“He’s just another man who used you,” Sean said. “Just like all your customers, Britt. All he’s done was use you, from the beginning. I cared about Daryn. Maybe I didn’t understand her, but I cared. I wanted to be with her…by the end, that was all that mattered to me, being with her.”
Panic and confusion painted Britt’s face. The shotgun drooped further. “I don’t-”
“Shoot him and be done with it!” Smith shouted, showing the first signs of impatience.
Faith had been moving slowly during the exchange between the other three, inching with her feet toward the Glock on the floor. Outside, the storm had built to a scream.
She went into a dive, her arms outstretched. She got her hands around the pistol.
“Shoot him!” Sean said.
“Britt!” Smith shouted. “Remember what Daryn said!”
Britt screamed, an agonized wail. Faith froze, her eyes locked onto the window. A grayish white funnel-shaped cloud had descended from the sky and was churning up the ground, on a collision course with the house.
Tornado.
The scourge of Oklahoma in spring, they were intense storms with winds stronger than any hurricane, and they struck with much less warning. The cloud looked almost like it was dancing, its tail swaying back and forth. A tree in its path suddenly disappeared. Debris swirled around it and inside it.
“Sean!” Faith screamed.
They all turned. For an instant, Faith saw something cross Smith’s face that she never expected to see-uncertainty, fear.
Thunder, a lightning flash outside, and the interior lights went out.
There was a scream from the stairs-Britt.
The tornado danced across the plains. A window blew out.
“Is there a basement? A cellar?” Faith yelled at Sean.
“The kitchen!” her brother shouted back.
Each moved in the dark toward where the other had been standing. Faith and Sean found each other, and they clasped hands, just like when they were children and something scared them both. And just like then, Sean led the way, pulling Faith toward the kitchen.
More windows exploded. “Here!” Sean shouted, but couldn’t say more because of the deafening din of the storm.
He kicked open a wooden door in the kitchen. It led into blackness. An earthy smell drifted up to them.
Faith glanced up at the kitchen window. The funnel filled her line of vision. She screamed wordlessly.
She caught a glimpse of her brother, half-turned away from her. Then his hand was ripped from hers and she felt herself falling through the doorway. Her foot caught on something. She felt bones snapping, as her foot tried to go a different direction from the rest of her body. After a moment of blinding pain, she was falling again. Then, over the roar of the storm, she heard the boom of the shotgun. She thought she heard Sean’s voice one last time, and then everything was dark and silent.
38
FAITH AWOKE SLOWLY, TO THE SMELL OF WET earth all around her. She was lying on her left side, and that entire side of her body was damp. One arm was curled under her. Her hair felt matted. There was no sound whatsoever. She remembered how loud the tornado had been, and the quiet now seemed unnatural, unreal.
She didn’t move, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Gradually, objects took shape in the darkness. The kitchen door that Sean had pushed her through seemed to have led down to an unfinished, dirt-floored basement. She saw lumber, paint buckets, cans of food. Surely she must be dreaming-she was in a muddy basement surrounded by cans of green beans and chicken soup.
She sat up. Directly ahead of her was the staircase, except it wasn’t a staircase. She began to see that it was a folding wooden ladder. That explained how she’d snagged her foot between the steps-there was an open space between each rung.
Bracing herself with her hands on the muddy floor, she got to her feet. Millions of shards of red-hot broken glass stabbed both her feet. She screamed wordlessly and collapsed again.
She sat on the floor, breathing hard, until the pain receded a bit.
Okay, so one foot is broken. I remember that. And the other one-who knows? But I can’t stay down here. I have to find Sean. And what about Smith and the girl, Britt?
She rolled onto hands and knees, trying to keep her weight away from her feet. She grew dizzy and nauseous and collapsed again.
There was a small shaft of light entering the basement from the doorway above. Faith very carefully maneuvered her body so that both feet, still wearing the gray boots Hendler had given her, were in the light. The right one was at an odd angle to the rest of her leg-she’d felt it snap on the way down. The left foot was at yet another angle still. She hadn’t felt it break-she must have landed on it and her body’s weight twisted it.
Okay, so both feet are broken. Still can’t stay down here.
She rolled over again, fighting the tide of nausea. She stayed still until it abated, then crawled a couple of steps, using only her arms and upper body, essentially dragging the lower half of her body behind her.
The pain lanced her again, and tears formed. She struggled against the pain and dragged herself a little farther. More pain, more reflexive tears. She was breathing hard, and she made herself do some breathing exercises, the ones Alex had taught her. In sixty seconds her breath was under control, her mind focused and centered.
She dragged herself to the ladder-the one that had broken one of her feet, she reminded herself. She leaned an arm against it, resting from her trek across the muddy basement floor. Mud caked her arms up to the elbows, and the front of her tank top had the mud completely ground into it.
Now came the hard part-climbing. She’d known people who were rock climbers, who knew all about how to use their upper bodies to pull themselves up. Faith’s fitness had always been attuned to the lower half of her body. She took a moment to reflect that she had rarely found her running useful in real life. Fat lot of good all those miles and marathons did her now, with two useless feet dangling at the ends of her legs.
Move your ass, Faith. Get yourself out of this hole. Your brother might need you.
She reached two rungs above her head, wrapped her arms around the wooden ladder, and pulled. Her feet screamed in pain. Faith bit her lip.
One rung at a time.
Her body moved a few inches.
Next rung.
A few inches more.
And so it went. She had no idea how long it took her, rung after excruciating rung of the ladder
By the time she reached the top, there was very little light. Her arms exhausted and aching, she put on one last burst of strength and pulled herself over the top.
She’d heard of the capricious nature of tornadoes, but had never lived through a major one herself. There were famous stories of a tornado making its way down a street, destroying one side completely, flattening everything in its path, while the other side of the street was completely intact, nothing out of place; or about how some tornadoes “skipped” houses, plowing through a neighborhood destroying every other house, leaving the ones in between alone.
What she saw was a microcosm of the stories she’d heard. The kitchen of the old farmhouse was nothing but rubble-two floors worth of rubble. The kitchen sink was upended a few feet away from the opening that led to the basement where she’d been. A toilet wasn’t far away, sitting upright but not connected to anything.
There was no wall. The southern wall was simply gone, whisked off the house’s foundation. Bricks and lumber were everywhere, housing fixtures no longer recognizable. Faith looked to the left, back toward the living room where she and Sean had found Isaac Smith.