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

figured her anxiety was likely compounded by the fact that it was her first job.

Though she’d scooped ice cream very part time at Snyder’s for two summers before the night hunters had come, and she’d waited tables and had a few internships, this was her first career-move job. And moving to new places and confronting new things was not her forte.

A life-threatening crisis—a real emergency—she could handle. A simple relocation was harder on her nerves.

The job was between Arab and New Hope, two small towns in northwest-ish Alabama. But being between towns meant there was no apartment-style housing for the crew, so HR had decided to house them in small groups in rentals.

She and Cage—thank God she was with her brother!—and Sarah and Deveron were all in a little two-bedroom house that the owners rented out under the catchy title of “Desperado’s Hideaway.”

The owners had traded the queen bed in the largest bedroom for two twins—when they signed the one-year lease, but there was still some kind of cow skull on the dresser as “decor.” It didn’t fit in the drawer where Sarah had tried to hide it, so it was now stashed under the dresser like some kind of bovine boogie man.

Joule sighed into air that was full of kicked up dust from the passing train. She would be living in “western rental-chic" hell for the duration of the assignment.

Looking to the right, she saw the end of the train approaching.

Was there a caboose? She found herself getting excited to see it. She’d lived near railroad tracks in several different places but couldn’t remember ever seeing them used.

Her phone dinged from its prop on the dash.

—Where are you?

—waiting on a train. Back soon.

The last car whizzed by right then, looking sadly not red and without any fancy railings where a passenger could stand and wave at the passing countryside.

Though the train itself was a disappointment, the silence as it left was a welcome relief. The grinding, gushing noise had grabbed her gut—there were tornadoes here. But not here. That was the reassuring part. Though much of central Alabama was its own “tornado alley,” her new employers had chosen this particular area specifically because it had a low annual tornado count.

Building a solar farm was only a worthwhile enterprise if it stayed put and sent power to the nearby towns. Theirs was a prototype landscape system that would rotate with the sunlight and conserve its own energy on cloudy days. Eventually, it would hopefully replace fossil fuels for this quarter of the state. But only if tornadoes didn’t rip it out of the ground.

Putting the car into drive, Joule reminded herself, When you hear a train out here, it’s actually a train.

But as she drove through a slightly more populated area, she saw what had once been a cafe or a library or a shop … she couldn’t tell. The roof was caved in on half of it, the windows all blown out. Although the damage looked old, the parking spaces in front were still covered in glass shards.

The place had been abandoned after some large hand had seemingly ripped it in half.

She turned toward home, the road rougher here, and headed toward Desperado’s Hideaway and the only people she knew.

2

Cage sat uncomfortably in the metal folding chair, his legs stuffed under the folding table. His chair was crammed in next to his sister’s and he tried not to bump elbows in the tiny, folding room.

It was actually a trailer that had been set up at the edge of “the lot”—although there wasn’t much to distinguish what was “the lot” and what wasn’t.

He cradled the coffee in his hands, the heat suffusing into him and providing comfort where there was little to be found. He was grateful the four of them had managed not to spill any in the car that he and Joule shared. The gravel road out here had given them a serious test of their balancing abilities.

Now they were all crammed into the tiny space, even though he didn’t know who they “all” were yet. They had been given three days to arrive and settle in, but this still felt far too soon to be getting to work.

He didn’t know the area. And he was pretty sure their small, elderly sedan was not going to survive long on these roads, and he hoped this wasn’t the best coffee in town.

He and Joule had opened their identical laptops, as had everyone else. They looked like a classroom as Radnor walked down the aisle, his broad shoulders and pink polo shirt taking up all of the available space. When he hit the front of the room, he rotated and moved his hand as he clicked a button lighting up the screen behind him.

Though his dark skin might have blended into the background, his voice boomed through the tiny space. He lifted a hand to shade his eyes, as if the projector were sunlight. “All right, I want the old guard. Raise your hands. Show who you are.”

He scanned the room as though checking that all the right people had their hands up. Cage did not. Day One on a job definitely did not make him “old guard” of anything.

Cage had noticed that the others in the room were a variety of ages and dressed in different ways. Though no one wore business suit, he saw everything from khakis to jeans, to even one pair of overalls. That was his roommate, Sarah, who somehow still managed to not stand out.

Radnor once again raised his hand and peered through the darkened room. “Kelsey. Hand up. I want all the people who’ve been here since the beginning of the project.”

Kelsey, it seemed, caught on and she now confidently held her hand aloft.

“All right. We’ve all seen them. Now it’s the newbies. Hands up,” he demanded.

This time, Cage and Joule shrugged to each other, but their hands went into the air, along with Sarah’s and Deveron’s. Glancing around the room, Cage