The Resurrected Compendium (3 page)

“Cyclone.”

“You’re fucking with me, right?” Laughter bubbled up and out of her, incongruous and painful as it shook her aching back and shoulders. “A tornado? At night?”

Cal pushed up with one hand on the side of the tub, stepped over, slipped on the wet floor but caught himself against the edge of the sink. He fumbled for a towel, and she had time to be embarrassed again that she hadn’t had the maid service come in to change them. Not that it mattered, they were on their way to being soaked. Besides, he’d had his mouth between her legs, would he really care if he wiped his face with a towel that had been in the same place?

The sound of a car horn drifted to her over the patter of water and her own delirious chuckles. Abbie took Cal’s outstretched hand and let him pull her upright. He wrapped a damp towel, not as wet as she’d thought, around her and shoved her through the doorway into the bedroom…or at least what was left of it.

The windows had blown inward, scattering glass across the carpet. Hail the impossible size of her fist gleamed on the dresser, the floor and the beds, which had been stripped of sheets and comforters but otherwise incongruously left untouched. It melted even as she watched. One wall of the room had buckled, showing glimpses of the parking lot outside. Wet pavement. Downed trees. She could see a red pickup truck tilted on its side. The blaring horn died as she listened.

Abbie clutched the doorframe as Cal stepped around the glass to stand in front of the windows. He didn’t seem to care that he was naked — but she suddenly did. Blinking, she sought any sight of her suitcase, which had been left open in the corner of the room now exposed to the daylight. It seemed unlikely the storm had taken the sheets and comforters and left her underpants, but she took a step or two in that direction anyway.

“Watch it.” Cal grabbed her elbow to keep her from stepping on a jagged shard of glass. “Jesus, Abbie. Stay put.”

“I want my clothes.” She sounded petulant and pouting and hadn’t meant to, but tears were suddenly thick in her throat. She covered her breasts with one arm, but it wasn’t enough. The world had forced its way inside this shelter, and not even a suit of armor could protect her from that.

“I’ll get your clothes.” He swiveled carefully on the rug and took both her upper arms. “Look at me.”

She did. Cal didn’t smile, but his gaze pinned her. He made sure she was looking into his eyes before he spoke again.

“This is going to be all right.”

The world tipped a little. Too much drink. Not enough sleep. Oh, yeah, and a tornado that had torn apart her motel room.
 

“Almost everything I owned was in my suitcase.” Some of it had been in the dresser drawers, but those looked like they’d been emptied too. Some of her belongings were in her car, but she didn’t dare hope it had escaped the red pickup’s fate.

“We’ll find your suitcase. Your things. It’ll be okay.” Cal rubbed her arms with his fingertips.

She shivered and sucked in a breath, feeling at least a little more sober. A little less tipsy-topsy, as she’d always said to her boys when they were out of sorts and she was trying to humor them into happiness.
Let’s be a little less tipsy-topsy
. They always laughed when she said it, but she couldn’t manage even a chuckle now. Abbie dug her toes into the carpet and closed her eyes, concentrating on the air she pulled with so much effort into her lungs. Held it in. Let it back out. When she opened her eyes again, he was still looking at her.

Abbie straightened her shoulders. “We both need clothes.”

He smiled, just a little. “Shoes first. If we can find them.”

She nodded and squinted, searching for the ballet flats she’d worn the night before and his boots. Her memory was hazy, but she thought both pairs had ended up under the bed…and there they were. She pointed, and Cal took one long step, then another, setting his feet carefully between the shards of broken glass, to pick them up. He tossed her shoes at her, and wonder of wonders, she caught them.

She put them on, the world already settling under her now that her feet, at least, were protected. Cal shoved his feet into the boots and crunched across the rug, bending to look under the beds for his jeans, which he found still turned inside-out — though that was how he’d left them, not something the wind had done. Abbie found a t-shirt — the one Cal had been wearing under his long-sleeved shirt. Also a pair of shorts that were too big and hung too low on her hips, but were better than nothing. Cal, in jeans and boots but shirtless, pushed aside the desk chair and looked around the room with single-minded determination, but couldn’t find his hat.

Still, they both managed to get dressed in a reasonable amount of time. Incredibly, Abbie’s stomach growled, and she sent up a prayer to the patron saint of alcoholics, whoever that was, for giving her an appetite instead of a hangover. This was not the right sort of morning to be hunched over and heaving into a toilet. She found an unopened bottle of water on the nightstand and cracked off the top, drinking half before offering it to Cal.
 

He waved it aside. “I’m going outside, see if anyone needs help.”

“I don’t hear any sirens or anything.” Abbie paused. “Maybe…maybe we’re the only ones who made it?”

Cal slanted her a grim look. “I don’t think so. Depending on the path of the storm, we might not even be the worst hit.”

She nodded and took another sip from the bottle. She was far from clear-headed, but at least she felt sober. “I’ll go with you.”

She thought he’d say no, but Cal nodded and held out his hand for her to take as she stepped across the broken glass. The door was not only still locked, but shut so tight into the warped doorframe it wouldn’t budge no matter how hard Cal yanked on it. He looked over his shoulder at her, then shrugged and moved a few inches to the side to kick out what remained of the window. He climbed through, then leaned in to help her through.

Outside, everything was still. No wind. No birds, no revving engines, no muffled laughter from the motel restaurant or from across the street at The Hole in the Wall. The reason was clear enough. Both the restaurant and the bar were simply…gone.

The motel had been sheared neatly in half from the room next to Abbie’s to the road. A few sparking wires still attached to the phone pole were still there, but the rest of it was gone. Abbie blinked and blinked again, eyes searching the empty space so she could convince her brain the building was still there, but not even her vivid imagination could put back wood and metal and glass in place of the shredded earth.

“Jesus.” Cal wiped a hand over his mouth, and Abbie couldn’t be sure if he were cursing or praying. “Jesus Christ.”

She’d taken a few unsteady steps toward the empty space when Cal grabbed her. She pulled against his grip, her hands out, her fingers already feeling the dirt. She needed to feel it, to sweep her palms against the empty space. She needed to touch the nothing.

“Abbie, stop. There’s live wires over there.” Cal pulled her firmly back against his chest. “It’s not safe.”

His mama had raised him right, as her grandma would’ve said. A gentleman. That’s when she realized she was crying.

Silent sobs wracked her. Cal turned her toward him, and she buried her face against his chest while his hand cupped the back of her head. She gasped in a breath, then another, but couldn’t seem to fill her lungs. That’s what happened when she got too upset — not all of her scars were on the surface. Her lungs had suffered in the accident more than anything else. That’s what having a steering column puncture your chest would do.

“Breathe, Abbie. Breathe!” Cal shook her. “Focus on me.”

She couldn’t tell him it wasn’t just a breakdown. She wasn’t succumbing to womanly vapors. She really couldn’t breathe.
 

The world had dimmed and faded by the time she managed to get out of his grip and sink to the ground to put her head between her knees. She closed her eyes. She counted slowly, forcing her muscles to relax and ease, to let her diaphragm expand. She pictured her lungs as balloons slowly filling with air, though she knew the truth was more like they were sponges in which too many holes had been cut. Someday, she’d need to be on an oxygen tank. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life.

“I’m okay. Just give me a minute.” She glanced up. He looked concerned. She wanted to cry all over again. She straightened. “I’m okay. Really.”

Cal shaded his eyes. The day had dawned bright and bold, the sun harsh enough to sear unwary eyeballs. When she closed her own eyes, red spots still danced in her vision. But she no longer felt like she was going to fall over, and the pressure had eased in her lungs. She was far from fine, but she was going to be okay.

“There’s nobody. How many rooms were occupied, do you know?”

“No. The
Vacancy
sign was on, I remember that. So maybe not all of them. But…some of them. And the people from the office…” She swallowed, hard. “Maybe they got out all right.”

And maybe they had, but there was no sign of it now. There was nothing but the two of them in the demanding sunlight and breezeless air, and finally, the far-off sound of sirens. Cal looked out across the stripped-bare fields, toward the highway.

“I need to go find my wife.”

3

It probably wasn’t the first time she’d slept with a married man, but that didn’t make the news any more palatable. Abbie shrugged. “Not my business.”

“My ex-wife,” Cal amended. “She lives between here and Ada. I should make sure she’s okay.”

Ada was a town, not a person. She remembered that much. Cal turned without waiting for her to answer, still shading his eyes. Last night’s journey across the street was hazy, but she did remember that they’d walked. He must’ve left his vehicle in the bar parking lot, and now there was little there but buckled asphalt.

Abbie wasn’t accustomed to the protection of a hat the way Cal probably was, but this morning’s sun was so vehemently brutal she also shaded her eyes to search for her car. A battered, dusty Volvo held together with spit and hope, it had seen her halfway across the country. It had brought her here. Once, its complicated system of airbags and seat-belts and reinforced steel had saved her life.

She hated that car, but she loved it, too.

She’d left it parked in front of her room, but it wasn’t there now. She found it on the other side of the lot, skewed across three parking spaces but not on its side. She ran for it, heedless of broken glass, live wires, whatever dangers were in her way. Behind her, Cal shouted, but Abbie ignored him until her hands were flat on the Volvo’s hood. The metal was hot even this early in the morning. She pressed her face to it, hugging the vehicle like a crazy woman.

This was the car in which she’d lost everything, and it was all she had left. She didn’t care about the stuff in her demolished motel room — she could replace underpants and her toothbrush; she could buy a new pair of shoes. But this car was irreplaceable and precious for that.

“I guess this is yours?”
 

The fact he could manage to sound amused even amongst all this destruction gave her the strength to lift her head. Her cheek felt welted. Abbie found a smile. “Yeah.”

“Don’t suppose you have the keys.”

She held up one finger before ducking to run her hand along the back bumper. She pulled out a small black container backed with a heavy duty magnet. Inside, a key.

She held it up, triumphant. “I do.”

Cal shook his head, tilting it to look at her with one squinted eye. “Lose your keys a lot, do you?”

“Have had them taken away enough times, that’s all.” She straightened, looking him in the eye. This wasn’t the time to share her personal history, but it wasn’t the time for lies either. She turned the key over and over in her fingers. It opened the trunk. She had clothes in there, she realized, some things she’d been meaning to take to the laundromat when she found one. She could really get dressed. “Give me a few minutes, okay? I want to put on something a little more…substantial.”

In the light of day after a night of drinking and fucking, soaked from an icy shower, hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed, there was no way she should have earned the sort of appraising look he gave her now, but that’s what Cal gave her. “If you have to.”

Abbie laughed. The short, sharp bark of it startled her at first, but then she dissolved into giggles so fierce she had to put out a hand against the car to keep herself upright. She looked up at him through the fringes of her tangled hair. Somehow, no matter what destruction had swept through here, she had the feeling everything was going to be okay.

Too much laughter could be as bad for her as too many tears, so she held herself back. She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth. Then, impulsively, she pushed up onto her tiptoes to kiss him. Hard.

“Thank you,” she told him.

He didn’t ask her for what, and that was just fine, since she couldn’t have said what she meant. Abbie pulled open the trunk, sifted through the duffle of her dirty clothes. She pulled out a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, plus a sweatshirt that didn’t smell too bad. There wasn’t much she could do about panties or socks, but at least she’d be more covered up. She stripped down quickly with no more than a glance from side to side to see if anyone was there. Nobody was.
 

“Christ, it’s like something out of the Twilight Zone.” She yanked the jeans up over her hips and buttoned them. The t-shirt over her head. “Like…we’re the only ones left.”

Cal looked into the distance. “I hope not.”

Abbie, on the other hand, kind of did. Only for a moment, though, because if they were truly the only ones left in the entire world, that would mean Ryan and the boys were gone too. And that, she thought, would be an unbearable knowledge.

She gave Cal the key. “You drive. But I’m coming with you.”

She thought he might balk, taking a one-nighter to visit his ex, but Cal nodded and unlocked the doors. If the interior of her car disgusted him he didn’t show it, though it was obvious he noticed the layers of fast-food wrappers and and other garbage the way he’d noticed everything else. Truth was, the trash repulsed her too.