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

there was no resuscitation to be done, no attempt at rescue. He wasn't alive. Micah Banner was lying on the ground in front of them.

Had it just been yesterday that Cage and Micah had been collecting plant samples? They’d walked with their hands full of carefully stacked, eleven-by-fourteen cardstock pages, each with a plant sample taped to it and marked with the coordinates and details of where and how it had been found. His mind flashed to Micah’s neat handwriting and how he’d asked his friend to scribe the information—because his own awkward scribbles seemed so juvenile in comparison.

They’d taken so many sample deliveries up to the tent where Izzy and Melinda cataloged them. Cage couldn’t say that he counted Micah among his close friends—he simply hadn’t had the time to build those relationships down here, not with anyone he wasn’t living with. But now he felt the sharp cut of the loss of even that possibility.

That was a stupid thing to think about when faced with the body his potential friend had left behind … in a field.

The group of them had run together as the tornado hit, dropping everything and linking hands, even though they weren’t supposed to. They’d made a chain for comfort, but Cage had read it as a gesture that they wouldn’t lose anyone. Yet here he and Dev were, trying to process what they’d found. Linking hands hadn’t been enough. They had lost one.

Cage had initially dismissed the body. He hadn’t wanted to look any further than his original assessment. He’d seen it from a short distance, the brown hair meaning it wasn't his sister or Izzy. After that, he'd simply decided that since it wasn't who he was looking for, he needed to look no further. But as they’d gotten closer, it had become clear this wasn’t just the body of some random victim.

Dev now walked a circle. They didn't need to flip him over. He was flat on his back, his face angled to one side. And though it wasn’t obvious, Cage thought he could detect the kink in his coworker’s neck that might have been responsible for his death.

The contents of Cage’s stomach slowly congealed and turned hard. He tried not to extrapolate the meaning, but he couldn't help it. The tornado had come through here, and the tornado was leaving dead bodies in its wake. There was no way to avoid the calculation that the odds were now lower that Izzy had survived or—though he didn't even want to admit it to himself—that Joule had.

For a moment, he wallowed in a bleak future. What would his life be like without his sister? What would he be if he were the last survivor of the original four Mazurs?

While Deveron walked a circle around Micah's body, Cage stared blankly into the distance. There was nothing he could think of, no alternate future things he would do. There was no better life, even on the small scale, without Joule.

Once, his father had gone missing for a day, trapped in a stalled subway train while he was out of town. Cage had asked his mother later what she would do if his dad died. She had plans. She’d get a cat—her husband was allergic and she’d always wanted a cat. She’d set the house temperature where she wanted it. Plant the pansies his father had vetoed. Small things, and nothing that would make up for the loss, but little things that she would do differently.

Cage had no such fallbacks. Maybe because he hadn’t met Joule later in life but had never known a minute without his sister. So there were no things that he would do if he didn't have his sister holding him back, or if he hadn't compromised on certain decisions.

Granted, he might not be here in Alabama now without Joule. He had originally chosen marine biology for his major, but after dealing with the things that might be found in the water, he’d changed to a more diverse bio major. So what would he do? Go scuba diving without her? It didn't change anything. He could just as easily go scuba diving with her. There was no job that he'd wanted that he'd compromised on so they could stay together. He had been offered another position that would pay approximately five thousand more dollars per year. It didn't mean anything.

He simply had to find his sister. And he didn't want to think about what his life might become if he failed.

He already had one family member permanently missing. Though Joule had rattled him once and made it clear that she believed their father was not coming back, she wasn’t here to dish harsh truths now. He would have to be the one to rattle himself. And he wasn't up for it.

The alternative was to simply find his sister.

“We need pictures,” he told Deveron before remembering that he still had Dev’s phone. Pulling it from his pocket, he went about the ugly business of snapping a few shots. For one, he knelt down and got in close to Micah’s face. It felt horribly intrusive. Cage told himself that his vision wasn’t blurry and he didn’t feel that sharp squeeze at the back of his jaw. The picture was necessary for identification.

“Where are we now?” he asked.

“Another two miles, maybe,” Dev said looking around and, again, overestimating.

Glancing back the way they’d come, Cage could see the track their bikes had made. If they needed to, they could turn around and exactly retrace their path.

But how long would the banked grass stay that way? Not long, he thought.

“We're near the path of the tornado, at least. So there is a relatively permanent landmark for us to follow.” Dev pointed to the unmistakable edge of the churned earth about forty feet away. He mentioned the marker as if he understood that Cage was struggling to pinpoint location without the ability to hook up to a satellite and get GPS coordinates.

When they had done everything they