Chapter Fifteen
We aren’t even back to the highway yet when Tracy calls.
“Hey, Tracy, did you see—”
“Baseballs? Yeah, I saw it. We might have bigger problems.” Her grim voice has the hair on the back of my neck standing up before she asks, “You guys anywhere near town? I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“No, we’re on our way in now. Wes is driving.” I hesitate, glancing over at him. His usual easy expression is gone, eyes flicking from the road to me and back again. “You think the town is getting hit?”
Anxiety curdles my stomach. I already know the answer. The possibility of a tornado would only put that tone in her voice for one reason.
“We’re a couple miles west. It keeps moving the way it is, if a tornado comes down…”
“It’ll plow right into them.” I squeeze my eyes shut, only opening them when Wes’s fingers brush mine. Without thought, I spread my fingers wide and refuse to overthink the effect something so simple as holding hands has on me.
“It’s not looking good.”
I glance at Wes. He catches my eye long enough to dip his chin in a nod. “We’re heading your way. Just in case.”
As soon as I hang up, I juggle finding Tracy’s blue dot on the radar app, updating the GPS, and catching Wes up. The hail coming up behind us remains a concern, but when we stop to top off the gas tank, I find a path that avoids it if we’re fast.
Wes emerges from the gas station with two cases of water in his arms and a hard set to his shoulders. I hurry to open the car door for him, and when our eyes meet, his are serious. “Just in case,” he says softly.
“Let’s hope we don’t need it.”
We make it to Tracy and Matt’s location on the side of the road with forty minutes to go until sunset. On the edge of town, two miles south of the seething storm, Wes and I exchange nervous glances as we get out of the car. Light leaks from the horizon and casts the whole scene in an eerie glow.
No one says a word. Wes plants himself next to me, arms crossed and radiating tension. Tracy watches the sky with her hands shoved in her pockets, while Matt paces a short circuit, constantly looking down at the radar app on his phone.
“Funnel.” Matt is the first to spot it, one finger pointing upward. His voice is flat, all the usual excitement stripped out by the gravity of what’s about to happen.
“Don’t do it, you bastard,” I mutter under my breath as it wobbles above the town. My stomach knots with dread. “Don’t you dare do it.”
Wind howls past us, strong enough to send me stumbling. Wes tugs me into his side, his body warm, his scent familiar, and presses a kiss to my temple. Whatever low words of comfort he murmurs are lost on the wind.
We watch in horror as the funnel lowers.
Our pleas and curses are entirely ineffective.
I’m already dialing the emergency number to call it in when an explosion of dirt transforms the swirling vortex from funnel to tornado.
Sirens start to wail less than a minute after I hang up.
There’s nothing we can do but watch as a stovepipe forms, the column of whirling air quickly turning a blackish brown as it sucks up dirt and debris.
The steel grain silos perched at the edge of town break apart like wet paper as they’re sucked into the murk of the storm, quickly followed by a flash of blue-green light and a loud boom as the first transformer blows.
The noise turns deafening. The high-pitched train whistle of the tornado, the roar of the wind, thunder, and more exploding transformers tear the evening apart one after the other like apocalyptic dominoes.
When you see a disaster on TV, there’s a boundary to it; it can’t exist beyond the confines of your screen.
On the ground, there’s no escaping it. I’ve never been to a war zone, but I have to think it’s not unlike the aftermath of a tornado ripping through a town.
It’s a level of destruction almost too big for the mind to handle.
Seconds are all it takes. One minute, we’re staring at a row of neat houses. The next, trees are ripped out at their roots, roofs are missing, windows are blown out, walls are shredded like tissue, and cars are tossed upside down like toys.
The tornado is still visible, the debris field widening as it roars through the town. With tornado warnings posted fifteen minutes before it touched down, I can only hope residents took it seriously and everyone is safe in a storm shelter.
“Let’s go.” My voice is hoarse as I turn back toward the car. “We shouldn’t drive too far into town in case there’s a gas leak. Wes grabbed some extra water earlier. There’s probably wires down, and they might be live, so we need to—”
“Sloane.” Wes grabs hold of my shoulders in a gentle but firm touch. “We’ve all done this before.” He leans his forehead against mine for a few precious seconds, takes a long breath, and then opens my door for me. The sirens continue to wail behind us. “I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”
I nod, squeeze his hand one more time, and steel myself for what’s coming. It doesn’t escape me that Wes never says it will be okay. We both know that while it might be true for us, for the people who live here, it’s not.
It only takes a few minutes to reach the edge of the destruction. Uprooted trees tangle in downed power lines. Shingles lay scattered across the road like confetti. Glass crunches under my boots when I get out of the car, the scent of freshly split wood heavy in the air.
We move quickly, emptying our camera bags and leaving our gear tucked under the seats. It’s replaced by first aid supplies and bottles of water. I hand Wes the small axe I keep in my emergency kit, stuff another bottle of water in my bag for good measure, and then take a long, slow breath.
His hand grazes my lower back in a comforting touch. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s help who we can.”
After making sure Tracy and Matt have plenty of water bottles to hand out too, Wes and I head in one direction while they take another. We’ll cover more ground in separate pairs.
The first couple of houses aren’t damaged too badly, families emerging unscathed from their storm shelters. But as we move deeper into town, the damage quickly grows worse. I peer into cars parked on the side of the road with their windows smashed out, relieved when I find them empty.
I try very hard not to think about the image of Wes’s car in a similar state and how badly that could have ended. Our eyes catch when I reach out to squeeze his hand. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one thinking about that moment right now by the way his throat bobs before he looks pointedly away.
We start knocking on what’s left of front doors, ears straining for cries for help in the near-deafening silence that falls once the tornado sirens abruptly cut out.
No one answers, but at the muffled bark of a dog, Wes glances back at me before shoving his shoulder into the door we just knocked on. Hard.
“Anyone inside?” he shouts, ducking under the branch that’s sticking through one of the front windows. “Call out if you need help!”
The house groans when he pushes his way inside. “Careful!” I hiss, reaching for the back of his T-shirt and grabbing a fistful of fabric. “You don’t need to get trapped in there too.”
This time, the barking is accompanied by the faint sound of a man’s voice, too quiet to make out words.
Wes hesitates, takes another step into the house, and waits to see if anything else shifts.
“I’ll be okay,” he says over his shoulder, but that doesn’t stop him from pointing toward the debris-littered yard.
“Wait out here while I see what we’re dealing with. ”
Apprehension tightens my throat. “If it’s not safe for me, then—”
“Sloane. Please. I know you’re capable, but I can’t handle you being in here with me, all right?”
The strangeness in his voice clicks into place.
Fear. Wes is afraid for me—and we don’t have time to argue about it.
I nod, take a step back, and wait the longest two minutes of my life for him to come back out with an elderly man’s arm slung over his shoulders.
A black lab follows so closely that Wes nearly trips on his way past the door barely hanging on to one hinge.
“Damn dresser tipped over,” the man says as we help him out to his driveway where, by some miracle, his car sits undamaged. “Couldn’t get out of the closet.”
We linger long enough to make sure he’s able to sit down, hand him a bottle of water, and then we’re on to the next house.
Before long, the town is swarming with first responders. We help where we can and get out of the way where we can’t. Someone hands Wes a chainsaw, and he goes to work taking apart tree limbs blocking access to roads while carefully avoiding the downed power lines strewn everywhere.
I lose track of time, squinting against the low angle of the sun as I work, heat and humidity rebuilding rapidly in the wake of the storm.
It’s one of the cruelest things—not twenty minutes after ruining lives, the sky is painted with one of the most stunning sunsets I’ve ever seen.
I swear it’s hotter now than it was before the storm, sweat dripping from every inch of me as I hand out water bottles next to one of the EMTs.
Night creeps in a little at a time and then all at once, the darkness broken by an army of flashing blue and red lights, the endless buzz of chainsaws filling the air.
I meet the eyes of strangers over and over, offering what little comfort I can.
My thoughts stagger between guilt and grief.
This would have happened whether we were here or not, but it’s hard not to feel like the worst kind of vulture.
This town will bear the scar of today for years to come.
I’m going to climb into a clean, dry vehicle and drive away from the carnage.
It’s hard to reconcile that something I love, the season I look forward to all year as an escape, can quickly turn into someone else’s private hell.