“No. I think we need to go now. Like right now.”
“It will only take a second,” he said, looking at me with a puzzled expression. Whatever he read in mine seemed to affect him because he changed direction and started toward the car.
With every step, my anxiety rose.
“How long till we get back?” I asked, scanning the parking lot as I spoke.
“Same as it took to get here,” he replied, opening the door to the beat-up old truck. “You not feeling well or something.”
“Yeah,” I lied. “My head feels a bit off. I’d like to go lie down as soon as possible.”
“All right then. I’ll get us back as quick as I can.”
He pulled out of the lot onto the quiet two-lane street and started off toward home. With every turn of the odometer, the tightness in my chest abated. When we were about two miles away from the farm, I leaned my head back against the head-rest and closed my eyes.
I felt like I was starting to lose my mind.
Was I some kind of wacko shut-in in my real life?
“I feel a bit better now,” I told him, hoping to smooth over my strange behavior.
“Good. I was worried for a sec there. You didn’t look too good.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised by his reply.
“Yeah. You looked pale.”
“Huh.” That was unexpected.
“Should be there in a couple of minutes. It’s hard to get anywhere fast on these old state roads. They’ve got craters in them the size of sinkholes.” Right on cue, the truck shook with the impact of driving over one of said craters. “Case in point,” he said with a tight laugh.
I started to join in with him, but a jolt of fear shot through me, cutting me short.
“Gabe,” I said, holding my stomach.
“You gonna be sick?” he asked. “Want me to pull over?”
I nodded, and he slowed the truck down. The crunch of the gravel shoulder under the wheels disappeared once he came to a stop. I hopped out of the passenger side, landing on my good foot, but the height of the truck was too much for me to make a graceful landing. My knee buckled and gave out, and I collapsed to the ground. I heard Gabe’s feet on the gravel, rounding the truck to come to my aid.
Such a hero.
“I’m okay,” I told him, working my way onto my good foot. “I just wasn’t ready for the impact, that’s all.”
I brushed myself off, then looked up at him. His expression was dubious to say the least. He started talking to me, but his words were lost to my mind. It was too busy trying to process what I saw in the distance.
A wall of black seemed to have swallowed the horizon behind us.
“Gabe,” I said, interrupting whatever he was saying. “Gabe…we need to go. Now.”
He must have seen the far-off look in my eyes, because he turned to find what I was staring at. And his reaction was not dissimilar to my own.
“Holy shit. Get in the car!” he yelled, scooping me up and plopping me down in the passenger seat. He slammed the door closed and ran around the back of the truck, looking over his shoulder as he jumped in. “Buckle up, Trouble.”
Before I could, he threw the vehicle in gear and slammed on the gas. The truck’s tires spun in the gravel for a moment before peeling out at a speed I highly doubted the old beater had seen for a long time. In fact, I was surprised she was capable of it at all.
But I was grateful all the same.
“It looks like it’s getting closer,” I said, looking out the back window.
“It is,” he replied through a tightly clenched jaw. “That right there is a twister waiting to happen.”
“Can we get home before it hits?”
He paused.
“Don’t have much choice beyond that. The ditches here are too shallow to lie in. We’d be sitting ducks if it went over us.”
“Shit…”
“Our best shot is to get home and into the crawl space.”
“Oh my God, Gabe. Your mother—”
“I know. I’m goin’ as fast as this old thing will let me. Start praying that it’s fast enough.”
I decided to shut my mouth and let him focus on driving. The wind was picking up as the ominous veil of darkness gained on us, shaking the body of the truck. If we were lucky, it would hold up against the onslaught.
Finally, I could just make out the farmhouse in the distance. Gabe sighed with relief, but the reality was we were far from in the clear.
“I need you to listen to me very clearly, okay? When we get inside the house, I need you to open the tiny door that looks like it goes beneath the stairs. In there is a trap door to the crawl space. I want you to go in there and wait for me. Understand?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding frantically as we neared the driveway.
“I’ll help you into the house, but then you’re going to have to do it on your own. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
We fishtailed into the dirt driveway, turning at too fast a speed. As we neared the house, it looked as though the storm was farther away—like it had turned away from the farm somewhat. But it was still headed in our general direction.
He jumped out of the truck the second it was in park. I threw the door open and tried to let myself down gently, only to be snatched up by Gabe. He threw me over his shoulder like I weighed nothing and took off at a sprint to the porch steps.
“The wind stopped,” he said to himself, sounding disturbed by that fact. “That’s not a good sign.”
He slammed through the front door, shouting for his mother. We were in the piano room in a flash, and he set me down in front of the half door he’d described to me. I’d thought it was a closet of sorts before, but now I knew better. It was our lifeline.
I fumbled with it, the old wood sticking as though it hadn’t been opened in years. Once I yanked it open, I hopped in and threw open the trap door.
“Jump down,” Gabe ordered from behind me. Without a thought, I did as he said. The dirt was dry and hard under foot when I landed, and I fell to my hands and knees in order to fit down in the tight space. I bit back the cry of pain that wanted to escape me. There was no time for that. “Take her feet,” he yelled down to me, lowering his mother down. I helped guide her to the ground and folded her into my arms, pulling her back to sit with me so Gabe would have room. When he didn’t immediately follow her, I got nervous.
“Gabe!” I shouted. The silence that followed made me queasy. “Gabe!”
“Coming!” he yelled back, just before his feet descended into the space. He bent down and closed the door behind him, pushing a deadbolt across it to lock us in. Then he clicked on a flashlight. “I thought we might need this.”
“You scared me,” I told him, my voice sheepish as I held his mother in my arms and stared at him across the cramped space.
“Something’s off about this storm,” he observed. “The house should be getting beaten with wind right now. The calm should be over.”
“Shouldn’t we just be thankful and pray it doesn’t slam into us out of nowhere?”
“We probably should,” he said, flashing the light around the room as if he were looking for something.
“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’d rather not see what all might be lurking down here with us?”
He seemed to find my comment morbidly amusing.
“Don’t like creepy crawlies?”
“I have no clue if I normally do or don’t, but I sure don’t right now.”
Just then, the house moaned as though something was pushing against it.
“It’s like the storm is all around us, creating inward pressure,” he said to himself, trying to make sense of what he found to be strange about the storm's behavior.
“How will we know it’s safe to come out?” I asked, hoping for a concrete answer. Sadly, I didn’t get one. Instead, Gabe’s mother started to wrestle against my hold.
“Mom!” Gabe shouted, scurrying t
o get to her. “Mom. Relax. It’s just a storm. It’ll be over soon.” The more Gabe tried to reassure her, the more she struggled to get out of the crawl space. And she was surprisingly strong. “Mom. Stop! Please,” he pleaded, trying to restrain her as she reached for the deadbolt. Then, out of nowhere, she collapsed against him, resuming her passive, seemingly unaware behavior. “What the hell was that?” Gabe muttered to himself, staring down at her with wide eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said softly, equally surprised by what I’d just witnessed. It was one thing for his mother to feel compelled to join me at the piano; though initially shocking, her love of music could have reached her in a way that nothing else had since her husband died. My mind found that to be reasonable enough. But for her to fight her son to escape the safety of the crawl space during a violent storm and almost overtake him? That was far too big a pill to swallow without choking on disbelief. She hadn't moved a muscle in nearly a decade, and he worked on a farm from sunup to sundown. No sane person would have bet on her in a fight between the two of them.
And it seemed that maybe they should.
Another groan of the house pulled me from my musings, and I looked over to find Gabe opening the trap door.
“I’m going to go see if we’re in the clear. Lock the door behind me. Got it?” I nodded. “I’ll be right back.”
I held my breath as he disappeared through the door and closed it. Obeying his orders, I locked it behind him.
“You did this,” a barely audible voice said. I turned to find Gabe’s mother staring at me. For the first time since I'd met her, she looked completely lucid. “It won’t stop till it gets what it wants.”
“What?” I asked, voice trembling. Though her face was soft and kind, in that moment there was something terrifying about her, like she was a puppet being controlled by some outside force. I stared at her, heart thumping wildly in my chest, awaiting her reply with a growing sense of dread.
But one never came.
Instead, a thumping on the trap door above echoed through the tiny space.
“All clear,” Gabe called out, his voice muffled by the barrier between us. I threw back the deadbolt and practically launched myself out of that dark, creepy room, not caring at all about my ankle in the process. Once out I stumbled past him, cowering against the adjacent wall with wide eyes.
“Jesus, Trouble. What happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I couldn’t bring myself to reply, so I just stood and shook. I wasn’t sure he’d believe me if I told him the truth anyway. He stared at me for a minute, trying to process what was wrong, then grudgingly turned and jumped into the crawl space to retrieve his mother. When he reappeared with her in his arms, my body stiffened. I hoped he didn’t notice.
He carried her across the room and placed her down in her seat, throwing a light blanket over her lap.
“I have to check on the animals, Mom. I’ll be back in a minute.” Then he looked at me, cowering against the wall. “You coming with me?” I nodded frantically, thrilled by the idea of getting away from his mother. “Then let’s go.” He came over and looped my arm around his shoulder before guiding me out of the house to the truck. “It’s easier to drive with you in tow, and if any of them got out, I’m going to have to bring them back. You can drive yourself home if that happens,” he explained, pausing for a second. “Unless you don’t know how.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when it comes,” I said, staring out the window at the now-clear horizon.
“I’m going to do a loop of the property first. See how much damage we sustained.”
He pulled out onto the road we’d just taken home, headed in the opposite direction. We weren’t driving for long before we both noticed the devastation.
“My God…” he uttered, staring out the driver’s side window at the land across the road from his. In truth, there wasn't much there to look at. The entire property as far as the eye could see had been devastated. “It’s been flat-out leveled. All of it.”
It didn’t take long to realize just how accurate that statement was. The longer we drove to the end of his property, the more we saw the extent of the damage to the surrounding properties. And it was awe-inspiring.
“Gabe…the people that owned the land…”
“It’s vacant.”
“Okay,” I said, fidgeting with my lap belt. He turned off the road onto a dirt path that must have run along the far side of the farm. As we drove, it was impossible not to notice the path of devastation, and how it seemed to stop at the property line.
By the time we’d driven around the lot, Gabe’s face was pale and he was eerily quiet. Something had him spooked.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said to himself, driving up toward the barn.
“What doesn’t?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea of what he was about to say.
“The path of the storm…it doesn’t make sense. Twisters either skip along the ground leaving patches of destruction or they cut a road of it, but they don't encircle something and leave a bulls-eye of hunky dory in the middle of devastation. They just don’t.”
I had no idea how to reply to his observation, so I kept my mouth shut as we approached the barn. He threw the truck into park and hopped out, leaving me alone. I watched as he disappeared into the decaying building, thinking it was a damn good thing that the twister hadn’t hit us because neither the barn nor the house would have survived it.
The sight of Gabe darting out of the barn at full speed yanked me from my ruminations. Without so much as a glance in my direction, he took off down the dirt road toward the creek. Nervous that something was terribly wrong, I hopped out of the truck and made my way after him as quickly as I could, calling for him as I did.
“Gabe! Gabe!” He never replied. With rising anxiety, I pumped my crutches as hard as I dared, nearly running with my awkward gait until I came upon a grim scene. Gabe was on the other side of the creek, soaking wet, kneeling down beside a mound of black. A mound I recognized. “Oh no,” I breathed as I carefully made my way down the bank to the water. When I reached it, I could see that it was deeper than I expected.
“Stay there,” Gabe said, his voice tight. “I don’t need another casualty today.” His harsh sentiment belied the hurt he felt at the loss of his horse, Mason. It had been clear that he was his favorite when I’d met him and Jinx. The grief he felt was almost palpable from where I stood.
I have no idea how long I watched him, but it seemed like ages before he gave the dead horse one final pat, then pushed himself up off the wet ground. He turned to face me, his expression tight and angry. It made me want to run the other way.
“I’ll have to leave him here until the ground dries up a bit. I can’t risk losing the tractor in the creek,” he said as he made his way down in to the water. Halfway across, he was chest deep in it. “You should have stayed in the truck.”
“I saw you take off running. I knew something was wrong.”
“You Super Woman or something? Hoping to save the day?”
“No, I just—”
“We need to get back,” he said, stepping onto the bank. “I need to check on Mom. Bad weather used to make her anxious. Looks like maybe that old habit has returned.”
He brushed past me, pulling his wet shirt off as he did. I couldn’t keep up with his pace, but I did my best not to fall too far behind. I didn’t want to make him wait for me at the truck. In truth, I think I was more afraid that he would leave me behind. His mood was understandably not great, given that his favorite horse had died, but something else was stirring within him. Something dark and unwelcome, as far as I could tell. He’d been nothing but generous and patient with me from the moment he’d happened upon me. Why there'd been such a drastic change in his temperament was beyond me, but I was willing to bet there was a story behind it.
One I was suddenly fixated on hearing.
Much to my surprise, I found Gabe waiting for me in the beat-up old truck. He made no
attempt to help me into the vehicle, not that I minded. I was happy for him and his cloud of irritation to stay on his side of the truck.
He fired the old girl up, and though she protested at first, she finally sputtered to life. Putting her in gear, he started toward the house.
“I’m—I‘m sorry,” he said abruptly. I turned to find him staring out the windshield, his hands gripping the wheel far more tightly than was necessary. “About what I said. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. You were just trying to help.” I didn’t want to say the wrong thing in response, so I just sat quietly across the vehicle from him and stared. My silence must have gotten to him because he eventually turned to look at me. “I mean it. I was wrong to say those things and I’m sorry for it. For all of it.”
I nodded.
He sighed.
The truck rolled up next to the front porch, the engine banging loudly when he threw it in park. He killed the engine, then turned to face me. The cab of the truck suddenly felt far smaller than it was.
“You’re really gonna make me work for this, aren’t ya?” he asked, pouring on his lazy drawl. He even threw in a half smile that was virtually impossible to resist. “Trouble—”
“It’s fine. Really. I’m not mad at you. I just didn’t want to say the wrong thing,” I explained. “You know that mouth of mine that you like to comment on so much; I was afraid it would think it appropriate to let loose something snarky. I thought keeping it shut might be best for us both.”
At that, he laughed.
“I’ve made you paranoid, have I?”
I smiled.
“Seems like it.”
“Well maybe I should apologize for that too.”
“You’re on a roll. Might as well ride that out.”
With a shake of his head, he dropped his forehead to the wheel and rested it there for a moment. His laughter disappeared in an instant, taking my smile along with it.
“Just before my father died,” he started, his voice low and sorrowful, “there’d been a stretch of storms like these. Worst the state had seen in decades.” He paused for a moment, and I swear I couldn’t breathe until he spoke again, my chest too tight to allow it. “The day of the accident, I was just about to head home when the sirens started to wail, and all the students were corralled in the gym. I had the strangest feeling like I should get out of there—that something bad was going to happen—but I just sat there, huddled in with all the other kids, and waited for the storm to pass.” He finally lifted his head to look at me. It was impossible not to notice the glassy sheen of his stare. “When they let us out, I ran to my truck and tore out of the parking lot. The closer to home I got, the more I knew I had been right. I could see the sheriff’s cruiser, the ambulances and fire trucks from at least a mile down the road. There were so many flashing lights…some of the rescue vehicles had come from three towns over to help. That’s how bad the explosion was.”
Live Wire (Blue-Eyed Bomb #1) Page 8
