The Tempest by A.J. Scudiere (story read aloud .txt) 📗

had previously heard about through country music. Over the past few weeks, she’d come to think of it as a friendly, neighborly noise. Now, it was unsettling.

Even as she heard his car start up, she had the vague feeling that he'd memorized her face. Sarah had told him her name, and he would be able to easily find her.

As his taillights faded down the long drive, the threat still hung in the air.

10

Cage was thrown toward the dash when Sarah hit the brakes, the car skidding to a stop on the gravel just before it crashed into the pile of branches in the road. He hadn’t quite smacked into the windshield, although he got a good little jolt from the seatbelt, which he ignored and watched Sarah look from side to side.

It had been five days since Jerry had come to the house. The protesters had shown up each morning after that, waving their signs, and each time Jerry had been there, front and center. He’d spent some money or time or both on the big signs that he could only hold one corner of.

The night he’d been to their place, Sarah had plopped onto the couch afterward and explained. “He’s my cousin. We played together as kids. I was always the smart one in high school, and he was the jock.”

Cage had looked to Joule. They didn’t have that. They saw their cousins at holidays, and even not then sometimes. Their parents had moved around with their work and then, once they were gone, and after grandma had passed, they hadn’t seen their cousins at all. The twins had lived in a town of high-IQ scientists, they’d lived near the think tanks, and they’d lived at college. What Sarah was describing was as foreign to him as Alabama itself.

Sarah had leaned back onto the couch, her head tilted onto the cushions as she stared at the ceiling. “He graduated two years before me and went from high school football hero to factory worker. He wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t get any college offers like he thought. Then I graduated as valedictorian—”

“That’s cool,” Deveron had interrupted. “I wasn’t valedictorian.”

“Well, there were only sixty of us, and some of my competition was a lot like Jerry.” Sarah had stuffed her hands into her pockets. “He watched me move away and get jobs and come back for holidays. We haven’t really spoken in years. Now, I don’t know if this protest is just something to do, if it’s personal against me, or if he really loves the grass and the trees and thinks we are poisoning his home.”

“Could be all three,” Joule had mused, and the conversation ended there.

In the meantime, they’d seen the protest crew here each morning as they drove in. They were gone by midday, seeming only to want to harass the workers as they arrived. But Cage had noticed that Jerry was staring Sarah down as she pulled the car through the crowd. She’d seemingly become their designated driver, with all of them piling into the same seat each morning. So Jerry was easily positioned to lean near her window as the crowd slowed the car down. Sarah had ignored him, looking straight ahead.

Cage was beginning to wonder if maybe Jerry was the leader of the protesters.

Sarah put the car into park, as she had no other options. The branches had been dragged across the road for clearly that exact purpose. He could see she was clenching both the steering wheel and her jaw.

Cage squeezed her arm to steady her. “I've got this.”

From the back seat, Deveron leaned forward, too, clapping his own hand on Cage’s shoulder. “I'm with you.”

The two climbed out from opposite sides of the car, intending to simply clear the branches and drive through. Cage hoped the protesters were done interfering, but he kept his attention on them in the periphery.

As he leaned over to grab a gnarled branch, Deveron whispered in a low voice, “We’re not the first ones here.”

“Right, they were here first.” Cage picked one of the smaller branches and chucked it to the side.

“No, we aren’t the first Helio Systems people on site today. That means they're throwing the branches back into the road every time there's a break in the cars entering.”

Cage picked up another of the pieces from where it blocked the road. Not the lightest, he thought as he tugged it off the roadway. Behind him, the protesters started in with a chant that they hadn't been doing when Sarah stopped the car. At least, not that he could remember. The fact that they’d started up again, and that Sarah’s was the only car here right now, meant this roadblock was specifically for them.

He sighed, having already had enough of this bullshit. Like Sarah and Joule, Cage was more than willing to sit at the table and have a conversation. He was more than willing to look into any accusations. He didn't want to work for Helio Systems if the company was actually poisoning land. With the remainder of their parents’ life insurance money still in the bank after they finished college, they could afford to walk off the job, if the situation warranted.

So if the protesters were right, he wanted to know. If they weren’t, then this was bullshit. And the method was bullshit, either way. So, using his momentum, he swung the branch around and hurled it away from the road, nearly whacking some of the close-by protesters.

Turning to them, he gave a neatly insincere shrug. “Oh, sorry.”

Beside him, Deveron laughed softly and did the same with another branch, chucking it near to the protesters on the other side of the road. As the branch sailed and they hopped angrily out of the way, he called, “Look out! Guess I don't know my own strength.”

Cage knew he was being childish, but he didn’t care until he spotted Chithra Murasawa—one of the managers—walking toward them. She’d followed the gravel drive from the field