"Marcus?"
"Here."
"Preacher?"
"Still ugly."
"Good. Sadi?"
A woman's voice answered from near the ladder. "Present."
Emily realized with a start that one of the riders was a woman. In the chaos outside, the soaked leather and helmets had blurred everyone together.
The leader kept counting until he reached twenty-seven.
Only then did he sit.
He ended up beside Emily, close enough that his shoulder touched hers whenever the shelter shook. For several minutes neither spoke. Jake gripped Emily's hand, sometimes hard enough to hurt, and she let him because pain in her fingers was easier to manage than whatever might be happening to her home overhead.
"I am Michael Reynolds," the leader finally said.
Emily turned slightly.
"Most people call me Hawk."
"Emily Carter."
"I heard you tell Jake."
Another impact rolled through the roof.
Hawk looked upward, then back at her. "You did not have to open that door."
"Three men were bleeding in my parking lot."
"Still did not have to."
"Daniel would have."
"Daniel your husband?"
Emily nodded once. "Was."
Hawk did not offer the automatic apology people usually gave, and Emily was grateful for that. Instead he asked, "He build this shelter?"
"Every inch of it."
Hawk pressed one palm against the reinforced wall. "Then he saved twenty-eight people tonight."
Something in Emily's chest tightened so suddenly she had to look away.
For three years, people had spoken about Daniel only in the past tense. Daniel had been kind. Daniel had worked hard. Daniel had loved her. Daniel had loved the shop. The idea that something he had built could still be doing work in the present struck her harder than she expected.
"He would have liked that," she said.
The storm continued for what felt like hours and was probably less than twenty minutes. Time inside the shelter distorted around noise, darkness, and fear. A minute could hold ten separate impacts, three prayers, one joke, and a lifetime of regret. Emily heard a man near the ladder whisper the Lord's Prayer and lose his place halfway through.
Another rider began humming low under his breath. After a moment, someone else joined him. It took Emily a few repetitions to recognize the tune as an old hymn Daniel's mother used to sing during storms when Emily was a child.
Jake's breathing finally slowed.
"There you go," Emily murmured. "That is better."
"You really think I am going to be okay?"
"I think if you survived riding a motorcycle through that wind, you are too stubborn to quit in my basement."
"It is not a basement."
"Now you are correcting me. Excellent sign."
Hawk laughed quietly beside them.
Then the roaring changed.
It did not stop. It moved.
The pressure eased first. Emily felt her ears release. The low vibration under the floor lessened. The sound became less immediate, then less physical, then finally distant enough that ordinary rain could be heard again.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
"Is it gone?" someone asked.
"Maybe," Hawk said. "Nobody moves yet."