Page 32 of Even If the Sky is Falling
“Chicago doesn’t get tornadoes, right?” Jones yelled over the sound as her phone repeated it’s shrill wailing.
“It’s not a tornado,” Dianna said, her voice shaking.
“Flash flood?” Jones asked. She could barely hear herself think.
Instead of answering, Dianna flipped her phone around so that Jones could read the warning splashed across her lock screen. She had to squint, but the words fell into place. Big red exclamation marks bookended words that made bile rise her throat.
“This is an official announcement—aerial debris detected. This is not a drill. Please find immediate shelter in an underground bunker or interior parts of a building away from windows. Remain sheltered and wait for an all-clear.”
Jones, with her head hunched in a pathetic attempt, scrambled for her phone on the floor. Maybe Dianna was playing a cruel joke on her. Though she couldn’t ignore the pallid look that stretched over Dianna’s face like a veil. Her phone, while it had ceased its screaming, had the same life-altering message as Dianna’s. Meteoric debris was heading for Earth, and it was likely that sometime soon, she would be dead.
Jones threw her phone with a squeal, rushing toward the door. She yanked, but the door failed to give. She pushed, thinking that maybe her head was just as jumbled as her body. Everything she did was useless. The door stayed shut.
“What the fuck?” Jones shrieked.
“It’s not going to open,” Dianna said.
“What are you talking about?” It came out of Jones’s mouth in a whine that Dianna didn’t expect. Tough-as-nails Jones was afraid.
“Don’t you remember our orientation packet 1L year? The Reserve Room in the library is one of the designated bunker rooms.” She pointed to the walls. “No windows. Cement framing. Underground.”
“No,” Jones said, refusing to believe her.
“Yes.” Dianna nodded, like she was talking to a toddler one second away from the temper tantrum of the century. “We’re stuck in here.”
“No,” Jones repeated. “I am not dying in a library with you.”
“We’re probably not going to die,” Dianna said, smoothing her skirt before she sat down. She ignored the shaking in her fingers as she picked up her can to continue drinking. She told herself that it was just the siren putting her on edge, which had been going nonstop for the last four minutes.
“Oh, are you also focusing on astronomy too, Galileo?” Jones asked through gritted teeth as she continued to manhandle the door.
“Wow, you’re even a bitch when you think you’re about to die. No last-minute repentance?”
“You think this is funny?” Jones said, her eyes narrowing into slits. “Of course, you do. You’ve already gotten to see the world and travel and date and do all the things. While I’m just some lame girl who gets dumped and replaced in a matter of seconds. The universe is so unfair that I’m actually starting to believe in a higher power. Because there is no way that my life is this much of a shit show by accident.”
She tilted her head up and screamed at the blinking lights. “Are you there, God? I hope you’re getting a really good laugh.”
And just as suddenly as it had started, the siren stopped. Jones stilled, looking around the room. Dianna ducked, just in case.
“Is it over?” Jones asked.
Dianna grabbed for her phone. The warning was gone. She pulled up Twitter. If there were updates, that was the best place to look. Contrary to what her grandma had believed about social media, it was way better during catastrophes than relying on local news sources, which were mostly behind paywalls anyway.
But her home page would not refresh.“Tweets failing to load”was the only new message she could see each time she swiped. “Oh,” she said aloud.
“What’s wrong now?” Jones rushed beside her. It was the closest they had ever been and Dianna felt like her skin was leaping off her body as pinpricks of heat reached from her fingers to her toes. She had never noticed that Jones smelled like oranges and eucalyptus. She had never been near enough to notice. It made her want to bury her head in Jones’s neck and breathe in until her lungs exploded.
“Twitter’s down,” Dianna answered, trying to find her words again through the brain fog caused by Jones’s aroma. “Check yours.”
“I don’t have one,” Jones said. She sounded remorseful, like starting up a Twitter page in high school would have been the one thing that saved them now.
“Well, check something else,” Dianna said, as she rushed to Instagram. Down. Snapchat. Down. TikTok. Down.
“I don’t have anything.”
The bars at the top of Dianna’s phone were still showing three bars, but for the life of her she couldn’t get a single page to load. “Well, see if you have service. I don’t.”
“Who do you have?” Jones asked, as she opened her email.
