he forced a smile and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he’s always liked the rain.”
“The rain, Luke,” I said, feeling a sting. I didn’t need him to patronize me, not that I really felt he’d done so on purpose. “He’s terrified of storms. I can’t even imagine how he’d react to a tornado, especially since he’s home alone.” I looked down to my dirty hands and tried my best not to make eye contact with any of the others. I didn’t want to see the fear or the pity in any of their eyes. “I’m worried about him.”
A candle sat inside the lid of the open pizza box, lighting the small area around our dinner. Kara was cozied up in a blanket on the floor, and I sat next to Luke with a blanket draped around our shoulders. Both of the guys had kept mostly quiet for the last half-hour since discovering the blocked door, and neither one of them had touched the food. They weren’t saying it, but it was clear to both Kara and me that Luke and Matt had much bigger concerns than keeping their bellies full. Their thoughts weren’t inside that basement at all, but out there—among the devastation.
Luke draped his arm around my shoulder, drawing me closer. He knew that there was nothing he could say to really make me feel better at that point. Oakland had suffered a pretty nasty storm, and if that tornado had torn through the town like we’d all predicted, there was going to be a lot of uncertainty in the hours ahead. Was Elvis okay? Were our friends and family safe? We’d gotten lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, but what about Charlie and Bruno? What about Derek and the baby? What about Rebecca? Lonnie and Grace?
“Is there anywhere at the station to take cover?” I asked, looking to Luke. “If there was danger near the station, and the tornado got close—”
“There’s protocol in place,” Luke promised. “They know what to do. Charlie’s safe.”
“And Bruno?”
“He wasn’t at the station today,” he said, but just as confidently as he’d assured me of my uncle’s safety, he promised Bruno’s, as well. “He’s home and well-protected.”
“He built a storm shelter years ago for emergencies like this,” Matt chimed in, but he still hadn’t looked up. “He’s better off than any of us, I’m sure.”
I didn’t question how my cousin knew that Bruno had a storm shelter. I’d pretty much figured that he’d learned that during the short period he’d lived with him. Back when our family had fled the house for termite extermination, I’d run off and bunked up with Luke; Charlie and Matt sought refuge at Bruno’s place.
I dropped my head and took a deep breath, silently praying that Bruno had made it into the safety of his shelter in time.
“Where were Derek and Zoey today?” Luke asked, looking to me. “Any idea?”
“Derek had class,” I said. “He would’ve been at the West Bridge campus by the time the storm hit.”
“So chances are he’s safe?”
“Right,” I nodded, thinking of the baby. “He was supposed to drop Zoey off at the flower shop before his evening classes. She should be with Grace and Lonnie.”
For a brief second, I swore I saw Luke’s eyes flicker to Matt, and my cousin peeked through the top of his eyes and stared at Luke. But then as soon as the two men realized the other had looked up, they both looked away. Matt focused back on the burning candle inside the pizza box, and Luke’s gaze trailed off to the side.
“What was that?” Kara asked, looking between the two men. “What aren’t you saying?”
“There’s no basement in the shop,” Matt said quietly. “There’s nowhere to go for cover. If they were in the district when the tornado hit—”
“They’re fine,” I said, shaking my head. “The back office would get them far enough away from the front window.”
“It’s a small shop, Julie,” Kara said, and I saw a twinge of pain ring on Luke’s face. Slowly, that twinge of pain grew darker, sadder. He wasn’t saying it, but it was apparent: Luke’s thoughts weren’t just out there among the devastation; he was thinking of his family. His father and step-mom, his niece and sister… they weren’t suited with the best circumstances for dangerous weather.
“All right, guys. We need to stop. We’re not going to talk like this for another second,” I said. “We don’t know how bad the storm was, and there’s a chance that we’re worse off than anyone. We don’t know what they’re dealing with out there, and until we do, we have to stay positive.”
“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Those were the final words any of us said for the next fifteen minutes. The candle continued to burn, flickering and lighting each of our solemn faces. I kept staring at Kara, looking to Matt, and even when I looked at Luke, I couldn’t get even the slightest glimpse from him. Nothing. No one would look at me; no one would look at any of the others.
The silence thickened as the moments passed, and I kept my ears open for any sounds coming from outside, but I still couldn’t hear a thing. We were no closer to getting out of the basement than we had been an hour ago.
While the rest of our group remained quiet, I took to studying Kara. She’d finally looked up, and now she was watching M
att. He wouldn’t dare look in her direction, but I could see that he felt her stare; he fought it, expending every ounce of energy and willpower he had not to steal a glance in her direction.
“Will one of you two just fess up already?” I asked, hearing my words too late to stop them. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but I couldn’t help the thoughts that were burning on my mind. Watching them like that, close enough to talk, but still refusing to say a word … it was frustrating.
“Fess up?” Kara asked, suddenly looking to me. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” I asked, and then Matt grumbled something and looked off into the other direction. “You broke up in what has gone down in history as the nastiest and most ruthless separation in the town’s history. Matt runs off to culinary school for a year, never hearing a word from you. And then one day he suddenly drops out of college, returns home, and gives up every dream he’s ever had. I think it’s safe to say there’s something you two aren’t sharing with the group.”
“Matt?” she asked, looking to him. “I thought you were taking classes at the—”
“No,” he said, finally looking at her. But he didn’t let his stare linger too long before he stood up, brushed off his pants, and turned away. He went over to the corner of the room and settled himself down on a pile of blankets and pillows. He turned over and faced the wall, completely shutting us out.
Kara turned back to us and looked down, almost seeming embarrassed. I gave her a hard look, and she looked over her shoulder again to look at Matt. With a quiet sigh, she leaned forward and shrugged.
“I thought you knew,” she said. “I thought all of you knew.”
“Knew what?” I asked.
The way she and Matt split up was brutal. She’d found out that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and the thought of marriage and commitment at such a young age had left her scared. No one blamed her for that. But she took her anger to an extreme, and she broke up with him for loving her too much, thus breaking off our friendship simply because I’d stayed loyal to my cousin. She was angry that I hadn’t told her about his plan to propose, and when she and I parted ways, we didn’t do so without a little slapping and shoving from her end. After all of that, I hadn’t really seen or spoken to her. She went her way, and I went mine. Life moved on. And now, here she was again, sitting only a pizza-box length away from me, thinking I knew things I had no way of knowing.
A Little Beyond Hope Page 7
