But again, the wind and noise stole his voice. And even as he asked, the front door flew open and Deveron slid into his usual seat.
“Go!” his friend yelled, and Sarah was off before Dev even had the door closed.
As Cage looked out the back window, Izzy tried to situate herself, partially climbing over him and smushing herself into the middle space. He tried to put on a seat belt but couldn't make it click and instead reached out and braced his arm against the back of Deveron’s seat. With his head cranked around to look out the back window, much like his sister on the other side, the twins watched as the wide beast hit the edge of the field, pulling up enormous trees by their roots and sucking them into the sky.
22
“North,” Cage yelled as they hit the main road. “Go north!”
He said it the second time, in case Sarah hadn't heard. How could she hear with the windows down?
She’d opened them to let the wind flow through the car rather than shattering the glass. But as she made the sharp turn onto the small highway, he felt a precarious dip in the back of the car. The tire missed the pavement and his stomach pitched as he worried about going nose down into the ditch.
Across the back, he and Izzy and Joule clutched the seats in front of them, as though that would save them if the car suddenly dropped seven feet. The ditches on either side of the roads here were deep. The advantage to that was that they would already be low to the ground, in case the tornado went directly over them. Unfortunately, he would bet there were no pipes, nor anything solid, to hold on to if it rolled right over them.
He'd never seen anything like the wide, curling monster. Though Sarah had pulled away before he could see more, he found he was grateful for that. He'd watched three tall trees get ripped out of the ground—roots and all—the dirt that pulled up with them disintegrating quickly into the air that disappeared into the gray. As the trees were quickly whirled away, he wondered how long it took them to reach the other side of the funnel or to come back around to the front. Would the tornado eventually just drop them somewhere?
Underneath him, the tires squealed as Sarah raced down the road. They all knew they weren't supposed to try to outrun it, but there was now no other option.
The pylons they'd sunk in the field, though they should hold up to the force of at least an F5, had not been tested, and they were too big for human arms to wrap around them and hold on. Although the best hope for anyone stranded in the field would have been to belt themselves to the pylon anyone still out there probably would have been ripped away in a heartbeat.
Cage found himself wondering if all the Helio Systems people had made it off the field because it looked like the tornado was barreling across their construction even as Sarah squealed away from the site. He hoped everyone including Radnor had abandoned the area …
Behind them, he watched as one of the other cars turned and headed south.
Wrong direction! The thought screamed through his head, but he didn’t say it out loud. What good would that do?
It was Miranda’s car. He recognized it and his heart stuttered at the serious gamble his boss had just made. There wasn’t time to dwell on it. Sarah was yelling frantically into the open space of the car.
“What do I do? What do I do? Where should I go?” She had one hand gripping the steering wheel as the other smacked against it.
Joule, ever calm in a crisis, leaned forward to make herself more easily heard.
“Unless we get too close to it, stick to the freeways. If we get on one of the smaller roads, we won't be able to go as fast.”
“Oh, I can go as fast,” Sarah said, the threat finally sounding less than frantic. But she said it as though it were merely a matter of hitting the gas pedal.
Joule, still outwardly breathing easily, replied, “Not on gravel roads, not with those potholes, not with those turns. If possible, stick to the highways.”
Cage could barely hear the words. Maybe it was only because he knew Joule as well as he did that he deciphered what she said. But he was tapping her on the shoulder and pointing out the back window once again.
Behind them, the monster had reappeared. Now it seemed to have moved toward the north end of the Helio Systems work site.
He was offering up a silent wish that his colleagues were safe as he saw a pale blue metal pylon launch into the funnel and disappear.
He gasped, but as he tried to process it, the image was gone. It was so fast that he had to wonder if he'd only imagined it. But next to him, Izzy breathed out, “Holy shit,” in a nearly reverent tone.
At the same time, Joule muttered, “Holy flying monkey balls.”
He would have laughed at the contrast had they not been stuck in the small car, fleeing for their lives.
“It's tracking us,” Izzy breathed the words, her awe apparent between the wispy tone and her wide eyes.
Though Cage knew that kind of anthropomorphic attribution to a weather system wasn't smart, it definitely did feel as if they were being actively searched out.
“Sarah!” he yelled, “Keep going forward. But take the next highway to the left that you can find.”
It was coming closer, the distance between the car and the storm shrinking with every passing moment. It was possible they couldn’t outrun it at all. But his brain was absorbing everything, the way the edges were somehow both rough and clear. The feeling of a limited space but the absolute destruction that dwelled inside
