The Tempest Read online

  The Tempest

  Black Carbon #3

  A.J. Scudiere

  The Tempest - Black Carbon #3

  Copyright © 2021 by AJ Scudiere

  Griffyn Ink. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  * * *

  FIRST EDITION

  Contents

  Books by A.J.

  A.J.’s Renegades

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  About the Author

  Want a free story?

  Go to www.ReadAJS.com/join-now to get free short stories.

  * * *

  Look for other novels by A.J. Scudiere.

  Available in bookstores, online, and at ReadAJS.com.

  * * *

  The NightShade Forensic Files

  Book 1 - Under Dark Skies

  Book 2 - Fracture Five

  Book 3 - The Atlas Defect

  Book 4 - Echo and Ember

  Book 5 - Salvage (A Shadow Files Novel)

  Book 6 - Garden of Bone

  Book 7 - The Camelot Gambit

  Book 8 - Dead Tide

  Book 9 - Sabotage (A Shadow Files Novel) (available 2020)

  * * *

  Black Carbon

  Book 1 - The Hunted

  Book 2 - The Surface

  Book 3 - The Tempest

  Book 4 - The Swarm

  * * *

  Legends

  The Landa Landa & The Aellai

  * * *

  FORTUNE (red)

  FORTUNE (gray)

  FORTUNE (Red & Gray)

  * * *

  The Vendetta Trifecta

  Vengeance

  Retribution

  Justice

  The Complete Vendetta Trifecta

  * * *

  Stand Alone Stories - Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited

  * * *

  Resonance

  * * *

  Dissonance - a companion novella to Resonance

  * * *

  God's Eye

  * * *

  Phoenix

  * * *

  The Shadow Constant

  * * *

  Stand Alone Novels by A.J. Scudiere: Resonance, God’s Eye, Phoenix, The Shadow Constant

  * * *

  A Collection of Blogs

  Smart Chickens - Deliver Us From Email

  Smart Chickens - We’re Not Like Other Families

  Smart Chickens - Tele Me More

  Smart Chickens - Omega Dog

  Join A.J.’s Renegades here: www.ReadAJS.com

  Praise for A.J. Scudiere

  "There are really just 2 types of readers—those who are fans of AJ Scudiere, and those who will be."

  -Bill Salina, Reviewer, Amazon

  * * *

  For The Shadow Constant:

  * * *

  "The Shadow Constant by A.J. Scudiere was one of those novels I got wrapped up in quickly and had a hard time putting down."

  -Thomas Duff, Reviewer, Amazon

  * * *

  For Phoenix:

  * * *

  "It's not a book you read and forget; this is a book you read and think about, again and again . . . everything that has happened in this book could be true. That's why it sticks in your mind and keeps coming back for rethought."

  -Jo Ann Hakola, The Book Faerie

  This one is for all my pandemic friends. The Tempest is just one of several books I’ve written while on lockdown. Thank you for keeping me sane and for just being there. I hope we come out the other side okay. Because, honestly, we were all pretty nuts before we got shut inside our houses for a year.

  Thank you.

  * * *

  It’s also for anyone who has survived a catastrophic weather event. Parts of Alabama are prone to twisters. The entire northeast was under water or snow a handful of years ago. Texas just had a deep freeze. Things are getting weird. If you’ve survived, then this one is for you. I admire your fortitude so much, I wrote a whole series about it.

  Acknowledgments

  Books like this require research. There was too much involved to name each person who helped. But thank you to everyone who’s traveled with me to help make this series more realistic. Thank you to everyone who shared stories of the twisters they’ve been through. You helped make this book better.

  1

  The rumble sounded like a freight train bearing down on her as Joule drove along the virtually empty highway. Her head turned from side to side, looking for the threat. She’d been told that tornadoes were supposed to sound like trains, and that Alabama had tornadoes.

  Her breathing shortened and her chest tightened, even as she tried to talk herself down. She scanned the skies and saw nothing. She should be safe.

  Joule hated being ever-alert, but it had to be some level of post-traumatic stress. Lord knew, she’d had enough trauma in her life.

  The flashing red light signaled a four-way stop, and as the large, dirty white pickup loomed to her right, she saw that the driver seemed wholly unconcerned with whatever disaster was bearing down on them.

  Why had she gone to pick up supplies by herself?

  Unable to linger at the intersection and assume she was safe if she sat still, she took the ninety-degree right-hand turn with her breath held.

  “Are you kidding me?” she yelled into the empty space in the car, to the groceries sitting in too many plastic bags, to the flashing red lights and long, wooden signal arms crossing the road.

  It had sounded like a freight train because it was one.

  With her foot on the brake, Joule breathed at least a little easier as the red and white-striped bars came to a rest and the small motion toward her right grew into the oncoming engine
and the probably thousand cars that it was towing at high speed.

  The train was going to take a while and the grocery store had already been far enough away to make her worry about the ice cream melting. The prolonged stop turned her worry to certainty. If she had a spoon, she’d dig the ice cream out of the bag and eat it now, so that at least someone got to enjoy it.

  Instead, she watched the cars whizz by and turned the radio on, hopping through the stations.

  Country.

  Country.

  Christian.

  Country.

  Metal.

  Sighing, she went back to one of the country stations. There were a few country songs she liked, and the back beyond of Alabama was not going to be the place to find an alt-rock station.

  For a moment, she contemplated the nerves and jitters that came with starting a new job. She figured her anxiety was likely compounded by the fact that it was her first job.

  Though she’d scooped ice cream very part time at Snyder’s for two summers before the night hunters had come, and she’d waited tables and had a few internships, this was her first career-move job. And moving to new places and confronting new things was not her forte.

  A life-threatening crisis—a real emergency—she could handle. A simple relocation was harder on her nerves.

  The job was between Arab and New Hope, two small towns in northwest-ish Alabama. But being between towns meant there was no apartment-style housing for the crew, so HR had decided to house them in small groups in rentals.

  She and Cage—thank God she was with her brother!—and Sarah and Deveron were all in a little two-bedroom house that the owners rented out under the catchy title of “Desperado’s Hideaway.”

  The owners had traded the queen bed in the largest bedroom for two twins—when they signed the one-year lease, but there was still some kind of cow skull on the dresser as “decor.” It didn’t fit in the drawer where Sarah had tried to hide it, so it was now stashed under the dresser like some kind of bovine boogie man.

  Joule sighed into air that was full of kicked up dust from the passing train. She would be living in “western rental-chic" hell for the duration of the assignment.

  Looking to the right, she saw the end of the train approaching.

  Was there a caboose? She found herself getting excited to see it. She’d lived near railroad tracks in several different places but couldn’t remember ever seeing them used.

  Her phone dinged from its prop on the dash.

  —Where are you?

  —waiting on a train. Back soon.

  The last car whizzed by right then, looking sadly not red and without any fancy railings where a passenger could stand and wave at the passing countryside.

  Though the train itself was a disappointment, the silence as it left was a welcome relief. The grinding, gushing noise had grabbed her gut—there were tornadoes here. But not here. That was the reassuring part. Though much of central Alabama was its own “tornado alley,” her new employers had chosen this particular area specifically because it had a low annual tornado count.

  Building a solar farm was only a worthwhile enterprise if it stayed put and sent power to the nearby towns. Theirs was a prototype landscape system that would rotate with the sunlight and conserve its own energy on cloudy days. Eventually, it would hopefully replace fossil fuels for this quarter of the state. But only if tornadoes didn’t rip it out of the ground.

  Putting the car into drive, Joule reminded herself, When you hear a train out here, it’s actually a train.

  But as she drove through a slightly more populated area, she saw what had once been a cafe or a library or a shop … she couldn’t tell. The roof was caved in on half of it, the windows all blown out. Although the damage looked old, the parking spaces in front were still covered in glass shards.

  The place had been abandoned after some large hand had seemingly ripped it in half.

  She turned toward home, the road rougher here, and headed toward Desperado’s Hideaway and the only people she knew.

  2

  Cage sat uncomfortably in the metal folding chair, his legs stuffed under the folding table. His chair was crammed in next to his sister’s and he tried not to bump elbows in the tiny, folding room.

  It was actually a trailer that had been set up at the edge of “the lot”—although there wasn’t much to distinguish what was “the lot” and what wasn’t.

  He cradled the coffee in his hands, the heat suffusing into him and providing comfort where there was little to be found. He was grateful the four of them had managed not to spill any in the car that he and Joule shared. The gravel road out here had given them a serious test of their balancing abilities.

  Now they were all crammed into the tiny space, even though he didn’t know who they “all” were yet. They had been given three days to arrive and settle in, but this still felt far too soon to be getting to work.

  He didn’t know the area. And he was pretty sure their small, elderly sedan was not going to survive long on these roads, and he hoped this wasn’t the best coffee in town.

  He and Joule had opened their identical laptops, as had everyone else. They looked like a classroom as Radnor walked down the aisle, his broad shoulders and pink polo shirt taking up all of the available space. When he hit the front of the room, he rotated and moved his hand as he clicked a button lighting up the screen behind him.

  Though his dark skin might have blended into the background, his voice boomed through the tiny space. He lifted a hand to shade his eyes, as if the projector were sunlight. “All right, I want the old guard. Raise your hands. Show who you are.”

  He scanned the room as though checking that all the right people had their hands up. Cage did not. Day One on a job definitely did not make him “old guard” of anything.

  Cage had noticed that the others in the room were a variety of ages and dressed in different ways. Though no one wore business suit, he saw everything from khakis to jeans, to even one pair of overalls. That was his roommate, Sarah, who somehow still managed to not stand out.

  Radnor once again raised his hand and peered through the darkened room. “Kelsey. Hand up. I want all the people who’ve been here since the beginning of the project.”

  Kelsey, it seemed, caught on and she now confidently held her hand aloft.

  “All right. We’ve all seen them. Now it’s the newbies. Hands up,” he demanded.

  This time, Cage and Joule shrugged to each other, but their hands went into the air, along with Sarah’s and Deveron’s. Glancing around the room, Cage found that almost half of the group were newbies.

  “All right,” Radnor called out again, waving his hands dramatically. Everybody had been seen and all positions addressed. “Put them down.”

  Cage wondered if he was supposed to memorize who was new and who was Radnor’s “old guard” in that short period of time. But he would just have to wait and find out. His new boss was plowing forward.

  “Before I get started, I want to be sure everyone understands. We're on a time crunch for a number of reasons. We started this project about six months ago. Some of you newbies were hired to come in and help with Phase Two. We were on track, and we did this.”

  Jabbing his hand toward the screen, as though that helped the clicker, he popped up a picture of a cleared field with spanking new pylons being sunk into the ground. In the next picture, people were taking measurements and Cage recognized some of the people who were in the room.

  “We got the environmental impact report done. We got everything measured, and we started the install.” He pointed to the picture and then to the wall. “This setup is less than one mile that way … and then we got this.”

  When he clicked the images again, Cage again saw the same field, only this time, some of the pylons were bent. Debris was strewn all over the field, wood and metal and plastic everywhere. Smashed dark glass fragments revealed that some of the solar panels had not survived the onslaught.

  “So now we've been
kicked back for two reasons. One, we lost the work that we already did.” Radnor was striding up and down the stubby aisle now, hands on his hips. Those who were sitting closest to the center of the room were leaning back to avoid his elbows as he rotated, his anger at the situation radiating through the small space.

  Radnor appeared not to notice. “And two—we have to redesign. Clearly, what we had was not as strong as we thought. So, here's where we're aiming next.”

  He jabbed at the wall again, his hand dwarfing the tiny remote that he held. This time, the picture showed on his back and his shadow was cast directly into the middle of the image. His heavy sigh and a few choice swears were clear as he tried to get himself to the front corner of the room and out of the way.