Bloodstained Oz (3 page)

The sky roiled with black clouds, a tidal wave of storm that swept
slowly toward them. Black fingers reached down from the sky and traced across
the ground. She had seen tornadoes before, of course, but never this close.
Four thin strands of dust and filth spread apart and cut into the land from
each point of the compass. Darkness danced madly where they touched the arid
earth and brought the promise of sudden, violent death.

The sky howled and Elisa climbed from the seat, holding her son to her
chest. She went around to the back of the wagon and clambered through the
curtain flaps that hung there, Jeremiah in one arm. Stefan shouted to the
horses, got them moving again, and coaxed them along, heading off of the road
and across a barren field.

She quickly strapped down the few items that were not already tied in
place, resisting the urge to throw Stefan’s elixirs out through the back while
he was too occupied to notice. In the wagon, some of the many crucifixes he
had collected in his travels swayed from their chains and on hooks. Through
the small window she could see a man dancing madly, waving his arms as he
whirled in tight circles.

Jeremiah removed his mouth from her nipple and belched, looking up at
her with all the trust and love in the world. She smiled at her little boy and
then looked out the window again in time to see the lunatic dancer careen
toward the wagon. Elisa almost screamed but instead merely sighed when she
realized it was merely a scarecrow broken free from his post. The canvas face
smashed against the window and black button eyes stared at her for a moment
before the wind stole back its dancing partner.           

Elisa held on to her son with both of her arms as the wagon rocked and
swayed dangerously toward the left. Through the window she caught a quick
glimpse of a farmhouse, and a second later of the monstrous black nightmare
that tore it asunder.

Outside, doing his best to lead them to safety, Stefan held on to the
reins and cursed his horses as they whinnied in fear. Elisa closed her eyes
and held her breath as shattered boards and tar paper shingles hurtled through
the air, all that remained of a home destroyed by the fury of the storm.

Elisa lay down in the center of the wagon and sheltered her son with
her body. She had no faith in God, but she refused to believe that she and her
family would have come all of this way to die in the middle of a stretch of
ruined farmland.

A hail of debris, rocks and dust assailed the wagon and she could her
husband praying. “Please, Lord,” he called out to the howling storm. “Watch
over Elisa and Jeremiah. Protect us, keep us safe in Your hands and shelter us
from this and all obstacles. Amen.”

Elisa would not pray.

Funnel clouds moved across their path and blocked every possible method
of escape. But she would not pray.

      If there ever had been a God, she felt
certain He had long since gone deaf.

Gayle Franklin swallowed the hot grit that coated her tongue and stared
at the sky with wide eyes. The air was still, and she could see the dust
falling from the air in a fog of midnight.

The storm was coming this way, a massive wall of churning dirt and
hurricane wind that was going to plow right over them. She knew she had to
move, knew every warning sign she was seeing, but her legs didn’t want to
follow orders from her head. Off in the field, she saw her father running for
the house, his legs pumping furiously and one hand held to his face, clutching
the handkerchief that made it possible for him to breathe at all in the caul of
gray dust. She could track his progress by the little clouds that rose up from
the dirt with his every step, could see his wide, frantic eyes.

“Pa…” she called, her voice breaking.

He used to be such a big man and these days he seemed as skinny as the
scarecrow she’d watched blow away. The calm was here, and the storm was on its
tail, furiously hunting for prey. She called to her father again, but her
voice was a whisper and a whole field still separated them.

Behind him the midnight clouds descended, spitting dusky shadows into
the air even before they touched the ground. That was silliness, of course, a
touch of heat fever on her brow surely, because any fool knew a tornado that
hadn’t touched down yet couldn’t have picked anything up to begin with. Any
fool from Kansas, at least.

“Run, Pa . . . run faster . . .” Gayle placed her hand on the window
and felt a chill on the glass that earlier had been hot to the touch. Far in
the distance she could see the Yancey farm, where Lorenzo and Enid Yancey had
been toiling as hard as her own folks, but with less success. Her eyes moved
from her father, closer now, so much closer than he had been before, his legs
moving almost in a blur, over to the Yancey place. She was looking directly at
buildings she had known all of her life when the tornado touched the roof of
the house like the hand of God.

Gayle stepped back from the window, rigid with horror, as the Yancey
farm disintegrated, feeding itself into the cyclone. The base of the thing had
been a tiny tendril and now was a serpentine dervish, twisting and shaking as
it roared and ripped the Yancey place apart.

She looked toward the heavens, almost expecting to see an angry face, a
horrid mouth and eyes of lightning staring back. There was only the storm, but
she was not comforted. Somehow its blank fury was worse.

Below her, the front door slammed open, the wind banging it against the
house again and again, a cavernous drum beat that startled her almost as much
as the sound of the tornado.

“Gayle! You get down here, girl! There’s a twister coming our way!”

When she heard her father’s voice she let out the breath she hadn’t
been aware of holding. Her eyes remained locked on the funnel as it writhed
and snapped at the air. For a moment she thought she saw angels in the sky,
holding the clouds at bay and struggling to protect them all.

But that couldn’t be. Angels had to be stronger than a storm, or they
wouldn’t be angels. Still she would have sworn to the Almighty Himself that
she saw winged men falling to the ground from impossible heights. Angels cast
down or demons ready to pillage the land and take whatever the twister left
behind.

“GAYLE!”

Her father’s scream snapped her out of her fearful trance and Gayle
rushed out of her bedroom into the hall. The house wasn’t safe, couldn’t
possibly be safe. She knew that as surely as she knew the view from her window
would never be the same again.

The stairs creaked and seemed to sway beneath her feet as she ran down
to the first floor, her eyes stung by the dust blowing in through the open
door, where he father stood waiting.

“We have to run, Sugar! We have to run now!”

He was thinner than when she was a child, true, but her father grabbed
Gayle in his arms and half carried her as he ran for the storm cellar. Across
the yard, her mother waited for them with one of the heavy wooden doors propped
up, straining to hold it open despite the wind. The doors led down into the
earth itself. Gayle had never liked it down there.

Beyond her mother she could see only the blackness of the dirt storm,
this terrible night that had swallowed the day, and hear little besides the
churning roar of the tornado that come down out of it and now moved toward their
home, tearing the very earth apart in its fury.

Gayle scrambled down the wooden stairs nailed into the ground and lost
herself deep in the darkness of the storm cellar, her hands trembling. Her
mother came down next and moved to her, a strong woman with a face made old
before it should have been. Her father was last, pausing only long enough to
slam the cellar doors shut, and then lock them into place with a stout
crossbeam as thick around as his own thigh.

They huddled together in the darkness, in the chill of the underground
shelter, and Gayle wondered what would be left of the farm when the storm was
done with its tantrum. She closed her eyes and clutched at the arms of her
parents as the darkness howled above them and rattled the wooden doors. Her
eyes stayed closed, sealed against the nightmares and the night.

      The morning after the dirt storm and the
tornadoes had torn their way through Hawley, Gayle awoke in the cellar under
the Franklins’ farm house. A layer of dust covered her, having slipped like
mist through the cracks around the doors and collected on everything and
everyone while the family slept.

      The doors stood wide open and the sun
shone down the steps onto the dirt floor. Gayle smiled at the sight, a strange
relief coming over her. It had been foolish—childish, she told
herself—but she had been afraid that morning would never come, that the
darkness of that storm would swallow the world and she’d have to live in the
wind and the dark forever, with the scream of the tornadoes making her clutch
her hands to the side of her head every moment.

      She had fallen asleep like that, with
her hands over her ears.

      “Momma?” Gayle said softly. She wiped
grit from her eyes as she stood up and then brushed off her dress. Suddenly
she needed very badly to pee.

      With a frown she headed for the splash
of sunlight, and then up the stairs and outside. The first thing she saw was
that a section of the south field had been plowed up by a twister, crops torn
out of the ground. The fence down that end of the property was just gone, save
a few splintered posts sticking up out of the dirt. Of the Yancey farm in the
distance, all that she could see was jagged rubble. The barn and the house had
been reduced to nothing but memories.

      Gayle stared, breath caught in her
throat. How could that be? How could they just be gone? And if the buildings
were gone, where were the Yanceys?

     
In
town
, she told herself.
They must
have gone into town
.

      “Momma?” she asked again, if only to
hear the comforting sound of her own voice. For several seconds she did not
even look around from the devastation. Then, with no response from her mother,
she started around to the front of the house.

      The windows were all open. Two of the
big ones had cracks in the glass, but hadn’t shattered. That was lucky. From
inside she heard the sounds of cabinets being opened and closed, and now she
called out louder.

      “Momma?”

      Her mother’s face appeared in a kitchen
window, a crack in the glass like a scar slicing down her cheek. “Morning,
Sugar. You still in one piece?”

      Gayle smiled, heart swelling with the
sound of her mother’s voice. “Yes, ma’am. One piece.”

      “You looked peaceful and I didn’t want
to wake you, darlin’. We’ve got a lot of work to do today. I’m trying to
clean up a bit in here, and to figure out if we’ve got anything to eat that
isn’t caked with dirt. I don’t suppose you want mud pies for breakfast?”

      The little girl rolled her eyes
heavenward. “No, ma’am. If it’s all right with you, I don’t have much
appetite for mud pies.”

      Her mother laughed softly and now Gayle
looked around. “Daddy out in the field?”

      “Looking over the damage,” she
confirmed, and then her smile faded. “We’ve still got some crops growing out
there that didn’t get choked out in the storm. Ain’t gonna be easy, but we’re
a sight better off than the Yanceys. Poor folks don’t have anything left.”

      “Are they all right?” Gayle asked, eyes
widening.

      “Believe so. Your daddy thinks they
went into town last night after the worst of it past, looking for a place to
stay.”

      Which was exactly what Gayle had
thought. She liked the idea that she and her father had come to the same
conclusion. It made her feel grown up, somehow.

      “You come on in and give me a hand, now,
little one. You hear?”

      “Yes, Momma. But I’ve got to
go
, first.”

      Her mother had begun to move away from
the window, but now her face returned, a lopsided smile turning into a soft
laugh. “Well go on, then, Gayle. You don’t need permission to pee.”

      Again she brushed at her dress, dust
clouding around her. A clear, gentle breeze carried it away. There were wisps
of white clouds in the sky, but no trace of the deadly, brutal weather that had
come through the previous afternoon and evening.

      Gayle walked along the porch and then
around the side, headed for the outhouse. Fortunately, the little hut had not
been blown over by the storm. As she walked, she peered across the farm in
search of her father. She saw a figure near the corn that she thought might be
him, but then she realized that it was just the scarecrow.

      In her mind she could still see the way
it had snapped off and pinwheeled away in the wind. Her daddy must have
repaired it already, wanting to take care of the corn, since that particular
crop had withstood the storm pretty well. If the new dirt and dust that would
have been spread across the field didn’t choke the stalks, it would be just
fine.