Chapter 14
Terror. Unadulterated, pure terror. No other words were necessary to describe the wretched feeling powering through Kelly as they sped away from the tornado. A tornado. It went beyond reality into a nightmare.
When Kelly was seven years old, a tornado had passed through Mount Grove.
She didn’t remember much beyond the “game” her mom had played with her in their bathtub on the first floor.
It was noisy, but her mom held her close as they cuddled under the mattress.
Her mom had called it the Fort of Prayer.
The Doyle house had been spared, but other buildings and houses had not been.
As tornados went, it could have been a lot worse.
The horror of the damage and deaths were overshadowed in her young mind by the excitement of the Mount Grove Middle School being destroyed.
The tornado had torn a path straight through, and while the school had not been hers, it was a thrill for the town youths to know a school had been taken down by a tornado.
Kelly was not removed now. She gripped the door handle with all her might, like she had the power to infuse the SUV to just go faster.
Her other hand was reached across the bench seat to Maddie, trying to keep the young pregnant woman steady as Jackson swerved, weaved, and pushed the SUV to its limits.
The night the bar had exploded, Kelly had wondered if that chaos had been comparable to a warzone. As awful as that night had been, it didn’t come close to now.
Cars with panicked drivers landed in ditches, people running haphazardly across the road—some even towards the tornado as they sought shelter—branches, debris, and unidentifiable parts flew this way and that in front of them, like the wind couldn’t figure out which direction it was blowing.
Vehicles crashed into each other, blocking the road.
Somehow Jackson kept his cool, taking them around everything with so much ease that Kelly had to wonder if he was even human.
She certainly was unable to detach herself from her panic and fear.
Her mind kept flicking through times in her life.
Her mom. What would happen to her mom if Kelly died today?
And Bubbe! Without Kelly’s salary, Bubbe would not be able to stay in the home.
She’d be kicked out onto the streets, and it would be all Kelly’s fault.
The club. Faces, smiles, laughter ran through her mind like a reel on steroids.
Kelly remembered the first time Lucky brought Scotty into the diner.
It was her second or third day working there.
She knew who Lucky was, having seen him and his little sister around town.
All the women knew he’d come home from the war to take guardianship of his sister.
Kelly was too young to remember his parents, but everyone knew the tragic story of how his dad went missing one winter night and wasn’t found until the spring when the river thawed.
It was used as a cautionary tale in Driver’s Ed classes.
Then there were the rumors that Lucky was fighting for another sibling, this one just a few months old.
Kelly might have had a crush on him, but unlike other women in town who tried to make a move on him, Kelly recognized that he was far too busy and stressed to even consider romance.
She’d watched Scotty grow, from that little baby in the carrier to the young man he was today. A college student! He was the light of the town, and Kelly was honored to be his friend.
The ol’ ladies who now called themselves her sisters.
Kelly had been looking forward to being one of them, to sharing in that bond so few could ever understand.
And the club brothers. Whoever thought a motorcycle club could ever be honorable?
Kelly certainly hadn’t. Shows like Sons of Anarchy and news stories about Hell’s Angels MC had painted a not-so pleasant outlook for motorcycle clubs.
So when a hardened Marine moved to town to create a new club, many were not thrilled about the prospect.
Now Kelly was one of them, an ol’ lady. She loved them, even before she wore a cut of her own. They were good people. People who had found family in circumstance, not blood. And for a moment in time, Kelly had been welcome in their home.
And Maddie. Yesterday had been incredible.
Getting to meet her, getting to learn about her and know that Kelly was going to be a part of, not just her life but also her babies?
There was so much life in her, so much potential.
Maybe Kelly would never have kids of her own, maybe Maddie would never call her ‘Mom’.
But she could have been the very best bubbe to those little babies.
Would she ever know? Would she ever get to meet them? If anyone survived today, it had to be Maddie. It just had to be.
Kelly tried not to think of the last. It was too much, too distressing. The idea that it had taken them ten years to get to where they were. A bomb had tried to keep them apart; it had failed. His mom had tried to keep them apart; she had also failed.
Would a tornado succeed?
Kelly couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear the thought that this was their end.
The SUV veered so violently that Kelly was thrown against the door. She cried out, her eyes that she hadn’t realized she’d closed flew open. Her left shoulder screamed in pain, and she lost her grip on Maddie.
“Daddy!”
Kelly’s head turned, praying that Maddie’s outcry had been from fear, not pain. Tears streamed down the young woman’s face. Her black hair was held up in a ponytail. She had a pillow pressed to her belly.
“Is she okay?”
The SUV bounced and jostled over rough terrain. Kelly reached over again to help steady Maddie, but her strength was nothing compared to the force trying to push them from their seats.
“Kelly!” She jumped at her name, and her attention was wrenched off Maddie to the front seat. Grumpy had his head turned over his left shoulder, facing them in the back even though he wouldn’t be able to see them from that angle. “Is she okay?” he demanded again.
Kelly looked Maddie over, and while she didn’t see blood, she did see a wet patch between her thighs.
“I’m fine!” Maddie called forward when Kelly said nothing. She met Kelly’s eyes, new tears flooding her cheeks as she confessed in a horrified voice, “It’s pee. I peed.”
For some reason Maddie’s embarrassment over the fact that she’d peed her pants knocked Kelly back into herself.
Here her mind was thinking of things that didn’t matter.
The past and the future didn’t matter. Now mattered, and Kelly’s mind thinking only of what had been and what could have been solved nothing, helped no one.
Determination filled her. She was not going to die today. None of them were going to die today.
She took Maddie’s hand. “It’s okay,” she assured her.
“It’s turning!” Jackson shouted as he pulled them off the grassy shoulder and onto the road.
It was then that Kelly realized they’d sped under an overpass without slowing in the slightest. Why hadn’t they gotten off the highway? Or stopped? Weren’t overpasses supposed to be safe turning a tornado? That’s what the movies showed, anyway.
“And we’re about to,” Grumpy threw back at the younger man.
Kelly swiveled in her seat. Holy fuck… Her eyes widened as new terror took her.
The funnel that had been so far away before was no longer far away.
And it was huge. She had no idea how to even begin to judge the width of it, only that it seemed to span the entire highway.
That was also when she realized they were no longer driving on the northbound side of the road.
At some point, Jackson had taken them across the median and they were now driving north on the south side of the road.
She wasn’t the greatest at judging distances, but she estimated they were, maybe, a mile or two ahead of it.
At least, she hoped they were. A mile or two sounded better than ten feet—though she would have preferred to have been states away.
True to Jackson’s prediction, the tornado’s path took it off the highway and into the trees on their right. But as Kelly faced forward again, she saw that Grumpy was also correct. The road curved ahead, and it would lead them directly into the tornado’s path.
* * *
Grumpy might not have grown up in Texas as Maddie had, but he’d lived there through his twenties and into his early thirties.
He knew the signs of a tornado. Should have spotted them sooner.
Between his depth perception and loss of his periphery, he wasn’t too trusting of his vision these days.
Instincts he thought were chronic itching on his graft sites had tried to warn him sooner, but he hadn’t listened.
The stats were not on their side. While tornados were more common in the spring, they were not unheard of this time of year either. And since they were less common, they could be just as, if not more, deadly. People don’t plan for tornados when they’re prepping for snow.
To make matters worse, they were heading northbound on a rural highway with only trees surrounding them for miles. Good for the population living in the area, but not for them.
From the second man had taken their first steps up to now, there was one constant trait throughout humanity—people on a whole did not handle fear well.
Be it cultural change, the loss of power, or a fucking tornado barreling down on them at over a hundred miles per hour. Fear turned people into utter morons.
But Grumpy had to hand it to the prospect. Jackson kept his cool. Even with people running through the roads, debris flying everywhere, and vehicles crashing into each other at every turn, the guy powered through, found an alternate route, and kept going.