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

would drive on autopilot now, and she knew all the roads around her. She swerved again, knowing that the pothole was just over the small rise, and automatically missing it.

“Is home safe?”

She was thinking it as Cage asked. Just like a twin. She was once again grateful they were still together.

“And where do we go at home? There's no basement,” Deveron pointed out, though neither of them was looking at Sarah. They were still trying to figure out where the tornado had gone.

The lack of it was more nerve-wracking than seeing it had been. Now Joule felt as though it would pop back up at any moment, ambushing her rather than giving a solid chase.

“No basement,” Sarah said, “but there is an interior closet.” Again, her voice was measured while the other three were flipping out.

Joule scrambled far too fast for the road. Gravel kicked as her nerves made her speed climb higher and higher, until even Deveron was telling her slow down.

“If we go in a ditch, we’re completely screwed.”

That much was true.

The roads sloped off steeply to either side. Whether there was water in the runoff ditches, she didn't know, but she didn't want to find out. And she sure as hell didn't want to discover it by being nose down off the side of the road.

“It’s over there,” Sarah said, and Joule tried not to jerk the car as she looked.

Even before she said it, the others in the car were feeding her information.

“It’s a waterspout now,” Cage told her. “It must have gone out over the lake.”

They couldn't see the lake from their home. But it wasn’t far away as the crow flies, hidden from their back window behind the large, beautiful, and mostly serene hillside that flanked the small house. Joule had liked the landscape—both the hills and the lake. Maybe only until today.

Knowing she shouldn't, she turned her head, watching over the trees as the water climbed into the sky.

Now the spout was no longer gray. It was white. As if the water had cleaned out the debris the twister had picked up.

And it still didn't sound like a train.

She raced down the short road leading toward the house. The car fishtailed as she hit their turn, but she didn’t care. She offered a glance as they passed the only other house on their drive.

There wasn’t any movement inside—nothing obvious through the large windows—and she wondered if the couple who lived there had already hunkered down in their bathtub, or their closets, as Sarah had suggested.

Gravel kicked and sprayed behind her, as her wheels dug ruts in the road. Right now, she didn't care. The underside of the carriage pinged from the rocks she kicked up, but it barely registered in her brain.

As she took the last turn into the driveway, she could see the waterspout still hovering over the creek.

“Don't they die out over water?” she asked, pulling the car into the carport and slamming it into park.

“Sometimes,” Sarah said, though just “sometimes” wasn’t reassuring.

Whatever else her roommate told them was lost in the wind as the four of them opened the car doors and let in the full extent of the whipping white noise.

Joule felt her hair leap up, as though the wind was trying to tear it out of her scalp. Her clothing pressed against her, flapping in the gale. And for the first time, she realized it was raining, too. With the wind throwing the raindrops around, they hit with a zing.

“Inside!” Sarah pointed and demanded as though she’d given them this instruction before and they simply hadn’t paid attention. Her own hair was blowing wildly around her head as she grabbed at the edges of her jacket to keep the wind from stealing it.

Cage ducked suddenly to avoid something flying past. It moved too quickly to properly identify it, but seeing it sail by made Joule’s heart kick, when she would have thought it was already beating far too fast and hard for that to be possible.

He grabbed her arm, tugging her behind the other two. Only then did she realized she’d stopped. She’d been standing in one place, peering out at the backyard and over the hill, her instinctive human need to watch the devastation.

But intelligence won out over curiosity and she followed Sarah up the tiny stairs that led to the side door. It had bothered Joule before that the screen door opened out and there wasn't even a porch to stand on. Now it seemed a ridiculous arrangement when they were struggling to get four people inside.

Once all of them were in, Deveron turned and threw his weight against the door, pushing it until it fully shut. He struggled to get the bolt closed and tested it, since it never seemed to want to stay clicked on its own.

“Bathroom closet!” Sarah said, leading them toward the hallway and keeping the foursome centered in the bulk of the house.

The main room that Joule and Sarah shared had an attached bath, but it also had a window. The hallway bath had a separate room for the toilet and the tub and a door that closed it off from the sinks.

Slamming the doors and giving away the impression that maybe she wasn’t as calm as she seemed, Sarah shut them into the small space that was far too tight for four.

“We can shove in by the washer and dryer,” she offered.

Though Joule was tempted, shoving herself into a closet to escape danger was a place she'd been before—and one she didn't want to return to.

The four of them now stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Supposedly safe, they looked at each other as if to ask what next? Sarah was the only one with any experience at this.

But Joule found no answers on her roommate face either, so she put voice to what they were all thinking. “What do we do now?”

15

“No, I don't know where the radio is,” Joule snapped back to Sarah, as the two men looked at her