The Widow's Protector. Rachel Lee

      “It’s coming this way,” she said, her voice tight. “Straight at us. My place is only a couple of minutes from here.” A huge tumbleweed raced across the road in front of them, but she didn’t even slow down.

      “Maybe it will blow out,” he suggested, trying to offer hope.

      “Not likely when it’s this big.”

      What did he know? Just what he’d picked up from casual viewing of the news and weather broadcasts. A mile wide? Instinctively he felt she was right: it wasn’t going to die very soon, not with that much power in it.

      She rounded a bend in the road and he could have almost sworn two of the wheels lifted from the ground. As they swung around, he got a different view of the sky. Now those black clouds seemed to have reached the earth. Was that the tornado?

      Drops of rain splattered the dusty windshield. She ignored it. Ahead he could finally see a small farmhouse sheltered by a circle of trees. A few hundred yards away stood an ancient-looking barn. The buildings seemed to be in a slight dip, which had concealed them from him earlier. She headed straight for the buildings as if she wanted to win the Indy 500.

      At the last minute she veered, throwing him against the truck’s door. This woman was giving no ground to anything in her determination to reach safety. Her fear reached him and made him even more concerned about the weather’s threat.

      She braked hard and switched off the ignition. “Come on!”

      He jumped out, slamming the truck’s door, although he wasn’t sure it would do a damn bit of good as it seemed the sky had come to earth, inky green, and was racing toward them.

      She ran. He worried that she might stumble but she didn’t. Then out of tall grasses he spied a metal door in the ground. She bent to open it, but he brushed her hand aside and did the heavy work himself.

      It was a heavy steel door. “Get in,” he yelled at her as the wind began to howl and tried to pull the door from his grip. She hurried down some cement stairs, vanishing into the ground. Waiting only a second, he followed, battling to drag the door shut behind him.

      The day outside had grown as dark as night, but still he glimpsed the bolts that would hold the door closed. There was a moment of struggle, then he banged it shut. Feeling around, he found the heavy bolts and drove them home.

      Even with the door shut, he could hear the banshee’s wail of the wind outside. He waited.

      Then a flashlight beam punctured the darkness, lighting the stairs.

      “Come down,” she said, her voice shaking, “in case the door goes.”

      He obeyed and found himself in a tight shelter. It might have held six or eight people at most, but it had a few comforts: a couple of benches, flashlights, a battery-operated radio. It was enough to survive the onslaught.

      By the glow of the flashlight, he watched her twist her hands nervously as she listened to the wind howl. He tried to think of something reassuring to say, but he couldn’t imagine what. There was a tornado coming and they could do nothing but ride it out.

      “My house,” she said, fear edging her voice.

      “Worry about that if you have to,” he said as gently as he could. “We don’t know. It might miss you entirely.”

      “I hope so.”

      “What about your husband? He’s not home I gather.”

      “He’s dead,” she said baldly.

      He sure as hell didn’t know how to respond to that. A woman so far along in pregnancy, and she had no husband to help her? That was pretty bad all by itself, especially out here in what seemed to him, at least, to be the middle of nowhere. “Anybody else?”

      “I haven’t lived here that long. I don’t really know anybody but my doctor.”

      He was sure this line of conversation wasn’t making her feel any better. When she reached over and switched on the battery-operated radio, he was glad of it.

      Static hissed loudly, and a mechanical voice advised there was a tornado warning for all of Conard County. It advised taking shelter immediately because there was a large funnel moving northeast from the state highway. Several other funnels had been spotted.

      “That’s not good,” she said, her voice thin. He watched her gaze trail to the storm door that protected them, and just at that moment something banged it hard. They both jumped a little.

      The mechanical warning kept repeating in the background, fading out completely to static from time to time. How long could this go on? Ryder wondered. Only a few minutes, surely. But how would they know whether the storm was still approaching and when it had passed? Maybe they’d get an all-clear.

      She looked ghastly in the flashlight’s beam, and her face seemed to grow more pinched with every second.

      “I guess I should introduce myself,” he said, hoping to distract her. “I’m Ryder Kelstrom.”

      Her frightened gaze left the door and returned to him. “Marti Chastain.”

      “When’s the baby coming?”

      “About two months.”

      “That’s soon.”

      “It feels like forever sometimes.”

      But he noted the protective way she folded her arms over her belly, cradling her unborn child.

      “Boy or girl?” he asked.

      “Girl. I’m going to call her Linda Marie.”

      “That’s pretty.” Maybe talking about the baby was the ticket, he decided, not that he had a whole lot of experience with pregnant women. His own wife had never wanted to conceive, a good thing given how it had all turned out. It was hard enough to explain her suicide to himself without having to explain it to a child.

      “Have you got everything ready?”

      Before she could answer, however, something else slammed the steel door, nearly deafening them, and then a steady hammering began. Hail maybe. It was loud enough to drown out the radio, which might actually be a mercy.

      “I’m from back East,” he remarked, raising his voice to be heard, trying more distraction. “I’m not used to this.”

      “I’m not used to this, either,” she called back. “I’ve only been here a few months. I never expected this.”

      “Nobody does,” he agreed. “I bet even the people who live in Tornado Alley don’t expect it’ll hit them.”

      “Probably not.”

      But she was looking at the door again, as if she feared it might give way under the assault. He kind of wondered himself, although he’d felt its heft and weight and judged it to be sturdy. But he had no idea how it might react to a truly powerful tornado. Photos of heaped debris didn’t tell him much about the tensile strength of a door like that, just a lot about the tensile strength of the wood used in construction.

      “Do you work?” he asked as the elements beat on the door like an insane drummer.

      “What?” Her face turned back to him. “Oh. No. I didn’t need to, at least not until after the baby—” She broke off sharply as the storm’s giant fist pounded the door again.

      Who would have thought, Ryder wondered, that you might need ear protection in a storm shelter?

      Then, so suddenly as to be startling, the world fell absolutely silent.

      After a few seconds, she whispered in the silence. “It can’t be over yet. That was a big storm.”

      He agreed. “The tornado might have passed, but the weather still has to be threatening. I guess we should wait for an all-clear from the radio.”

      “I guess.” She wrapped her