Year's Best SF 17

“Use my shirt while I look.” She paws through the box. “There’s this sling thing, but that’s not very absorbent, or very big, come to that. And some cotton balls. I guess we could pack the cut with these.”

Kaylee suddenly says “Oh! I know!” and lets go of the shirt, which Jane grabs and tightens with her other hand. “Sorry,” says Kaylee, “only I just remembered, I’ve got some, well, some maxipads in my backpack, because you know, just in case … anyway—” she fishes in her pack and pulls out a plastic bag triumphantly.

“Perfect!” Jane says. “Brilliant!”

Kaylee flushes, embarrassed but gratified. She snatches away the shirt and slaps a pad onto Jane’s wound, wrapping it around her arm. Then, showing further initiative, she says, “Hold that like that,” and puts another pad on top of the first, and binds them both to Jane’s arm with the pressure bandage. “There! Just hold that really tight. If you bleed through the first one there’s another one all ready to go.”

“I will,” Jane says. “Thanks.” She looks around. “I need to sit still while this clots. Do you want to see if the window will open? I don’t like to have you walking around down here till we know for sure the house isn’t going to cave in on that side”—her voice catches and Kaylee thinks for the first time, Her house is totally wrecked, her perfect little house!—“but it should be okay. Just pry up the levers and try turning the crank. It kind of sticks. If anything shifts or falls, jump back.”

What felt like an explosion turns out to have been a humongous old hickory tree smashing down right on top of the house. The tornado only clipped one corner, peeling back part of the roof and tearing the screened porch off, but it dumped that hickory right in the middle of the crushed roof, where it’s hanging with its branches on one side and its roots on top of Jane’s car on the other. The car is crushed and plainly undrivable, but even if it could be driven there would be no way to get it down to the road; Jane’s steep quarter-mile driveway is completely blocked with downed trees.

In fact, the world has become a half-moonscape. Everything on one side of the house just looks about the way it might look after a really violent windstorm, but everything on the other has been toppled and ripped and broken to pieces. “We must have been right on the very edge,” Jane says, holding her wounded arm with her other hand. “And this must have been one hell of a big tornado.” There are no trees standing in the creek valley below Jane’s house: none. They’re all laid down in the same direction, pointing uphill on this side and downhill on the other. The road that follows the creek, the only way there is to get to Jane’s house, has completely vanished under a pile of trunks and branches, broken and jagged, piled many feet deep on top of each other.

The sight of this world of leafy destruction has obliterated Kaylee’s spurt of competence. She’s shaking and crying in little sobs, arms wrapped about herself. “I need to talk to my mom,” is all she can think of to say, “I need to find out if she’s okay.”

Jane says soothingly, “The best thing you can do for your mom and dad right now is just take care of yourself and stay calm. They know where you are, and they know you’re with me. Eventually somebody will come looking for us. It might take them a few days—if that twister hit any population centers, all the emergency equipment and personnel are going to be very, very busy for a while. We have to give people time to get things up and running again. But they’ll be along.”

“But the road’s covered with trees!”

“I’m betting on a helicopter ride long before they get the road open. The good news is, lots of people know where you are. We just have to hunker down and wait.”