Eye of the Storm (15 page)

I try not to look too happy. “They probably figured they should head for a safe room.” The sky looks grayer and greener, more menacing than it did a few minutes ago.

“Well, boo,” she says. Then she grabs my hand. “That's okay. I still want to show you something.” She ducks between two vintage tractors with steering wheels for actual people who'd drive them and ride around on them. Then she bends down and tugs at a big metal ring sticking up from the floor. “Help me with this, will you?”

I wrap my hand around the cool metal, too, and pull. A creaky panel of wood lifts up from the floor—a trapdoor.

“Check this out.” Risha climbs down a metal-runged ladder and fades into the dark.

I wait for her to pop up again, but she doesn't.

“Are you coming back?” I call, squatting by the swung-open door. My voice sounds echoey and cold. The skies have opened up now, and rain is pelting the roof like a mad drummer. The wind blows a flurry of wet, battered leaves through the open door, and I shiver, even though the air is still warm. “Risha, I want to go home.”

She doesn't answer.

I stand up, shake out my knees, and head for the barn door. I'm about to step out into the rain when a colossal bolt of lightning cracks through the sky, close enough that the tiny hairs on the back of my neck tingle. Thunder follows half a second later—a sharp, deep crack that shakes the whole barn.

Wind rattles the windows, and outside, tree branches are starting to snap. The sky is dark. Too dark.

Don't let this happen now. Not with us out here.

There's no way I can leave now. I turn away from the pounding rain and call again, “Risha?”

Something knocks on the barn roof. Again. And then two knocks turn into frantic pounding, beating on the roof, and outside, hailstones the size of my fist pummel the dirt.

The sky explodes in light and thunder again. Vibrations shake the barn.

And then there's another sound.

A growing roar that rumbles through my body.

I run for the trapdoor.

I don't know what's down there, but I know what's coming, and I can't be in this room full of sharp metal tools when it hits.

I step onto the ladder, cling to the cool metal rungs, and lower myself, step by trembling step. Above me, where the trapdoor is flopped open, the square of light flashes with lightning. The whole foundation of the building seems to shudder, and the wind blows through the door, through gaps in the beams, with a high-pitched whine that makes me shiver.

Without stopping to think, I climb back up the ladder rungs
into the barn and tug on the handle of the trapdoor. It's solid wood, and I can barely move it, but throwing all my weight against it, I'm able to lug it up from the barn floor, ease back down onto the ladder, and let the door thump shut over my head.

I know I am on the ladder with three, maybe four rungs to climb down, but the darkness feels too thick to move through. Even with the heavy wooden door closed over my head, I can hear the wind roar.

“Risha!” I call, but her name echoes back at me off the floor.

I take a shuddery breath and blink hard, but my eyes don't adjust, so still swallowed in the dark, I start climbing down again.

The rusty metal scratches my palms. I hold on tight, concentrating on that as I lower myself one rung at a time.

Down, down, down, until I see a sliver of light off to one side. I follow it down a long hallway with cool stone walls, and the roar of the wind grows muffled. The light brightens, and finally, I get to the source, a room at the end of the long hall. I push the heavy, half-shut door until it swings open.

“You came down!” Risha is lounging on a daybed. Rock music plays from speakers mounted on the walls. She pats the seat next to her. “Isn't this so perfect?”

I step into the room, and the door swings shut behind me with a thick, wooden thud that makes me jump.
Perfect?
She's bouncing lightly on the daybed, grinning, while the storm rages outside. I can't hear it way down here, but I know it's still there.

She reaches for a bottle of water—there are cases of them, rows of canned goods and packages of all kinds of food. Might as well be
comfortable if you're stuck in a tiny room, pretending everything's all right.

“Jaden, we're fine here. What's wrong?”

What's wrong?
I open my mouth to answer her, but nothing comes out. This. This is wrong, I think. This world where people have to run for shelter nearly every afternoon, where most people live in fear that this storm—this one—might be the one that destroys everything. This world, where a handful of people are so used to being safe, so used to living inside StormSafe's little bubble, that they never worry at all.

“What is this?” I finally ask. “It doesn't look like a regular safe room.”

“It's an old bomb shelter from the 1960s. Isn't it the best? It's just like a safe room, really—concrete walls, reinforced with steel. I think this must be what the StormSafe houses were based on.” She grabs a package of chocolate sandwich cookies from the shelf above her, tears it open, and shoves a whole one in her mouth.

“Want one?” She holds the package out to me. Cookies. In the middle of a storm that looks like it could devour us whole. My stomach twists, and I shake my head.

I strain my ears for the sounds of the storm, but I can't sort anything out anymore. The fluorescent light overhead flickers. What's going on up there?

“Sure you don't want one?” she asks.

“How can you sit there eating cookies?” I blurt out.

She swallows. “We hang out here all the time. It's fine. Tomas and Alex and I kind of took this place over, so we always—”

The music stops and the lights go out, and it feels like the blackness swallows up Risha, too, because she never finishes her sentence. The roar whooshes louder, and the wind isn't low, loud static anymore. It's growling, hissing, popping over our heads.

I reach out for Risha in the blackness, where I hope her hand might be. It's cool and damp. An edge of her fingernail scratches my palm.

“Has this ever happened when you were here before?” I whisper.

“No.” She squeezes my hand. “But Alex told me he rode out a storm here once. We'll be okay.” But her voice is quiet. Not so confident. Not so Risha.

I don't let go of her hand.

It sounds like the storm is chewing its way through the building over our heads, spitting out mouthfuls of metal, crunching wood into splinters.

I close my eyes and open them again. It looks exactly the same.

Black and terrifying and loud.

When I was little, afraid of the dark, Mom used to tell me that nothing could ever be as scary as the monsters in my imagination, that all my nightmares would vanish when she turned on the light. But this time, I already know that's not true. I am imagining a monster upstairs, and I'm afraid—so afraid—that reality will be a million times worse.

I squeeze Risha's hand and hear her ragged breath. I lean closer, and she rests her head against my shoulder, the smell of chocolate cookies on her breath mixing with something else. Sweat. Or fear.

The monster roars louder. How long can the barn hold out?

Glass shatters over our heads. Something splinters, crackle by sharp crackle by groan. Is it the support beam right above us? The barn roof? A wall? Whatever it is creaks, moans a long final moan, and then CRACKS.

Is it broken? Gone?

The wind doesn't answer; it only screams and roars.

Until finally, the sounds fade.

I don't know how long we sit. Long enough for chaos to turn to distant rumbling and then silence.

Long enough for our pounding hearts to sound like cannons in the dark.

We huddle together without moving, without speaking a word, and somewhere inside, I begin to understand what has happened. Even Risha, with all her StormSafe confidence, knows this was no everyday storm. It was bad. But we sit in the dark, still holding hands, both under the spell of the same fairy tale lie.

If you don't look, it won't hurt.

It you don't turn on the lights, you'll never see the monster.

If we stay here in the blackness, if we never go up to see what happened, then maybe it never happened at all.

But then come the sounds.

Quiet at first.

Uneven. Stopping and starting footsteps.

Creaking. Lifting. Wood-sliding-against-wood.

A voice so faint I can't tell whose it is or what it's saying. But the
tone is unmistakable. The raw edge, the desperation. Someone needs help.

“Risha?” I start to pull my hand away from her, but she holds on. I wiggle my hand free and stand.

I still can't see, but I hear the daybed creak and know she's standing to follow me. I slide a hand against the cool dampness of the wall until I feel the doorframe and take a step out into the hall.

“I'm scared,” Risha whispers, and admitting that is so not-Risha that a wave of cold terror races through me. What's waiting for us out there?

“Me, too.” We feel our way down the still-night-black hallway, scuffing our feet all the way to the end. The toe of my sneaker bumps something that makes a dull metal clang.

The ladder.

“Ready to go up?”

I wait until I feel her closer to me, feel her shoulder brushing against mine. I take hold of a cold metal rung and start climbing.

Risha's right behind me; her hand brushes my ankle every couple of rungs.

At the top, I keep one hand clutched around a ladder rung. With the other, I reach over my head to push on the spot where the trapdoor should open.

It doesn't budge.

“Can you steady me?”

“Hold on.” I feel one of Risha's arms wrap around my calves to help me stay balanced on the rung. I let go of the ladder and use
both hands to push up as hard as I can, until I'm sure my face is bursting red.

There is nothing at first—as if the door's been sealed. I give it another big push, and then, a crack of light appears.

I bend my knees and push harder. Something slides off the tilting door onto the floor, and the crack grows wider, until the light opens up into a bright, narrow beam of sun. The trapdoor swings wide, thuds down on the barn floor, and there is light. Bright, blinding yellow-white light, like we've flopped open the door to heaven.

I step up another rung and see I am wrong. So wrong.

This is as far from heaven as a world can be.

The light is so bright because there is nothing between us and the sky.

The barn is gone.

Gone, except for half a wall whose skeleton teeters, creaking as if it's in pain. A splintered wooden rod sticks out from the middle of the wall—it wasn't there before—and somehow in the midst of this chaos, I am fixated on it.

I crawl up out of the hole in the floor, my knees scraping over splintered wood, and rise, shaking, to my feet.

I climb over twisted metal, boards, and beams, through wood splinters and feathers and dust—up to the wall where the wooden rod sticks straight out.

It is the pitchfork I'd seen hanging from a hook on the other wall, part of the tidy row of tools, all lined up before the storm.

I wrap my hands around the handle and pull. I hang on it with all my body weight.

It doesn't move.

I breathe, hoarse and deep, and rest my hand on a ragged beam. It feels as if it's the only thing holding me up. I hold on as if the winds might return any second and blow me away, and slowly, I turn away from this piece of wall.

Around it, beams lay scattered over one another like pickup sticks tossed by a giant.

An ax is embedded in what must have been one of the main support beams. Shreds of roofing litter the foundation like bits of paper torn to shreds.

The tractor is gone. Way down near the driveway, I make out a mass of twisted red metal wrapped around a tree.

Risha is frozen halfway up the ladder, clutching the trapdoor frame so hard I worry the metal edge will cut her hand.

“Rish?” I call. But she won't come up. She's in shock.

“Risha?”

She stares. Blinks hard. Squeezes her eyes closed. Opens them again.

I know what she is trying to do.

It doesn't work.

It's all still here.

And then the voice returns, clearer this time, but ragged and choked.

“Newton! Newton!”

I turn toward the farmhouse, or where the farm house would have been, and suck in my breath. The concrete safe room is all
that's left, but I can breathe after I count the figures coming out of it. Alex's parents. His little sister, Julia. Tomas.

Alex climbs over the debris, and even from here, I see his tearstained face.

“Newton! Newton, come on, boy!”

“Alex!” I call from the barn, and he whirls around as if I'm a ghost or another storm. I don't care; I start running, tripping over twisted metal tools and clambering over splintered boards until I reach him. I want to throw my arms around him.

But I don't.

“I . . . let me help you,” I say.

“Where were you?”

“In that room under the barn. With Risha.”

“Where is she?”

“She's okay.” I turn to the barn where finally, Risha is rising up from the shelter, ladder rung by ladder rung.

When I turn back to Alex, his face is twisted in pain. “I could hear him barking,” he whispers. “But we had to close the door.” He turns and heads toward a high pile of debris that looks like it might have been the garage once. “Newton!”

He is flinging boards, and tears burn my eyes. If Newton is under there . . .

“Alex . . .” His father's quiet voice cuts through the clattering wood. He stands at the edge of the heap of house pieces, shakes his head, and holds out his arms. Alex collapses into them, sobbing.

“Is there anything we can do?” whispers Risha, who's made her way over to the safe room that still stands.