The sound of my daughter’s name was what finally kicked him into gear. He scrambled toward the four-wheeler, hopping on after me and winding his arms tightly around my waist as I jammed the key into the ignition point and started the engine. “What about the cows?”
Revving the engine twice before shifting it into gear, I shook my head. “They’ll be fine. All the gates are still open, remember?”
“Because we needed to herd them back home,” he muttered, just loud enough for me to hear over the rumble of the engine. His hands tightened around me when I punched the gas, jolting us both back from the momentum. “Right?”
“Right.” With my jaw clenched, I focused on the track immediately in front of us, avoiding any obvious potholes that would throw us out of our seats. A broken axle now would be catastrophic. I couldn’t avoid the many smaller divots in the ground that still held puddles of water from the rain we’d received over the past few days, so we both got jostled violently from side to side. Water sprayed our boots and the bottoms of our jeans every time we bounced through a slightly larger puddle, but I ignored it all in our race to get back home.
Back to Rose.
We still had about a quarter of the way to go when I heard Marshall curse violently.
“What?” I slowed just enough to shift in my seat so I could hear him more clearly, my eyes still on the ground in front of us.
“Dead man walking,” he yelled into my ear, panic clear in his voice. He thumped me hard on the back before I saw his shaking hand appear out of the corner of my eye, pointing us ahead. “Don’t slow down, for fuck’s sake. Go! Go! Go!”
Swallowing hard, I revved the engine and gunned the four-wheeler harder, still trying my best to avoid the biggest potholes. If what he said was correct, the thin funnel we’d seen out on the edge of our property had evolved into multiple vortices, known to viciously annihilate anything in their paths.
With every atom in my body, I prayed that the twister wasn’t following us home. Turning my head to check on its location would immediately doom us, so I trusted what Marshall had said and focused on what I could control in such an overwhelming situation—the speed and direction of the four-wheeler.
As soon as the house came into view, I laid heavily on the horn. The town alert that had come through to my phone would have also notified Rose. We’d run the drills over and over through the years, so something deep in the logical side of my brain recognized that she knew to head straight to the storm shelter when any alerts came through, but I could feel myself panicking. Until I saw her safe and sound with my own two eyes, logic held no sway in my brain.
Bucky was the only one in sight, scrabbling desperately at the glass sliding door, and although I couldn’t hear him from where we were, I could see his jaw working hard as he frantically barked.
I wasn’t the only one who was panicking.
A fresh wave of terror ran through me. Bucky and Rose had been joined at the hip for years. Why could I only see Bucky through the glass?
Where was my daughter?
I skidded the four-wheeler to a stop as close to the stairs of the rear deck area as I could before both Marshall and I jumped off our seats and ran for our lives.
Chapter Sixteen
Marshall
“Rose!”Danielroaredassoon as he threw the sliding door open.
I grabbed Bucky before he could escape through the new gap in the door, pulling him back inside with us as he growled and snarled at the twister behind us, slamming the door shut once we were clear through.
“ROSE!”
Stumbling slightly when I chanced a look outside at the terrifying tornado that had seemed to stalk us through the paddocks, growing ever closer with every passing second, I hauled Bucky by his collar away from the glass. “Bucky,” I said, forcing his attention onto me. “Where’s Rose? Find Rose, Bucky.”
With luck, he’d lead us to the left, toward the pantry, and through to the door of the storm shelter.
That wasn’t where he headed, though.
“In here, D-Dad!” Rose called from our right—the direction of Daniel’s bedroom.
Daniel immediately turned on his heel and ran toward his daughter, following Bucky. “Rose! Why aren’t you in the shelter?”
Choosing to let them bicker amongst themselves, I warily watched the tornado through the clear glass. Although the wind had picked up substantially on our way back, we’d stayed dry. When the first heavy droplets of rain began to fall, I looked up to the sky as I stepped back from the glass.
The sky had turned that sickening green again.
A flash of recognition ran through me at the reminder of what had happened at the gas station only days prior. First came the green sky, then the rain, then the deafening noise.
Right on schedule, the heavens opened, and the few heavy drops of rain progressed into a deluge of epic proportions.
