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

back for a moment before pulling away and scolding her. “You're not supposed to use that arm!”

But she was already hugging Dev. “I kind of worked it out. I took several Tylenol. Did some stretches. And it's actually feeling better.”

“You cured yourself?’

“Oh god, no. Look.” She aimed her flashlight down toward her arm. And he saw it was mottled blue and purple, bruised all to hell and back. “I probably bruised the bone. But I don't think I broke it. So I'm not putting any weight on it, but I can offer my returning journeymen a hug!”

Despite everything, she was still Sarah, still efficient. She’d already turned around and was picking her way through the debris back to the house. “Follow me.”

As Cage looked down, directing the helmet light toward her feet, he saw that the yard was worse than it had been before.

“We got rain here this time,” she said over her shoulder as though she had read his thoughts. “Which means we got rain inside the house.”

Oh, he thought, not good.

“We have no heat, no power, but check this out.” She waved the flashlight beam upward and Cage wondered what he was supposed to be looking at in the dark night. It took a moment to distinguish smoke.

“You have a fire?” Dev asked

“I do!”

They couldn't see it, but they could hear the grin and the pride in her voice. “We can sleep in front of the fireplace tonight. And in the morning, we’ll go looking again.”

Cage hadn't considered that. His thought had been Sarah was first—they’d checked her off the list—and then he’d turn around and head right back out to continue the search.

But as he turned and looked behind him, there was nothing to see beyond the small illumination of the headlight from his helmet. There was no way they would find Joule or Izzy tonight, and searching by bicycle in the dark wasn't safe. His body was now protesting as Sarah lithely used her good arm to help push herself up on the edge of the foundation and into the house proper. It was clear she’d been working the whole time they’d been gone.

As Dev followed her, pushing the bike up before him, Cage thought he heard his roommate groan. Yeah, they weren’t going anywhere tonight.

His heart crushed inside his chest. He wasn’t good with that, but what else could he do? The world was pitch black. His body was protesting from overuse. And he didn’t even know which direction to aim.

So he closed his eyes and did the only thing he could. He hoped to any god who might be listening that his sister was safe. Then he turned and followed Sarah and Deveron up into the house.

48

“What are the chances that the Larkins will come back to the farm and find us and let us out of here?” Joule asked into the darkness.

“Well, I mean…” Jerry somewhat hemmed and hawed at what should have been a very simple question. “They will come back. Eventually.”

He’d let the words trail off, as if to imply that the Larkins might not let them out. She flashed back to earlier, when she'd asked him why no one was home on any of these farms. He’d told her they locked everything down and left.

But was that really right? The tractor hadn’t been locked down.

When she’d mentioned that, Jerry had quickly replied, “No one locks down tractors anyway.”

And now he was acting as though they were stuck and the family that owned the home and the farm wasn’t going to come back or wasn’t going to set them free once they found someone had taken shelter in their cellar but had gotten stuck…

What was here that was more valuable than the tractor they’d ridden up on? She wanted to know, because she sure wasn't seeing it. Then again, she'd never been an Alabama farm girl and hadn't recognized cotton blowing across the road the first time she'd seen it, either. She’d been fascinated by both the softness of the bolls and by the hard sharpness of the shells they left behind.

Here, she couldn’t explore, touch, test, or see what happened. She was, unfortunately, stuck in a cellar, and working with Jerry's at least limited and probably biased information.

“So what's our best option?” She tossed it into the middle of the space, thinking that maybe leaving her question open would make him more willing to share information.

“I don't know.”

He didn’t elaborate, and Joule grew more frustrated. She might still be young, but she knew herself well enough to know that she didn't operate very well at all on “I don't know.”

“Well, I'm going to try and get us out of here.”

“It's night,” he protested. “We should try to get some sleep.”

Her erstwhile partner couldn't see her roll her eyes. “Scarecrow, dude, have you looked around? It's always night down here. If we wait until tomorrow to get out, we’ll run out of food.”

She’d taken only a few sips of her Gatorade. But she’d opened the second can of tuna for Toto when he whined and pawed softly at her jacket. It was the last can. Toto had quickly found the food in the dark and Joule was grateful that it was packed in water. He’d lapped that up. But where was his next meal coming from? There was no tuna left, and no water for him.

“Can you put your cell phone on?” she asked.

She could almost hear his facial expression as he protested. “You told me not to use up the battery with the flashlight.”

“Right. So we aren’t going to use the flashlight. What you should do now is simply turn the phone on and change the screen brightness to as low as possible. We only need a very little bit of light to be better than what we have right now.”

The ghosts of edges around the cellar doors and down the lines of the steps had faded some time ago, making her believe that either night had set