Free Just One Day by Sharla Lovelace Page A

caused alarm, because it turned him back.
    “What?” I heard behind me, but I knew he’d see it from where he stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Holy fuck,” he said under his breath, as more glass broke above our heads.
    The wind outside was sideways and swirling, pieces of limbs and debris were flung randomly. But what was driving that was about two blocks away. Where there used to be trees. A thick, barrel-shaped funnel of swirling dirt and debris and water was ripping up the ground. And coming our way.
    It was terrifying and mesmerizing all at the same time. I could even feel the rumble under my bare feet, like standing next to a train going by. Only this train was about to mow us down.
    “Get in the pantry!” Jesse yelled, his voice cracking. “Now!” When I didn’t move, he yanked me by the arm and pulled me behind the bar and opened a section of wall I didn’t even know was a door. The movement stunned me into action and I ran in. Shelves of canned goods, bagged goods, paper products and boxes lined the walls. An old twin mattress leaned against the back, along with some folded cardboard containers.
    “Get under that mattress and stay there, I’ll be right back,” he yelled, the deafening noise nearly drowning him out. I could see behind him to the tornado bearing down.
    “Back? No! Get in here,” I screamed, feeling the panic rise in my chest. “It’s coming!”
    “I have to get something upstairs, get under there now, Andie!” he yelled, shutting the door in my face. The little room went dark.
    “Jesse, no!”
    I opened the door just as Brad’s car tumbled and crashed across the parking lot like a child’s toy. Any other words froze in my throat. I slammed the door and scrambled to my knees in the dark, groping for the cardboard boxes and flinging them aside. I crawled behind the mattress and stuck three fingers in a ripped place to hold it.
    “Oh God, oh God,” I cried. “Oh my God, please help us.” Adrenaline rushed through me so fast I could hear my own blood moving. “Please, Jesse, get back here.”
    In the dark, everything intensified. I felt the rumble beneath me as if the earth were cracking open. Glass shattered outside my little world, something I assumed was furniture slammed against my door, making me scream. Horrible groaning sounds of metal bending against its will filled my ears. Walls collapsed over my head and cans of food fell all around me, bouncing off the mattress and slamming to the floor. I pulled my soft shield against me as tightly as I could, and something flat and heavy landed on top of me. I squeezed my eyes shut, my cries becoming wails. I’d never felt so utterly terrified and helpless, and as the roar got so loud I feared my eardrums would burst, it got worse. Leaves and sticks were hitting the floor around me, sweeping under the mattress into my face. There was only one way those things could get in.
    “Oh God, please,” I sobbed. “Jesse.”
    I wanted to vomit from the piercing fear and the images I held in my head of what might have happened to him. I screamed out his name again and again as the planet caved in around me. That’s what it felt like. I thought of my daughter and couldn’t remember the last time I’d talked to her or when I’d told her I loved her last. No one even knew where I was. No one would know if I died there. Something else flew across the room and shattered against the wall, and I concentrated on my daughter’s face and the funny way she scrunched it up when she laughed, hoping I’d see it again. Hoping she’d never know fear like that.
    Then it stopped. Like—poof.
    The only sounds were my labored breathing and the rain falling softly. My arms had gone into rigor mortis from the tension, and the mattress was suddenly too heavy to move. I couldn’t push it off me, but I could see out the side that it wasn’t dark anymore. My first loopy thought was that the lights had come back on. The next one told me that the