Read Online After the Storm by Linda Castillo - Free Book Online Page A

and they were going to spend it picking up trash and debris left by the tornado that hit the day before. First stop was a farm—or what had once been a farm, anyway—on the edge of town. Scoutmaster Hutchinson had instructed them to clean up the area, and boy was it a mess. Big trees had been knocked down. Men with chainsaws had left an hour ago, leaving branches and trash and chunks of crap everywhere. Tin shingles and splintered pieces of lumber from the old barn that had been blown down. It was a good thing most of the troop had turned out, because it was going to take all damn day. If they had to camp, Josh was going to miss practice for sure.
    His scoutmaster had started two piles: one for deadfall and lumber, which would be burned later; another pile for any type of steel, which would be loaded into a truck and taken to a recycling center. So far this morning, Josh and his partner for the day, Scott, had been concentrating on dragging branches from a felled maple tree to the fire pile. Hopefully, they’d get to have a bonfire later and maybe some hotdogs and s’mores. Mr. Hutchinson was usually pretty cool about stuff like that.
    “Hey, Josh, let’s get all them boards over there.”
    Dropping the branch he’d dragged over to the bonfire, Josh walked over to where his friend was standing and looked down at the old wooden siding scattered over an old concrete footer.
    “Musta been a hell of an old barn,” Josh said.
    “Or a big fuckin’ outhouse.”
    Both boys cracked up at that. Josh’s mom didn’t like Scott. She called him a smartass and said he cursed too much. Josh didn’t tell her those were the two things that made Scott so fun to hang out with.
    “Let’s do it.” Josh bent and picked up a six-foot-long plank. One side had once been painted red, but that must have been a long time ago because most of the paint had faded to gray.
    For twenty minutes the boys picked up two-by-fours and busted-up siding and a door that had been split in half, and dragged all of it to the woodpile. Josh was thinking about the bonfire and wondered if Scoutmaster Hutchinson would buy some hotdogs. It wasn’t yet noon and already he was starving.
    He tugged a long plank from the collapsed floor, when something round and white rolled out from beneath it. At first, Josh thought it was a rock, but it was a little too round and rolled easily. Too light to be a rock. Definitely not a soccer ball. Dropping the plank, he walked over to it and knelt, rolling the thing over with his hand. That was when he saw grinning skeleton teeth and the black holes of eye sockets.
    “Holy shit!” Josh lunged to his feet and stumbled back so fast he lost his balance and fell on his butt. “Scott!”
    Vaguely, he was aware of his friend laughing as he walked over to him. “If you’re freaking out over a mouse, I swear I’m gonna tell Missy Hansch, and she’s going to think you’re the biggest pussy that ever walked—” Scott let out a short little scream. “Whoa! What the hell is that?”
    “It’s a fuckin’ head!” Josh swallowed a big wad of something gross at the back of his throat.
    The two boys exchanged looks. Scott’s mouth was open so wide Josh could see the cavities in his back molars. “You mean like a human?”
    “Well, duh. You ever seen a cow with teeth like that?”
    Both boys crept closer, their eyes glued to their macabre find. “I wonder who it is,” Scott whispered.
    “I wonder why it’s here and not buried in a cemetery or something,” Josh said.
    “We’d better let Hutchinson know.” Scott sighed.
    “Jeez, I hope we still get to have a bonfire,” Josh said.
    *   *   *
    I’m standing in the middle of a street littered with twisted sheet metal, pieces of vinyl siding, a paneled door, and other unrecognizable debris. A few feet away, a flowered sofa that’s remarkably clean sits in the grass near the curb with a young maple tree draped across it. Farther down, a mangled car has been dropped