Chapter Eleven

Eleven

“Whatcha think, dude?” Mel reached up to scratch LT behind one red, silken ear. In the blue-white beam of the flashlight, his face seemed eerily long, the stripe on his face almost fluorescent. His wide, liquid eyes were the only sign that he was at all alarmed about the fact that she was sitting in the corner of his stall in the pitch black of the pre-dawn barn. He sniffed at the flashlight in her hands, then, deciding it was harmless, tried to figure out if it was edible too.

“No, no,” she laughed even though she didn’t feel like it, pulling the Maglite out of his reach. Her horses were magical like that: even when she felt absolutely hopeless, they inspired a smile, a warm thought. Reminded her that she couldn’t afford to swim in self-pity because she had creatures who depended on her for everything.

Sleep had mocked her until she’d finally given up and tugged on clean clothes, had moved through the barn as silent as a ghost and let herself into LT’s stall. She loved Roman, but if you were going to sit prone in anyone’s stall, it had to be LT’s.

She’d been eleven when the thousand-dollar, three-year-old chestnut had been presented to her by her parents. He was not a show horse, was not fancy. But he’d been all the Walshes could afford, and his coat had shone like a new penny. And though he was too green for her and she wasn’t strong enough in the saddle to be of much use training the green-broke colt, the bond had been instant and lasting. He liked French fries and peanut butter cookies, knew how to untie his lead rope from a dozen varieties of knot. He was lazy to a fault and had learned how to work just hard enough to keep his rider happy without exerting so much effort that he misbehaved and had to be put through the training exercise again and again. He was a nothing-special fifteen-hand gelding with good breeding, but no show record. And he was probably Mel’s best friend in the world.

“You wanna go home?” she asked him. He lipped at the flashlight again. Mel sighed. “Maybe we never shoulda come to Florida in the first place.” He snorted softly, misting her hands with the mixture of mucus and accumulated dirt that had built up in his nostrils. “Thanks,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans with a face. “Appreciate it.”

Making as little noise as possible – though it didn’t matter because she was the only person lodged above the barn – she went to the tack room and collected LT’s saddle and bridle, her favorite pad. Within ten minutes, she was leading him – fully tacked though not happy about it – out to the plastic mounting block beneath the tree behind the barn; the mounting block the guys had chuckled about because none of them ever used it, but of course she had needed to.

Won’t have to deal with me much longer, she thought to all of them in general with a scowl.

The last scraps of moonlight turned the world to a silver and black portrait, and the drive was a pale snake of gravel that was easy to follow, even in the dark. LT had slow, even footfalls, and as they walked along, the crunch of his steel shoes over the pebbled ground was a soothing sound, as was the gentle swaying of his gait. Bullfrogs, cicadas, and crickets screamed in the hopes of drowning the early morning chorus of warbling birds. The world was anything but silent.

At least, at first.

Mel had no idea how much ground they’d covered, but when she found herself at one of the property’s borders, she turned back toward the barn and faced a sunrise that spiked her pulse immediately.

Red. The sun was an angry red ball behind the tree line, fat, black and purple fingers of cloud stretching across an orange horizon. The old adage was not just a myth, but truth: a red sky at dawn was a storm sky.

All the happy morning chatter of birds and insects had died down and now the ranch was thoroughly, eerily quiet.

Mel twisted her head on her shoulders and stared at the grayness behind her, realizing she was looking at a heavily-stacked cloud bank and not the gentle dove hue of early morning. A breeze stirred through the trees that was too hot and too stifling to lift their leaves. With a cold shudder, she remembered the circumstances of her last flight from a Florida farm, and decided she was not going to be behind the wheel towing her horses when this maelstrom broke.

-O-

The sun never finished its ascent. As Dan piloted the ranch flatbed through the broodmare pasture, he watched the thunderhead creeping in from the west double in size. White clouds boiled up in a gray sky, thin glimmers of lightning flashing miles away…but coming closer.

“…large hail and straight line winds expected,” the DJ’s voice crackled through the radio speakers as he interrupted the music for a weather update. “A tornado warning has been issued for…”

“That’s headed our way,” Eli said in a choked voice. “We should turn around.”

“Yeah,” Dan said, not slowing the truck. “We’ll just forget about the hundred-fifty grand worth of horseflesh out here.”

“Well I’m just saying…”

The truck hit a rut in the grass that sent both their heads nearly to the roof of the cab.

“Shut up.” Dan was silently preoccupied with his concern that none of the mares had shown up for breakfast. He only fed them on Sundays, but he knew that the typical summer rainstorm was never enough to deter the horses from coming up to the gate for feed. The fact that they’d traversed a large chunk of the pasture and still hadn’t spotted them was bothering him.

The tin roof of the horses’ shelter came into view over a slight rise in the landscape and Dan breathed an internal sigh of relief as he registered the small heard of mares and their foals clustered in front of the gate of the building. The closed gate.

“What the hell?” he threw the truck in park and killed the engine as the DJ regaled them with another warning, this time of intense cloud-to-ground lightning. As if to prove the point, a crisp, white bolt came snaking down out of the clouds.

“What?” Eli asked. The kid was starting to sound suspiciously like someone who was scared shitless of storms. “Dan, what? Dude…”

Dan was already out of the truck and wrestling the door shut against the stiff wind that was flattening the grass all around them. He glanced up at the ominous thunderhead that was continuing to roll and tumble its way across the horizon. “The gate’s shut,” he had to nearly shout to be heard above the wind.

“So?” Eli clapped his hat over his head with a hand and followed with reluctance.

“It was chained open.”

Eli followed without another question.

Though they had a true breeding barn where the mares were stabled during the winter and foaled each spring, the three-sided shelter out in their pasture was a long, low, empty building where they could take cover from summer storms as a herd. An eighteen foot gate spanned the entrance and could lock them in or out, but at the moment, it should have been secured in the open position with a heavy chain.

The mares and foals were restless as the two ranch hands approached: jostling against one another and snorting uneasily. The babies switched their bottle brush tails and hugged their mothers’ sides.

“Whoa,” Dan laid a soothing hand on Sawyer’s neck as he passed her. “Easy, now.” He did a quick head count as he moved toward the closed gate of the shelter and came up two short.

“Ginger,” Eli said the same moment Dan realized he didn’t see the lead mare. “Don’t see her or the filly.”

A frightened, inhuman squeal pierced the morning and Dan felt his stomach clench with grim dread.

He’d seen a myriad of gruesome, devastating images in all his years as a horseperson, but they hadn’t prepared him for what he saw when he stepped inside the shelter.