Hell Happened (17 page)

The heads of both beds touched at the corner, with Jerry’s going down the length of the back wall and the other along the wall on which the door was hung.

All the space in the room was used.

Kellie turned her penlight off after Molly had gotten herself comfortable and the room went totally dark except the red glow from the digital clock on the shelf by the door. Jerry felt Kellie’s hand stroke his head and he reached for it. “Good night, Jerry,” she whispered. Still holding her hand, he fell asleep before he could wish her the same.

~  
~
  
~

Morning came with rolling thunder that shook all of them. It was still very dark in his room when the rumble woke him. The digital clock on the wall was out and the light between the beds refused to turn on. He heard Kellie getting out of bed too and was happy with the total darkness for the moment.

Jerry reached for his pants and pulled them on. He had a penlight on the keychain he carried and turned it on to locate his shirt and work boots. Kellie was sitting on her bed hurriedly trying to locate her clothes too and Jerry noticed, but just briefly, because something loud was happening downstairs.

He could hear crashes and voices that sounded like Monica and Tony. He heard the wind outside their shelter and by the sounds of it the storm was hitting them hard. Using the light from Jerry’s penlight, Kellie was able to find her pants and a tee shirt in the pile of clothes. Jerry tried not to look like he was looking, focusing instead on pulling on his boots the rest of the way on, but he had to admit to
himself
, she was an attractive woman.

“You going to be okay?” he asked as he was leaving the room, making sure to not direct his light at her eyes. “Sure, go,” she said, waving him out. “I’ll be there in a second.”

He rushed out of the room, making sure to close the door to keep Molly from following him. He passed Tia’s room just as she opened the door to look out. He heard her kids asking questions and told them things were okay and that he was going to check on what the noises were.

Looking down the spiral stairway with his light, he saw Tony on the couch looking to where Monica was by the front doors. He saw the doors must have been blown open and she was trying to find a way to keep them closed in the feeble light put out by
Tony’s
small flashlight.

Jerry grabbed the big flashlight he kept on top of the bookshelf and turned it on. A bright blue light filled the foyer as 32 LED bulbs lit up. He rushed to the doors and leaned against them with Kellie to keep them closed. Kellie took the flashlight from his hand and stepped back to give the two a better view of what they were doing. The doors were closed again, but the locks were broken. The door stayed closed for the moment and Jerry and Monica stood back.

They could hear the ferocity of the winds outside and the rain pelting the doors.

“Wow,” Monica said, still standing by the doors in her underwear. “That wind is strong, Mr. Saunders.” Kellie brought Monica, who didn’t realize she was still standing in her underwear in the reflected light of the flashlight, a blanket to cover herself. Mike opened the door from the cellar and shined his light on the group.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“The doors blew in.
Broke the locks top and bottom.
Must be something hit ‘
em
hard because the wind shouldn’t be able to do that,” Jerry said. He heard Tia and her kids at the top of the stairs, but Randy and Eddie hadn’t even stirred yet.

Kellie was shining the light on the doors, looking at where they had been damaged when they flew open again. Hard horizontal and stinging rain and wind came through the door and she dropped the flashlight to cover her face as she and Jerry rushed to close them again. Monica and Mike also helped push against the doors to keep them shut.

“Randy! Get down here!” Jerry hollered as water cascaded over the four and wind battered against the double doors. Randy and Eddie were both on the stairway in seconds, both in their underwear but they didn’t care. They saw what was happening and rushed down to help Jerry and the others. Eddie grabbed two chairs and wedged them against the door handles while Randy put his not inconsiderable weight into keeping the doors shut.

The wind still howled but the amount of water coming through the doors was significantly lessened. Jerry’s luck or foresight, he didn’t remember which, had been to make the entryway to the shelter slope away from the inside of the shelter. The water that came through the cracks in the door frame didn’t flow into the room, but it was easily three inches deep by the door.

One by one everyone moved away from the doors. Randy was the last to move and he did so gingerly, making sure they were going to stay shut. Everyone watched for two full minutes before anyone moved too far from the door. They were all soaked, but no one wanted the doors to come open again.

Mike broke the silence. “Power’s out too, I see.”

Jerry accepted the flashlight from Kellie and walked over to a grey box on the wall. He lifted the latch and opened the front cover. “Yup,” he said. “It looks like we blew the main breakers.

“When I built this place and put in the electricity, I only knew half of what I was doing, but if the water wheel down at the river or the wind turbines got to
giving
the batteries too much juice, the main breaker would shut down.

“I never thought it would work, but it did just like I hoped it would.”

He switched the breaker back on and every light that someone had tried to turn on in the darkness came on.

“Sweet,” Eddie said, removing a lot of the tension from the room. There was a lot of water on the floor and Mike and Jerry started mopping it up, being more fully clothed than anyone else. The others were deciding it might be a good idea to get into some dry clothes. Tia and her kids, who had remained out of the way, came down to the foyer to help. They joined everyone and it was little Hannah who said something that only the innocence of youth can get away with. In a stage whisper, so her mom could hear her over the noise coming from outside she said, “Mommy, that lady’s shirt is sticking to her boobs.”

Everyone looked and saw that Kellie’s tee shirt had in fact gotten wet and everyone could easily see the gifts with which God had given her. Tia shushed the little girl and smiled apologetically at Kellie. Kellie took it in stride and gratefully accepted the kitchen towel Jerry was handing to her. He was seeing the same things as Hannah had seen when the lights came back on and had the chivalry to avoid staring. Eddie and Randy, he noticed, did not. They raced back up the steps as they were still in their underwear and needed to hide.

“Uh, yeah,” Jerry said to no one. “Let’s get out of these wet clothes. Anyone know what time it is?”

“It’s Oh-Six-Fifty-Two, sir,” John said looking at his watch. Jerry could tell he was an Army child.

“I guess we’re all awake for the morning,” he said, using a towel to dry his head and face. “If the doors stay shut we’ll have to just find ways to keep ourselves occupied while the storm moves through.”

“With the power back on,” Randy said, emerging from his room wearing jeans and a tee shirt, “We’ve got games in our room the kids can play.” John and Hannah looked at their mom and she nodded they could. Randy asked for a few minutes before the kids were allowed in so Eddie could finish putting clothes on.

Monica said she would grab a movie for herself, Mike and Tony to watch and Tia said if no one minded, she’d only had an hour of sleep and she really could use some more. No one minded.

Mike declined the offer, saying he was going to finish the book he was reading in the cellar.

Monica was heard, as she picked up a pair of men’s underwear from a pile under the spiral stairway, say to Eddie as he emerged from his room to gather up John and Hannah “Seriously, you wear that size?” Jerry chose to ignore them and started looking at the power levels of the batteries which stored the power from the wind mills and water wheel generators. He heard Kellie go up the stairs to change as well.

His shirt was soaked, pants were wet and shoes made squishing noises. There was no way he was going to mess with the electricity in the shelter with this much water on him. He checked the door again and
used his towel to tie the two handles together, just in case the chairs slipped. They were as secure as he could make them for now so he went to change into some dry clothes.

Forgetting that he had a new roommate he walked in on Kellie changing into dry clothes. He slapped his hand across his eyes and backed out as fast as he could, apologizing repeatedly for intruding. He stood in the narrow hall until she came back out, embarrassed about what had just happened. She opened the door a minute later, fully dressed and pulled Jerry into the room. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t even think to lock the door. I thought you were going to work on the electrical stuff. But thank you for being a gentleman,” and she kissed him that kiss he had enjoyed so much two nights ago. “I’ll put coffee on,” she said as she left the room.

Jerry locked the door after she left. He didn’t want anyone walking in on him.

The storm raged.

Chapter 5

J
erry
spent the day shoring up the front doors and checking the electrical systems in the house with Mike. Tia slept until noon and came down to have lunch with everyone.
Her kids, who played games with Randy and Eddie for an hour before going back to sleep with their mom, came out of the room around 10 in the morning, wiping sleep from their eyes asking for breakfast.

Tony watched two of the movies found the previous day and played with the CB radio while Kellie and Monica organized and sorted through some of the bounty that had been brought in.

Randy and Eddie had entertained John and Hannah and kept them from being underfoot and their minds off the storm until they were tired. Every so often the people downstairs could hear the laughter and giggles coming through the open door to the boys’ room until the little ones had retired back to their mom’s room for more sleep.

About 9 o’clock that morning, the winds died down to almost calm for about an hour. The eye of the storm was passing nearly overhead of them. The winds returned in a hurry with the same ferocity for another six hours. It had been a big hurricane and Jerry knew there would be damage to his farm. The storm continued through the morning and didn’t noticeably begin slacking off until late afternoon.

It was 7 p.m. when Jerry finally believed it was finally safe enough for him and Randy to go check on the cattle. The winds had died down considerably and they could hear rain falling, but not as hard as it had been. They donned raingear Jerry had kept in the basement. He slid one of the walkie-talkies inside his rain coat after testing it with the one Randy had and the one Mike was using. Everyone had their own walkie-talkie now and it gave a feeling of safety. Randy put his in his front pocket so he could get at it easily under his rain gear.

Jerry
undogged
the front door and he and Randy saw what had broken the door early this morning. It was still raining steadily, more of a dousing rain than the sideways wind-driven rain of earlier. Randy closed the door behind him and his dad.

There was a 20-inch limb, at least 35-feet long outside the front door, across the parapet. Jerry didn’t have any trees that big within 200 feet of the shelter, so whatever wind had brought it this far, had to have been a real
doosey
.

“Damn, dad. Look at the size of this. We’re going to have to get a chain saw to move it,” Randy said as they climbed over it.

“Yeah, it’s too big to move now. We need to take care of the cattle first, if there are any left. Let’s go.”

As the two men trudged down to the barn, the rain kept them from seeing too far. The hurricane winds had died down to less than 30 miles per hour, Jerry guessed, but there were still gusts that reached over 60 mile per hour.

As they neared the barn, Jerry could see the farm house had taken a lot of damage. Most of the roof was missing and three of the walls had caved in. There were dozens of large trees in the yard that were up rooted and two of the smaller outbuildings he used to store his lawn tractor and some of his equipment was gone. The lawn tractor had been blown into the tree line, along with a lot of other debris.

The cattle barn and garage had some major roof damage, but some of the steel and framework held. The damage was over the pens in the barn and not the equipment so it wasn’t a priority. The cows could stand to be wet, but he noticed eight of his herd was missing. The milking parlor no longer had a roof, but
the equipment, lag bolted into the floor of six-inch reinforced concrete seem mostly intact except for a few of the plastic lines.

The garage had taken a bad beating as well. Most of the siding had been ripped off, and the roof was gone. The big Ford and the Escalade had been pushed around and dented and some glass knocked out, but they were still there. The big Massey-Ferguson tractor was still sitting where he’d parked it, but it had a tree limb every bit as big as the one behind the shelter sitting across its hood.

Both trailers were upended and now leaning against one of the supports in the back of the garage. There was nothing he could do about it now, but when the rain stopped, probably tomorrow, he and the rest of the people at the shelter had a lot of work to get done.