Morgan, Macy, and waits for somebody to text back. It takes her mind off being scared, not that she’s all that scared really. There are tornado watches and a few warnings every spring—more and more of them in the last few years—her mom is always complaining, but they’ve never actually come to anything around Lawrenceburg, though she’s seen the TV shots of other places, even in Kentucky, where whole houses got turned into piles of rubble in a few seconds. The worst watches are the night ones, when you can’t see what the sky looks like.
While she waits—in the circumstances Jane can hardly object—she gets on Facebook and posts, “I’m in a tornado warning in Jane’s basement!”
She’s reading Tabby’s text—
At that instant three more buzzing beeps interrupt the droning radio robot.
“Kaylee, get down. Get under the blanket and hold that pillow over your head.” Fleece and Roscoe are both whining now; Jane slides out of the low chair onto her knees and stretches herself out on top of Fleece, with her arm tight around Roscoe and terrified Kaylee; she pulls the blanket up over all of them.
The roar becomes deafening. There’s pressure in Kaylee’s ears, she can feel the floor vibrating. The house blows up.
After the shaking and roaring have stopped, and they’ve thrown off the blanket, Kaylee can’t see anything through the cracked but miraculously unbroken patio doors but a tangle of branches full of new green leaves. The basement has held together, though light is coming through some new cracks in the aboveground foundation block. “Kaylee, let me look at you. Are you okay?” Jane says worriedly.
“I think so.” She feels lightheaded with relief that the tornado is over, but nothing hurts when she moves her arms and legs. She automatically checks her SmartBerry, still in her hand, but there are no bars at all. Dismayed, she reports to Jane, “I’m not getting a signal. We can’t call anybody.”
“I expect the tornado took out the cell tower. Phone line too. Keep the dogs in here with you—I want to check things out, all right?” Holding to the shelter’s doorframe, Jane hauls herself up, grimacing, steps carefully out into the basement and looks around. “Looks like we were lucky. The ceiling’s still in one piece, far as I can tell.” She moves a few cautious steps farther and stops. “The stairs look solid but they’re full of junk, I don’t think we better try to get out that way. Let’s see if the patio doors will open.” She goes over and tugs at the sliding door, but it won’t budge. “Frame’s bent. The window frame may be bent too, but I’ll check before we start breaking glass.”
Startled, Kaylee says, “You’re bleeding! Jane, you’re bleeding!” There’s a big spreading bloodstain on Jane’s shirt and jeans on one side.
“I am? Where?” Jane looks down, sees the blood on her clothes, sees it dripping onto her right boot. “Huh. Now how the dickens did that happen? I must have cut my arm on something.” She comes back toward Kaylee. “There’s a plastic tub with a lid, see it? Way inside, back where the stairs almost come down to the floor? That’s the first-aid stuff; can you pull that out here? Fleece, Roscoe, come. Down. Stay. Get out of Kaylee’s way.” The dogs, both panting now, slink out of the shelter, very subdued, and slump down on the basement floor by Jane’s feet without an argument. Fleece has some blood on her woolly white back but seems unhurt. Apparently the blood is Jane’s.
There are three or four plastic tubs with lids back there, all blue. “Which one?”
“The closest one, nearest the door. Just drag it out here.” Suddenly Jane leans against the wall, then reaches into the shelter, pulls out the camp chair and sits in it.
Kaylee backs out with a tub. “This one?”
Jane snaps off the lid and looks in. “Yep. Thanks.” She rummages around inside, gets out a packet of gauze pads and a pressure bandage, and rips the seal off the packet. She starts unbuttoning her flannel shirt. “Do you faint at the sight of blood? If you don’t, maybe you can help me find the cut. The back of my arm is numb, I guess I cut a nerve.”
Kaylee isn’t crazy about the sight of blood, but this is no time to wimp out. But the cut makes her feel a little sick. It’s high up on the back of Jane’s left arm, deep and triangular, and thick-looking blood is welling out of it. She can’t help sort of gasping through her teeth. “I see it. It’s pretty bad. What should I do?”
“Put the pads right on it and apply pressure, don’t worry about hurting me. The important thing is to stop the bleeding.”
Gingerly, Kaylee presses the pads against the wound, but they’re saturated in seconds; the cut is really bleeding. “Do you have anything bigger? These aren’t really big enough.”
“Use my shirt while I look.” She paws through the box. “There’s this sling thing, but that’s not very absorbent, or very big, come to that. And some cotton balls. I guess we could pack the cut with these.”
Kaylee suddenly says “Oh! I know!” and lets go of the shirt, which Jane grabs and tightens with her other hand. “Sorry,” says Kaylee, “only I just remembered, I’ve got some, well, some maxipads in my backpack, because you know, just in case … anyway—” she fishes in her pack and pulls out a plastic bag triumphantly.
“Perfect!” Jane says. “Brilliant!”
Kaylee flushes, embarrassed but gratified. She snatches away the shirt and slaps a pad onto Jane’s wound, wrapping it around her arm. Then, showing further initiative, she says, “Hold that like that,” and puts another pad on top of the first, and binds them both to Jane’s arm with the pressure bandage. “There! Just hold that really tight. If you bleed through the first one there’s another one all ready to go.”
“I will,” Jane says. “Thanks.” She looks around. “I need to sit still while this clots. Do you want to see if the window will open? I don’t like to have you walking around down here till we know for sure the house isn’t going to cave in on that side”—her voice catches and Kaylee thinks for the first time,
What felt like an explosion turns out to have been a humongous old hickory tree smashing down right on top of the house. The tornado only clipped one corner, peeling back part of the roof and tearing the screened porch off, but it dumped that hickory right in the middle of the crushed roof, where it’s hanging with its branches on one side and its roots on top of Jane’s car on the other. The car is crushed and plainly undrivable, but even if it could be driven there would be no way to get it down to the road; Jane’s steep quarter-mile driveway is completely blocked with downed trees.
In fact, the world has become a half-moonscape. Everything on one side of the house just looks about the way it might look after a really violent windstorm, but everything on the other has been toppled and ripped and broken to pieces. “We must have been right on the very edge,” Jane says, holding her wounded arm with her other hand. “And this must have been one hell of a big tornado.” There are no trees standing in the creek valley below Jane’s house: none. They’re all laid down in the same direction, pointing uphill on this side and downhill on the other. The road that follows the creek, the only way there is to get to Jane’s house, has completely vanished under a pile of trunks and branches, broken and jagged, piled many feet deep on top of each other.
The sight of this world of leafy destruction has obliterated Kaylee’s spurt of competence. She’s shaking and crying in little sobs, arms wrapped about herself. “I need to talk to my mom,” is all she can think of to say, “I need to find out if she’s okay.”
Jane says soothingly, “The best thing you can do for your mom and dad right now is just take care of yourself and stay calm. They know where you are, and they know you’re with me. Eventually somebody will come looking for us. It might take them a few days—if that twister hit any population centers, all the emergency equipment and personnel are going to be very, very busy for a while. We have to give people time to get things up and running again. But they’ll be along.”
“But the road’s covered with
“I’m betting on a helicopter ride long before they get the road open. The good news is, lots of people know
