Chapter 5
Chapter Five
It feels like something’s following us—a spirit or the dredged up memories of our life before, I don’t know.
Paint chips and curls off the walls, littering the floor, and busted ceiling tiles cling to the rafters for dear life.
With the front entrance shut, it doesn’t take long for the air to feel stiflingly thick between us.
As Charlie and I wind deeper into the prison, navigating only by soft gray light seeping through the windows, he’s determined to root through my life like a raccoon sniffing through the trash.
“What are you doing back in Texas?” he asks, sidestepping a shattered beer bottle. The low timbre of his voice makes me shiver. Not the worst place to start.
Not the best, either.
“I live here. Just outside Dallas.”
“Since when?”
“About a year and a half ago.” He’s quiet so I leap to fill the silence before he can prod any further. “So. Storm chasing. New side hustle, you said?”
“I’m doing it full time, actually,” he answers tightly.
A surge of energy rises up my sternum, tightens in my throat, as I blurt, “What happened to the forecasting office?”
“Quit.”
Some kids dream of singing on Broadway or throwing a pitch at Wrigley Field when they grow up.
Little Charlie only ever dreamed of his name on an employee badge for the National Weather Service.
It was one of the first things I ever learned about him.
If I close my eyes, I can still picture the look of pure glee on his face in the photo he showed me from seventh grade, holding up his official laminated ID card he got after his dad took him to become a trained storm spotter.
The day his internship at the regional office turned into a full time job offer, we went out for dinner to celebrate and he splurged on champagne—the real stuff, not the cheap stuff from California.
It felt like magic, watching someone achieve a dream they worked tirelessly toward for years.
And now he’s thrown that away?
It’s not my business to feel so protective over this. That doesn’t stop my jaw from clenching like I’m trying to crunch diamonds. “Why?”
“Guess I needed something to keep me on my toes after you left,” Charlie quips, voice flat.
A breath whooshes out like he socked me in the stomach. This is going well. “How’s that working out for you,” I grit out.
“We’re on the road a lot.”
“Across the country?” He always said he wanted to travel more. Guess he got his wish.
But he shakes his head. “Mostly just Texas. Between tornado season in the spring, hurricane season in the summer and fall, and the crazy ice storms we’ve been getting in the winters lately, this state keeps us pretty busy. You remember Garrett?”
I angle my chin toward him, glaring up beneath my lashes as my mouth gapes. “Of course I remember Garrett.”
Those cracked ice eyes don’t stray from our path.
Colder than ever. “He started letting me tag along on his live-stream chases, helping with equipment and navigation and what not. We were the first on the scene for a tornado that touched down just outside of Lubbock and the channel sort of blew up. All the big names in chasing were talking about us.”
We come to a split and without hesitating, Charlie hangs a right, so I follow.
He’s always been thorough; I wouldn’t be surprised if he dug up schematics of this place from a local archive in town and knew its layout like the back of his hand already.
The corridor opens up to a multi-level cell block and a chill creeps up my spine.
Barred doors hang loose from their hinges as we stride past the tiny spaces where so many men spent the worst days of their lives.
“It’s a legit operation,” he continues. I can’t decide if he’s nervous-yapping or genuinely wants to justify his choice.
“We brought on a support team, and another guy to chase with us, Chad. We have a decent following”—I swallow my snort so I don’t let on I know all this already.
Saddle Up Storm Chasers is closing in on 350,000 subscribers, which is a little more than decent—“and we’ve even been interviewed for a few articles.
One lady out of Boston who interviewed us said her fiancé’s actually a big fan.
He’s some kind of . . . fisherman? Farmer?
Anyways, he was pretty geeked about the weather stuff. ”
We’re officially in nervous-yapping territory.
My stomach sinks. I used to be the one person he was comfortable being quiet with.
“What about you? What happened to dance?”
“You know what they say,” I deadpan. “Those that can’t do, teach.”
“But I recall you—”
“I’m over at Winslow High School,” I cut him off, because I don’t want to hear him spout some comforting nonsense about how I never had a problem with the “do” before. There’s so much he doesn’t know. “Assistant dance teacher. The ghosts are just for fun. Got a little web series too.”
Silence walks between us a few paces and I can make out the shape of a door tucked beneath the rickety staircase along the far wall. He rubs the corner of his jaw, like he’s been chewing on this next question for quite a while.
“I never realized you believed in that kind of stuff,” Charlie says.
“I take it you don’t,” I volley back, tone sharpening like the thorns of a rose—a protective measure against greedy grazers.
The story of how I found myself in this strange new world is mine and mine alone.
One question would lead to another and another, until we’ve wound our way back to River.
Everything in me steels at the thought of someone prying into my little brother’s life. We’re not going there.
“If I could see hard evidence for it, sure,” Charlie considers. “But everything seems to be explained away by science. Or humans interpreting what they want to interpret.”
A growl threatens in my chest. People believe in plenty of things they can’t see—religious deities, good and evil, gravity, dark matter, love. Why is it always ghosts that get shit on?
“You’re entitled to your opinion. Even if it’s wrong.”
His laugh is a shock to my system; I’m used to people putting up more of a fight.
A small window in the heavy metal door casts a dull wash of light across the floor as we approach. “Moment of truth,” Charlie mutters as his large hand wraps around the handle. One good tug and it cracks open. Relief surges through my limbs.
“Oh, thank god,” I sigh.
The breeze takes the chance to sneak inside as Charlie peers out, cool air chilling my clammy skin. Like a down feather blanket, low hanging gray clouds suffocate any attempt at sunlight—darker than they were this morning. The storm’s moving in.
“There.” Charlie points out toward the prison yard. “See that?”
As promised, a section of chain-link fence near the back entrance of the property slouches in the overgrown grass. Nothing I can’t climb over. That is our way out of here, and most likely River’s way back in.
“Great. An exit.” I attempt to dry my sweating palms on the front of my shorts.
Charlie squats and picks up a stray rock nestled in the dirt outside, his backpack jostling with the movement. He positions it in the frame, propping it open as he lets gravity close the door again. “There. Just in case.”
“Thanks.”
I don’t need to look to know Charlie’s watching me as I stare at the charcoal sky; I feel it in my skin, like a hum of energy around me. It’s what happens when you spend so long in someone’s orbit—their gravitational force encodes into your bones. I avoid his gaze.
“I guess that’s it,” Charlie says, sliding his hands in his pockets.
He’s right. That’s it. We agreed to work together to find a suitable exit. We’ve done that. We even made polite small talk, catching up on each other’s lives on the way over. This should be the end of the road for us.
So why is something in me so resistant to letting him go?
Maybe Charlie was onto something in suggesting we catch up.
What we do for work is barely scratching the surface, and yet we’ve both been floored by each other’s changes since the last time we spoke.
What else is there about him I no longer know?
What other artifacts of his existence without me can I chisel from the stone, if I only steal a few more moments with him?
I didn’t leave because I didn’t care; I couldn’t stay because I did.
“Winona, I—”
“Do you—”
We both talk on top of each other but a thunderous scrape of metal dragging on metal bellows in the cavernous cell block, and every individual hair on my body stands on end.
I snap my head over my shoulder looking to the left, then to the right.
I check my phone. River hasn’t texted—he’s not back yet.
My chest rises with a ragged breath as I close my eyes, tuning into my body.
My senses are dialed up to a hundred—racing pulse, warmed skin, hearing tuned to the sound of a pin drop, my stomach a tight rock.
The Knowing.
Something’s here with us.
“You hear that?” I mutter.
“Yeah.” Charlie’s vowels stretch under the weight of his skepticism. “Probably just a—”
“Shh.”
It’s dead quiet around us. I yank my phone from my back pocket again, but before I can process what I’m doing, my heart skips. The white rectangle in the top right corner, which was full only a moment ago, sits at the halfway point now.
“Holy shit.”
“What? What happened?” Charlie asks.
“My phone! It dropped half the battery.”
He hesitates. “Okay? And? Did you forget to plug it in overnight?”
“I checked it a second ago and it was full! Something here drained my charge.”
“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation—”
“Yeah. Ghosts,” I hiss, swinging my backpack off my shoulder.
“If this happened at home on the couch, you’d be calling the Apple Store. But since we’re in this creepy-ass place it’s ghosts? What does a ghost want with your phone battery anyway, Win? C’mon.”