understand her, but I cared. I wanted to be with her…by the end, that was all that mattered to me, being with her.”
Panic and confusion painted Britt’s face. The shotgun drooped further. “I don’t-”
“Shoot him and be done with it!” Smith shouted, showing the first signs of impatience.
Faith had been moving slowly during the exchange between the other three, inching with her feet toward the Glock on the floor. Outside, the storm had built to a scream.
She went into a dive, her arms outstretched. She got her hands around the pistol.
“Shoot him!” Sean said.
“Britt!” Smith shouted. “Remember what Daryn said!”
Britt screamed, an agonized wail. Faith froze, her eyes locked onto the window. A grayish white funnel-shaped cloud had descended from the sky and was churning up the ground, on a collision course with the house.
The scourge of Oklahoma in spring, they were intense storms with winds stronger than any hurricane, and they struck with much less warning. The cloud looked almost like it was dancing, its tail swaying back and forth. A tree in its path suddenly disappeared. Debris swirled around it and inside it.
“Sean!” Faith screamed.
They all turned. For an instant, Faith saw something cross Smith’s face that she never expected to see-uncertainty,
Thunder, a lightning flash outside, and the interior lights went out.
There was a scream from the stairs-Britt.
The tornado danced across the plains. A window blew out.
“Is there a basement? A cellar?” Faith yelled at Sean.
“The kitchen!” her brother shouted back.
Each moved in the dark toward where the other had been standing. Faith and Sean found each other, and they clasped hands, just like when they were children and something scared them both. And just like then, Sean led the way, pulling Faith toward the kitchen.
More windows exploded. “Here!” Sean shouted, but couldn’t say more because of the deafening din of the storm.
He kicked open a wooden door in the kitchen. It led into blackness. An earthy smell drifted up to them.
Faith glanced up at the kitchen window. The funnel filled her line of vision. She screamed wordlessly.
She caught a glimpse of her brother, half-turned away from her. Then his hand was ripped from hers and she felt herself falling through the doorway. Her foot caught on something. She felt bones snapping, as her foot tried to go a different direction from the rest of her body. After a moment of blinding pain, she was falling again. Then, over the roar of the storm, she heard the boom of the shotgun. She thought she heard Sean’s voice one last time, and then everything was dark and silent.
38
FAITH AWOKE SLOWLY, TO THE SMELL OF WET earth all around her. She was lying on her left side, and that entire side of her body was damp. One arm was curled under her. Her hair felt matted. There was no sound whatsoever. She remembered how loud the tornado had been, and the quiet now seemed unnatural, unreal.
She didn’t move, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Gradually, objects took shape in the darkness. The kitchen door that Sean had pushed her through seemed to have led down to an unfinished, dirt-floored basement. She saw lumber, paint buckets, cans of food. Surely she must be dreaming-she was in a muddy basement surrounded by cans of green beans and chicken soup.
She sat up. Directly ahead of her was the staircase, except it wasn’t a staircase. She began to see that it was a folding wooden ladder. That explained how she’d snagged her foot between the steps-there was an open space between each rung.
Bracing herself with her hands on the muddy floor, she got to her feet. Millions of shards of red-hot broken glass stabbed both her feet. She screamed wordlessly and collapsed again.
She sat on the floor, breathing hard, until the pain receded a bit.
She rolled onto hands and knees, trying to keep her weight away from her feet. She grew dizzy and nauseous and collapsed again.
There was a small shaft of light entering the basement from the doorway above. Faith very carefully maneuvered her body so that both feet, still wearing the gray boots Hendler had given her, were in the light. The right one was at an odd angle to the rest of her leg-she’d felt it snap on the way down. The left foot was at yet another angle still. She hadn’t felt it break-she must have landed on it and her body’s weight twisted it.
She rolled over again, fighting the tide of nausea. She stayed still until it abated, then crawled a couple of steps, using only her arms and upper body, essentially dragging the lower half of her body behind her.
The pain lanced her again, and tears formed. She struggled against the pain and dragged herself a little farther. More pain, more reflexive tears. She was breathing hard, and she made herself do some breathing exercises, the ones Alex had taught her. In sixty seconds her breath was under control, her mind focused and centered.
She dragged herself to the ladder-the one that had broken one of her feet, she reminded herself. She leaned an arm against it, resting from her trek across the muddy basement floor. Mud caked her arms up to the elbows, and the front of her tank top had the mud completely ground into it.
Now came the hard part-climbing. She’d known people who were rock climbers, who knew all about how to use their upper bodies to pull themselves up. Faith’s fitness had always been attuned to the lower half of her body. She took a moment to reflect that she had rarely found her running useful in real life. Fat lot of good all those miles and marathons did her now, with two useless feet dangling at the ends of her legs.
She reached two rungs above her head, wrapped her arms around the wooden ladder, and pulled. Her feet screamed in pain. Faith bit her lip.
Her body moved a few inches.
Next rung.
A few inches more.
And so it went. She had no idea how long it took her, rung after excruciating rung of the ladder
By the time she reached the top, there was very little light. Her arms exhausted and aching, she put on one last burst of strength and pulled herself over the top.
She’d heard of the capricious nature of tornadoes, but had never lived through a major one herself. There were famous stories of a tornado making its way down a street, destroying one side completely, flattening everything in its path, while the other side of the street was completely intact, nothing out of place; or about how some tornadoes “skipped” houses, plowing through a neighborhood destroying every other house, leaving the ones in between alone.
What she saw was a microcosm of the stories she’d heard. The kitchen of the old farmhouse was nothing but rubble-two floors worth of rubble. The kitchen sink was upended a few feet away from the opening that led to the basement where she’d been. A toilet wasn’t far away, sitting upright but not connected to anything.
There was no wall. The southern wall was simply gone, whisked off the house’s foundation. Bricks and lumber were everywhere, housing fixtures no longer recognizable. Faith looked to the left, back toward the living room where she and Sean had found Isaac Smith.
The east wall-the front of the house-was still there and completely intact, standing as if in silent protest against the storm that dared to threaten this place. The north wall, at Faith’s back, was standing, but with giant gaping holes. Now that the storm had passed, there was a bit of natural light in the early evening, a tiny bit of sunlight peeking into the ruined house. Faith could see Isaac Smith’s rocking chair, sitting upright without a scratch on it, right where it had been.
She cleared her throat. “Sean?” she called. “Sean, are you here?”
Now that she was out of the hole, Faith began to hear sounds. A bit of wind, dripping water, and strangely, birds singing.
Something made a noise to her left, in the direction of the living room. Faith dragged herself a few feet, but it was even slower going than coming out of the hole, as she had to clear a trail through the debris, using her hands the way a swimmer parts the water ahead. Periodically one of her feet would glance off something-a brick, a piece of lumber-and pain would shoot from her toes all the way up to her neck, stopping her in her tracks.
Still she dragged herself forward. She heard the noise again.
Someone else was alive in here.
Faith blinked against pain and rage, trying to remember the last seconds before she and Sean had clasped hands and he had directed her toward the basement. Britt had been standing on the stairs, aiming the shotgun. Smith was urging her to shoot Sean, Sean had told her to shoot Smith instead, and Faith had dived across the floor for her Glock. Britt had looked confused, doubtful, panicked, as if things weren’t as black and white as she’d imagined them to be.
The lights had gone out. They’d found each other and Sean had taken her to the basement door, then practically pushed her through it. He’d turned away from her. She fell. The shotgun roared. The tornado slammed into the house.
Britt had shot
Faith’s heart began to hammer. “Please, God,” she whispered. “Please, please, please.”
There was the sound again, someone moving.
Faith dragged herself past the rocking chair, in the direction of the stairs, or at least where the stairs had been. The second floor had collapsed on that side of the house, tons of rubble on the floor. But again, it was surreal in that there were places where Faith could see the actual floor, areas where there was no rubble at all.
Where the stairway should have been, she saw a pair of bare feet sticking out from under some debris. She made her way toward them, her heart still triple-timing.
“Please,” she said again, her voice a rasp.
She froze when she saw the bright red nail polish on the feet.
She pulled herself next to the body and managed to raise herself into a sitting position. Her arms felt nearly as useless as her feet now, from dragging her dead weight all the way through the ruined house.
The lower half of Britt’s body was buried in rubble, only her feet visible. Her torso and arms were intact. One hand was still wrapped around the shotgun, her red-nailed hand curled around the
