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I fought the wind, leaning my head and then my whole body against the furious gusts pulling me backwards.
I lost my footing and rolled backwards, pulled by the wind, until I was crawling against it. I scrabbled on the ground like an animal, clutching at roots with my good hand, grass, anything.
And losing the battle.
I was being dragged backwards. I dug my feet in and kept trying, finally managing to make it to a slight divot in the ground, a ditch beside the road that was full of water. I didn’t care. I thought I’d heard someone talk once about ditches being a last resort if you found yourself caught in a tornado, so I laid my body out and tried to dig my good hand into the mud and muck as deeply as I could to hold on.
The train howl continued and I closed my eyes and prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in and thought—if this was my last moment on this earth, at least I’d gone my way. It wouldn’t be at his hands.
God take my soul and let me be as free in death as I found in these brief last months of my life.
I squeezed my eyes shut and I prayed. I prayed for myself and I prayed Reece and Jeremiah and Ruth were safe.
I screamed my prayers into the wind and spit out water and clutched onto mud for life.
And the train roared on as God reached down from the sky and spent his rage upon the earth.
Chapter Nineteen
Reece sped back down the dirt road towards the ranch house faster than was wise. The roads were mud, but Christ, the funnel cloud had been huge, and it had torn straight down the middle of the ranch.
He and Jer had watched in horror from the cab of his truck after he’d pulled his brother off the road and inside to tell him about the tornado warning right as the funnel cloud had touched down about a mile off.
Right on the ranch.
There wasn’t much to do at that point except drive in the opposite direction and then stop the truck and watch on in horror from a safe distance a few more miles off.
When everything in him had wanted to drive straight back.
Charlotte.
He’d left her there. He’d just left her there. What the fuck had he been thinking?
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.
