Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Read online

  As a sop to the young’uns, as Mike called them, with a disapproving scowl from Marta, we alternated in some of the players from the kiddie table as a reward for good play and good sportsmanship.

  Marta wasn’t mad at adding the younger players, but I knew Mike’s continual use of poor grammar aggravated his wife sometimes. He knew it too, which made the hillbilly speech that much more amusing to me. Adult doesn’t always mean mature, after all.

  “I don’t get it,” Tammy complained after her Aunt Nikki made another snickered comment that caused Pat to flash bright red, and her mother just shake her head.

  “I’ll explain it when you’re older,” Marta said, then in a mock whisper, “when she’s thirty and allowed to date.”

  “Moooom,” Tammy complained again, and we all erupted with laughter.

  Billy, though he was nineteen years old, fit right in with the other youngsters, which came as no surprise. His mother, Sally, confided that while Billy was physically nearing maturity, his intellectual and emotional development remained around that of an eight or nine-year-old. I wondered at that at times, though, when watching how he interacted with the little ones. No matter the game being played, or how badly he lost, Billy never raised his voice or caused a ruckus, which could not be said about any of my siblings’ children.

  Lisa, Nancy’s twelve-year-old daughter, fell into the same category as Billy when it came to maintaining a level head. Or so I thought, anyway. I knew very little about the care and feeding of little girls. My nieces remained a mystery to me. I knew boys. Charlie had always been easy to read, and he never seemed to meet a stranger in all of his short life. Collette deserved nearly all of the credit, but I tried my best to be more than an absentee father.

  I stumbled across Lisa enduring her breakdown late on the second day. She was sitting in the exercise room next to the recumbent bike, and at first, I thought she’d somehow fallen off and injured herself. I nearly charged into the room, a shout for Marta dying on my lips as I invested a second to study her posture and lack of open wounds.

  Lisa sat on a pair of exercise mats, backed up into a corner with skinny arms wrapped around her knees and silently crying. No sobs, no wailing. Just a steady stream of tears that trickled down her cheeks as she seemed to struggle to hold her head up. At the sound of my short knock on the doorframe, she looked around and started frantically wiping at her face with the sleeve of her t-shirt.

  “Uh, hi Mr. Hardin,” Lisa started, sitting back suddenly to lean against the concrete wall.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked softly, using a tone I typically reserved for one of the skittish fillies in the barn.

  “No, no, I’m fine,” Lisa blurted, “just not feeling…”

  I nodded. I sank down to one knee, feeling my old bones complain and my joints ache a bit as I did so. This put me closer to eye level without invading her space in the small room.

  “Missing your mom? Worried about her?”

  A short nod was her only response, but I felt encouraged to continue by even that movement.

  “She should have called by now,” Lisa whispered, as if she feared being overheard.

  “Sweetie, cell service has been down since yesterday,” I said, telling her something she already knew. Like with the little hand-held radio, cell phones usually caught a signal if you stood on the stairs, but the cell grid was sometimes even more fragile than the power grid it emulated. Who cares if you have a boosted router when the next tower is down in a ditch.

  My heart went out to the girl, because I knew better than anyone outside her family just how much she had already been forced to endure. And now, unlike the other children, Lisa was stuck coping with a new environment without Nancy, her only life preserver in a life that had already been unkind. Lisa played Monopoly and Risk and chatted with the other kids, but I thought I could sense she was keeping up a wall to separate herself from the others, and to shield herself from the hurts she feared were coming her way.

  “Lisa, I can’t begin to understand how you’re feeling,” I began, “but I do know how much you love your mom. And how much she loves you.”

  “Then why did she leave me here? Why couldn’t I stay with her?”

  “Because she loves you so much, and she wants the best life for you she can manage,” I replied, not trying to sugarcoat my answer. “This job with the electric company means a lot to her, and it means a lot to the people in this community, too. But you have to know, you’re the most important thing in her life.”

  “But she’s not here…”

  “And that’s tough on you,” I agreed. “She would never want to make you feel bad. But with this job, I’m sure your mom is thinking she can make enough money to take care of you on her own. Can you understand how important it is, to be able to take care of yourself? To be dependent on no one else but yourself?”

  I knew self-reliance was an adult concept, but I judged Lisa as mature enough to grasp the concept, at least in theory. Hell, most young adults twice her age still seemed to struggle with the reality of showing up to a job on time and taking pride in their work. I was so busy mentally castigating the next generation of slackers I almost missed her next question.

  “But if she’s so set on taking care of us on her own, why are we here?”

  Ah, that was a very astute question from a twelve-year-old. I decided to proceed delicately.

  “Do you remember those days right before the hurricane hit? When your mom was so busy helping me and Mr. Mike and everybody else get the farm ready for this storm?”

  “Yeah…” Lisa replied hesitantly after a long moment of thought.

  “That’s why your mom was here, and why she asked us to watch over you while she’s working her day job. This, her helping us out here on the farm, that’s like a part-time job, and she gets paid for her work here with having a place to stay and food to eat.”

  Lisa wrinkled her nose, thinking hard on my words.

  “Momma had part-time work before, and she got paid for her work in dollars, not a place to stay.”

  Lisa made this pronouncement with such offended dignity, my laugh came out without warning. Almost against her will, I could see a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth. I gave her a real smile in return, but my words were more serious.

  “Lisa, when I said your mom’s job is important, I wasn’t kidding. There are thousands, probably millions, of people in the path of this storm who are without electricity.” I paused, as if considering something. “In fact, I’ll bet you right now there are hundreds of people just in this county alone, sitting in the dark with their families, hoping and praying that the lights will come back on as soon as the storm passes. One of the reasons she wanted you to stay here was she knew we would still have service in nearly any circumstance.”

  “But why can’t I see her? Why couldn’t I stay with her at the shelter in town? I’m worried something happened to her.”

  “Because where she’s staying is only just down street from her job,” I explained, “and that shelter was designed to survive a bomb. I’m sure she’s just as worried about you. But she didn’t want you to be alone and scared when she had to go to out for work. Helping get the lights back on for everyone.”

  Lisa sat silent for a long moment, no doubt digesting my words. I had some credit still with Lisa after helping her and her mother move out of their old apartment and into the mobile home located here on our property. I’d also faced down a bully and stalker who’d menaced the two of them, though I hadn’t explained to Lisa yet that she never had to worry about Marky again. I wondered if I ever would.

  I don’t know if my words helped Lisa deal with her fear and loneliness, but I never caught her like that again. Maybe I was some comfort, or Lisa just got better at hiding her fears. Either way, nobody, not even Beatrice and her borderline claustrophobia, freaked out and publicly lost their cool in the shelter while we stayed hunkered down and hid from Mother Nature. I sensed this was only the first of many times we would need
a place to retreat from her considerable and unpredictable wrath in the years to come.

  We would acclimate. Not that we really had any choices. Adapt or die. That was the new world we lived in, now that the planet itself seemed to be turning against us.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Digging out from the hurricane meant more than just exiting the shelter, of course. After shutting off the breakers to everything but the bare essentials downstairs, we then repeated the process on the ground and second floor circuits. With the commercial power still out, Mike and Pat kitted themselves out in their rain suits to go around to the side of the house to fire up the generator, the ladies busied themselves checking the integrity of the windows throughout the house, and I spent some time ‘digging out’ the front porch.

  I say ‘digging out’ because even though I didn’t need a shovel, the machete I took with me got plenty of use as I hacked and slashed away to clear the open-sided porch. The one-hundred-plus miles-per-hour winds piled up a massive assortment of junk against the sides of the house and the barns. This was like the flotsam you found on the beach after high tide. I found myself shaking my head as I went through the mess littering the wooden planks of the porch, marveling at the accumulation of tree limbs, pieces of PVC, and a wide six-foot-long section of gray, curled sheet metal wedged between two posts holding up the porch roof.

  All the sticks and wood scraps went into a pile for recycling, but I was unsure what I needed with a four-foot length of quarter-inch plastic pipe. Maybe use it as a stake in the garden, I wondered idly. For the jagged piece of eighth-inch sheet metal, the sharp edges cut my gloves and then threatened to accordion on me as I wrestled it out into the yard.

  “Where the heck?” I wondered, then took a second to look around and take in my surroundings. I’d checked all the barns on my earlier excursions, in addition to the well house, chicken fortress, and other assorted outbuildings, but the source of the slightly curved piece of metal made me take a second look. Maybe it was blown from somewhere off the property, I thought as I panned around. Then I saw it, or more properly, didn’t see it.

  The single-wide trailer I’d called home while we’d built the main house, and more recently been loaned to Nancy and Lisa, was no longer sitting on the poured concrete slab adjacent to the front barn. The pad remained, along with the cement block battery housing for the water bug, and so did the bolted frame that made up the bottom undercarriage of the trailer, but everything else was just…gone.

  My vision was noticeably limited in the continuing drizzle of the falling rain, but I strained my eyes for some sign of the missing structure. If we’d experienced a tornado, this would make sense, I reasoned, but no one had heard the tell-tale wail of those winds. So where…

  Pattern recognition is a fairly well-understood brain function, as our relatively weak senses bring raw data to the brain and that magnificent organ fills in the blanks to make an actual image that matches those parameters. We see an octagonal shape and a blob of red color, and our brains interprets this as a stop sign. Of course, sometimes our brain slips in horses when we hear hoofbeats, and the stampede is actually zebras. Now what I was seeing in the front pasture didn’t look like a three-bedroom mobile home, so my brain took long seconds to piece the data together.

  As a young attorney, I’d worked on a case representing the heirs of a family killed in a downed charter flight. This scene reminded me of nothing more than the pictures I’d studied of that twin engine plane crash, and I finally figured out where the trailer had gone. In fact, the mobile home had apparently been torn loose from the base and gone cartwheeling end over end until it’d exploded in a tangle of plastic sheeting, fiberglass insulation and yes, sheet metal.

  “Well, glad we moved everything out of there,” I said to myself, and then I wondered at the fate of the Bonner house.

  “What are you mumbling over there?”

  Nikki’s voice cut through my musings like a knife, and I spun to see my sister, dressed in her yellow rain poncho, cutting the tree limbs into uniform length. Wisely, she had passed on a machete and she was instead using a pair of the limb loppers, and I heard her grunt every time she squeezed that last little bit to finish the slice.

  “Just noticed the trailer was gone,” I replied, then held out my hand for the two-foot long tool. Nikki sniffed, but handed the loppers over without further comment.

  Shaped like a pair of bolt cutters, the curved blades of the loppers did a much better job on the limbs than using a machete or ax, and without the risk of cutting off random body parts. They also gave the user a good workout in the shoulders, biceps and triceps, but without having to go to the gym.

  “Yeah, I saw that,” Nikki finally commented as she gathered up the now more manageable lengths of wood. Following her lead, I cut them off in three-foot lengths, and I noticed she was making two piles. One was relatively straight, while the other was made up of the crooked or cracked pieces.

  “What are you planning to do with these?” I asked as I cut the final limb. It was my turn to grunt as this one was over an inch thick and it took me three tries to eventually slice into sections.

  “Straight ones are for the tomato plants in the greenhouse,” Nikki said patiently, “and the crooked ones will eventually be kindling in the stoves. Now, what are you planning on doing with that trailer?”

  I sighed before replying.

  “Pretty much the same thing. Recycle what we can. Salvage the wire and fittings, see if any of the sinks or appliances survived. Won’t be burning any of the pieces, though.”

  “Why’s that?” Nikki asked with real curiosity in her voice this time.

  “Treated lumber,” I explained simply. Nikki got it. Burning wood soaked in God-knows-what chemicals wouldn’t exactly qualify as a smart plan. Good way to get a nice dose of arsenic poisoning, given the age of the trailer.

  “We’re going to get mighty cramped in that house, Bryan. I mean, I understand. We need the extra help. But where is everybody going to sleep? We’re going to be pushing it, even if we split up into the bunk rooms.”

  I understood what Nikki meant, and she wasn’t being dramatic, or ungrateful. Just realistic. The electric and septic systems, for example, would struggle to keep up with this many residents.

  “I was planning to see if you guys or if Mike wanted the trailer,” I admitted. “I know it was a small space, but with three bedrooms, that would be doable. Now though, we really need to get the Bonner place fixed up, and rigged with at least some limited solar power or the wind turbine.”

  “If it’s still standing,” Nikki murmured.

  If indeed.

  “Well, no time like the present to check it out, now that we’ve made some progress on the yard,” I replied, trying to sound hopeful and upbeat. Nikki gave me a look.

  “What?” I asked, waving my hands to signal my cluelessness.

  “With everything we still need to do, you want to dump all the heavy lifting on my husband and our brother and go goof off?” Nikki challenged, and I had the grace to flush in embarrassment at her words.

  “Well, when you put it that way…” I responded with a weak shrug.

  “Sounds like a great idea,” Nikki interrupted, rewarding me with a toothy grin. “Let me grab my rifle and we can take the side-by-side quad.”

  I laughed at Nikki’s enthusiasm, waving her back inside.

  “Go get your rifle,” I popped back, “I’m getting the real equalizer before we go.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Chainsaw.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nikki might have thought I was kidding, but we couldn’t get within fifty feet of the recently added gate in the fence line before I needed to fire up the chainsaw. I could see the fence was down in half a dozen places where the cedar posts were either broken off or the barbed wire had come unfastened. Most of that could wait, and I was pleased to see the old cross x metal gate was battered but still standing, but as far as I could see, nearly half the trees
were either uprooted or broken off stubs from the unrelenting wind. Some of the trees barring the gate could be moved out of the way for future processing, but I saw where three pines had come down almost on top of the gate, and each other, and formed an impromptu abatis.

  “Crap, that looks even worse up close,” Nikki complained, sliding over to take the driver’s seat as I unfolded from the position.

  “We can snake some of them out of the way,” I explained. “That’s why I loaded the tow chains. You drive, and I’ll hook.”

  “Well, that beats the alternative,” Nikki joked, and I gave her the obviously fake laugh she deserved.

  The trees lining the fence rows were a mix of pine, live oak saplings, and sycamores, with a few species I didn’t recognize, and they were interspersed with a wide variety of bushes and shrugs that had not done well in the storms. Added to the mix, I saw shards of metal, bits of glass, and pieces of plastic intermingled with the detritus. All in all, I was wondering if staying back around the house might have been the less strenuous option. But I wasn’t getting paid to stand around admiring the view, so I slid on another pair of heavy-duty gloves and began unrolling the chain.

  We quickly learned the limits of the side-by-side ATV when it came to towing trees, and I realized I would need to limb most of the trees out before hooking up the chains. Even the trees that weren’t rafted together like the three blocking the gate were nevertheless intertwined, and trying to pull one ended up moving, slightly, the next nearest two or three. Rather than risk burning up the ATV engine, Nikki pulled over and switched off the ATV and set to dragging brush and limbs out of the way as I stuffed myself into the protective gear and started the chainsaw.

  I never claimed to be a professional lumberjack, but you couldn’t tell from the safety gear I’d purchased over the years, and I wore it religiously. Or like my life depended on it, you might say. In addition to a full facemask helmet, I wore the Kevlar chaps and arm guards and my steel-toed boots while using the 16-inch Worx chainsaw. The weight was noticeable, but I wasn’t going to complain.