With a snap of his lighter, the fuse flared to life, and the end of its long cord began to crackle toward his fist. Vegeta dropped it to the ground and ran for cover. He leapt over the square-cut hedge that buffered a line between the Briefs' estate and their neighbors' where the heiress was crouched, waiting. The trajectory of Bulma's fireworks was a game of roulette, and though he remained uncertain that bushes would offer much protection, there was some excitement in the gamble. A tincture of gunpowder swept through the air as they watched the long fuse spark and hiss, coiling through the grass like a snake preparing to strike. The heiress wrapped her hands around his arm, pulling on the sleeve of his shirt as she bounced on her knees, squealing near his ear. Vegeta's heart raced, and his muscles tensed beneath her grip, but he didn't throw her off. Even if she was paying him attention, it was too dark to see the reddened flush infused across his face. Besides, her proximity would make it easier to tackle the girl, hold her to the ground should the damn firework fly in their direction. As the flare burned its way to meet the base of the explosive, Vegeta sucked a breath.
A crack, sharp and searing, rocketed him from a deep sleep as if shocked back from a flatline under paddles. Vegeta shot upright, heart pounding, to catch the last remnants of light flicker and fade from the room before they left him in blackness to grope and grasp at the comforter. His body felt frantic and his head disoriented, as if his consciousness was trying to close a gap, shake him back to reality from a vivid dream. Drunken latency left him to survey the space around him whose furnishings flashed in an out of view as the Earth sighed in a low, dissipating rumble. The room suddenly illuminated in bright, white light, and the walls shook with a violent clap of thunder.
"Oh shit!" Vegeta lurched from the bed on ungainly limbs, stumbling over the tips of his tennis shoes as their rubber soles gripped the floorboards to nearly pitch him off his feet. Kami, where did he put his phone? His palms pawed at the mattress until the strobing lights glinted off the glass screen that was tucked halfway beneath a pillow. He darted from the room in an inelegant stagger, bumping into the doorframe, the walls, the couch once he'd made it to the living room to see that all the lights were out—not just turned off, either. Even the microwave clock was black. Outside, the wind howled like a freighter. It bent the arms of every tree against their will, left them straining and creaking, and sent their leaves to thrash.
Vegeta fumbled desperately to unlock his phone and find the right distance for his garbled vision to navigate to Raditz's number, but as it rang against his ear, he began to recognize the dumb hip-hop beat of his cousin's ringtone permeating from behind the door of the other guest room. A wave of relief eased the turbulent churn of his stomach when he realized that Raditz was home, that perhaps his cousin heard the storm approaching and returned with the boys to the cabin. He followed the tune down the hall and pushed open the door to find Raditz sprawled like a starfish, every limb stretched wide across the bed, alone.
The few sickening seconds it took to realize that the kids were stranded in the woods—a six and seven-year-old left unaccompanied in a tree fort in the midst of a dangerous storm—were enough to sober his dulled mind and flimsy limbs to propel him out the sliding glass door, not bothering to close it behind him. Thick sheets of rain lashed sideways to sting his skin and quickly soak his clothes. Lightning webbed across the sky like broken glass followed by cracking whips of thunder. Worse, however, were the howls of wind that seemed to overwhelm everything else, as if the storm's multitude of threats were at war, and the wind was stealing the show over the glamor of jagged lights and their booming encores. It pushed at his back and nearly carried him off his feet as he raced toward the line of trees that danced and swayed to the tune of its grisly chorus.
Though he knew the general direction of the fort, there weren't any paths to go on, especially in the dark, half-drunk, and without Kakarot to guide him. Getting lost was a new odious obstacle for which he lacked more than a prayer to avoid. He ran headlong into the forest, and just as he did so, the erratic beam of a powerful flashlight cut across the tree trunks in front of him. Vegeta hastily glanced back, not pausing a beat, to see the heiress clopping toward him in a pair of knee-high rain boots. Her shouts were smothered in the roaring air and rustling branches, failing to reach him.
He didn't wait for her—not at first, not until the woods grew thick and dark and even the ceaseless lightning was obscured by the crowd of trees that gesticulated their limbs like drunkards, swaying back and forth with every forceful gale. As he crouched at the base of a giant Spruce to wait for Bulma, he could hear them creak and moan and wondered what the chances were of trees this large being uprooted, ripped from the ground to wail in their final throes of death—or perhaps worse and even more likely, the chances of the tree fort coming through the storm unscathed.
Thankfully, she wasn't too far behind. Her light grew brighter, bouncing with her gait before the silhouette of her hooded rain jacket emerged feet away.
"Bulma!" he shouted and reached for her sleeve as she nearly ran past him.
"It's this way!" She cut a path ahead at an angle at least thirty-degrees off from wherever he'd been trekking. Kami, if he hadn't stopped, just as he'd feared, he would have bypassed the kids completely and become stranded in the forest himself.
Vegeta clipped close behind at her heels, focused on the soppy ground where each foot landed, soaking through his shoes. More than the uneven terrain where his feet kept catching on roots, he felt annoyed, almost piqued by the heiress's pace. If she hadn't been wearing the gawdy boots, they might have reached the fort by now. He refused to let his mind imagine what the boys were experiencing in the moment. His brother wasn't exactly a brave soldier, and while Kakarot was as dauntless as they came, he was still just a child whose steel nerves were undoubtedly breakable under real life and death conditions.
"Almost there!" Bulma hollered.
His heart that had been lobbed solidly in his throat since he'd awoken finally floated back into place when the treehouse came into view, still erect; though it was missing many of its shingles. His respite was cut short when suddenly the heiress sprung ahead at awkward gait, hiking up her legs as if she were high-stepping through car tires.
"What's wrong?" Vegeta shouted after her, but she didn't respond, or perhaps she couldn't hear him.
Bulma gave up trying to run in her impractical footwear and dropped to her knees, skidding through the muck like stealing bases. She abandoned her flashlight at the foot of the tree, and as she did, the wild hair of his cousin's silhouette became visible in its beam, kneeling beside her. That's when his heart stopped, skipped entire measures, realizing Tarble was the reason she'd broke ahead. It didn't beat again until he was standing over Bulma's shoulder. She'd already pulled Tarble into her lap and hugged him tightly against her. The boy was hysterical, screaming a mix of terror and agony with his eyes pinched shut, as if he didn't realize that they'd arrived.
Kakarot, whose hand was clasped over one eye, said in a worried tone, "He didn't mean to!"
"He didn't mean to what?" Vegeta asked as he knelt beside them to lay a palm against his brother's forehead.
"He slipped on the ladder!" The boy pointed above his head. The way he held his eye and apologized for Tarble was enough to piece together that his brother must have nailed Kakarot in the face on his way down.
Bulma was muttering to the boy, trying to quell his piercing wails that paused only long enough to draw breath. She pulled his hand off his ankle, examining it carefully under the light. The joint stretched the elastic of his sock, swollen to the degree that there was no longer any distinction between his calf and foot.
"Vegeta, we need to get back. Can you carry him?"
His brother clung tightly to his shirt once he'd scooped him up, his tiny fists pulling at the material like a baby koala gripping his mother's fur. Tarble muted his own cries by stuffing his open mouth with Vegeta's shoulder, teeth and all, his hot breath panting through the fabric.
"It's okay," he murmured several times.
It seemed that as far as the storm was concerned, he was right. The wind had let up, the trees were righted, and only their branches continued to wave with small gusts. Even the rain had called a ceasefire, with only the occasional fat droplets that fell from branches to splatter against his skin.
Bulma took up Kakarot's free hand and began to lead the way. His cousin, ever the fiend for danger, chatted-up the heiress about their adventure. In the tale he delivered, with no shortage of bravado, Kakarot starred as the superhero, and Tarble, a pitiable babe in the woods, played his rescue. To hear Kakarot describe Tarble's panic as the storm closed in was painfully nauseating, as if Vegeta's shame for his neglect could burn a hole through the pit of his stomach. He squeezed the boy tighter. It was the most horrible thing to picture Tarble in that fort, powerless and alone, crying his name on repeat as thunder rumbled ominously in the distance, drawing closer and closer to trap him.
Vegeta's self-flogging guilt, however, was short-lived as they all stopped at once to tune their ears to a sound tolling from beyond the woods and across the vast expanse of the lake where the little town they'd traipsed through earlier that day resided. Barely audible at first, it quickly swelled into a steady continuous note whose meaning they all recognized at once. Even so, it didn't make sense, and they stood frozen, listening to the eerie tone with their heads tipped toward the sky that was mostly hidden beyond the canopy of trees. The only evidence of the storm's existence was left growling behind them.
"Is it broken?" Vegeta asked of the siren. The moment he did, as if their luck in finding the kids mostly intact had all been a practical joke, the wind began to stir and shake the trees above their heads in answer. It picked up fast and sudden, rolling their tops in dizzying circles like it had lost all sense of direction. There was no mistaking what was heading toward them, a fact that was reflected in the whites of Bulma's eyes leaping out at him in the dark.
"Run!" she screamed and yanked Kakarot with a force that nearly floated his feet.
The maze of brush and branches reanimated, reaching out like twisted arms to attack them, and they ran with the tops of their heads bent into the wind to block their lashes.
Tarble's teeth bit down on his shoulder and his voice pulled up his throat to give sound to the panicked breaths he heaved in shorter and shorter blasts. The kid was hyperventilating in his arms. It didn't help that his own heart pumped blood through his veins with enough pressure to rupture every vessel that lay beneath the surface of his skin, much less keep the boy from feeling the way the organ banged against his chest like a battering ram.
He tried to calm his panicked pulse with logic. These days, those sirens could predict a threat at least ten minutes in advance, and they didn't always mean a tornado was imminent, only detected. A funnel cloud—that would sound the alarms. And ten minutes was enough time to make it back to the cabin… at least he hoped. But their three-minute warning signal stopped, which meant the clock was ticking toward a deadline they couldn't entirely trust.
The storm escalated its assault, dropping debris across their path as if from nowhere, branches whose size and speed increased proportionately with the squall's ferocity. They ducked and jumped and stumbled over and around them. There wasn't any worse place to be than the woods, and that was all that lay behind them, more than a million acres of protected national forest. With no other choice but to continue in the direction of the pursuant threat, face it head-on, even as the trees' massive boughs began to creak and groan, they pushed forward with Bulma as their guide.
Physically, Vegeta was far more conditioned to the chase than her and Kakarot, but found the worn soles and soggy stretch of his tennis shoes proving useless against the forest's mossy bed that was slick and thoroughly saturated. Each step was a test of agility and balance, and even more so his resolve—his confidence eroding with every rolled ankle and awkward stumble as he fought to keep from nose-diving into the ground.
The heiress took notice, and despite the deadly threat and responsibility for her own charge who was leashed tightly in her fist, she laid back, unwilling to let him and Tarble lag too far behind. She kept their troop together, never straying more than a few paces ahead with her focus honed-in on their destination. The deftness with which she maneuvered through a minefield was mesmerizing, jerking Kakarot this way and that to find the safest path.
In the deafening wind as they ran, another sound was muffled in its undercurrent as a dull, heavy crack. Just yards ahead, the ground swelled around the base of a pine as it was ripped-up from the earth by the roots. Bulma saw it too and changed course to avoid the path it felled and the domino effect of the other trees it floored beneath its massive body.
It wasn't the first to fall, and others groaned to signal their decent. The heiress pivoted to forge a path that was parallel like fighting a riptide; she steered them off track just enough to give berth to the falling giants. Though toppling trees, it seemed, were the lesser threat. Their roots clung desperately to the earth, resistant to give up and lay down; they were slow to upturn. More dangerous were their severed limbs, projectiles just light enough to torpedo through the air and heavy enough to drop without warning.
The heiress suddenly shrieked and jumped sideways yanking Kakarot with her as a heavy log fell from the sky to land an inch from their toes. Tangled, wet hair whipped across her face, and the fear and doubt with which she met Vegeta's eyes expressed a desire to do nothing more than drop to the ground, cower and take her chances with Kakarot in her arms, hold him against the base of a mammoth cedar and hope it wouldn't give like the others. But that kind of thinking went against the grain of the girl's very nature, and she knew it. Bulma tossed her mane behind her as if daring mother nature to throw another punch.
Bulma was foolhardy, like his cousin, and now Vegeta could see that it was the reason Kakarot idolized her, spoke about her in the same vocabulary as the action figures he'd used to decorate the tree fort she built for him. She'd never give up to play the damsel. The kid's praise was well placed because Bulma Briefs' recent act was just that—an act; it was fake and borne from some post-pubescent, misguided need to be liked. The real Bulma was still alive and well, and that girl was the one who could lead them all out of the woods.
With her eyes glued in the direction of the cabin, Bulma pressed on, and Vegeta followed, each footfall leading them closer to both their refuge and chaser as the forest became a battlefield. Their enemy dropped its deadliest weapons as trees that towered a hundred feet in the air continued to drop from the sky like kamikazes, crushing the life from everything they met on their decent.
It was only thanks to her, their tactical officer, whose knowledge and foolproof compass were just enough to skirt them around the edge of the densest danger that they were alive at all. And as the woods thinned out, and the dark cabin appeared within his sightline, a strange, strangled sob heaved from his chest. Fuck, she'd saved him, saved them all. The dimes of hail that pelted him as they crossed up the lawn, stinging and painful as they were, he was only glad to feel at all.