Tempest (#1 Destroyers Series) (3 page)

“He’s alive. Help me get him up.” Janelle
made to hook her hand under his armpit while a reedy man kneeled
down to get his other arm.

The drenched guy coughed; his purple sleeve
crept up as she helped tug him to his feet. Janelle froze in place
and stared at the arm just inches from her face. No, it couldn’t
be. But it was.

He had a familiar grayish birthmark just
below his shoulder. A birthmark in the shape of a spiral.

Onlookers’ bodies brushed against Janelle as
she hooked her arm under one of Vortex Guy’s, holding her breath
against someone’s perfume. She and the reedy man pulled him across
the lot and into the building, but his feet dragged against the
pavement and slowed them down. It was like dragging a limp puppet
along. A big,
heavy
puppet.

Janelle’s gaze went down to his left arm
again, to the gray spiral. There was no mistaking it. It looked
exactly like hers, all the way down to the dark spot in the middle.
She felt suddenly glad that she still had the bandage covering
hers, and she wasn't sure why.

Her dad waved the suffocating crowd towards
the walls. He swallowed with nerves, something he should have been
doing earlier today. “Back up. Give the poor kid some room.”

The rest was a blur as she helped the man
pull the boy through the doors. Bodies and lamps retracted with
scraping sounds as a bare circle formed on the floor. Silence fell
through the crowd except for someone’s heavy breathing.

Now she needed something to put him on. A
blanket. But why was everyone just standing and gawking?
Oh
yeah,
she remembered. The bystander effect. It seemed Janelle
was the only one not under its spell.

“I’ll get a blanket down for him. Here.” She
motioned to her father as he took the guy’s arm. Janelle spread the
nearest blanket out on the cool tile.

Her dad swallowed again and pulled the boy’s
purple sleeve down over the gray spiral, but he said nothing. The
newcomer coughed, lurching for the blanket like a fish trying to
flop back into water. Vortex Guy fell onto his stomach with a
thud.

He was dying. Janelle’s heart thumped. First
aid. He needed first aid. That class she’d taken last
summer...drowning…vomiting…choking…what to use? He was breathing,
so no Heimlich maneuver. She gripped him on the shoulder, pulling
it off the blanket. “Roll him onto his side, so if he coughs up
anything—”

“What’s wrong with him?” a plump woman cut
in. “Where the hell did he come from?”

Her dad lifted a finger to his lips and
addressed the thick crowd around him. “Quiet. He’ll be fine after
he rests a while.”

Janelle couldn’t stop what came out next.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know
anything
today.” She
studied the nervous, clueless faces above her, not even caring that
she'd finally talked back to her father and was sure to get
grounded later. “There any doctors here?”

Others echoed her question up and down the
hall. A chubby woman made her way through the wall of onlookers.
“I’m a nurse. Let me see.” She took Janelle’s place and took Vortex
Guy’s pulse. Her face relaxed, and Janelle could sense shoulders
slumping and breath being released all around her.

A stiff breeze blew down the hall, ruffling
Janelle’s hair. The guy opened his eyes, which darted back and
forth like a terrified animal’s. “I…I…” He squeezed them shut,
curling into a fetal position.

Phew. So he wasn’t dying. Janelle opened her
mouth to soothe him or at least ask a dumb question, but no words
came out. What did you say to someone who’d just appeared out of an
eight-foot-tall waterspout?
Hi. How’s Oz?
Leslie was going
to get a kick out of this story later.

“Close the door,” a woman called from down
the hall.

A squeak followed as someone pulled the
double doors shut. Rain beat against the building, but the wind
seemed to have lost its punch. The storm was dying, as if this
boy's appearance had sucked the life right out of it. At least one
thing was going right.

Static cut over the man on the radio. “Gary
has now been downgraded to a tropical storm, with maximum wind
speeds of seventy miles per hour. It may be downgraded yet again to
tropical depression status within a few hours. Now we are beginning
to receive damage reports…”

Vortex Guy winced as if the nurse had given
him a shot. “Turn…that off. Please.”

Janelle turned the radio off as she leaned in
for another glimpse of the gray spiral. But her dad had pulled down
his sleeve enough to hide it, and his shoes appeared next to her, a
silent warning against trying to look again. A salty aroma hit her
nostrils, sending a strange tingle through her body. Had this guy
just crawled out of the ocean or something? But that didn’t make
sense since it was miles away.

“What were you doing out there?” Janelle
asked, but still he didn't open his eyes. His head fell to the
side, revealing a cute mole on the side of his nose.

“Leave him alone, Janelle.” Her father tugged
her away, taking her place at his side. He lowered his voice to a
barely audible level as he spoke to Vortex Guy. “I know it tires
you out. Rest a while.”

Janelle shook her head. She must not have
heard him right. Her father must have said,
you must be
tired
out
or something along those lines. Before Janelle
could ask him, Ed appeared at his side. “I’ve called the
ambulance,” he said. “They’ll come out as soon as things calm
down.”

A giggle rose up in her throat, and she
wasn't sure why. The stress of the day was starting to get to her.
She held back a joke about having them take her dad to the mental
hospital while they were at it. Or her.

Her dad straightened up, speaking with the
same authority as the man on the radio. “The storm’s done and it’s
falling apart. They should get here not too long from now.”

An occasional gust made the windows whistle,
but they were weaker, mere strong breezes instead of roars. Good.
The whole storm had given up its will to live, and she wasn’t going
to argue with it.

Sirens approached and cut off. A moment
later, the ambulance backed towards the double doors, lights
flashing. The crowd pressed themselves to the walls as the
paramedics wheeled in the stretcher to take away Vortex Guy and his
marking that was just like hers.

* * * * *

Janelle rolled down the truck window, gaping
at the damage as the muggy air crept over her face. Her stomach
grew upset at the sight of it. This was so much different than
seeing it on TV. On television, at least, there was some distance
that made it unreal somehow. Now, that protective wall had come
down.

Much of Palm Grove looked like a bomb had
exploded right above it. The destruction wasn't as bad as
Andrina's, nowhere near, but it was still enough to make a lump
form in her throat.

A branch had shattered the windshield of a
car—a shiny red convertible’s, of course—and a tree had caved in
the roof of a pink house. The truck crunched small branches and
shingles under its tires as her father drove them past, silent. All
the enthusiasm he'd had earlier that day had disappeared now.

Janelle rubbed her temples, training her gaze
on her lap to give her emotions a break from the beating they'd
taken all day. “I don’t even want to know what our house is going
to look like. I’m just going to
love
Florida.”

“You’ll never have to look at a snowflake
again,” her father said, squinting against a peek of sun. He took a
detour as an emergency worker waved him down a side street. A
telephone pole leaned over the road behind them.

She winced, remembering the strange near miss
from earlier. For a second, it seemed like it must be that same
telephone pole, but it was impossible to tell. So many of them had
come down.

“Yeah. This is so much better than snow. And
that’s the third detour we’ve had to take,” Janelle said, clutching
her dolphin necklace. Sarcasm was the best she could do right now.
A monster headache was coming on, like it always did whenever she
got too stressed. Probably something she'd inherited from her
mother, since her dad was lucky enough never to get them.

“We’ll get home in just a few minutes.” Her
father tapped the steering wheel in some kind of rhythm, daring
only quick glances at the houses around them and their missing
shingles. Still, he didn't open up about why he thought they hadn’t
been in danger earlier. He was seeing now. They
had
been in
jeopardy, and his silence was his way of admitting it without
admitting it.

“What do you think was wrong with that guy?”
Janelle asked, a little more satisfied with him now. Though no
apology by any means, this was better than the insanity he'd fed
her that morning. She almost added,
and why did he materialize
out of a vortex of mist and water?
But what would her father
know about that? About as much as everyone else at the shelter, she
decided. There was one thing, though, that she
could
talk to
him about. “He had a birthmark like mine. Didn't you see it?"

Her father stared hard at a house with sheet
metal wrapped around one of its corners. “He had a birthmark, too?
That’s odd.”

“But you saw it, Dad. You even pulled his
sleeve down over it. Come on. I know there was a lot going on
today, but you can't deny that one."

“I don’t remember any such thing.” He gripped
the steering wheel with both hands, licked his lips, and looked
straight ahead. “It
was
a stressful day and all, you
know?”

The pounding between Janelle’s ears grew
worse. She didn’t have the energy to argue with him right now, or
to even think about this. Once she laid down for a while and got
this to calm down, she'd have plenty of time to do that.

They made another turn, and a bent sign
labeled
Missoula Street
stuck out of a fallen branch as if
greeting them. This was their street—and it didn’t look any better
than the others they’d passed so far. Fallen trees grabbed for the
road with leafy fingers and the pieces of an orange gas station
sign had wedged up against a car. People stood in tight groups and
surveyed the damage. A pair of women hugged and comforted each
other in front of a house with half its roof missing. The sobs from
one floated over the sound of the truck’s motor as they passed.

Janelle twisted her hair around her fingers
and swallowed a bad taste in her mouth. Their house was next, and
there was nothing she could say to delay the inevitable. "Dad, I
can't look at this anymore."

His lips twitched, but he said nothing as
they rolled the rest of the way down the street. At last, just as
the tension had built up to the point where she couldn't hold back
her nerves anymore, he spoke. “Well, would you look at that,” her
dad said, pulling into their driveway. “We came out pretty good in
all of this.”

His voice gave her the strength to look.
Words escaped her. "What?"

Their roof hadn’t lost any shingles. Not one.
None of the front windows had cracked even though her dad hadn’t
lifted a finger to board them up. Every tree remained upright in
their yard, a stark contrast to the one leaning on the neighbor's
house next door. All they’d gotten was a couple of little branches
in their lawn.

Sunlight reflected off her father’s
glasses—and right into her eyes—as he twisted in his seat to face
her. “What are you complaining about?”

“I’m not complaining. It’s just that—” She
gestured to the whole neighborhood around them. Everyone else had
taken some sort of damage. Everyone. Poor Ed stood across the
street, staring at the tree in his yard. It was as if, in the
middle of the storm, someone had lowered a gigantic shield or force
field over the house. That was impossible, but what were the
chances that every piece of debris in the neighborhood would avoid
their yard, and that their skinny tree out front would survive the
winds next to the huge one that had fallen across the street? “We
should've gotten
something
out of all this. The math just
doesn't add up."

“Maybe you ought to go lie down.” Her father
opened the door and stepped down to the pavement. “You look tired.
I’ll go see if we can do anything for anybody, so don’t be shocked
if you wake up and find me gone.”

That sounded like a great idea. The pounding
in her temples threatened to go over the line to migraine status
any minute. “I’d help, but I feel like a gremlin’s beating at my
head with a hammer.”

Her father unlocked the front door and gave
her a pat on the back as she went in and breathed in the thick, hot
air. The smell of fresh paint and cardboard filled the house,
released by the heat. The power was still out, and a fresh
lightning bolt of pain shot through her temple. Weaving around
boxes, she made her way to her new room, closed the blinds to shut
out the stabbing light, and collapsed.

Through the pain in her head and behind her
eyes, the day danced in front of her.

Roaring wind. Snapping trees and power lines.
Her father, repeating
we're completely safe, Janelle,
over
and over until it made her want to throw up.

The boy, with his marking that matched hers
exactly.

But she had no energy left to process it
anymore. After an hour in a haze, Janelle drifted off to a swirling
maelstrom of darkness, chaos, and pain.

* * * * *

The shrill ringing of her phone jarred her
back to reality some time later. Janelle shot up and rubbed her
head, but the pounding had stopped, left behind somewhere in her
nightmares. She searched the dark room for her phone. A green
square glowed on her bedside table. There. Stifling back a yawn,
she scooped it up and raised it to her ear. “Hello?” It had to be
Leslie. Her friend would always rather talk than text.