13. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
I see the sky and I know.
Green and wrong, that yellow at the edges that means the air itself has gone bad, and the wind has shifted from bad to dangerous in the last ten minutes. The horses know it before we do. They’re pressed against the far fence, eyes rolling white, and the shed horses won’t stop screaming.
My phone is dead. Died somewhere between the creek crossing and the north pasture, and I didn’t notice because I was thinking about this morning, about the look on Ellie’s face when I walked out without kissing her goodbye.
I’ve kissed her goodbye every morning I’ve walked out of that room.
Every single one. And this morning I didn’t, and now the sky looks like the end of everything and I can’t call her.
I grab the kid with the sunburned nose, the one who’s been here since spring, the one who set a post straight without being told last week. “I need you to call the house. Right now.”
He’s already got his phone out. Good kid. Learns fast.
“Tell them everybody goes to the bunker. Now. Then you and the rest of these boys get in the cellar under this shed and stay there.” I shake him once to make sure he’s listening. “Make sure Ellie’s there. Ellie first. You tell them that exact thing. Ellie first.”
He nods, already dialing, and I hear him relaying it word for word as I run for the truck.
Thirty minutes. That’s how long it takes to get from the far shed to the house on a good day, and this is not a good day.
The wind is pushing the truck sideways on the road, and there’s debris coming down now, branches and fence posts and pieces of things I can’t identify, tin roofing that spins past the windshield edge on.
I keep both hands on the wheel and I lean forward over it and I push the truck harder than it wants to go.
The radio’s nothing but static and emergency tones. I turn it off.
The mailbox at the county road is bent flat to the ground. The stop sign is gone. I’ve driven this road ten thousand times and I’ve never seen it look like a place I don’t know.
I think about Ellie in that house. I think about her standing at the window the way she does when she’s waiting for me, her hand on the glass, watching the drive.
I think about her in our bedroom this morning, turned toward the wall, not asleep, just done.
Her side of the bed still twisted where she lay awake.
I think about every time in the last two months I could have chosen her and didn’t.
The fence along the east pasture is down. Posts ripped clean out of the ground. A trough I don’t recognize is in the middle of the road and I swerve around it and almost lose the back end and I don’t slow down.
Fifteen minutes out and the sky goes from green to black. Not clouds. It’s moving.
I drive faster.
The ranch house comes into view and it’s still standing, which is the first good thing that’s happened in an hour.
The bunker door is open, men filing in, and I can see Hollis at the door, holding it open against the wind.
The hands are going past him one by one, heads ducked, and then a UTV skids up from the direction of the equipment shed with two figures in it.
Daphne and Jenna.
I’m out of the truck before it fully stops, running for the bunker, and I grab Jenna’s arm as she stumbles out of the UTV.
“Where’s Ellie?”
She’s white as paper. Shaking so hard I can feel it through her sleeve.
“She went down with the others, sir.” Her voice is high and thin. “She’s already inside.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” She won’t meet my eyes. “I saw her go.”
Daphne’s on my other arm now, tugging, her voice high and scared. “She’s inside, Jake, come on, we have to go, come ON.”
The sky is making a sound I’ve never heard before. Not a train. People always say it sounds like a train, but it doesn’t. The air itself is tearing, and every breath of it is death.
I count heads as they pass me. Ranch hands, the two maids, Jenna. Hollis, last through the door, his eyes on mine.
“She’s inside?”
“Jenna said she saw her go in.”
Hollis nods once and I haul the door shut behind us and throw the bolt.
I don’t look back at the house when I do it. I have one second with my hand on that door and the house right there across the lawn, and I didn’t turn my head, because Jenna said she saw her go in and I had no reason on earth to think Jenna would lie to me.
The bunker is concrete and steel, dug into the rise across the lawn from the house, meant to hold twenty people and all the supplies they need for a week. Right now it holds twenty-some, pressed against the walls in the yellow emergency light, and I’m turning before the bolt finishes sliding home.
“Ellie?”
Faces in the dim light, every one of them turned toward me, and none of them hers.
“ELLIE!”
Nothing. The silence stretches for one horrible second and then the sound outside hits the door hard enough to shake it and somebody screams and I’m already moving.
I go for the door and Hollis is on me before I get two steps.
His hand hits my chest and then it’s not just Hollis, it’s four of my men, five, all of them between me and the door, and I’m fighting them. I’m bigger than any of them alone but there’s five and they know what I’m about to do and they won’t let me do it.
“Let me go.” I throw an elbow and connect with somebody’s ribs. “Let me the fuck go, she’s in there, she’s in the house.”
“You can’t.” Hollis has my arm twisted behind my back now, his weight against my shoulders, his mouth close to my ear. “You go out there, you die. You die and she’s still in there and nobody’s coming for either of you.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know you don’t. That’s why we’re not letting you move.”
I fight them. I fight them with everything I have, throwing my weight against them, trying to break free, trying to get to that door.
The sound outside is so loud now I can feel it in my teeth, in my chest, in the bones of my skull.
The walls are shaking. Dust is coming down from the ceiling.
Somebody’s crying somewhere behind me and I don’t know who and I don’t care.
I have never been this afraid in my life and I cannot breathe.
She’s in there. My wife is in that house and I shut the door without looking back. I trusted Jenna, who I barely know, and I trusted Daphne, who I should have thrown out two months ago, and I shut the door, and Ellie was standing at a window somewhere watching me do it.
“Please.” I’m not above begging. Not for this. “Hollis. Please. I have to get to her.”
“You have to stay alive.” His voice is rough in my ear. “You have to trust that she found somewhere safe. You have to wait.”
“I can’t.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
The roar goes on forever.
The emergency lights go out and come back and go out again.
In the dark somebody grabs my shirt, I don’t know who, and holds on the way a kid holds on.
The concrete under my boots is shaking. I can hear the hay shed go.
I know the sound of that shed in wind and I hear it stop making that sound and start making another one, and then I can’t hear anything but the thing on top of us.
I stop fighting at some point. Not because I’ve given up, but because there’s nothing left to fight. The men ease off but they don’t let go, and I stand there in the middle of the bunker with my arms pinned and my chest heaving and I listen to my house come apart above us.
I think about the first time she spoke to me. A wedding, two years ago. I was in the corner with a whiskey I didn’t want, and she walked up to me and looked at me the way nobody in that room had all night. Blonde curls. Blue eyes. A smile that made everything else look dim.
I think about our wedding night. Her head on my chest. Her fingers tracing patterns on my skin.
“I love you,” she whispered, and I said “I know,” and I thought that was enough.
I thought showing her was enough. I thought I could love her with my body and my hands and my time and never have to say the words.
I think about this morning. Her face when I left her in that bed with the coffee going cold on the nightstand.
The sound changes. The roaring is still there but it’s different now, less directly overhead, more distant. Moving away.
The second it fades, the second the pressure drops and the screaming stops, I throw off the hands on my arms and I’m at the door before anyone can stop me.
The bolt sticks for half a second and then it gives and I’m out, running through debris and dust and things I don’t let myself look at, toward the house.
The house is still standing.
Most of it. The roof is open over the foyer, a massive hole with a tree through it, branches spread across the floor. The west wing is damaged but standing, the windows blown out, water leaking from the eaves. I don’t stop to assess. I run.
“Ellie! ELLIE!”
Every room. I check every fucking room, kicking through rubble and broken glass, and she’s not in any of them. The bedroom is intact but empty, her side of the bed unmade from this morning, the sheets I didn’t touch when I got up. The bathroom, the study, the closets. Empty, empty, empty.
I scream her name until my throat bleeds. I tear through the debris in the foyer, in the kitchen, in every corner of this house I brought her to, and she’s not here, she’s not anywhere, and I’m losing my mind.
The kitchen. The pantry. The basement.
The basement door is open.
I take the stairs three at a time, into the dark, and there’s nothing down here but freezers and shadows and the smell of must and cold concrete. The beam over the stairs is cracked. Cracked in a line I can see even in the dim light from the open door above.
She was here. She was here, under this beam, while the house screamed above her. There’s a boot print in the flour dust on the bottom step, small, hers, pointed toward the stairs. She got out. Whatever else happened down here, she got out on her own feet.
I go back up. I go back through every room, slower this time, looking for blood, looking for anything that tells me where she is.
I look at the floor now instead of the doors.
I’ve tracked cattle across two counties of rock and I can’t find one woman in my own house.
Nothing. Nothing but dust and debris and the absence of her.
I come back to the foyer and she’s there.
Standing under the hole where the tree came through, dust in her hair, looking up at the sky like she’s never seen it before. Alive. She’s alive. Her clothes are dirty and her face is streaked with dust and tears, and I’ve never wanted anything the way I want to touch her.
My hands close on her arms before I’ve decided to move.