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The house should be safe. That was what he’d been thinking. From most storms, yeah.
But that thing… dear God. He’d chosen wrong, again. Thinking to save his brother, he’d just left her there…
He pushed the gas pedal harder.
“Slow down!” Jeremiah yelled from beside him. “You ending up in the ditch isn’t going to do anybody any damn good.”
Reece did slow down, but only because ahead he saw the road itself was torn up.
“Jesus Christ,” he swore.
“It came across the road,” Jeremiah said, stating the obvious.
Reece slowed down, navigating around debris of all kinds that was covering the torn-up road. A kid’s bike, tree branches, fence posts, a car tire, all sorts of shit.
The path seemed to be almost 500 yards wide, the earth completely flattened and decimated. Before it had crossed into the road, it had run beside it, and the path headed back towards the house.
Reece navigated past the debris and once the road cleared again, he slammed his foot on the gas.
It wasn’t much further to the house, maybe half a mile.
Except when he pulled up over the last hill when he should have been able to see the gable of the two-story structure… there was nothing there.
“No,” he said. No, no, no. His brain refused to process even as the truck pulled up to the pile of bricks and wood and roof that had, just thirty minutes before, been a standing house.
With Charlotte inside.
He slammed the truck into park and was out in a flash, running up to the absolutely demolished house.
He just kept shaking his head, his brain refusing to process. No, no this wasn’t— The house was safe. He’d gone to get Jeremiah who was out where it wasn’t safe. This was the safe place. He’d left Charlotte in the safe place—
“Charlotte!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, running forward towards the ruin. “Charlie!”
His brother was in front of him, grabbing his chest and stopping him. “What are you doing? You can’t! It’s not stable.”
Not stable, was he kidding?
“Charlie’s in there!” Reece screamed at him, yanking to pull away from him.
“If she was then she’s dead,” his brother shouted back at him. “And there’s nothing you can do.”
Reece threw him off, knocking him backwards to the ground. Reece didn’t care. Jer would be fine.
“Charlie!” Reece screamed again, running up to the rubble. It was unrecognizable as a house. He climbed up some boards that he thought might have once belonged to the porch. They shifted underneath his feet and he almost fell, but he righted himself at the last moment, trying to climb further into the rubble.
“I don’t think she’s in there, man.”
“What?” Reece swerved to look behind him to see Buck, standing beside his brother and helping him up off the ground. “What do you mean?”
“I was watching out my window and I saw a car drive off right before the storm hit.”
Reece scrambled back off the unsteady wreckage to solid ground. “What do you mean? What car?”
Buck shrugged. “Don’t know. Never seen it before. Just saw the taillights booking it down the road. Then the sky got green and that noise started up like the sky was screamin’ and I hunkered down in the bathtub.”
Reece looked past him to see the bunkhouse, still fully intact. “And you saw Charlotte get in the car?”
Buck shrugged again. “Just saw the taillights, like I said.”
“It had to be her,” Jeremiah said. “Who else?”
Reece looked back at the wreckage. Who the hell would have shown up on the ranch during a storm like that? And would Charlotte really have gotten in a car with them? Had they seen the funnel touch down and realized they needed to get the hell out of there, whoever they were?
“Call the sheriff,” Reece said.
“Already on it,” Jer said, and when Reece looked over, he saw that yeah, Jer already had his phone at his ear.
Reece paced back and forth, dragging his hands through his hair, still feeling like he should be digging through the rubble. That he should be doing something. What if Charlotte was still in there, trapped? Suffocating? And he was just standing here like a dumb bastard, doing nothing while she choked to death? Or slowly bled out?
He imagined her dying a hundred different ways in the time it took a deputy to arrive. Twice more he’d tried to go searching for her in the collapsed house and twice, Jer had held him back and talked him down.
When he heard the sirens, he jumped up from the ground where he was crouched with his hands on his head.
The deputy let out a low whistle when he stepped out of his cruiser, and immediately pulled the radio from his shoulder and started speaking into it.
Reece ran over to him and started explaining there might be a woman inside. His words were spilling over themselves when the deputy frowned and held up a hand.
