Chapter 19
Nineteen
SAM
The road disappears in front of us. Not fades. Not blurs. Disappears.
One second, I can make out the pale strip of gravel cutting through the fields.
The next, rain hits the windshield hard enough to turn the world into a sheet of moving metal.
The wipers thrash uselessly. Wind shoves against the truck, and Brooks corrects without jerking the wheel, his jaw locked tight enough that a muscle jumps near his cheek.
I keep one hand braced against the dash and the other wrapped around the tablet.
“We’re not taking the bend,” I say.
Brooks doesn’t ask me to explain. “Where?”
“East.” I lean closer to the radar, then look past it to the road, the sky, the ugly wall of cloud wrapped in rain. “There’s a farm road in about two hundred yards. Maybe less.”
The truck lurches beneath us as something small hits the passenger side with a crack that makes my teeth snap together. A branch, maybe. Sheet metal. I don’t look long enough to find out. Behind us, Hershel’s headlights flicker in and out through the gray.
I grab the radio. “Unit Two, Unit Three, break off. Don't follow us east. Repeat, don't follow lead east.”
Static chews through the first half of Hershel’s answer. “...like hell we’re letting you two…”
“Hershel,” Brooks says, voice sharp.
I look at him. He keeps his eyes on the road. “Follow Sam’s call.”
There's no hesitation in it. No pause. No little glance asking if I'm sure, and no old fear stepping into the cab to pull him back. Just that. Follow Sam’s call.
My throat tightens. I swallow against the sudden ache, keeping my focus locked on the road ahead.
A burst of static, then Hershel again. “Copy. Peeling south. You two keep talking.”
“We will,” I say, though my voice comes out thinner than I’d like.
Brooks takes the turn when I point. The truck fishtails hard enough that my shoulder slams into the door.
He catches it, cursing under his breath, and gravel spits out behind us.
For a few seconds, the world gets smaller.
The cab. The radar. Brooks’s hands on the wheel.
The brown leather bracelet against his wrist. The rain.
My own breathing, too fast and too loud.
I check the velocity, then the reflectivity, and then our position. The storm isn't behaving. It's erratic. The circulation tightens, wobbles, shifts, then wraps itself in rain like it knows exactly how badly I need to see it.
“Talk to me,” Brooks says.
“Inflow's getting stronger. Motion’s messy. It’s trying to turn right again.”
“Toward us?”
I don’t answer fast enough.
“Sam.”
“Maybe.”
He nods once, and that scares me more than if he’d argued. “Options?”
I drag my fingers over the map. “North road’s half a mile ahead.”
“Good.”
“No. Not good. Low-water crossing.”
“West?”
“Gone.”
“South?”
“We’d drive right into it.”
He absorbs that without flinching. “Then we keep east.”
“We try.”
The word hangs between us. Try.
The truck jolts over a rut. Rain hammers the roof with the force of thrown rocks. Something larger skids across the road ahead of us, pale and jagged, and Brooks swerves just enough to miss it without taking us into the ditch.
“Power line?” he asks.
“Fence panel, I think.”
The radar updates. My stomach drops.
“Brooks.”
He hears it. “What?”
“We’re not outrunning this in the truck.”
His hands tighten on the wheel. For one awful heartbeat, I wait for him to become the man who locked me out of the field. The man who heard danger and tried to shrink my world to keep me safe.
Instead, he says, “Tell me what we’re doing.”
I look out through the windshield, searching between pulses of rain. There. A farmhouse, half hidden by trees bent nearly sideways. The roof has already lost pieces. A small concrete structure sits low to the ground beyond it, with a metal door angled away from the wind. Storm shelter.
“There,” I say. “Right side. Past the mailbox.”
Brooks sees it. “I’ve got it.”
A thick tree branch drops across the road ahead. For half a second, my brain refuses to make sense of it. Then the trunk hits with a heavy, wet crack, branches scraping across the gravel and leaves shredding in the wind.
Brooks slams the brakes. The seat belt locks hard across my chest. The truck slides, tires grinding, and the nose stops feet from the fallen tree. We sit there, breathing. Rain pounds. Wind screams. The radar keeps telling me things I already know.
Brooks throws the truck into reverse.
I twist in my seat. “No,” I say.
He stops immediately. Behind us, debris tumbles across the road in dark, jagged fragments. A power pole leans at a wrong angle beyond the ditch, lines snapping and whipping in the rain. Even if the road is open, the air isn’t.
“We have to get out,” I say.
Brooks looks at me. His face is pale beneath the grime and rainwater, but his eyes are steady. “All right.”
I shove the tablet into my bag, grab the emergency radio, and unclip the small first-aid kit from under the dash. My fingers feel clumsy. Brooks reaches behind his seat and pulls out the hard case with the portable beacon.
“Leave anything we don’t need,” I say.
“Already am.”
“Door opens toward us. Wind’s going to grab it.”
“I’ll take driver side, come around.”
“No.” I look at the shelter again. The distance is nothing on a normal day. A quick jog. A short stretch of open ground. “We go together.”
His eyes meet mine. “Together,” he says.
We wait. That might be the worst part. Sitting still while the world comes apart around us, watching the rain angle sideways, listening to the truck creak under pressure, feeling the storm bear down on us.
“Now,” I say.
Brooks moves. The door nearly rips from my hand. Cold rain hits my face like gravel. I duck my head and jump down, boots slipping in mud as Brooks rounds the front of the truck, one arm lifted against the debris whipping through the air.
“Go!” he shouts.
I go. The wind hits my side hard enough to knock me off course. Brooks catches my elbow, not dragging me, not hauling me like I’m cargo. Just keeping me upright long enough for me to find my feet.
“Low,” I shout. “Stay low.”
We run bent forward, bags banging against our hips, rain filling my mouth, my eyes, my ears. The storm roars so loud it turns thought into fragments. Fence post. Ditch. Shelter door. Brooks beside me.
The farmhouse groans somewhere to our left, wood shrieking as something gives way. I glance up against every instinct, bracing to see what's tearing through the air. A piece of metal lifts from the yard and cartwheels toward us.
“Down!” I yell.
My boot slips. The ground vanishes under me. My knee hits mud, pain shooting up my thigh. Brooks’s hand closes around the back of my jacket and hauls me up just as the metal flashes past, close enough that I feel the air move.
“Sam!”
“I’m okay.” I’m not sure I am, but that's a problem for later.
We're ten feet from the shelter when the wind changes.
Not shifts. Changes. The pressure drops so fast my ears pop, and the roar deepens into a violent vibration.
Brooks moves before I can tell him not to.
He steps between me and the storm, shoulders hunched, body angled around mine as debris starts ripping through the yard in pieces too fast to identify.
“No,” I shout, but he's already pushing me toward the door.
The metal handle is slick beneath my fingers. For one terrible second, it doesn’t move. Then Brooks’s hand covers mine. Together, we wrench it open.
We fall inside more than climb. Brooks yanks the door shut behind us and throws the bar across. The storm hits the other side with a force that makes the whole shelter shudder. Darkness swallows us.
The air inside is cold and thick with the damp, mineral chill of underground stone. Brooks grabs me and pulls me down. The shelter shakes again. Dust sifts from the seams.
Something slams into the door. I flinch despite myself, and Brooks covers me with his body. For half a second, I let him. Only half.
Then I shove at his shoulder. “Stop.”
He doesn’t move. “Stay down.”
“You stay down.”
“I am down.”
“You’re on top of me.”
“Observant as ever.”
“Brooks.” My voice cracks around his name. I push harder. “If something comes through that door, you being over me won’t fix it.”
“If something comes through that door, it goes through me first.”
“No.” The word tears out of me. “You don’t get to decide that.”
His face is inches from mine. Rain drips from his hair onto my cheek. His breathing is rough, and I can feel the tremor in him where his chest presses against my arm.
“I'd decide it every time,” he says.
The shelter groans.
I grab his soaked shirt in both fists. “That isn't romantic. That isn't brave. That’s you trying to leave me with one more storm I have to survive without you.”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
The door rattles so violently that I taste metal. Fine limestone dust blows through the gap near the bottom, stinging my eyes. Brooks lowers his forehead until it touches mine. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“I love the way you argue with me like you know you're right because you usually are."
My heart stops. “Brooks.”
“I love the way you go quiet when you’re reading a storm. Like the whole world could be on fire and you’d still catch the one detail everyone else missed.”
“Stop talking like this.”
“I love that you still make that face when you’re pretending coffee isn’t too hot. I love that you tuck your left foot under you when you read. I love that you used to steal all the motel pillows and then deny it while lying on every single one of them.”
My fists tighten in his shirt. The roar above us grows until there's no separation between the storm and the shelter and my own blood rushing in my ears.
“I loved you when we were broke,” he says, voice rough and too close.
“I loved you when we built something bigger than either of us knew what to do with. I loved you when everything was falling apart and I was too scared to say the right thing, so I said nothing. I loved you badly, Sammy Girl. But I never loved you less.”
My eyes burn. “No,” I whisper. “No, you don't get to make this your last speech.”
His hand cups the back of my head as another impact lands outside hard enough to make the light flicker. “Sam.”
“We’re not dying.”
“I hope to God you’re right, because I've got a lot to make up for."
“I’m right.” My voice shakes. I hate that it shakes. “And if you have all that left to say to me, then you can stay alive and tell me tomorrow.”
His eyes search mine, wet and scared and so full of raw feeling that I can barely stand to look at him. “All right,” he says.
The door buckles inward with a scream of metal. Brooks throws himself over me. I scream his name into the dark.
For a moment, there's only pressure, noise, and concrete trembling beneath my hands. Brooks’s body is locked over mine, my cheek pressed against the wet floor.
Then, slowly, the sound changes. Not silence. Just the roar pulling away by degrees, turning ragged at the edges. The shelter still shakes, but less. The door still rattles, but holds.
Neither of us moves. I don’t know how long we lie there. Time stops being useful.
Finally, Brooks lifts his head. “Are you hurt?”
“Are you?”
A wild, broken laugh slips out of me. His breath catches, and then he laughs too, once, barely there.
“I asked first,” he says.
"I asked better."
My knee throbs. My shoulder aches. My hands won’t stop shaking. Brooks has a shallow cut near his temple and mud smeared across one cheek. His injured shoulder has to be screaming, but when I ask him, he lies badly enough that I almost believe we’re going to be okay.
We wait until the worst of the wind moves farther off. Then Brooks lifts the bar with both hands, jaw tight, and eases the door open.
The world outside is wrong. The farmhouse roof is torn open, trees are snapped and twisted, and the road is buried under debris. The truck, the truck we would've stayed inside if I had waited too long, sits crooked near the ditch with the passenger side crushed by a fallen utility pole.
I stare at it. Brooks stands beside me, silent.
Two years ago, a storm took our baby and left both of us bleeding in different ways. Brooks let that fear build walls around me. Around us. Tonight, I made the calls. Tonight, he listened. Tonight, when there was nothing left to calculate, he shielded me, but he never made me helpless.
My breath breaks.
Brooks turns toward me. “Sam.”
I step into him before I can think better of it. His arms come around me, careful at first. Waiting. Always waiting now. I fist my hands in the back of his wet shirt and hold on. He exhales against my hair, shaking so hard I feel it through my whole body.
We stand in the rain and the wreckage: alive, filthy, bruised, and still here. For the first time in two years, I let myself hold my husband without counting everything standing between us. Brooks holds me like he knows I can leave whenever I want, and he holds me anyway.