by Ninie Hammon
“Why didn’t she tell me?” he cried aloud, his voice anguished.
Reality settled into his belly, so stone-cold he shivered. How could she tell him when he wasn’t there? Oh, the two of them had occupied the same geography, but in the past six months, he had been mentally, emotionally and spiritually AWOL. Poor Joy had been all alone. So scared! Trying to figure it out on her own. So desperate she was even willing to…
He let go of his grip on the thought then, and it sailed away in the maelstrom inside his head. But its emotional wallop lingered in his chest and tears sprang to his eyes, blurring his vision just as the rain started to let up. The traffic began to move ahead and pain was replaced by panic, the same urgent desperation he’d felt when Princess—
Princess!
He glanced at his watch. The fragile woman with purple eyes and a haunting voice had less than half an hour to live. The reality of it struck him with the blunt force of a runaway train. Princess was going to die—to save Joy.
But Joy would die, too, if he didn’t get to her in time.
With a recklessness spawned by terror, Mac pulled out around the creeping car ahead and held his breath. He couldn’t see oncoming traffic; if there was another vehicle in that lane, he would plow into it head-on. Fishtailing on the wet road, he passed the car and swerved back into his own lane seconds before headlights appeared to the left and a truck materialized out of the downpour. Mac sped away, going way too fast, playing Russian roulette again and again with oncoming traffic as he careened around everything that got in his way.
And the thing was, he wasn’t even completely sure where Wanda Ingram lived. He’d only been there once when he dropped Mel off to pick strawberries. With his heart galloping in his chest, thudding in his ears, he slowed at each crossroads off Route 79, looking for Harrod’s Creek Road.
When he finally turned southwest on it, the rain let up like he’d pulled out from under a waterfall. Then he could see what he was driving into—clouds so black they were purple, piled one on top of the other. Bubbling and boiling and writhing, they had swallowed the whole southwestern sky.
The Big Ugly’s a-comin’…
* * * * *
Thunder rumbled as the guard named Talbot unlocked the passageway door and ushered Blackburn into the Long Dark. Even inside the stone walls, you could hear the wind and rain savagely pummeling the building. The warden smiled.
The storm had solved his protester problem more efficiently than a whole regiment of Oklahoma Highway Patrol troopers. There’d be nobody out front mournfully playing “Amazing Grace” to set the other inmates’ teeth on edge. No chants, no hysterics. All the protesters were huddled in their cars, and it hadn’t looked to Blackburn like the storm would be over in time for the hundred or so people to do anything more than mourn the passing of Emily Gail Prentiss after she was already dead.
Flanked by guards, Blackburn walked between the solid metal doors toward a cell halfway down on the right. As Talbot fit a key into the ancient lock, he steeled himself to face Princess. Dang it, he liked the woman. Okay, there it was, truth. He cared about her, with an affection born of more than long association. Though over time he had grudgingly developed a respect for how she conducted herself, it was more than that. He’d actually thought about it quite a lot, tried to puzzle it out, and came to the conclusion that his caring merely mirrored hers. People mattered to Princess, whoever they were. She’d certainly demonstrated that the day she’d told him to go home to his wife.
When he’d told Mac about the experience, he’d made light of it, passed it off as no big deal. But it had been huge. Princess hadn’t just urged him to go home; she had pleaded with him, huge tears streaming down her scarred face. When he went into her cell, she’d fallen to her knees in front of him, begging him to go, saying his wife needed him. When he finally did go home that night, he’d found Joanie sobbing on the couch. She’d already had two miscarriages, so she hadn’t even told him she was pregnant this time. As he’d cradled her in his arms, she’d whispered brokenly over and over again, “I wish you’d been here. I needed you.”
He squared his round shoulders as the door swung open. Princess was sitting at the table staring into the face of a beautiful red-haired teenager—Joy McIntosh. What was Princess doing with a picture of Joy McIntosh?
Princess looked up when the warden stepped into her cell, but she was so focused on the picture of Angel that she had trouble shifting her attention to the warden.
“Miss Prentiss, I—”
“Princess, please, Warden Blackburn.” Her voice resonated in the stone room, seemed almost to echo in the small space.
“All right, Princess,” he said in a kind voice. “I’m here to talk about what’s about to happen, to prepare you so you know what to expect.”
“I ’spect I’m gonna die, ain’t that right? I reckon I been preparin’ to do that for fourteen years.”
She was going to die. It was really going to happen this time. Today. In just a few minutes.
For a moment she was seized by such raw terror she feared she’d be sick again, but was certain she wouldn’t make it to the toilet to vomit. Knew there was no way she’d be able to stand up on her rubber legs and move. And the horror was so intense she couldn’t breathe at all. It was a physical pain in her belly so ragged and powerful that she recognized this must be real fear, the kind every human being could identify.
But as quickly as the terror grabbed hold of her, a calm took its place. The agonizing sensation in her belly, like a giant fist squeezing it, loosened. Her heart stopped pounding. She could breathe.
She didn’t know if the whirlwind of emotions within her had been evident on the outside. The warden and the guards just stood there, looking at her. She saw compassion in the Warden’s eyes and in Talbot’s. There was only fear in Bradley’s.
“Well, go ahead then,” she said, and her voice was firm, didn’t tremble. “Tell me whatever it is you’re—”
There was a crack as lightening split the sky and an instantaneous boom as the thunder rumbled in on its coattails. The lights in the cell and the hall flickered and went out. Then came back on again.
The warden looked around. “One thing you need to know is that there’s a generator in the room next to the chamber that powers the … equipment. So a power outage won’t—”
“Save me? I ain’t lookin’ to get saved.”
She glanced at the pictures on the table in front of her. They instantly seized her attention and she fell into the images as the warden talked and the fury of the storm beat against the prison walls.
Princess grabbed hold of her thoughts and refused to allow them to wander from the faces smiling up at her. But she could feel it, the boiling, black rumble. The darkness.
The Big Ugly was coming fast.
* * * * *
Even in the pouring rain, Jackson Prentiss had no trouble finding the road that would take him to the preacher’s house.
Emily thought she was so clever, but she had given it away. She’d smarted off that he probably “had family” up there in that town on the hillside you could see from the prison. Looked like a little bitty town; the road to it wasn’t even paved. Anybody he asked there would know where the preacher lived.
He’d planned to go roaring up to the town, grab the kid, and speed back to the prison in his brand new black and silver 1962 Pontiac Grand Prix. But right now he was only inching along in the downpour. The rain was falling in such a torrent that Prentiss could only see a few feet in front of the grill of the car.
He let fly a string of expletives and when he looked at his watch, he spewed out even more obscenities. It was 4:40 and he wasn’t even to the town where the preacher lived yet, much less on his way back to the prison with Angela in tow, ready to sit smirking at Emily as she died.
Jackson had no doubt he could convince the preacher to make the girl go with him. His pitch would be short and sweet, a perfect one-two punch: Here’s the deal, Preach. You get your gir
l to go to the prison with me, or I’ll tell her the whole story.
He’d reassure the preacher that she didn’t have to stay through the actual execution, just long enough for Emily to see her and then she could leave. In fact, the preacher could go along with her if he wanted to.
While the preacher was still reeling from the first punch, he’d land an uppercut to the jaw: If you don’t get her to go, my lawyers will be in court when the courthouse opens Monday morning with papers demanding full custody of my daughter.
Then he’d purr: But if you do, you’ll never see me again.
All he was asking was a half an hour of the girl’s time in exchange for the rest of her life, and Jackson wouldn’t give the preacher time to think it through and realize the whole thing was a gigantic bluff.
After all, Jackson had not a shred of proof that the preacher’s girl was his Angela. If Emily had gotten cold feet and told the truth to save her hide, that would have been all over the news; the whole world would have known about it. And then he’d have fought to the death for custody of Angela—just to spite Emily! But with Emily dead, the last thing Jackson needed was for the press to get wind of all this, some nigger-loving reporter to start digging around in his past and find out about his “marriage” to a thirteen-year-old girl. No, he’d never tell a soul that he knew Angela was alive. But the preacher didn’t know that.
The plan was sound; the preacher would cave in. Jackson only had to find him first! And right now he was puttering down a rain-slick road at ten miles an hour, racing a clock that was ticking away the final minutes of Emily’s life.
Rage filled his chest like dragon’s breath and he shoved his foot down on the accelerator. The big car leaped forward, though he could barely see twenty feet in front of him. That’s why he missed the curve.
He was going way too fast when the turn materialized out of the downpour. He tried to stop, locked up his brakes, and the car skidded on the muddy road. Jackson watched, like seeing the scene in a movie, as his beautiful new Grand Prix slid sideways across the road, spun all the way around so it was facing the opposite direction, and then toppled off the edge of the road on its side in a ditch.
Though the impact wasn’t severe, he was thrown out of the driver’s seat into the bucket seat on the passenger side and banged his head on the door frame. He sat there stunned for a few moments, his heart thumping hard in his chest, until he got his bearings. Then fury burning blue-flame hot consumed him. He’d never be able to get his car out of the ditch by himself. And no telling how long it would be before the storm let up and he could make it into town to call a tow truck.
There was no way he’d be able to get Angela and take her back to the prison in time to see the execution. Worse, he wouldn’t make it back there himself. Jackson pounded his fists on the dashboard, the sound drowned out by the huge hailstones that were now knocking dents in the metal of his new car.
* * * * *
“Maggie!” Jonas yelled and ran to the bathroom.
Empty.
He raced from one room to the next in the downstairs portion of the house, hollering his wife’s name as the radio squalled out, “The National Weather Bureau has issued a tornado watch for an area along and thirty miles either side of a line stretching from Atoka to Konawa, including the following counties: Atoka, Co—”
Jonas switched the radio off as he passed it on his way up the stairs. Graham was squatted smack in the middle of that line.
Maggie wasn’t upstairs either. He opened every door, expecting to see her there. In the bedroom, the guestroom, the upstairs bath… But each room was empty and silent. Where could she have gone? She’d never run away before. Then Jonas remembered what that Oklahoma City doctor, the one with the Hitler mustache, had said about old timer’s disease: “Every morning you wake up in a whole new world.”
Jonas came back down the stairs and stood helpless in the living room, staring at the spot on the wall where there once had been a curio cabinet, until Maggie’d smashed it the other night with the fireplace iron. His heart hammered in his chest so hard that for the first time in his seventy-four years, he sincerely feared he was going to have a heart attack. His whole body was slathered in fear sweat. He could smell it, feel it trickle down between his shoulder blades. He could feel panic down deep in his guts, too, scratching like a caged bobcat, struggling to get free.
If she wasn’t in the house, she had to be outside. But where? Surely, she hadn’t gotten as far as the barn. She wouldn’t walk on grass, said it stabbed into her feet like needles.
The tool shed? The garage? He ran out the back door to search them and glanced southwest across the flat fields. The mammoth storm took up the whole sky, gray at the top, the color of a gun barrel, and soot-black at its pedestal base where lightning danced like shiny fishing lines cast into a lake.
The tool shed was dark and musty, built as a lean-to against the side of the garage. Something moved in the back corner and for a moment joy leaped in his heart. He’d found her! But he hadn’t. It was just the calico cat Lupe kept setting milk out for, the one he’d almost run over when he came careening into the driveway … what? Five minutes ago? Ten?
“Maggie, where are you?” he wailed, but the only response was the whistle of the wind.
The rain hit hard again while he was in the garage, hammered the building so loud he thought for a moment the wind had torn the crabapple tree out of the ground and dropped it on the roof. The wind did grab the single bay door he’d opened and slammed it shut, leaving him in the dark so that he had to feel along the wall to the side door.
As he raced toward the barn, sheets of torrential rain drenched him to the skin in seconds. Then the rain turned to hail, tiny pellets that attacked his head and arms like a swarm of bees. By the time he made it to the barn, the hail was the size of the doughnut holes Maggie used to fry up for him when she was making a dessert for a church social. The hunks of ice pummeled his bare head and beat down on his hands as he held them up to ward off the blows.
He tore open the side door of the barn and leapt inside, calling Maggie’s name; went from horse stall to horse stall, looked behind the tractor, checked out the tack room. Hail beat on the roof of the barn like a dump truck load of gravel was falling out of the sky, making such a racket he feared he wouldn’t hear Maggie’s voice if she answered him.
But she wasn’t there.
Before he finished searching the barn, he was sobbing in fear and frustration. He turned and raced through the hailstorm back to the house. The storm gobbling up the sky was now shrouded from view by the rain; rocks of hail hammered his head and shoulders and a savage wind tore at his clothes. He staggered through the pummeling to the gate and into the back yard.
Maggie was standing in the open back door in her white night gown, her hair loose and whipping in the wind. She was smiling like an excited child.
“Now it’s your turn to hide,” she called out above the roar of the gale.
And as he raced to her, Jonas had that sensation again, like he was running in mud, like he had cranked down to thirty-three rpm and the rest of the world was on seventy-eight.
In one motion, he scooped her up into his arms, turned, and suddenly he was sprinting like a young man, like an athlete, toward the storm, across the yard to the back corner. To the cellar.
There was no time to run away now and no place to go. He set Maggie down long enough to pick up a rock and pound on the rusty padlock. It gave on the second try and he flung open the double doors.
As he reached down to pick up his wife, the faucet of rain switched off in an instant; the wind stopped so abruptly he staggered forward a step, off balance from leaning into it. He smelled plowed dirt. Maggie quit struggling when they both heard a roar like the rocket that had launched John Glenn into space. They looked up as one across the field. A great maw of boiling darkness that extended down from the clouds and stretched out as far as they could see in both directions was hurtling at them in a freight-train rus
h.
Jonas didn’t see a twister in it. Then he sucked in a ragged breath.
That is the twister!
Frozen in terror, he only had time to think Princess ain’t the only one’s gonna die today before the roar ate up the world.
Chapter 27
Even after everything that had happened, Mac groaned out loud when he saw Mr. Wilson parked beside the old house where the matted green trellis veiled the front porch. Some little part of him had held out, had not believed, had clung to the reasonable and explainable in the face of Princess’s “knowing.” Now there was no doubt, and his knees felt weak when he jumped out of the car and raced across the yard to the porch.
He was prepared to kick the front door in if he had to, but when he tried the knob, it wasn’t locked. The living room was dark, the shades drawn, and it had a musty, unpleasant smell he couldn’t place. Rotted food? A litter box? Sweaty, unwashed clothes? He forced himself to stand still just inside the door and listen for voices, but either nobody was talking or his heart was pounding so hard in his ears he couldn’t hear the sound. The house was small and he dashed frantically from one empty room to the next, searching for his daughter. He longed to call out her name, but didn’t dare. Princess said the “witch” was not just crazy, but homicidal, and he had no trouble whatsoever believing that. He didn’t want to warn Wanda: he thought he might just need the element of surprise.
On the far side of the kitchen, beyond the pile of stinking, dirty dishes in the sink, he saw a small door ajar with a bright glow shining out through the crack. A basement door. He eased quickly down the creaking wooden steps, hurrying to the bottom before the noise alerted Wanda to his presence. When he stepped into the basement out of the stairwell, the bright light momentarily blinded him.
The room was as well lit as an operating room—which is exactly what it was; as clean and bright as the upstairs of the house had been filthy and dark. The white floor and walls were spotless; shiny silver instruments lay in clean trays on a white metal cabinet next to a raised examining-room table.
