Sarah gave her a deadpan look before sweeping her gaze around the small group. Apparently, they were all found equally lacking. “Stay here.”
Before they could protest, Sarah had dashed into the hall—the space she’d just declared unsafe. Shaving the door closed behind her, she left Joule, Deveron, and Cage looking to each other as if to ask, What just happened?
Though she couldn't see anything from their windowless space, Joule couldn’t avoid hearing the rage of the wind outside. It slapped at the house with whatever debris it had picked up and whipped around. She wondered if there was a whiteout of cotton in the air, and she fought down the prickling of anxiety. All they could do was sit in the safest place in the house. And wait.
But Sarah—who’d been adamant that they hunker down and wait—wasn’t doing it herself.
It was Deveron who first put words to Joule’s thoughts. “Look, she's the only one of us who seems to know what she's doing.”
Even as he finished saying it, the door flipped open and Sarah, keeping her body limited to the lower half of the open space, duck-walked through and quickly shoved it shut behind her.
Why not just stand up and run through? Joule thought that would be quicker, but Cage managed to voice the question.
“Keeping myself low in case a window goes out,” Sarah explained. “Don’t want to get hit by any flying debris.”
Though the explanation made sense, Joule had been avoiding thinking about the tornado getting into the house. Sarah was still offering up her impromptu tornado safety lessons. “If you're exposed, you get down and you crawl around. It protects your torso, too.”
Jesus, Joule thought. For all the wind and the noise that sounded like someone had left a massive grinder on high, this storm still didn't sound like a train. In fact, every time she'd heard a train, it had been a train. And now that she'd actually seen a tornado, it didn't sound like a train at all.
She was super salty that her limited information had turned out to be incorrect.
But Sarah was already fidgeting with the dials on a small radio she had grabbed, and Joule didn’t have time to remain angry at whomever had sold her that useless bit of goods. The radio wasn’t old-timey, as Joule had anticipated. It was sleek, black, and high end.
“This is our lifeline.” Sarah held it up for a moment. “We don't have tornado warning sirens out here, but we do have access to updates even in a power outage. In fact, we should probably keep it in this room, since this is where we'll come if we see another one.”
If we see another one, Joule thought. That was something she didn’t want to contemplate. Being chased down the street had been heart-stopping enough. She didn’t want to become jaded to them the way Sarah had.
Or maybe Sarah was just handling the pressure well and she’d freak out later. For the moment, her roommate played with the knobs and found the emergency broadcast station. The voice came through loud and clear, updating them on what was happening and where.
At first, they listened with rapt attention, but after a while, Joule started to tune it out. The information repeated and only a few useful bits drizzled in over the next hour or so. None of it changed anything for them. They simply sat on the floor, waiting it out. Joule was grateful that she was too uptight to have to use the bathroom or get hungry, but she decided she was going to lay in supplies for “the next one.”
Mentally, she made a list of good things to have—snack bars, crackers, some bottles of water. She’d want a coloring book and some crayons maybe. Puzzles, something to damn well do.
If we see another one. The words ran through her head in a sarcastic loop.
“This was supposed to be a low-tornado area!” she complained aloud, as if the weather should understand where it was and wasn't supposed to go. But it certainly hadn’t understood that this last decade.
Sarah shook her head at Joule. “This is low tornado.”
Joule and Cage blinked at each other as the words processed.
It was Cage who spoke up this time. “I've seen exactly zero tornadoes in any of the other places I've been—until today. I might not have lived here very long, but I've now been chased down the street by a tornado. It doesn't feel low to me—”
“Listen!” Sarah interrupted, jostling the radio a little bit as if to draw their attention.
The voice over the system let them know that this twister was currently being classified as an F1.
“F-1?” Joule cried out. “That was huge!”
“You won't think so once you’ve seen a bigger one,” Sarah told her, still remaining outwardly calm. Too calm.
“I hope I never do. This is supposed to be a low tornado area!” She reiterated the clearly incorrect idea.
“But there's no part of Alabama that's a no-tornado area.” Sarah sounded like she was trying to be comforting, as if anything she said would calm the other three down. “In fact, there's no part of the US that's a no-tornado area. They can happen anywhere. It’s just a matter of how frequent they are.”
“Well, I'm with Cage. I've seen exactly zero of these fuckers before now.” Even as she said it, Joule noticed that some of the noise outside had died down. But the voice on the radio crackled back to life, and this time they listened as it told them where a funnel had been spotted. In fact, there were two.
Christ. Joule sighed, but didn’t say it. Why should there just be one?
They had apparently seen the larger of the two. The other was also classified as an F1, but wasn’t quite as big.
Another hour of staticky updates passed before the voice declared the danger gone.
“That's it,” Sarah said, standing. “We are now free
