Bloodstained Oz Read online

  “Tornadoes!” Hank shouted, pointing.

  Inmates and guards alike began shouting, cussing, and took off at a run. The guards climbed into the two trucks. Inmates pulled themselves into the beds of both, no one giving a damn if they were kneeling on shovel blades. The gates of Guilford were mostly barbed wire around the outside, but the buildings inside were like bunkers. They ought to be safe within the walls, in cells or cellars.

  Hank Burnside wasn’t afraid of anything, but only a fool wouldn’t have run in the face of that storm. As he gripped the back of the equipment truck, the engine roared and the driver put her into gear and started off. Hank glanced back to see a lone figure in dirty prison overalls racing for an irrigation ditch.

  Terry Pritcher figured this was his chance. With the guards distracted, he was on the run.

  J.D. Cotton put down his shotgun and picked up a rifle, calmly judging the wind and the distance. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and shot Pritcher in the head from a hundred yards out. Blood and brain and bone sprayed out, mixed with the dirt and the wind and disappeared, even as Pritcher fell into a ditch, dead as the bleached earth.

  The truck rattled onto the dirt road and headed toward Guilford Prison.

  The storm kept coming. The sky turned black. One after the other, the tornadoes touched down. The ground shook and the wind began to scream.

  Chapter Three

  Jeremiah wailed inconsolably, and only one thing could soothe him. Elisa bared her breast and settled her baby against her, doing her best not to wince. He was starting to teethe and she was tender. Though that sharp pain paled by comparison to the deep ache in her temples, the pressure pounding at her skull with each beat of her heart. The throbbing of her pulse was like the fist of a giant, squeezing her head.

  Breathe, she told herself. Fresh air will help. And a few minutes of quiet . . . a few minutes without fighting.

  She loved her husband, Stefan, but he shared the blame for her headache. Elisa had begun the argument, but the man was so stubborn that they could not have ended it peacefully. She wished now she had not yelled at him. Then they could at least have pretended to be happy today.

  Instead they rode together on the seat at the front of the wagon in the silent aftermath of their argument. Stefan held the reins and willfully avoided looking her way.

  Some days she could not remember what it had been like before they came to America, before his dreams and the arrival of their baby son had taken away any hope they had of comfort and peace. Elisa loved Jeremiah with all of her heart and soul—and she still loved Stefan in spite of it all—but the life they had made was misery for her. They fought because she could not keep silent about it, and because Stefan was not willing to admit that perhaps his dreams had led them down a treacherous path. That this had been a mistake . . . that they should leave Kansas, and try to find a new life somewhere else.

  Elisa flinched as Jeremiah scraped her nipple with his teeth. She looked down at her baby and saw the tired contentment on his face, the closest thing to bliss that existed in the world, and she smiled. As long as she had Jeremiah, she could endure whatever came.

  She bent to kiss the baby’s head, and when she glanced up, she caught Stefan studying her with love and regret in his eyes. But he said nothing. Only shook his head and turned to gaze at the darkening sky on the horizon.

  After a moment, he finally spoke, but his tone was clipped and distant.

  “There’s a bad storm coming. Dirt storm, most likely. We need to find shelter.” The wagon creaked and swayed beneath them, the wheels moving over the uneven ground and rocking them like a boat upon a turbulent sea.

  Elisa bit her lower lip and resisted the urge to tell him that shelter would be easier to find if he hadn’t been swindling the people at all of the surrounding farms. She looked at the mass of clouds that churned in the heavens and blinked the grit away from her eyes. Then she cradled Jeremiah even more tightly to her as he fed. Jeremiah made it all worthwhile, even the deceptions.

  She knew her anger was fruitless, but that did not stop it coming. Her family was Rom, and they’d traveled all of Europe in wagons much like this one. But that was three generations ago and she could not live her life the way that her ancestors had. She’d gone to school; she’d been educated and—in her mother’s words—civilized. This wasn’t any sort of life she had wished for.

  All of the things that Stefan did—including selling his camphor and alcohol elixir and making absurd promises about its virtues—he did for the sake of their family. She could forgive him that. But he would not need to make up such lies if his damned wanderlust had not stranded them in this blighted land to begin with. They would never have gotten rich on what he had earned as a fishmonger in Boston, but they would have made due. Now their house was a distant memory and he held onto the belief that he could somehow make enough as a traveling salesman to earn them a better life somewhere else.

  Elisa had her thick, curly hair pulled back into a ponytail. The wind that harbingered the storm buffeted her and her hair whipped across her face. That same growing breeze lifted dust from the ground in a rising ghost of a cloud and cast it across the rutted path the wagon moved along.

  Stefan called to the horses and pulled the reins, halting the wagon.

  “Elisa! Take Jeremiah and go inside!”

  His voice was strained, but she knew her husband well enough to know that it was not anger than unsettled him now. It was fear.

  The sky roiled with black clouds, a tidal wave of storm that swept slowly toward them. Black fingers reached down from the sky and traced across the ground. She had seen tornadoes before, of course, but never this close. Four thin strands of dust and filth spread apart and cut into the land from each point of the compass. Darkness danced madly where they touched the arid earth and brought the promise of sudden, violent death.

  The sky howled and Elisa climbed from the seat, holding her son to her chest. She went around to the back of the wagon and clambered through the curtain flaps that hung there, Jeremiah in one arm. Stefan shouted to the horses, got them moving again, and coaxed them along, heading off of the road and across a barren field.

  She quickly strapped down the few items that were not already tied in place, resisting the urge to throw Stefan’s elixirs out through the back while he was too occupied to notice. In the wagon, some of the many crucifixes he had collected in his travels swayed from their chains and on hooks. Through the small window she could see a man dancing madly, waving his arms as he whirled in tight circles.

  Jeremiah removed his mouth from her nipple and belched, looking up at her with all the trust and love in the world. She smiled at her little boy and then looked out the window again in time to see the lunatic dancer careen toward the wagon. Elisa almost screamed but instead merely sighed when she realized it was merely a scarecrow broken free from his post. The canvas face smashed against the window and black button eyes stared at her for a moment before the wind stole back its dancing partner.

  Elisa held on to her son with both of her arms as the wagon rocked and swayed dangerously toward the left. Through the window she caught a quick glimpse of a farmhouse, and a second later of the monstrous black nightmare that tore it asunder.

  Outside, doing his best to lead them to safety, Stefan held on to the reins and cursed his horses as they whinnied in fear. Elisa closed her eyes and held her breath as shattered boards and tar paper shingles hurtled through the air, all that remained of a home destroyed by the fury of the storm.

  Elisa lay down in the center of the wagon and sheltered her son with her body. She had no faith in God, but she refused to believe that she and her family would have come all of this way to die in the middle of a stretch of ruined farmland.

  A hail of debris, rocks and dust assailed the wagon and she could her husband praying. “Please, Lord,” he called out to the howling storm. “Watch over Elisa and Jeremiah. Protect us, keep us safe in Your hands and shelter us from this and all obstacles. Amen
.”

  Elisa would not pray.

  Funnel clouds moved across their path and blocked every possible method of escape. But she would not pray.

  If there ever had been a God, she felt certain He had long since gone deaf.

  Chapter Four

  Gayle Franklin swallowed the hot grit that coated her tongue and stared at the sky with wide eyes. The air was still, and she could see the dust falling from the air in a fog of midnight.

  The storm was coming this way, a massive wall of churning dirt and hurricane wind that was going to plow right over them. She knew she had to move, knew every warning sign she was seeing, but her legs didn’t want to follow orders from her head. Off in the field, she saw her father running for the house, his legs pumping furiously and one hand held to his face, clutching the handkerchief that made it possible for him to breathe at all in the caul of gray dust. She could track his progress by the little clouds that rose up from the dirt with his every step, could see his wide, frantic eyes.

  “Pa…” she called, her voice breaking.

  He used to be such a big man and these days he seemed as skinny as the scarecrow she’d watched blow away. The calm was here, and the storm was on its tail, furiously hunting for prey. She called to her father again, but her voice was a whisper and a whole field still separated them.

  Behind him the midnight clouds descended, spitting dusky shadows into the air even before they touched the ground. That was silliness, of course, a touch of heat fever on her brow surely, because any fool knew a tornado that hadn’t touched down yet couldn’t have picked anything up to begin with. Any fool from Kansas, at least.

  “Run, Pa . . . run faster . . .” Gayle placed her hand on the window and felt a chill on the glass that earlier had been hot to the touch. Far in the distance she could see the Yancey farm, where Lorenzo and Enid Yancey had been toiling as hard as her own folks, but with less success. Her eyes moved from her father, closer now, so much closer than he had been before, his legs moving almost in a blur, over to the Yancey place. She was looking directly at buildings she had known all of her life when the tornado touched the roof of the house like the hand of God.

  Gayle stepped back from the window, rigid with horror, as the Yancey farm disintegrated, feeding itself into the cyclone. The base of the thing had been a tiny tendril and now was a serpentine dervish, twisting and shaking as it roared and ripped the Yancey place apart.

  She looked toward the heavens, almost expecting to see an angry face, a horrid mouth and eyes of lightning staring back. There was only the storm, but she was not comforted. Somehow its blank fury was worse.

  Below her, the front door slammed open, the wind banging it against the house again and again, a cavernous drum beat that startled her almost as much as the sound of the tornado.

  “Gayle! You get down here, girl! There’s a twister coming our way!”

  When she heard her father’s voice she let out the breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. Her eyes remained locked on the funnel as it writhed and snapped at the air. For a moment she thought she saw angels in the sky, holding the clouds at bay and struggling to protect them all.

  But that couldn’t be. Angels had to be stronger than a storm, or they wouldn’t be angels. Still she would have sworn to the Almighty Himself that she saw winged men falling to the ground from impossible heights. Angels cast down or demons ready to pillage the land and take whatever the twister left behind.

  “GAYLE!”

  Her father’s scream snapped her out of her fearful trance and Gayle rushed out of her bedroom into the hall. The house wasn’t safe, couldn’t possibly be safe. She knew that as surely as she knew the view from her window would never be the same again.

  The stairs creaked and seemed to sway beneath her feet as she ran down to the first floor, her eyes stung by the dust blowing in through the open door, where he father stood waiting.

  “We have to run, Sugar! We have to run now!”

  He was thinner than when she was a child, true, but her father grabbed Gayle in his arms and half carried her as he ran for the storm cellar. Across the yard, her mother waited for them with one of the heavy wooden doors propped up, straining to hold it open despite the wind. The doors led down into the earth itself. Gayle had never liked it down there.

  Beyond her mother she could see only the blackness of the dirt storm, this terrible night that had swallowed the day, and hear little besides the churning roar of the tornado that come down out of it and now moved toward their home, tearing the very earth apart in its fury.

  Gayle scrambled down the wooden stairs nailed into the ground and lost herself deep in the darkness of the storm cellar, her hands trembling. Her mother came down next and moved to her, a strong woman with a face made old before it should have been. Her father was last, pausing only long enough to slam the cellar doors shut, and then lock them into place with a stout crossbeam as thick around as his own thigh.

  They huddled together in the darkness, in the chill of the underground shelter, and Gayle wondered what would be left of the farm when the storm was done with its tantrum. She closed her eyes and clutched at the arms of her parents as the darkness howled above them and rattled the wooden doors. Her eyes stayed closed, sealed against the nightmares and the night.

  Chapter Five

  The morning after the dirt storm and the tornadoes had torn their way through Hawley, Gayle awoke in the cellar under the Franklins’ farm house. A layer of dust covered her, having slipped like mist through the cracks around the doors and collected on everything and everyone while the family slept.

  The doors stood wide open and the sun shone down the steps onto the dirt floor. Gayle smiled at the sight, a strange relief coming over her. It had been foolish—childish, she told herself—but she had been afraid that morning would never come, that the darkness of that storm would swallow the world and she’d have to live in the wind and the dark forever, with the scream of the tornadoes making her clutch her hands to the side of her head every moment.

  She had fallen asleep like that, with her hands over her ears.

  “Momma?” Gayle said softly. She wiped grit from her eyes as she stood up and then brushed off her dress. Suddenly she needed very badly to pee.

  With a frown she headed for the splash of sunlight, and then up the stairs and outside. The first thing she saw was that a section of the south field had been plowed up by a twister, crops torn out of the ground. The fence down that end of the property was just gone, save a few splintered posts sticking up out of the dirt. Of the Yancey farm in the distance, all that she could see was jagged rubble. The barn and the house had been reduced to nothing but memories.

  Gayle stared, breath caught in her throat. How could that be? How could they just be gone? And if the buildings were gone, where were the Yanceys?

  In town, she told herself. They must have gone into town.

  “Momma?” she asked again, if only to hear the comforting sound of her own voice. For several seconds she did not even look around from the devastation. Then, with no response from her mother, she started around to the front of the house.

  The windows were all open. Two of the big ones had cracks in the glass, but hadn’t shattered. That was lucky. From inside she heard the sounds of cabinets being opened and closed, and now she called out louder.

  “Momma?”

  Her mother’s face appeared in a kitchen window, a crack in the glass like a scar slicing down her cheek. “Morning, Sugar. You still in one piece?”

  Gayle smiled, heart swelling with the sound of her mother’s voice. “Yes, ma’am. One piece.”

  “You looked peaceful and I didn’t want to wake you, darlin’. We’ve got a lot of work to do today. I’m trying to clean up a bit in here, and to figure out if we’ve got anything to eat that isn’t caked with dirt. I don’t suppose you want mud pies for breakfast?”

  The little girl rolled her eyes heavenward. “No, ma’am. If it’s all right with you, I don’t have much appe
tite for mud pies.”

  Her mother laughed softly and now Gayle looked around. “Daddy out in the field?”

  “Looking over the damage,” she confirmed, and then her smile faded. “We’ve still got some crops growing out there that didn’t get choked out in the storm. Ain’t gonna be easy, but we’re a sight better off than the Yanceys. Poor folks don’t have anything left.”

  “Are they all right?” Gayle asked, eyes widening.

  “Believe so. Your daddy thinks they went into town last night after the worst of it past, looking for a place to stay.”

  Which was exactly what Gayle had thought. She liked the idea that she and her father had come to the same conclusion. It made her feel grown up, somehow.

  “You come on in and give me a hand, now, little one. You hear?”

  “Yes, Momma. But I’ve got to go, first.”

  Her mother had begun to move away from the window, but now her face returned, a lopsided smile turning into a soft laugh. “Well go on, then, Gayle. You don’t need permission to pee.”

  Again she brushed at her dress, dust clouding around her. A clear, gentle breeze carried it away. There were wisps of white clouds in the sky, but no trace of the deadly, brutal weather that had come through the previous afternoon and evening.

  Gayle walked along the porch and then around the side, headed for the outhouse. Fortunately, the little hut had not been blown over by the storm. As she walked, she peered across the farm in search of her father. She saw a figure near the corn that she thought might be him, but then she realized that it was just the scarecrow.

  In her mind she could still see the way it had snapped off and pinwheeled away in the wind. Her daddy must have repaired it already, wanting to take care of the corn, since that particular crop had withstood the storm pretty well. If the new dirt and dust that would have been spread across the field didn’t choke the stalks, it would be just fine.