Anyone? (11 page)

I shifted on my seat so my back faced him.
No crying. Don’t
you dare start crying.
“I think he left it the day everything happened. I
didn’t have my phone with me until... until the other day.”

Cole didn’t say anything, but Callie leaped over the back of
my seat and curled herself in my lap.

“Hmm... I can see where that could get you down, but
honestly, does it change anything?”

I turned my head enough to see him without looking at him straight
on. “It changes everything.”

“Oh, really?” He yanked the charger from the cigarette
lighter and let it dangle from his fingertips.

“What are you doing?” I snatched it from him, plugged it
back in, and checked that the battery had begun charging once more. What was he
thinking?

“Just what I thought. It doesn’t change anything. Okay,
sure, the message is older than either of us would like, but that’s not going
to stop you from checking it out, is it?”

I shook my head. “No.”

He started thumbing through the cassettes once more until he
found one he liked. “Oh, a mixed tape! This should be good.” He slipped it in
the player and turned up the volume.

A country singer sang about her cheating lover and slashing
his truck tires.

I couldn’t help but think I hadn’t seen Dad or Toby in
almost three months. I’d never been without them for longer than a day or two.
Would I ever see them again?

“Hey, buck up.” Cole tapped my chin lightly with his fist. “You’ve
got a message to listen to, remember? That’s nothing to pooh-pooh.”

I glanced at Cole. “But he’s probably not there anymore.”

“Probably not.” He kept his gaze on me and turned the volume
up a little at a time. “But we definitely have a place to start.”

Cole flew upright in his seat, and I straightened in my own.

“What’s wrong?” I had no idea what had freaked him out, but
his strange behavior had me on edge.

He raised his arm across me and pointed out the passenger
window. “That’s what’s wrong.”

My back had been pressed against the door while I waited for
my phone to complete its charge, but when I turned around, I could see what had
made Cole’s eyes wide with fear. I was quite certain my own eyes held the same
look—pure and utter horror.

In the distance, but growing closer with each passing second,
a darkness, several miles wide and several miles high, rolled over homes and
buildings, engulfing everything in its path.

Lightning zigzagged like a fourth of July fireworks display,
highlighting shapes briefly before the giant black mass enveloped them.

Rumbling caused the car to tremble, and Callie disappeared
under one of the back seats, tangling her leash in a spider-web pattern as she
darted for safety.

My hair slowly rose, standing on end, touching the roof of
the car. I reached up and tried to smooth it down to no avail.

Tornado? Electrical storm?
How could that be? This
wasn’t Kansas! We didn’t have those kinds of things around here.

“Cole, what’s going on?” This couldn’t possibly be
happening, but the black mass continued toward us whether I believed it
possible or not.

My words seemed to snap him out of his trance, and he threw
open the car door without saying a word.
What? What is he doing?

I opened my door, figuring I should follow his lead, and
tugged on Callie’s leash, but she’d dug her claws into the floor. “Where are
you going?” I yanked on the leash again.

“Get back inside, Tess!” He started heaping items from the
cart into the back seat. “Get inside now!”

What was he doing? The water, the toilet paper, the waffle
iron—we wouldn’t need any of those things if we died in the process!

I glanced over my shoulder at the darkness approaching.
Ho-ly
crap!

Cole’s hair began to stand upright too. I jumped back inside
the car and slid to the floor with my face pressed against the seat, as if not
looking would change the course of our fate.

Holy crap, holy crap!
What is happening?

In all my seventeen years of life, I’d never seen or heard
of a tornado or electrical storm in this part of the States. Lightning, sure,
but it was regular old lightning—tame enough to be pretty—but this, this was of
the devil. It had to be. Nothing else could explain it.

My ears began to buzz as the droning sound of the storm drew
closer.

Cole threw open the driver’s side door, and slid into his
seat. It felt as though the air inside the car had been sucked out and replaced
with something else entirely—breathable, but not air. He slammed the door shut,
and looked down at me. “You better hold on. This is going to get interesting!”

Hold on to what?

He put the car in reverse and glanced over his shoulder as
he pressed the accelerator. The car skidded backward, and I heard the crunch of
metal carts as the station wagon plowed into them, scattering most of the
things we had taken such effort to pack.

I clutched the seat as best as I could, and kept my eyes on
Cole.

There was nothing confident about the way he stared out the
front window, or how he glanced behind him every other second.

Was that thing gaining on us? Could we outrun it?

I tried to climb back up onto my seat, but the car bounced
and swerved, and I was forced back to my spot on the floor. My back slammed
against the passenger door when he took a sharp left turn, and the force caused
the door to fly open and snap off the frame. It hit the ground with a metallic
thud, shooting up yellow sparks, but lay there only an instant before it flew
upward, spinning in a circle, and soared backward.

“Cole!” I grappled to find a handhold as my fingers slid
over the plastic surface of the seat. Oh, to have claws like a cat! The storm sucked
at my body, extracting me from the car inch by inch.

One of my feet slipped and dangled in the open, being
whipped by the increasing wind. I felt as though I were riding an amusement
park ride, as my stomach pressed tighter and the inertia pulled on me,
stretching me like taffy.

I was going to fall out of the car!

Cole kept one arm on the steering wheel and used the other to
clasp my wrist. “Hang on!”

Easy for him to say! He’d buckled himself in!

I positioned my good foot against the wall, and pushed
myself forward enough to draw my dangling foot back inside the vehicle.

“Get in the backseat!” He tugged on my arm.

“I can’t!” If I let go, for even a moment, I was certain I’d
be sucked out of the car, and just like the door, I’d hit the ground before shooting
upward and away.

“You’re going to fall out!” He glanced over his shoulder
once more.

“I know!” I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing, I knew
that, but I didn’t want to hasten being sucked out of the car either.

“Get in the back!”

“I can’t!” My toes ached as I pressed my feet against the
floor.

“Well, I can’t drive the car and hang on to you at the same
time!”

“Don’t you dare let go!”

“Get in the back or I will be forced to make a hard decision!”

I shook my head.
No, no, no.

“On the count of three, Tess. You dive for the backseat.
One, two—”

He didn’t wait till three, but jerked my arm with such
force, I had no choice but to follow his lead and shoot my body over the
backseat or have my arm ripped out of its socket. His muscles strained and the
veins of his upper arms bulged under his skin. He never let go, not even after
I’d made it over.

He yelled at me to put on a seatbelt, and only when I was
strapped in did he remove his hand from my arm. He shifted his entire focus to
the mess of a road ahead of us. For the first time since I’d met him, he’d
become serious—
very
serious.

He weaved in and out of cars, dodged fallen trees and random
debris. Sometimes he would take a left turn or a right turn that not only left the
wheels squealing but had me squealing too.

I glanced behind us, but quickly turned around in my seat
once more, face forward, eyes wide. The monster of a cloud was catching up.

Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap.

“Cole?”

“Not now.” He swerved the car down a side road to avoid the
huge parked semi stretched across all four lanes, blocking our path.

I fell to my left, nearly floating, but the seatbelt kept me
from hitting the roof. “It’s gaining on us, isn’t it?” I didn’t want to look
anymore. My heart couldn’t handle it.

He didn’t say anything, but glanced in the rearview mirror.
He pressed the accelerator even more. My answer. If the cloud of death didn’t
get us, speeding at over eighty miles an hour down a littered residential
street would.

Everything Cole had tossed inside the car—toilet paper, the
George Foreman grill, the bottles of water—slammed against one side and then
the other with every chaotic turn. All I could do was duck and throw as much as
I could into the very,
very
back, praying none of it would come
careening forward and smack me in the back of the head.

It didn’t matter that electric-tornado-demon clouds shouldn’t
exist—because they shouldn’t—all that mattered was that one now grew ever
closer in the rearview mirror.

Cole bounced the car up over the cement gutter and through
the parking lot, past car vacuum machines and the little store selling various
tree car fresheners.

What in the—

He drove the car straight into the automatic car wash. The
large brushes and hanging strips scraped and slapped against the metal frame,
but Cole kept going, driving the car along the track, forcing the tires over
the dividers.

A tire blew, then another, but Cole continued to drive the
slowing car into the middle of the building. When the station wagon ground to a
stop, he leapt into the back and shoved me down against the seat, covering me
with his body.

The seatbelt cut into my shoulder, my chest, my waist, but I
didn’t say a word. The air around us seemed light, like helium. An intense roar
filled my ears, echoing off the cement walls surrounding us, louder than
anything I’d ever heard before.

The car vibrated and glass exploded, causing me to shake all
over. Cole held me closer. Darkness cloaked us, covering us in black so thick I
couldn’t even see his face next to mine. No light shone, not even a sliver, but
the incredible, deafening noise threatening to pop my ears made up for it.

A lion roaring at my left, a train horn blaring at my
right—both within inches of my ears—would only be a fraction of the noise.

One sense replaced by a monster of another.

I coughed and choked on the dust and dirt swirling around
us, sweeping in through the open car door. Cole drew his coat over our heads, tucking
it in, which helped some, but didn’t ease my rising panic. I wasn’t good in
these kind of situations, and in the past couple of months, I’d been dealt more
than I thought was fair.

We were being engulfed by the dark mass, bit by suffocating
bit, like everything around us.

I tried to focus on Cole’s breathing to give my own a sense
of direction.
Easy, no deep breaths, just simple and shallow.
Less dirt
to scrape my throat as I swallowed.

Everything happened so fast. There hadn’t been time to
decide if driving a car right into a dry carwash was the best option, or if the
building was even stable.

There had been no time at all.

All we could do now was wait.

The storm now hovered directly over our building, tugging on
our bodies with such suction and grip it threatened to rip us out of the
shaking car. It popped my ears and filled my head with ringing. I could only
assume Cole experienced the same.

The car moved, not much, but it jolted my senses, and I
realized the car was inching backward toward the opening. A little here, a
little there, bumping over the way we had come. Whenever I thought it had
stopped moving, it would shift again. The brushes of the carwash scraped
against the sides.

“Cole!” I could hardly hear my own voice—whether because of my
buzzing ears or the loudness of everything around us, I had no idea. If he
heard me or answered back, I couldn’t hear...

Neither of us could stop the car from being sucked away into
oblivion. Climbing from the car would prove deadly, even if staying in it might
kill us. We could only hang on and hope.

I shoved the fingers of one hand into the crack of the seat,
gripping it, and wrapped the fingers of my other hand around the metal frame
under the front. Cole’s hold on me tightened, as his body seemed to lift away.
My seatbelt grounded us both.

Please, please, please.
I pressed my feet against the
front seat, fighting for leverage against the whirling darkness, and just when
I didn’t think I could hold on any longer... everything stopped.

It stopped.

The rain, the wind, the thunder, the lightning, the blaring
noise, the hum of electrical currents, even the darkness, lifted, graying ever
slowly. Shadows appeared through Cole’s jacket, but even that little bit of
light felt like a lighthouse beacon. Fantastic.

Cole’s body fell heavily on mine, as though the beast had
let go of its hold and he’d come crashing down with his full weight. He didn’t
move. Only his warm breath against my ear let me know he was alive. I didn’t budge
or push him off, but waited. We needed a moment to collect ourselves. Had we
really lived through that?
Really?
It seemed surreal.

“You okay?” he whispered. The jacket still covered both our
faces. His whiskered cheek rubbed against my forehead.

“I think so. And you?”

“I about crapped myself for a minute, but I’m good.”

“Do you think it’s over?”

He was silent.

“Cole?”

“I say we give it a moment before going to find out.” He
removed the dusty jacket from our heads, but continued to lie on top of me,
listening.

I’d never seen his face so serious. He stared upward and
tilted his head as if in complete concentration. I listened too. Deafening
silence replaced all of the terrifying sounds from before. The light and lack
of noise seemed like a good sign to me, but I had no idea if it was only
temporary. We could be in the eye of the storm, for all I knew. I kept my
fingers wrapped in place, gripping whatever I could.

I followed his lead and remained quiet, like him, but
scanned the roof of the car, the dirty interior, and him. When my eyes fell on
Callie’s limp leash, I shoved him forcefully.

“Get off me!”

He didn’t budge. “Not yet.”

“Callie!” In all of the commotion and near death experience,
I’d forgotten about her. I pushed against him again, and this time he rose to a
sitting position.

I unhooked myself from the seatbelt and fell to the floor,
squeezing myself between the sections of seats, not caring that the silence and
calm may only have been a trick.

“Callie!” I grabbed on to her leash, drawing it toward me.
When I held the long strap and the empty harness in my hands, I couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t do anything.

I pressed the harness to my chest, holding it. I was already
on the floor of the car, but had I been able to sink lower, I would have.

“We’ll find her.” Cole placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m
sure she’s here somewhere.”

There was no way that could be true. Between racing down
streets and taking sharp turns, not to mention the insanity of the suction
power which held all of us in its grip, my kitten could be anywhere.

Anywhere.

“I... I should have held onto her. I should have—”

“You were doing everything just to hang on yourself. This
isn’t your fault.” He squeezed my shoulder. “It’s not.”

Then whose was it? She was my cat, my responsibility. She
was all I had had left, and now I had nothing. I’d failed.

“Hey, let me check if things are safe and then we’ll go
looking for her. Okay?”

I didn’t answer.

He seemed to take my silence as acceptance and slipped out
the side door.

I continued to sit on the floor and cradle the empty leash.
I couldn’t have grabbed her, a large part of me knew, but I should have at
least tried. I hadn’t even made any attempt. Not one.
So selfish.

Some could argue she was only a cat—dispensable,
replaceable, just an animal—but she held me together when the world seemed to
fall apart. I placed my head against the back of the front seat, resting my
forehead against the plastic. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I bit my lip to
keep it from quivering. I could smell my stinky cat on the leash.

“Tess!”

Whatever Cole wanted, could wait.

“You’ve got to come see this,” he called again. “Seriously.”

I continued to hold the leash and the harness, and slid out
through the open door. I pushed my way past vertical spin brushes and hanging
strips and made my way toward the opening where Cole stood.

He glanced over his shoulder at me then looked outward
again. “This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

It wasn’t until I stepped outside myself that I realized
what held him so captivated. I drew in my breath and without really thinking
about it, I slipped my hand into his.

I needed to hold on to somebody.

Everything to the left of us lay flattened. Timber, bricks,
and lots of glass. Homes. Stores. Buildings. All rubble. To the right, things
looked pretty much the same. Hours before, the place had been left
untouched—almost
perfectly
untouched. Spring blooms had poked through
wet dirt. Grass had needed mowing. Wind chimes had hung from front porches and
sales banners had clung from storefronts.

Now, nothing stood upright.

Only our carwash with its little store front remained
intact. The windows were blown out, but the air fresheners still dangled from
their hooks. Odd and improbable, but I wasn’t complaining.

A double rainbow curved in the sky, stretching from the
north to the south, and softball sized hail littered the ground for as far as I
could see—thousands of balls like curled white rabbits. Had they not been so
destructive, it would have been amazing—
all
of it would have been
amazing—but right now, I was only horrified.

Cole bent, still holding my hand, and picked up a piece of
hail, bouncing it up and down. “Yeah, this isn’t normal.” He held it out to me,
but I didn’t accept the ball of ice. I didn’t want to hold it at all.

He tossed it and when it hit the ground, it shattered like fragile
glass. A shiver ran up my spine.

He didn’t mention Callie, and from the look of our
surroundings, I knew exactly why.

We stood there, staring at the nothingness of it all. He
didn’t attempt to remove my hand from his as we stood side by side.

“Remember how I told you about the weird weather?” He kicked
a ball of ice with the toe of his boot and it splintered and cracked, but didn’t
fall apart.

I nodded.

“Well, now you know what I’m talking about. Though this”—he
waved his free arm—”was something unexpected.” He looked up into the clearing
sky and the hint of blue in the grayness. “Mother nature sure likes screwing
with us, that’s for sure.”

After I’d looked around enough to know everything was a big
fat mess, I let go of his hand and started back to the car. I needed to check
on my phone, though chances were clearly against it being there, clinging to
the charger. But maybe, just maybe....

“This is only a minor setback.” Cole called to me. I didn’t
acknowledge him, but kept walking. “Tess?”

I didn’t answer—didn’t feel much like talking.

“Tess?”

The genuine concern in his voice forced me to stop, though
it took me a few seconds to turn around.

“We’ve got this, you know?”

I stared at him. What was he saying?

“We’re alive, and that’s something.” He gave a simple yet
sincere smile. “Everything might look real bad right now, but we still have
that.”

Yeah, we still have that.
I continued to the carwash.

A thick coat of dirt and grime covered the station wagon,
and as I walked beside it, I dragged my finger over the paneling, clearing a
thin wiggly line. A worm. I was about to wipe my finger on my pants but instead
stepped closer to the car and wrote my name and the date on the back window. It
wouldn’t hurt, in case someone happened to see it.

After staring at it a moment, I decided to add Cole. I didn’t
know his last name, but maybe if Dad heard I was alive and with someone, it would
ease his worry. A long chance, but something.

I wiped my hands on my pants, though the material was just as
filthy and hardly cleaned the dirt from my fingers.

Meow.

I whipped around, and stumbled backward, searching.

Meow.

Clinging to the large horizontal brush above the car, almost
lost in the bristles, Callie peered at me with large frightened eyes in dirt-encrusted
fur.

A sob exploded past my lips as I scrambled to climb on top
of the car, slipping and sliding over the slick surface. “Callie!” I lost my foothold
and crashed down on my knees, but I ignored the pain, and climbed again. “Callie!”

On the roof, I reached for her, but inches separated us and
prevented me from scooping my scared kitten into my arms. “It’s okay!” I stood
on my tiptoes, stretched upward, and wiggled my fingers.
Come on, come on.

Hands grasped my ankles, steadying me, and I glanced down at
Cole who grinned.

“It’s okay now. It’s okay. I’ve got you!” I stretched as
much as possible, more than was safe, and when my fingers brushed over her
matted leg, I took hold and yanked, freeing her.

She flew into my arms, digging her baby claws into my chest as
she clambered to find safety against my neck.

I slid to my bottom, sitting on top of the car, holding my
kitten against me as she wailed her high-pitched meows over and over against my
ear.

Tears fell down my face. I couldn’t stop crying.

Cole patted my leg and kept right on smiling. “One life
down. Eight to go.”