White and Other Tales of Ruin

The rain was even heavier now, and dark clouds boiled the sky. Through the copse of trees I could see mountain slopes being assaulted by the weather, and creeping down the mountainside like the shaky legs of an old, angry god, two tornadoes twisted their way towards us. Black Teeth and his people were gathered behind me, muttering amongst themselves in a language I hoped I would never know.

“Daddy,” Laura said weakly. I smiled and went to answer, but then I felt myself slipping down and out, the rain turned warm on my face as my tears mixed, and someone caught me under my arms as I slipped to the ground.

She’s alive, I thought, alive and she knows me, she sees me, and she’s not ignoring me or telling me to leave her alone, let her live her own life, not like I’d been expecting, not like people had been telling me, because she’d run away with a religious sect and who … who had even told me that in the first place?

“Laura!” I called out, but it was Chele I heard in response, her voice cutting through the tempest.

“Grab hold,” she said, and I heard a sharp snick as wire was cut. I thought I had my eyes open but I could not see anything, and I may have been mistaken. Someone was holding me against them, their hand on my forehead. “Hold her weight, hold it! Ease her down. That’s right … that’s right … gentle now, she’s a baby …”

Gentle now, she’s only a baby, aren’t you just a big baby? I’d used to say that to Laura when she was five, it would annoy and delight her in equal measures as I swung her around in my arms, called her my little baby and set her down on the grass, watching as she staggered with dizziness. She’d giggle as she fell over …

… Laura cried out, and I sensed the source of her voice lowering until it was at my level.

“Laura!” I called, trying to stand, to see.

There was the sound of an explosion from higher up the hillside and the sky was suddenly filled with grit, splinters and leaves. I opened my eyes in time to see the sky falling in.

“We have to leave here!” Black Teeth shouted into my ear.

“I want my daughter!” I shook off restraining hands and went to the trees. Chele was already back on the ground, trying to snip wire with a pair of cutters she’d liberated from someone. Laura was bleeding and crying and writhing. She wanted to stand and walk, I could see that, but pain held her tight.

Another explosive sound and this time the ground shook, the skies turning from dark to black as the tornadoes plucked trees and earth and rocks and mixed them into a barrage of natural shrapnel. I ducked down and knelt beside Laura, pulling a strand of wire carefully away from her wrist. The rain sluiced the wounds on her body, washing the blood into the earth. I put one hand under the back of her neck and lifted slowly. I looked into her eyes, promising that I was here for her.

“Daddy,” she said, “you came to rescue me.” I could barely hear her but I read the words in her eyes.

“Yes honey.”

“I hurt.”

I nodded. “I’ll look after you now, honey, don’t worry.”

“Now!” Black Teeth shouted, and I noticed that most of the people he’d been with had vanished.

Chele appeared on Laura’s other side and held her up, draping my daughter’s arm gently across her shoulders. “Where to?” she shouted.

Black Teeth said something but he was already turning away, his words lost to the storm.

We followed, lifting Laura because she could not move her legs, and each cry made me want to stop and hold her to me. At the same time I was enraged, ready to take revenge for what had been done to her. I kept my eyes on the madman’s back. The wire cutters had vanished from his belt, but that meant nothing.

He hadn’t denied putting Laura up there in the first place.

The storm pushed us on and the tornadoes shook the earth, sucking it up and raining debris down around us. A shattered tree trunk speared into the earth twenty yards to my left. It groaned and fractured, and jagged splinters fired out like the spines of a tarantula. I felt a sting in my leg but kept on moving. I tried to haul in a breath but the air was moving too fast, being sucked away, and I remembered hearing about people whose lungs had imploded during tornadoes.

Laura had her head down. Her hair was blowing about her head like some mad Medusa, but her teeth were gritted, and I knew that she was holding onto consciousness to help Chele and me as much as she could.

Black Teeth was standing by a huge mound of boulders just ahead, gesticulating and shouting as if challenging the weather to a fight. He turned and stepped behind the rocks, and we followed.