// FIFTEEN //
There's this feeling. An unadulterated, irrevocable type of fear that settles itself deep into your core. It takes over, it quells the tornado in your heart but turns everything else on.
All your receptors, your nerves, your senses, your thoughts, they all start rolling on overdrive. You feel, hear and see everything and that, to a higher degree than ever before. Every single thing around you is tangible. You can almost touch the tension in the air, you radiate of terror and can almost see the rays of fright around you.
It's funny how this feeling, so alert and quick, can keep your two feet frozen in place. Hilarious, how this mechanism that tells you everything that is wrong around you does not give you the means of escape. Insane, how your mind can fail your body so badly.
That was me in that moment. When I locked eyes with that tornado, I stopped moving and my brain went running on a marathon.
I feel a tug on my left arm. It's Jakub.
He looks at me with his pleading, light hazel brown eyes. His blonde hair is out of my place and his suit is covered in dust. The wind sends my hair into my face, keeping me from seeing everything on his.
"MAY, PLEASE. YOU NEED TO MOVE."
I swallow hard and nod. I take his hand, which is when I realize that he had uncuffed me from Vanessa while I was in my daze.
I look around us and see that we are the only two left on this floor. Jakub stayed behind for me. I couldn't move. I was frozen and paralyzed and almost endangered everyone.
We run down the spiral staircase to the first floor and then down into the basement. The dark, wooden basement is large and open and leads to a small door at the far end. Its door is wide open and I can see everyone waiting inside the metallic bunker.
As we run to them, I see Pete yelling at the top of his lungs for us to run faster. He must be terrified.
We jump in the bunker and one of his men locks the bunker door behind us only a split second later. All the sounds around me stop except for the buzzing of adrenaline in my ears.
I look around us. Pete is in absolute shock sitting in a corner. Jakub slips to the ground beside me not saying a word. Aside from Jakub, there are only two men in suits in the bunker alongside Vanessa. We're missing one.
I sit down next to her. I don't want to ask, but I make it evident that I'm counting the people in the bunker so she can tell me herself.
"The wind took him away," she whispers in a broken voice. "Another window shattered on the way down and he was pulled out."
She takes a long pause. I see one tear fall from her eye. "We are all so lucky we made it in this bunker, May."
"I've never been so close to a tornado before."
After a few minutes, Vanessa regains her cool and quickly jumps to her feet. She starts going around the room comforting everyone starting with Pete whom seems to be the most shaken. I'm blown away by her strength and courage. Not a minute before she was terrified. She was instantly able to put everyone else before herself.
Jakub, being the closest to me, seems like someone I could try to comfort, maybe even thank.
"Hey," I mumble as I scoot over closer to him. "Thank you, for eum, pulling me out of there. I'm sure it must have been stressful and frustrating trying to get me out without my cooperation."
He looks straight ahead at the steel door. We're surrounded by steel walls and we try to be as comfortable as we can on the concrete floor. All there is a aside from the people in the room is a book shelf behind Pete with provisions, the stool Pete is sitting on and a small table a little to my right, in the corner I used to be sitting in.
Waiting for him to answer, I notice that we can still hear the sirens from inside the bunker.
"No worries," he ends up saying through gritted teeth.
"Are you okay? Eum, considering." I don't know why he's so hard to talk to now. In the car ride here, I approached him very easily and he opened up quickly.
"Fine."
I decide to give up on him. I keep watching Vanessa talking to Pete.
After a few minutes, he sighs. "Sorry. It's just that, Simon was my best friend."
"I'm really sorry," I say guessing that Simon was the bodyguard we lost to the wind.
He just shakes his head.
"I don't want to give you false hope, but you never know. He could be alright."
"Yeah, okay," he scoffs sarcastically.
His attitude is really starting to annoy me.
"Jakub?" I ask after a few minutes of silence between us. He still has his right arm resting on his bent knee.
"What?" he mutters.
I almost take back what I was going to say but I think that would annoy him even more.
"Do you think we're going to make it out of this? Out of this bunker?"
"I think we can only hope for this best," he says through his teeth.
"At least, if we don't make it out of this bunker, we'll have made it out of this world and the control of these people, huh?" I say with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood.
"Don't belittle this world. It's my world. One I chose to live in and I still believe in," he exclaims. I'm surprise no one has turned toward us with how loud he suddenly got.
"You might think we're the bad guys, but who is with the guy who's father put us in this mess in the first place? Who's the real enemy, May?" Almost out of breath, he continues his rant and I feel like a little child that can do nothing but cower and listen.
"Do not insult my life and my world by making death seem like a better option."
He huffs and pushes himself up and walks away from me.
I didn't realize that he would take it so personally. I try so hard to befriend people sometimes that I push them away. I don't know how I do it.
***
"How much longer do you think we're going to be here?" Vanessa mumbles her head resting on my right shoulder.
I shake my head as I bite into my cranberry and dark chocolate organic granola bar. I hand it to Vanessa who takes it without saying a word. Between each bite, we switch it back between each other.
I watch everyone around us. It's fascinating how people react so differently to tragedy. Vanessa had already tried comforting them all, but she could only do so much.
Pete was still on his stool, but he was turned toward the shelves behind him counting the water bottles. He was making the inventory of our emergency stash of food and drinks.
To my left, the three boys were sitting, their backs to the wall with their arms resting on their bent legs. They had all taken their suit jackets off and thrown then of the table. They were calmly sitting with their rolled up sleeves. They had been silent this whole time.
As for Vanessa and I, we tried making conversation but eventually found more comfort in the normality of simply eating.
"I don't know when we'll be out."
It's been a couple of hours now. Pete has finished his inventory and a few of us have napped a couple of times, excluding me.
Suddenly, there's a crackling sound in my ear.
"Why does this thing disconnect so often?" someone complains. It doesn't sound like Cyrus.
"Okay, I think I got it, Cy," I hear Darius say, now recognizing his voice.
"May, are you there?" he continues.
The bunker is completely silent. I'm afraid someone will hear Darius let alone have me answer him.
He raises his voice. "May, can you hear me?"
I see Jakub lift his head from the corner of my eye. I can tell he's looking at me but then he starts tilting his right ear to the wall behind him. He can hear something and he's trying to tell where the sound is coming from.
"Vanessa," I whisper.
She lifts her head from my shoulder.
"Can you start up a conversation?" I whisper keeping my back to Jakub.
"Is this about that voice I hear in your ear?"
I eye her threateningly.
"Right, sorry. You'll explain later."
I turn back into my old position and no one seems to have heard our conversation. After what seems like a minute or two later, Vanessa walks up to Pete.
"Hey, handsome. How you doin'?" she asks standing in front of him.
I'm taken aback by her choice of words. I still don't know anything about their relationship.
Pete looks up at her. "Better," he mumbles. "I keep thinking about Simon."
"Oh, I know, me too," she answers, pouting her lips as she rubs her hand on his shoulder.
"Oh, guys remember that time when we were all in Prague? When Simon was skiing?"
The guys look at her confused.
"Oh my God, you don't remember? Granted, it was two years ago. But come on! Okay, get up here. You need to hear this."
The three guys get up and form a circle with Pete and Vanessa.
"Can you talk now?" Darius asks probably hearing the conversation.
"Yes," I whisper as my voice drowns in Vanessa's booming voice and their laughter.
"We've just seen the news of the tornado. Are you alright?" he says in a worried tone.
"I'm okay, Darius. Pete has a bunker so we're huddle in here. We did lose someone though."
"We?" he questions.
"Don't be like that."
After a few seconds of silence, I speak up again. "But honestly, thank God for Pete's bunker."'
"Talking to yourself there, May?" Pete asks me.
I suddenly lift my head up from its place on my crossed arms that were resting on my knees.
"Gotta keep myself entertained somehow," I say with a chuckle.
"Well, then come here," he says. Jakub and Vanessa pull apart to leave a space for me between them. "Come hear Jakub's story about Simon."
"You're going to love it," he says, in a surprisingly nice tone. "It has Vanessa as the leading actress."
She punches his shoulder playfully.
"Sure, I'd love to hear it."
I push myself up and place myself closer to Vanessa leaving my conversation with Darius unfinished. She wraps her left arm around my neck.
"Okay, so one night Simon and I were training. We were going to Tokyo the next day and we wanted to sleep on the plane so we were dragging the night along. He was getting tired much faster than me so I'd swing punches thinking he'd dodge but them, but they'd really make contact with him."
"Poor guy," one of the other guys says with a chuckle.
"Yeah," Jakub answers. "This was around the time he had just joined and he was crushing real hard on Vanessa. Obviously, the crush was long gone when he got to know her," he says with a laugh.
She uses the hand she had around me to slap him on the back of his head.
He laughs. "Anyway, Simon is laying there on the floor. I'm messing with him, teasing him about Vanessa and how he needs to train for her and that moment Vanessa walks into the gym but we don't see her. I keep talking and he answers further incriminating himself and then," he stops trying to get himself to stop laughing.
"He," he continues between laughs. "He needs to go to the bathroom but he's tired and also slightly concussed, but he makes it. On his way back, I turn around to see him with his back turned to me. I ask him what he's doing and I see that he is spraying water from his bottle on his crotch."
He starts laughing full on again and all of us have grins on our faces waiting to hear the end.
"The guy was trying to cover the fact that he sprayed on himself by pouring water on himself. And his face when he realized Vanessa was in the room, priceless!"
Vanessa starts laughing and shaking her head probably remembering. After a few minutes of laughter, I decide to speak up.
"I really hope he's out there."
They all nod.
In our silence, I notice something.
"Guys, the siren is off."
The guys jump to the door and put their ears to it.
"She's right," Jakub mumbles. "The door has stopped shaking too."
Pete pushes everyone behind him. I am surprised by his act of selflessness. Maybe he isn't the bad guy. All I can think about though, is how he could be good when he almost killed Cy and Em in Italy years ago.
He hesitantly puts his hand on the locks. He undoes the one at the top of the door and then bends down to unlock the other. He then puts both his hands on the circular handle that resembles those that most submarine doors have. He turns it to the right making it go two full turns.
When the door pops, he open it and a gust of warm wind swarms in.
None of us were prepared for the sight that was before us.
The tornado is long gone and has taken everything with it.
Everything is gone. Everything is destroyed.
shoutout to vanessssssssaaaa and JauzaMumtazah for being the freakin best supporters on this book!