That was where he lived now, after Nick. In the static. In the gap.
At some point, he’d replaced driving with football. There was a mindless repetitiveness to it – and, as an added bonus, it gave him something to hit and permission to hit hard. Hanging with Baz and Matt served the same function. He laughed, he partied, he steered them away from felonies, and he let the fog fill him up and hide what needed to be hidden. It frightened him sometimes, how easy it was to pretend.
He’d never been to Nick’s grave.
Now there was a funnel in the sky, and it cut through the fog. Something was coming, and he wasn’t about to ride it out with strangers while his mind turned over images of tractors, horses, parents spinning into the sky. If he was going to lose something else – like the only two people left who meant anything at all – better to lose himself with them. And maybe this time, if the damn truck would go faster, he would get there in time to save the day. It was stupid and reckless, and he didn’t much care.
West had never imagined himself living anywhere other than Oleander – had never conceived of himself as separate from the place and people that shaped his life. But after Nick, there had been times when he wanted to aim the car at the horizon, gun the engine, and go. The impulse was still there. The impulse was strong.
Maybe the crazy was still there, too, much as he’d thought he’d numbed it into submission. Because part of him wanted to turn the truck around. To arrow into the spinning black and let it lift him away.
If you live in Kansas, you know how to handle yourself in a tornado. Get to the basement, preferably the northeast corner, though there are those who believe that a myth. If without a basement, get to the lowest point in the house. Protect yourself beneath something heavy and hard: a desk, a table, an overturned bathtub. If outside, get out of your car, stay clear of overpasses. Lie flat in a ditch. Pray.
Oleander was prepared – as prepared as it was possible to be for two-hundred-mile-per-hour torquing winds. There were protocols, instructional pamphlets, emergency kits, backup generators; there were warning systems and sirens and storm cellars. There were advance warnings from the local weather station, and warnings from the weather itself, at least for those who knew what it meant when the air went still, the pressure dropped, the birds stopped singing, and the sky turned a funny yellow-green. But some months there were warnings nearly every day. You could set your clock by them. You couldn’t duck down to the cellar every time some waxy-haired forecaster warned you bad luck might be on the way.
You waited. For the rains to come, the winds to pick up, the black clouds to roll in, the sirens to blare. The average tornado moves across the land at thirty miles per hour. Which means a funnel spotted from a mile away offered two minutes for life-saving measures. If you’re lucky enough to have any on hand.
But not everyone had a storm cellar to flee to.
Not everyone could get to it in time.
Not everyone wanted to.
This is my time.
This is my calling.
Ellie heard her name on the wind, and Ellie was afraid.
That was all right. Abraham had feared what would come of taking Isaac up the mountain; Daniel had feared the lion, the wild hunger, the teeth that awaited him in the dark.
She raised her face to black sky. The rain hurt, but it washed away her tears. The streets had emptied themselves of life, and in the windblown darkness, Oleander turned alien. A barren and hostile landscape; a town at the end of the world. It seemed to take hours to traverse the six blocks between her house and the Church of the Word, but there it was, stony and unbowed by the storm. A single ray of sunlight poked through the dark and glinted off the stained-glass windows, as if to confirm her calling.
The doors were unlocked: she went inside.
The church had been rebuilt bigger and better, with a soaring arched ceiling ringed by biblical scenes in a rainbow of stained glass. The windows were even grander than those in the original church, twice as high and twice as colorful. But today the windows all seemed the same shade of black. She flicked the lights, but nothing happened. The power had blown, and the nave would bear the storm in the dark. So would Ellie.
She’d spent years waiting for God to answer, wondering how it would come if, when, it did. A voice in the darkness; a burning bush; a vision; a sign. Perhaps something subtle she’d been too lazy or too vain to see, missing her chance forever. But when it came, it came without intermediaries. There was no voice. Just a truth, a knowing, as soon as the storm began. The church needed her; He needed her. Tonight, neither of them would be alone.
The pews were made of burnished red oak. She chose a bench midway between the doors and the sanctuary, and watched the cross. Remembering.
Only Ellie knew what had happened that day in the church, why it had caught fire when it did. Only Ellie knew evil had made its way into the old church. She would not let it cross this threshold.
Wind battered stone. Above, a window shattered, and glass showered the nave. Ellie felt a hot pain on her cheek, and the trickle of blood, but then the water came and washed this away, as it had her tears.
She was allowed to be afraid, she reminded herself, feeling very small in the dark.
She was not allowed to crawl under the pew, curl into a ball, cradle her head in her arms, and try, in some small, useless way, to save herself. The Lord would spare her, or He wouldn’t. It was His choice, as He had chosen this as her place.
Unless she was wrong.
And she was nuts.
The ground shuddered; the air smothered her; a deep sonic boom rattled her bones. And then, from above, there was a great tearing sound, as if the universe were rending itself in two. She forced herself to stay in her seat, to tip her head toward the arching roof, the stained-glass windows, the dome of stone.
It was gone. All of it neatly sheared away. There was nothing above her but a swirling tunnel of cloud and debris.
Ellie screamed.
But she would not look away from the face of God.
Grace Tuck knew better. Hadn’t her parents drilled her on storm-survival strategy since she was five years old? Get to the cellar, Gracie. Ride out the storm.
She no longer went by Gracie. That was a child’s name – and she was old enough now to do the right thing in case of emergency. It was only because thirteen was old enough to know better that her parents left her alone overnight. Not because they didn’t care what happened to her, definitely not that. But because they trusted she could take care of herself.
She imagined them driving through the storm, rushing home to protect their remaining child. The wind blowing their car from one lane to the other, their headlights useless in the curtain of rain. They would be arguing – they were always arguing. And maybe her mother would take her eyes off the road for just a second, or maybe the sky would reach down, close them into its cloudy fist, and carry them away. Grace supposed the idea should worry her. Instead, she turned it over in her head with a clinical fascination: What if they never came back? Would anything change?
People assumed she was still grieving her brother. That Owen was the reason she never smiled. It didn’t occur to them that when Owen left, he’d taken her parents with him. They were the ones she wanted back: The father who woke her up by tickling her feet and teased her with riddles over the dinner table and swung her upside down until she stopped complaining she was too old for such things and started to laugh. The mother who insisted she make her bed and put potato chips on her pizza and read to her every night – Judy Blume and Jane Austen and Shakespeare, with a sprinkling of Dr. Seuss. When Owen was born, Grace had worried the baby might wreck everything. But she hadn’t known what broken meant. Not then. Nor had she known what it would be like when the people who were supposed to care about you more than anyone in the world no longer cared about anything.
Somewhere above her, the windows rattled in the wind. She wasn’t worried about broken glass. That was no threat to her hiding spot, the
narrow space beneath Owen’s overturned crib. Even if a branch were to poke through the window, or some poor idiot’s coffee mug came hurtling into the room, the expensive maple frame and plush mattress would protect her. And if the tornado ripped the house off its foundations and sent it spiraling into space? Well, it had worked for Dorothy. There was a temptation to extricate herself from her hiding place and press her face to the windows, to see for herself exactly how bad things could get. Maybe it would be like the movie, houses and horses and tractors flying past, in transit to another world. Maybe she would even spot the Wicked Witch, pedaling toward a hell of her own making. If she opened the window, if she leaned out and let go… would she fly?
Inside her windowless room, Cass heard no wind, no sirens, no rain. But, even through the thick padded walls, she heard the screams. And the sharp reports of something that could have been gunfire.
She climbed onto the bed and tucked her knees to her chest, as if the old rules of childhood still applied: stay on the bed, and the monsters hiding in the shadows can’t get you. Somewhere beyond her walls, there was a small series of pops, and then an explosion. The bed rattled beneath her.
The lock on the door was supposed to protect the people out there from her, from the monster. She doubted it would protect her from them. They were the ones with the key.
She focused on the door, and overlooked the crack beneath it, only a few centimeters high. It had never been wide enough to reveal anything when she’d lain on the ground and peered out, longing for a glimpse of something new, even if it was just the rubber tread of a passing set of shoes – but it was wide enough for smoke.
It seeped in, slowly enough that at first the faint, acrid smell could have been her imagination, the wistful remnant of all those cigarettes she’d been too conscientious to try. But it got stronger, and it got thicker, enough to cast the room in a gray haze, enough that it burned when she drew a breath. It scraped her throat and constricted her lungs, choking her voice so that there was nothing left but sad, hoarse whimpers by the time she thought to pound her fists against the door and scream.
The day had been shit to start with, and things had only gotten worse from there. The parasite had woken her up when he’d stumbled into the trailer a couple of hours before dawn, reeking of beer and cheap perfume. Since the idiot was too piss drunk or too lazy to find his way without knocking over a stack of dirty dishes and cursing as he crunched through the broken glass, the sun had risen over yet another scene of domestic bliss. Jule’s mother and the parasite screamed at each other until they got bored, then turned on Jule. Somehow, the fight became her fault, and it didn’t help that she had to endure it in a pair of boxers, all too conscious of the parasite’s gaze playing across her bare thighs. She knew better, but had suffered enough summer nights beneath thick, baggy sweats. That night, the hottest of the summer, it had seemed worth the risk.
He hadn’t raised a hand against her mother yet, which was unusual, and maybe why Annie Prevette had taken the even more unusual step of marrying this one. She talked of having another kid. “A sister for you, baby,” she told Jule, with an embarrassing giggle. “Like you always wanted.” Annie was fond of making up things that Jule had always wanted, especially when they complemented the things that Annie herself desired. On this latest wedding day, decked out in a yellowing dress made all the dingier by the fluorescent lighting of the county clerk’s office, she had squeezed Jule into a lily-scented hug and whispered, “I finally did it, baby. I found you a dad.”
She hadn’t noticed the way the parasite looked at Jule.
For most of the year, Jule showered in the school locker room, sliding in and out of the cold spray before the jocks rolled in from morning practice. But in the summer, she was pretty much stuck with the trailer’s privacy-free stall, unless she wanted to tote her soap and towel down to the swampy lakes that lay just beyond the edge of the trailer camp. Most mornings, she did. The water was cold and left a gloss of slime on her skin, but it was worth it for the privacy. The swamps and surrounding wood were considered Prevette territory. The only people who ventured into them with any regularity were the Prevette brothers themselves, and then only during hunting season, when they’d worked themselves into enough of a frenzy to lay down their test tubes and load up their arms. Turkey season was over, deer season was yet to start, and though squirrels were fair game year-round, the Prevettes considered rodents beneath them. (Or maybe, as was whispered around town, they didn’t think it right to shoot their own.)
She’d forgotten discovery was possible… until, about to rinse the shampoo from her hair, she heard them. Tires crunching gravel, roaring diesel engine, the hoots of drunken morons. She made it into the bushes just as the pickup skidded to a stop and the guys piled out of the truck. Five of them, all football thugs. They’d spent nearly an hour laughing and shoving and farting and trying to light empty beer cans on fire while she cowered, dripping and naked behind a beautyberry bush, all too clear on what would happen if they found her there, too angry to be afraid. Imagine their faces if she rose from the bush like a miracle, five foot two inches of bare skin, daring them to do anything but get the hell out of her swamp.
She hadn’t done it. And when they finally drove away, the rage lingered. When three of the thugs appeared in the drugstore that afternoon, it was almost a gift. A second chance. Except that once again, all she’d done was run away.
Now here she was, hiding for the third time, in a cramped closet with this boy Daniel’s scrawny body wrapped around her, as if his lean arms and brittle bones would somehow protect her own. And she let him do it, play protector, imagine that he could stop the wind.
She had to get out of this town. That was her prime directive, the necessity that drove her through every day. Jule had a lifetime of reasons to hate Kansas, but topping her list was its landscape, its sameness, the way the yellow-green prairie droned on and on as if to bully the eye into accepting that there was and could be nothing else. A world of flatness and corn, a life of leaky trailers and arrest records: all resistance futile. Bad enough she had to live in Oleander; she refused to die here.
The closet was tiny and crowded with cleaning supplies. Not enough space for one person, much less two. A mop handle jabbed her back, and everything smelled like bleach. Outside, it sounded like the world was coming to an end. They stayed put.
“It’ll be okay,” Daniel said, sounding unconvinced.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know, but —”
“But you thought if you said it out loud like you did, that would, what? Make it true?” She didn’t know why she felt such an urge to be a bitch. It probably had something to do with the prospect of getting blown out of existence – and doing so like this, in a closet, with a stranger and a mop.
“I thought I should comfort you.”
She laughed. And the blessed dark meant he wouldn’t see the flush that crept across her face. Comfort her. When was the last time someone had dared try that?
“So what if it’s not?” she said.
“Not comforting?”
“Not okay. Let’s say we die here. Right now.”
“That’s not going to —”
“The roof caves in and I get hit in the head and die, like, instantly. But you’re trapped under the debris, and your legs are crushed, and —”
“Can you please stop?”
“—you just have to lie there, next to my corpse, waiting.” She didn’t want to stop. She wanted to push him and push him until the ridiculous Dudley Do-Right facade broke and something real came through. “And you can hear them above you, search and rescue, but you’re too weak to scream, and you lie there day after day until the oxygen runs out and you —”
“Enough.” There was no anger, only exhaustion. Like he expected her crap, everyone’s crap, and had long ago decided to roll over and take it. “Please.”
“What do you think would be the worst thing?”
Silence.
“I’d guess dying a virgin.”
Nothing.
“You are a virgin, right?” Sometimes she hated herself.
But it won her a sigh. “What are you trying to do?”
“Comfort you,” she said.
And, to her surprise, he laughed. He had a nice one. It was lighter than the rest of him. It made her hate herself just a little less.
It seemed like they were done talking then. His breathing was quiet, like the rest of him.
“I’ve done that, you know,” he said. “Lie next to a corpse.”
“I know that,” she said, because everyone did.
“It’s not like you imagine it. Not like in the movies or anything. Dead people. Bodies. They’re… it’s not like the movies.”