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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.
“Wait, wait, wait, you don’t happen to mean a small woman, about yay tall with short, dark hair?” He held up his hand about the height of Reece’s shoulder.
“Yes. Yes!” Reece grasped the deputy’s shirt and dragged him closer. “That’s her. What do you know?”
The deputy looked alarmed, but answered. “She’s back up the road.” He hitched a thumb over his shoulder. “Maybe half a mile where the road’s all tore up. She was crawling out of a ditch when me and the ambulance were coming and flagged us down.”
“The ditch!” Reece yanked the deputy into a hug, then let him go, looking at Jeremiah. “The ditch!”
