Outfoxed (The Fox Witch #1) - R.J. Blain Page 0,36

deal with the paperwork, which the cops claimed and would take to City Hall on our behalf. He gave me a carbon copy of my lease-to-ownership form, ordered me to keep it safe, and left me to my grisly business of burning the dead.

With so many working to stack every scrap of usable wood, it didn’t take long to surround the corpses. Long-burning logs, a luxury imported from some other quadrant, would help ignite it. Those went around the pyre at equal intervals, and a few went between the cinderblocks in the heart of the pyre to allow air to flow through it.

It took a lot of fire to burn a body all the way down, and the glow from our battered neighborhood would be visible even in Inner Tulsa should anyone bother to look our way. Most wouldn’t. Why would they care about us when death came for them, too?

“It hit so fast,” one of the women who’d helped me build the pyre and drag the bodies whispered.

That it had. Mother Nature didn’t waste her time when she wanted to cut ours short. “Maybe Mother Nature will get bored and leave us alone for a while.”

“Or hit us where we go.” The woman gesture down the ruins of the street. “My cellar’s still good. The rest of the house isn’t.”

“But your cellar is still good. That’s something. Clear off the property, pop up a shack, and City Hall will leave you alone about it. It’s not like they can use the land.” Giving her tips on how to keep her home post-twister wouldn’t do much in the grand scheme, but I’d been in the Alley long enough to recognize a bitter truth. Sometimes, when all that was left was a scrap of land, it was worth living and dying for because there was nothing else.

“You’re right. How long have you been in this hell hole?”

“Too long.”

Anyone who’d survived a full season gave that answer, and like the sensible, she didn’t press to learn more about where I’d come from, why I lived in the outskirts, or what I planned to do with the rest of my life—or what was left of it.

The cops had been kind enough to give me a lighter, and as we’d run out of bodies in easy range, I went to work lighting the paper-wrapped logs so they’d ignite the rest of the pyre. I gave it an hour before a thick column of black smoke trailed into the sky and notified Inner Tulsa bodies burned.

Personally, I wouldn’t have wasted the precious long-burning logs on lighting a pyre, but I didn’t want to stick around and watch Carl go up in flame and smoke, not after being foolish enough to harbor hope of friendship. If the devastation went closer to Inner Tulsa, I’d have more bodies to bury or burn.

I didn’t want to lose either of my bosses, nor did I want to say goodbye to any more of my co-workers. Some days, I questioned everything about my life.

Someone with a soft heart didn’t belong where death came daily, and I was tired of the tragedy.

I was so tired.

To keep the rest of the world from discovering how tired I was, I headed to the gym to shower away the smoke and pretend it was just another day in Tulsa.

Sunday, May 3, 2043.

Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Alley.

* * *

McCoy’s Bar & Grill still stood, and I wanted to cry. It wasn’t joy or some other form of happiness; those evaded me as always. The relief of not having to bury McCoy or the others, who worked hard to appease the gossiping crowd, was what threatened to do me in. Within thirty seconds of stepping through the door, I learned six tornadoes had made a mess of Tulsa’s outskirts.

My neighborhood had only dealt with one of them, but Mother Nature had brought out her biggest guns in her effort to get rid of us. For the most part, she had succeeded.

What a bitch.

“Jade,” my boss bellowed from the kitchen.

Damn. Did he have eyes in the back of his head or had he installed a security camera overnight? I hadn’t even been in the bar long enough to figure out if anyone was missing, although it looked like most everyone had made it to work. Turning my ears back, I eased through the throng and pushed through the door. “Sir?”

“Good. You made it. I figured if you’d survived, you’d show up on time as always—or send someone to tell