Eye of the Storm (22 page)

Alex taps a button on the DataSlate to bring up the storm's projected path.

The track makes it pass north of Placid Meadows—everything
does—but then the storm's path swings east, and Alex's body tenses beside me.

“The farm,” he whispers. “It's going straight for the farm.” He squints at the screen, then looks up at me, his eyes bright with fear.

“It's okay, Alex. Their alert will have gone off, too,” Risha says. “They're probably already in the safe room.”

Alex wheels around to face her. “There
is
no alert at my house. Mom and Dad's DataSlates are still buried under the wooden beams from the porch. And the safe room . . . the safe room door hasn't even been replaced yet.” He stands so fast his chair clatters over. He grabs his DataSlate, trips over the backpacks on the floor, scoops his up, and flings open the door. “I have to go warn them.”

I catch his sleeve. “Wait!” My throat is dry, and the colors of the radar are still dancing in front of my eyes.

“
What
?”

I swallow hard. The storm is enormous. What if it's one of Dad's? The thought makes me want to pound my fists and scream. But more than that, it makes me want to help. I unplug my DataSlate from the system and shove it into my backpack.

“I'm coming with you.”

I race for our bikes leaning against the library, but Alex grabs my elbow. “No bikes. We can't take them through the gap in the fence.”

“I'll come too.” Risha's voice wavers in a way I've never heard before. “Just . . . let me check in with my parents so they don't freak.”

“There's no time. But go. Track the storm from your house; it'll help in case we can't get a strong signal out there once it gets bad.” I give her a quick, tight hug. “Keep your DataSlate on. We'll call.”

I turn and run with Alex out the gate, all the way to the fence.

“When you ran that track on the storm, how fast was it moving? How long do we have?” I ask as he climbs through to the other side.

“Looked like twenty minutes, max.”

By the time we reach the tree that bridges the river, my heart sounds like thunder in my ears. We have to slow down to cross.

One foot.

Then the next ahead of it.

The river is swollen and fast.

Thunder booms to the north, and in front of me, Alex teeters.

“Careful!” I grab the strap of his backpack to steady him. He reaches back to take my hand and doesn't let go, even after we've reached solid ground on the other side. We run, and he squeezes my hand as if holding on will keep the storm away.

But it doesn't.

When we reach the farm, loose bits of roofing from the last storm are flying up from the ground like ghosts out of a grave. The chickens are out of the temporary pen Alex and his dad built, clucking around in a panic. A stack of wood that used to be barn walls and hayloft floor groans in the wind and topples, and the chickens scatter in an explosion of feathers.

“Mom! Dad! Julia!” Alex calls into the trailer his uncle brought over so they'd have somewhere to sleep while they rebuilt. There's no answer. “Newton!”

“They had to have gotten the warning somehow! They must've left already!” I shout over a gust of wind that pushes me toward the remains of the house.

Alex runs to the trailer door and flings it open, still shouting. He tugs it shut, but the wind blasts it back open and rips the flimsy aluminum door from its frame. It clatters across the dust and comes to rest against an uprooted tree from the last storm.

“Alex, they're gone! I'm sure they're safe somewhere!”

But he's not listening. His eyes are focused beyond me, off to the north, and his mouth is gaping open.

I turn around in time to see the sky shape itself into a nightmare.

A wall of death-black cloud sits on the horizon. Slow-swirling charcoal fingers reach down from it. They point to the ground,
hungry for dust and trees and buildings. The fingers close into thick fists, swirling, churning toward the farms.

I watch, transfixed, as the drifting clouds organize themselves into a thick funnel, spinning faster and faster, stretching closer and closer to earth until it touches, and there's an explosion of dirt and tree limbs, a second swirling circle around the tornado.

The monster barrels on toward two houses, a silo, a barn.

“No. No,” I whisper, as if it might hear me and change its mind. As if anything with a soul could tear the roof off a house, hurl the walls off into fields, and keep marching on.

The tornado plows through a field, sucks up barn pieces. Nourished by splintered wood and twisted tractor metal, it grows. And I feel like I'm shrinking, about to be swallowed up. Was this the kind of storm Grandma Athena drove out into the night she died?

A flash of blue-bright-white pops at the edge of the funnel. An electrical explosion? A natural gas line?

A shower of sparks rains out one side of the surging mass of dark cloud. Pieces of roof and support beams and window frames swirl around the heart of the storm, tossed aside every so often when it's sick of playing with them.

Whose house was that?

Did they make it to a safe room?

Is the safe room still there?

“Come on!” Alex starts to run.“We have to get to shelter!”

I shout over the wind,“I thought your safe room door was—”

“Watch it!” Alex grabs my arm and yanks so hard I fall backward
into the swirling dirt, just in time to miss being blindsided by a piece of barn siding that whips past in the wind. I land on my backpack, and a corner of my DataSlate jabs into my shoulder blade. I cry out, half in pain, half in fear that it's broken. But there's no time to check. Alex pulls me up, and we start running again.

“Our safe room's no good.” He ducks into the trees past the clearing where the gazebo used to be. “We need to get to Tomas's place. We'll bang on the door and hope they hear.”

Over our heads, trees bend and groan, grinding against one another in the wind. When they can't bend any more, a loud, deep crack splits the air, then smaller cracks as a tree falls, snapping branches in its path.

We burst out of the clearing in time to see the door ripped from the barn at Tomas's farm. It flies and bounces, top over bottom, cartwheeling across the field.

“Over here!” Alex pulls me toward the farmhouse door and bangs with both fists. “Tomas! Mr. Hazen! TOMAS!!”

Alex jiggles the lock one last time, then backs up to the driveway. “Stand back.” He runs, throws his shoulder at the door. There's a sick thud of flesh and bone on a solid surface but no crack of wood splintering.

“Hold on!” I run to the barn, though the opening where the door used to be, and look wildly around. Flying branches have already smashed two windows, and wind screams through the broken glass, churning loose hay into a frenzy.

There! Still hanging on the wall is an ax, and I lunge for it, trying
not to think of what the storm at Alex's barn did to the tools on the wall, how it collected them like a cache of weapons and drove them into the wood, blades first.

“Here!” I run back out and practically throw it into Alex's hands. He raises it over his head and swings.

THWACK!

The wood splinters on the first hit.

He aims lower, closer to the lock.

THWACK!

THWACK!

Beads of sweat fly from his forehead in the wind, and his breathing is fast and heavy, but he swings again—

THWACK!

—and the door makes a loud
CRACK!

He kicks once, twice, and the third time it falls. “Go!” He pushes me ahead of him. “To the right and down!”

The safe room door is obvious—the only one plated in doublere-inforced steel.

It's locked.

Alex shoves me aside and bangs until the heels of his hands start bleeding.

“They can't hear!” I scream, because the wind here is louder. “We need to go someplace else!”

“There is nowhere else!” Alex shouts.

I see the wooden board a fraction of a second before it hits the window. “Alex!”

I pull him down on top of me as it crashes through the glass.
The board flies over us and pierces the video screen in the living room.

“We have to go!” I pull him toward the door.

“The truck!” Next to the barn is a green pickup, miraculously, still unharmed, and we push back out into the wind. The whirling dust stings my eyes, and tears dry on my face as I run.

“Get in!” Alex screams, and runs to the driver's side.

I reach for the handle and fight the wind to pull open the door, but this is no shelter. Even a smaller tornado could pick it up and fling it a quarter of a mile.

I force the door closed, panting, and stare through the windshield.

My heart drops right into my stomach.

The tornado is closer, wider, swirling faster than before.

Right behind it is a second one.

Not far off to the left is a third.

All of them, NF5's, at least.

All of them heading straight for us.

The truck's engine rumbles to life. “You have
keys
?” I stare. It's an old-time ignition—no fingerprint panel.

“These keys are always in the truck! Hold on!” Alex flings his backpack onto the seat between us, yanks the truck into reverse, and jerks us away from the barn. The tires spin, and we fly down the driveway onto the main road, away from the storm.

The DataSlate in my backpack pokes into my hurt shoulder, but I leave it on. Somehow, I can't let go of it right now, even to put it next to me on the seat. I reach for my seat belt, and Alex almost laughs—as if seat belts will protect us from the storm—but he puts his on, too.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“I don't know.” His jaw looked so set, his eyes burned with so much confidence driving out of there that I was sure he'd have an answer, but he's as terrified as I am, and for a moment, all that matters is easing that fear for him. I try to make my voice as light as it can possibly be with three tornadoes gunning for us in the rearview mirror.

“Since when do fourteen-year-olds drive?”

He brakes to go around a sharp turn. “I've been driving this thing since I was eleven. Tomas and I'd sneak out and run it up and down the dirt roads while his dad was working in the barn.” He almost smiles.

“Well, I guess that comes in handy when—”

He slams on the brakes so we don't hit a twisted piece of swing set that must have blown out of someone's yard. The seat belt catches me, and my shoulder stings.

“You okay?” Alex asks.

I don't answer. I'm staring at the piece of swing set, three twisted metal support bars coming off a crosspiece that still has a swing attached. The painted wooden seat is splintered, but not so much that you can't see the painted handprints that decorate it.

A big green hand. A smaller blue hand. And two tiny prints, pink and purple.

Whose handprints are these? Are they safe?

How many more swing sets and barns and houses will be swallowed up before this night is through?

Alex drives around it, and I twist in my seat to look back.

The three tornadoes are lined up, still coming our way, but something is different. It looks like they've slowed down, maybe even stopped. Will they die out before they get to Alex's farm?
Oh, please, please.
I stare out the rear window at the funnels growing more distant.

But instead of relief, I feel a chill of terror. They may have stopped, but they are growing. Churning with more intense energy. And they are coming together.

Oh, God, make them stop, make them stop.
I try to pray them away, will them to be sucked back up into the sky before they do any more harm. But even as I pray, I recognize what is happening . . . three tornadoes that merge. The monster that hit Paris in 2020. A sick feeling swirls in my gut.

This is no act of God.

“Alex, look.”

He puts a shaking hand over my seat and twists to stare behind him. “Ten-ten-twenty,” he breathes.

Stalled for a moment, the three tornadoes dance, whirling, crunching, spinning closer together and apart, together and apart, until two of them touch, like tops spinning on a table that collide. But these tornadoes don't stop spinning; they swallow each other up, fatter, stronger, and hungrier. Even though they're not here yet, the wind is picking up.

“We have to get out of here!” Alex throws the truck into gear. “Maybe we can get back to the campus, or maybe—”

“Alex! You
know
this storm!” The truck shakes in a gust of wind, and I fling my arm back, pointing at the swelling monster behind us. “You know what it did in '20. It's going to start moving again any minute. It's going do the same thing unless somebody stops it!”

“We have to find shelter!” he screams. “We can't stop that thing! I'm taking us back to campus, or Risha's place, or—”

He turns to the left, back toward the entrance to Placid Meadows, but I reach over, grab the steering wheel, and jerk it to the right instead, toward the curve in the road that leads to StormSafe.

“What are you doing?!”

“Just go!” A thick branch flies out of the woods toward the driver's side window. Alex stomps on the accelerator, and instead of bursting through the glass, the branch clangs into the metal truck bed.

“Go!” I urge him on, and he keeps driving until we reach the first sign for StormSafe. Then he slams on the brakes. “Jaden, what are you
doing
? We need shelter, and this locked compound isn't it. We'll be trapped outside, and even if we get in, what are we supposed to do?” He pounds his hand on the steering wheel and winces. “We need to get to a safe room now! We can't stop this thing!”