“One of us should be to y’all soon,” Price said as they were ending the call. “Stay safe, Wildcard. And watch the weather. The air still feels weird.”
They didn’t know how ominous those words wouldlater become. Instead, the call dropped, and Rose drove the service road attached at the back of the lot and headed toward the new, fancy, research annex.
She didn’t make it far without stopping.
There were only two ways to get to the high-tech annex—the road from the hospital and the road from the county. Both converged for a three-way stop surrounded by trees. Rose understood why the bus had been stranded on the road leading to the hospital. There was a tree down, blocking the road near the three-way.
She stopped her car and jumped out to survey the damage.
The road was almost impassable, completely so for a bus. For her old car? Rose decided she could make it work. And she did. Slowly and with great caution, she maneuvered the flooded shoulder until she cleared the debris. The parking lot of the annex hadn’t fared too much better. It was partially flooded and mostly covered in leaves and branches that had been stripped from the surrounding trees.
There was no bus, so she backtracked and went the only direction she could.
The road to the county was as country as they came. Dirt and gravel and underbrush creeping out. Trees lining the sides and some old fence, from the property of an owner who had long since passed on, scattered between. Not exactly a wooded area but enough oaks to shade the road even when the sun was in the sky.
Rose knew the road.
The one she stared at now was unrecognizable.
The hours of rain had seemed to collect solely in this area. She could only see patches of the dirt and gravelbeneath the water. She bet that was why the bus had driven where it shouldn’t have. Instead of being within the lanes, it was on the shoulder, sitting at an odd angle.
The back emergency door was open and facing her.
That was when she first saw Lloyd Harrison.
Tall, thin, and wearing an outfit that seemed to come right out of a movie—white lab coat, comically large ID badge and booties still wrapped around the bottoms of his shoes—he looked nothing but flustered as he yelled out to Rose when she stepped out onto the only part of the road that hadn’t yet been submerged.
“We can’t move,” he cried, his voice carrying through the wind. “Our front tire blew, and we can’t drive out of whatever we’re stuck in!”
Rose assumed he had already spotted her badge hanging around her neck but motioned to it all the same.
“I’m a deputy with the McCoy County Sheriff’s Department,” she yelled out. “I’m here to help! Right now, let’s sit tight and figure—”
Rose’s words were strangled by a sound that made her blood run cold.
A tornado siren.
It tore through the air with an eerie echo.
Screams exploded from the bus.
“Keep calm,” she instructed. “Just because it’s going off doesn’t mean it’s near us! It just means it’s in the county.”
To help her point, Rose pulled her phone up and went to the local weather station’s social media page. She clicked on their meteorologist’s live feed, ready to prove to the panicked people on the bus that they had time tomake good decisions. That this new threat was scary, but not something they had to deal with themselves.
The meteorologist’s face filled her screen, focused and commanding, a map of McCoy County beneath his waving arms.
He spoke and Rose heard him, yet, months later, but she still wouldn’t remember what he actually said. Instead, all her attention had stuck to the red area on the map he seemed to be so concerned about.
It turned out Rose was wrong.
It looked like they didn’t have much time to make good decisions at all.
So she worked with what she had.
Rose flung herself back into the car and hit the gas. Her old car lurched into the rushing floodwaters with absolute obedience. If it had been higher, she couldn’t have done it. And if she hadn’t been so small herself, rolling down the driver’s-side window and crawling up onto the roof of her car would have been harder. As it was, she managed both actions in rapid succession. The metal roof held sturdy as she found her balance and turned to face a wide-eyed Lloyd Harrison. Now there was only the space of her hood between her and him at the back emergency exit.
Rose kept her voice as calm as possible. She also made it as loud as possible too.
