“I never said that. I said it can’t hone in on us and chase us, I said we can change directions. You don’t listen.” Martin lowered to the ground to join us. “And just like that last one did, tornados can lose speed if the storm gets under them and just stop or back up. Bet you did …” His eyes widened. “Hey, where did you find that?” he pointed to the bottle. “That’s a treasure find of bourbon. I know you didn’t buy it. Did you pick it out of the rubble somewhere?”
Lane cleared his throat. “You can say that.”
“Supposedly one of the finest bourbons there is,” Martin said. “Cost a couple grand a bottle. That’s why I never opened mine. I see that’s open. Mind if I try it?”
“Sure.” I handed him a cup and the bottle. “It’s not very impressive though.”
Martin poured some, sniffed it, then brought it to his lips. He took the tiniest of drinks. “Wow, this is good. Now I’m sorry, I didn’t search my house for my bottle.”
I shrugged. “You didn’t want to.”
“You’re right. Besides, it’s only bourbon.” He stood. “I’m going to take this with me.”
Lane and I remained quiet until he walked away.
“Oh, Jana, I thought he was going to flip,” Lane said. “He has no clue.”
“I know. He would be mad. Do you feel guilty for not telling him?”
“Absolutely not.” Lane poured himself another drink, then grabbed another one of those little margarine servings and opened it.
✽✽✽
The plan was to sleep until the storm calmed enough for us to safely leave. We had arrived at the garage late in the afternoon, and the storm only increased. First it was a steady rain, then it grew stronger with intermittent, loud and booming thunder, then as late evening set in, things would occasionally blow down the ramp along with the water. Nothing big, small items like trash.
We couldn’t leave any of the vehicles running, but I was able to charge my phone in Lane’s truck, plus I took advantage, like everyone else, that there was a signal in Joplin.
All information gathered was from social media. News outlets hadn’t updated in over twelve hours.
To me, the only information I wanted, was what was ahead of us.
Finally, Julius responded to my message I had send four hours earlier.
He apologized for the delay. He said he was putting together a few rescue teams in case anyone had to arrive on foot or was lost.
Julius told me to make sure I try to come in on either Internet Sixty-Four, Route Sixty or Route Two-Nineteen. He planned on placing people there until they had to pull back for the shelter for safety reasons.
Too many people, he told me, where in route, messaging him and, like me, had gotten held up or ran into trouble. The few exceptions were those already close.
I made I sure did a screen shot of what he said, messaging would be hard to pull up without a signal. I wanted to make sure I remembered it exactly.
‘They are launching a Jupiter Correction mission,’ he had written. ‘Twenty-nine Geo missiles will be fired in twelve hours in an attempt to break the massive storms.'
“Will it work?” I asked.
“We’ll know within twenty-four hours,” he said. “It will take twenty-four hours, give or take an hour.”
“What will happen? We’ll know right?”
“Absolutely. Either it works, the clouds break and the sun shines or Ares forms. If you are not in the safety region by then, anyone not in the safety region will probably never make the safety region.”
Then something strange happened. Not that it was uncommon, but it wasn’t on purpose. It was something I had done a ton of times with that stupid messaging app. I went to swipe down to close it out and I accidentally hit ‘video chat’.
It rang once and then he hit ‘end’ because the call was dropped.
I should have thought nothing of it, I mean, how many times had I been chatting with someone and they accidentally called me. And knowing it was an accident, I sometimes hit ‘ignore’, but why did Julius?
He couldn’t have possibly known it was an accidental call. How was he to know there wasn’t something important I had to tell him.
All I kept thinking about was Lane saying Julius wasn’t real. That he wasn’t part of some deep NASA lab or no way did he have access to the underground bunker.
Maybe he was some guy or kid in a basement, but if that was the case, how did he get everything so right?
It just bothered me and aided in my inability to fall asleep. More than the Julius anxiety, Walter was on my mind. Every time I wasn’t focused on something else, all I thought about was Walter and his family. Watching the car get sucked up and dropped hard.
The smashed car … the blood.
It was a nightmare; a horrendous sight I wish I could erase from my mind.
I tried everything. I organized the supplies again, trying to come up with a ration schedule. What would we do if Olympus wasn’t an option? What then? How were we to feed everyone?
I picked up the empty little margarine serving cups that Lane ate like candy. I was certain he would be sick over it.
Nearly forty-eight hours had passed since I had been to bed. Other than an hour nap in the RV, and another hour just before dinner, I did not rest.
Everyone else seemed to have no problem with it. I didn’t know how they could sleep. Maybe they weren’t and were just lying there like me.
The storm had intensified to the point the power had gone. The two emergency lights, which barely lit the garage, were dimming by the minute. The lightning was bright. Bright enough to make its way into the garage like flashes of the paparazzi.
If that wasn’t enough to wake people, the wind should have been.
It grew louder, and so steady, it sounded more and
