began walking back to her car.
Her shoulders were too damn straight.
Her steps were uneven.
He knew she was crying.
After she was gone, he drove up and parked beneath the tree near the grave and walked over. When he saw the yellow giraffe, the pain in his chest bloomed. He looked down at the yellow truck he was carrying and shook his head. They’d always been on the same page with everything.
Then he focused on the name and smiled.
“Hey, Sammy, it’s me, Daddy. I see Mama’s already been here. That’s a great giraffe you have there. I brought you a birthday present, too. You’re three years old today, and I brought you your first Hot Wheels. This one is a little yellow truck like the ones I used to play with when I was three.”
He dropped to his knees, set the truck on the marker next to the giraffe, and then laid the palm of his hand on the engraved name.
“This is the closest I can get to you here, baby boy, but I carry you in my heart.”
Then he got up and walked away, his shoulders a little too straight, his steps staggering. He couldn’t see for the tears in his eyes.
Houston, Texas
Hershel Inman hardly remembered the man he’d been before his wife, Louise, died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and could barely cope with what he’d become, since Louise wouldn’t let him forget it.
She alternated days of crying and begging him to stop killing with preaching at him for his sins. If he didn’t love her so much, and if she wasn’t already dead, he would gladly have strangled her just to make her shut up.
His mission had begun as payback to the authorities who’d come too late to save her, and to God for picking and choosing who lived and who died. Then the FBI showed up, and his power grew as he continued to kill and escape detection. He had been invincible—until he’d made that first mistake and missed a survivor who’d witnessed what he’d done. After that, everything began to unwind. He’d tried to silence her, but the FBI kept interfering, and then, to make matters worse, she married the agent who’d saved her.
Their lives got better and his got worse, ending with the explosion in his getaway boat that nearly killed him. He’d dropped off the radar to let his burns heal and thought about disappearing altogether. But when he closed his eyes at night, all he saw was Louise’s face and the fear in her eyes as the water rose higher and higher around them, so he stayed in the wind, waiting for a chance to strike back.
Spring arrived, bringing with it the chance of tornadoes on a weekly basis through the heartland of America. He knew people would die, but even more would survive, and he thought about starting over with the killings, and wondered if he would be able to contact the FBI team like before. He wondered if they had deactivated the stolen phone he had used to communicate. He told himself if the phone still worked when he recharged it, it meant he was to continue. If it didn’t, then he would disappear.
When it activated, he took it as a sign. He packed his pickup with new camping equipment and headed north out of Houston. Storms were predicted within the next two days. If he got out there ahead of time and set up near where the outbreaks were expected to occur, and if the storms were bad enough, he would be close at hand when the survivors started crawling out of the debris.
Hershel drove north all the way to Wichita Falls, which was near the Texas-Oklahoma border, found an out-of-the-way place to camp and set up his tent.
When the storms started building, his anxiety built along with them. As they finally formed into wall clouds and began moving through the countryside, Hershel moved into action.
“This is it. It’s time to party.”
He checked his shoulder pack for Tasers, ropes and leather gloves, tossing them in the front seat of his truck beside the flashlight. He wore dark clothing with a black hooded sweatshirt to hide the side of his face burned in the explosion, and heavy boots for walking through the debris.
The wind was rising, and the sky was getting dark. It would be sunset within the hour, and the storm would move through the area soon afterward. He got in the truck and started driving north, pacing himself so that he would be coming in behind the weather, and the bigger the storm clouds grew, the more hyped he became.
According to his radio, the tornado watch had just been upgraded to a tornado warning for Wichita Falls, even as he was nearing the city. A side draft from the powerful storm cell made it difficult to drive, and he finally pulled off the road and parked, unwilling to get any closer until it had moved on. He had the radio tuned to a local weather station with a minute-by-minute update on what was happening. When he heard the frantic announcement that tornadoes were touching down in city neighborhoods, he began planning how he could get into the area before police and rescue sealed it off.
As soon as the storms began moving away, he drove straight into the chaos they’d left behind and, as he’d hoped, became just another person on the streets trying to help. He’d thought long and hard about how this would play out, leaving bodies with his mark on them. He’d been dreaming about the condition of Louise’s body when they finally found her—naked and coming apart at the seams. She would have hated the humiliation, but she was dead, so he hated it for her.
Rain was still coming down hard as he jumped out of his truck. He shouldered his backpack, grabbed his flashlight and began moving down the street, quickly getting lost among those who were already afoot.
Some were searching for survivors, while others appeared to have rescued themselves. They were wet, blood-stained and disoriented. Soaked by the downpour and on the lookout for live electrical wires, he kept moving through the area with an eye on his surroundings. At any moment the police or emergency services could show up, and then he would have to move on.
He saw a trio of men already working to free a couple from under what was left of their home. He wanted no part of that and kept running, dodging downed power lines and using the light from the intermittent lightning flashes to see a broader area than what his flashlight beam showed. Finally he heard what he’d been waiting for: a faint cry for help. He stopped, waiting for the cry again, and when he had a location, he headed into the debris.
At first he was just moving broken lumber and huge chunks of insulation, then he realized there was a standing wall with a partially attached staircase behind it. He removed a broken commode, cushions from a piece of furniture, broken table lamps and the water-soaked contents of a closet before he finally got to a door. As he dug his way closer, the shouting got louder.
“I hear you, man. Stay calm,” Hershel said, and the man quit shouting. Nothing like having the victim cooperate in his own demise.
Finally he cleared away enough to see that the man who lived here had taken refuge under the stairs. Hershel got out the Taser, grabbed a piece of rope from his backpack and reached for the doorknob.
An old man stumbled out into the rain.
“Thank you, thank you, you saved my life,” he cried, reaching for Hershel’s shoulder to steady himself.
“I didn’t save it. You don’t deserve to live,” Hershel said, and pulled the trigger on the Taser.
The man dropped to his knees, paralyzed by the electrical current pulsing through his body. Hershel glanced over his shoulder and dragged the man behind the
