Chapter 27 #2
Nic grabbed his quicker. “Another tornado touched down a few miles from here.”
The wind chimes on Felicity’s balcony clanged against her apartment’s door.
“Shit.” She grabbed her phone, and that twisting motion sent a snapping sensation through her neck. She tried to hide it, but Nic never missed anything. “Samantha—she’s been bringing Ani to the bookshop at night while she does inventory, so Abbott can sleep before his bar exam. I need to—”
“Samantha and the baby are already in the basement in your shop. That’s what I was coming to tell you.”
Felicity exhaled in relief. She made another attempt at rising, clenching her jaw hard enough that it popped.
“Christ, can you even walk? Why didn’t you tell me it was a bad pain day?”
“Is now really the moment to be berating me?”
“I’m not berating you. I’m asking.”
“In a berating way.” She stretched, and the pain eased a fraction. “I’m fine. Let’s get downstairs.”
“You go.”
“Where are you going?” She grabbed on to his shirt.
“Thea called because she can’t find Courtney. Hasn’t seen her since the festival ended. I thought she was going home with a migraine, but she’s not there. She’s not answering her phone. I need to make sure she knows what’s happening if she’s in the studio above the restaurant.”
Felicity’s fist clenched tighter around his shirt. “Nic—”
“I’ll be there in three minutes. I promise. Go find Sam. Make sure she’s okay. She looked shaken up.”
With a shudder, Felicity let go of his shirt. She hugged her arms around herself. She was even colder now. The door snapped back as she opened it, wrenching her shoulder. She did not need this right now. She headed down the stairs to the old church basement room.
The seed-starting light blinked and shuddered and went out.
Felicity grabbed the flashlight she always kept in the corner.
Sam sat with her daughter held close to her chest.
“Sam, are you okay?” Felicity scanned her friend. Nic had undersold it. Sam didn’t just look shaken. She looked sick.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“You’re all sweaty. What does your Dexcom say?”
“It’s been acting up. I don’t know. It was beeping and woke Ani, so I silenced it.” She pulled out her phone. “It says I keep going high, and I keep fixing it. I don’t know.”
“It’s over three-fifty?” This didn’t add up with the way Samantha looked. She was deathly pale.
“It’s this stupid Dexcom site. It hates my stomach for some reason since having Ani, but with nursing, it was driving me nuts on my arm.”
“Can you change it? Do you have extra stuff? Maybe it’s not reading right.”
“Yeah, it’s—” Her eyes shut in a grimace. “No, it’s fine. It’s happened before and it comes down.”
“Where’s your bag?”
“It’s on the counter in the bookstore. I set it down when I grabbed Ani’s diaper bag. When things calm down, if you watch Ani, I can go—”
“You’re fucking nuts if you think I’m going to watch Ani and send a lady who just had a goddamn baby out in a bad storm.”
“I didn’t mean I was going to go right now. I mean, we haven’t had an actual tornado touch down in the city for years.”
“Exactly. Which is why I am going to run over to the bookstore and grab your stuff.”
“I don’t need it. It can wait an hour until the warning passes. This happened the other night too, and when I reset it, it worked.”
“But all your extra emergency stuff is at the bookstore? What if you go low after? You look like you’re low now.”
“Yes, but—”
Felicity grabbed the keys from beside Ani’s diaper bag.
“You’re being so stupid. Just wait. Goddamn it, Felicity. Stop being so stubborn.”
“I’ll be fast. You didn’t give Nic a hard time when he went to look for me.”
“He was going to the garden. And that was before that second warning came in—” Samantha swallowed. “The bookstore entrance is a hundred feet farther away.”
“That’s not that much, Sam. I can get there fast. Be right back.
” Felicity sprinted up the stairs and through the long aisles of the plant store.
She paused at the front door. It was really windy, but it didn’t look any worse than when Nic had kissed her in the garden.
She cringed against the aftermath of that memory.
Why did he have to ruin the moment? He had to have some awful reason.
She ran out the door and under the pergola and down the newly constructed deck area and along the old root-rippled sidewalk to the bookstore.
The key twisted easily into the door, and there it was, Samantha’s emergency bag. It was exactly where she had said it would be.
Felicity locked up behind her and ran back down the sidewalk. In the few minutes she’d been at the bookstore, things had gotten worse.
The sky was bottle green.
A strong gust had toppled all of the tables on the deck beneath the pergola. Her hanging pots were in pieces. All of the hanging lights had snapped. So much damage.
Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. They’d worked so hard.
At least the pergola was still holding strong. She touched one of the posts.
A sudden gust sent scattered dust and soil from the smashed planters into her eyes. Lightning flashed and everything blurred.
Sirens blared.
Her hands reflexively covered her ears. Her panic surging, she stepped backward and tripped, falling down on the sidewalk to the stairs, where those large roots made the surface uneven, catching the full weight of her upper body with the hand that wasn’t clutching Samantha’s bag. Something cracked in her wrist.
“Shit.”
She shifted the leather bag to beneath that arm, so she could use the other to open the door.
“Shit shit shit.”
She was ten strides from the steps but couldn’t help a quick glance back. Where was the school playground? There had been floodlights over it that lit up the field.
Her eyes strained. The school. It wasn’t there.
It was gone.
Leveled.
Streetlights winked out in the distance.
The sirens faded beneath a new sound. A sound that drowned out everything else.
It roared from everywhere at once, echoing off the buildings. It was exactly as everyone described. A barreling freight train.
She wiped her eyes with her functional hand and squinted. The dark, powerful shadow was about a mile away. She could actually see it, sweeping across that large field.
Even as the wind scraped her eyes, she couldn’t look away. It was mesmerizing.
And she felt …
Terrified.
In those milliseconds of frozen panic, that freight train roar took her back to another moment of decision. Except then, there had been an actual freight train blurring past.
It was a year ago. She was in Maryland.
Felicity had worked a night shift the night before.
She’d seen so much death during those twelve hours.
She was sick of death. As tired as she was, the idea of going back to her parents’ house and seeing the way her mother and father were treating her like she was made of shattered glass was too much.
But Felicity knew she was too tired to drive much more.