The white oak towers above them, ghostly, vaguely triangular, glowing against the dark sky. Rachel's blue feather earring dances in the cool breeze. Her cheeks are wet. Her eyes shine with light reflected from the stars.
"What I wouldn't give to leave this place and never come back," Chloe says. Suddenly there is this eerie silence. The wind dies down, like the world holding its breath.
"What's stopping us?" Rachel asks. The question hangs in the still air.
"Us? Are you serious?"
"There is nothing keeping me here. Not anymore."
"So if I came to you tomorrow and told you to pack your bags…"
"I'm serious, Chloe. Let's leave this place forever."
"Okay."
Rachel looks down at the photo of her and her dad in her hand.
"Can I borrow your lighter?"
Wait, is she actually going to…?
Hesitating, suddenly remembering the picture taped to the side of the shelf in her room, near her pillow, Chloe checks a couple of wrong pockets before finally handing over the lighter.
Would she burn that too? Would she give that to leave?
"Thank you," says Rachel. She walks over to the trash can and proceeds to light the photo on fire, and stands there watching it burn in her hand, her bracelet dark, almost black around her wrist, and Chloe's skin hurts, until the photo disappears into the bin and she can breathe again. She can breathe, but she doesn't want to be there any longer. It feels wrong. The garbage inside the can catches on, and she can see the flames rise, dancing on the inner walls.
"Come on," she says.
Rachel moves like she's about to come, but suddenly she steps up and kicks the trash can, knocking it over and spilling the burning trash all over and immediately igniting the lower branches of the curved, horizontal trunk of the white oak. Rachel screams, and the pain comes for a brief moment and something snaps and all of the wind is suddenly back at once and it roars towards the oak and picks up the fire and spreads it in another instant through the entire tree. Rachel heaves a breath and screams again, and the second gust of wind comes, almost lifting them off the ground.
In a shower of sparks, the fire rises, spinning, spiraling, to the sky.
Where it is extinguished into a great spinning cloud of smoke, churning, turning into a huge tornado that's drawing inevitably closer to Arcadia Bay.
"Chloe…" Max Caulfield says, shaking her head.
"Max, you finally came back to me this week, and… you did nothing but show me your love and friendship. You made me smile and laugh like I haven't done in years. Wherever I end up after this… in whatever reality… all those moments between us were real, and they will always be ours. No matter what you choose, I know you'll make the right decision."
"Chloe, I can't make this choice."
"No, Max," Chloe Price says, taking her hands. "You're the only one who can."
They stay like that for a minute.
"Max, it's time."
"Chloe, I'm so, so sorry. I don't want to do this."
"I know, Max. But we have to. We have to save everybody, OK? And you'll make those fuckers pay for what they did to Rachel. Being together this week… it's the best farewell gift I could have hoped for. You're my hero, Max."
"Oh, Chloe," Max Caulfield sobs. "I'm gonna miss you so much."
They hold each other for a long time.
"I'll always love you," Chloe Price finally says. "Now get out of here before I freak! And Max Caulfield, don't you forget about me…"
"Never."
Max turns towards the cliff and focuses on the photo in her hand. The bands around her wrist look dark, almost black. For a long time, she doesn't move. Then she jumps backwards, falling to the ground. The photo in her hand gets loose and flies, flapping, away into the wind. The tornado shows no sign of abating. The noise is deafening. Chloe rushes forward.
"Max!" she screams.
Max's face snaps towards her, a look of shock in her eyes.
"Chloe!"
"Did it work?" Chloe screams over the noise.
"Did it work? Chloe, the last thing I remember was coming to the beach."
"You went back! The other you… Through the photo!"
"The photo? You mean that photo? You mean… No, Chloe!"
"No, it's fine! We talked about it. We have to save everyone! And maybe you went and created a reality where everything is fixed now, but here… Here the storm is still coming. I guess here everyone is still going to die."
Max gets up from the ground and comes to stand next to her on the cliff. Down below, the tornado makes landfall. The Two Whales diner disappears into the vortex.
"But you get to live…" Max says and somehow despite the noise Chloe can hear her.
There is an explosion, and the fireball turns into several ropes of flame that are sucked upwards into the storm and for a moment, like a flash of a camera, before the flames wink out into nothing, it looks like a tree on fire.
"Rachel," Chloe breathes. She grabs Max by the shoulders. "Max, we have to save Rachel."
For a moment Max stares at her, incredulous, which slowly morphs into a look of compassion and suffering.
"Rachel… Rachel is dead, Chloe," she says softly.
"Not in every timeline. Come on!"
She takes Max by the hand and drags her away from the cliff, just as a fishing boat, launched by the storm, smashes into the lighthouse, sending the top tumbling down, crushing through the cliff edge where they were standing a second earlier and disappearing down below.
"Whoa!" Max exclaims.
They start down the path, almost getting caught by a bunch of rolling logs that break free of their stack. Max grabs her arm and pulls her to the side at the last moment. They watch the logs roll down the path and crush through some bushes, as the rain lashes at their clothes.
It's Chloe's turn to "whoa" and give Max a grateful look, which turns to a suspicious one.
"A doe?" Max says staring somewhere off to the right, but when Chloe looks over, there is nothing there.
They start down again.
"Chloe, where are we going?" Max asks.
"Blackwell. Gotta get to Blackwell."
"Why?"
"The Tobanga."
"The Tobanga? The totem? What about it?"
"We have to destroy it."
"What? Why?"
"Just trust me, Max!"
"I do. But the storm is already in town. And you left your car at the beach. Which was right in the path of it. There is no way we get to Blackwell before the storm does. God know what's happening in Arcadia Bay right now."
"We just gotta get there, Max. Before, after, that doesn't matter. You of all people should know that."
They continue down the path. Their clothes are soaked. Chloe's teeth start to chatter. It's October and the rain is fucking cold. She clenches her jaw and pushes on.
"Is this something you got from the other Max?" Max asks behind her.
"What?"
"Blackwell. The Tobanga."
"No, that's… something else," she says, which is true, but she doesn't actually know what that something else is. All she knows at the moment is that she's freezing and that she needs to get to Blackwell, and that once there she needs to find a way to destroy the totem.
Enough for her to work with.
They reach the bottom of the slope and emerge out of the woods onto the beach. The tornado has moved inland and from their angle seems to be right above Blackwell. It looks more water than wind now, black, thick water, against which the water tower looks skeletal white. The beach is covered in rubble. Of Frank's RV, only the wheels are left. Chloe's truck sits sideways from how she parked it, but is otherwise miraculously unharmed.
"See?" she says to Max cheerfully.
They get in and slam the doors shut and sit, shivering. Chloe starts the truck, feeling intense love for its dryness and warmth. She cranks the heat all the way up. Max is grasping the strap of her stupid shoulder bag with both hands. As her shivers subside, Chloe takes a deep breath and drives.
Arcadia Bay avenue is like a war zone. Or maybe a junkyard. The Tornado turned the entire town into American Rust. There are mounds of debris where brick buildings used to be; there is a semi lying across the street, on fire, next to a school bus; there are fucking dead whales. Also on fire, with two gaping holes in its hull, like a ship that's been torpedoed and flipped on its head, is the Two Whales diner. Chloe distances herself from it as she banks left by what's left of the Harbor Inn, making her way slowly up the road that leads to Posh Bay and Blackwell, and the black liquid tornado that's taking up the entire East of the world. She doesn't dwell on the diner, or Max's glances. Joyce was probably not even there, she thinks, most people probably evacuated, or hiding in bunkers. There is a nagging thought somewhere under that that's trying to tell her that she knows, she knows where her mother was, where Frank was, where Warren was, but no, she wasn't there, so she can't know that, she can't.
No fucking way.
As they get closer to the storm, visibility drops dramatically, and shit starts flying sideways. A billboard the size of a small locomotive, advertising water or something, materializes out of the rain, flipping end over end, misses the truck by maybe half an inch, then cleaves the wall of a house that was otherwise spared. Fucking water. A minute later they have to stop, because half a dozen electric poles are lying across the pavement like ties of a giant railroad. Chloe tries to drive around the roadblocks through the front lawns, but that only lasts until an overturned Buick in the next driveway.
"Shitballs," Chloe says. "I guess we're walking from here."
Max is watching the weather raging outside the cab with a great deal of distaste. Clearly, going back out there is not a preferred course of action.
"You wanna sit this one out?" Chloe asks.
"Chloe, you said it didn't matter if we get there before or after, so should we wait for it to be over first?"
"We probably could, but I have this feeling… like I shouldn't be in one place for too long. Like something is after me and if I stay still it'll zero in. Crazy, huh? You can totally stay here, though. No worries."
She pushes the door open, struggling against it, slips out of the cab and slams it shut. She's soaked in moments. The torrents of water streaming down the windshield prevent her from seeing Max's face. Max is just a blurry ghost, a memory.
"Don't you forget about me," she mumbles, hugging herself and starting off towards the twister. Before she takes three steps past the final horizontal street pole, there is a clanging sound coming from up the street, then another one, closer, turning into a grating sound of something being dragged along the pavement. It turns out to be a hood of a car, sliding too quickly towards her along the road. At the last moment, before the hood takes out both of her legs, something jerks her backwards and away from it. She realizes what it is when she falls on top of it. It's Max Caulfield.
"I'll just… tag along," Max says, as Chloe rolls off her. Max's face is visibly pale even in the weather. Chloe pulls her up and doesn't ask.
"Let's go, Supermax," she says instead, and they set off across the lawn, holding hands.
"Damn, it's fucking cold," Max says, exhaling raggedly.
"There is going to be a fire at the end of this," Chloe replies. "I promise."
On foot, they aren't moving as fast, so the tornado is moving farther away and things become calmer. Soon, it's a fairly normal downpour. Suddenly, Chloe realizes that they're on Cedar street, two houses away from her house. Two piles of rubble away from the pile that used to be her house. There is nothing left standing, except the old swing in the yard. A piece of her bedroom wall with CAN'T SLEEP graffiti on it is in the driveway, on top of the pile that used to be her room. Max doesn't seem to recognize anything, and Chloe doesn't point it out as they press on.
Max does get her bearing when they get to the Caulfields' old digs, though.
"Shit," she says. "That's all gone."
They pass a playground that's mostly intact. Its merry-go-round is spinning, squeakily, a kid's bike on the ground next to it. It hits Chloe suddenly how many people died today. How many bodies are in those piles of rubble all around them. Big and small… Can't see much while it pours, but when it clears…
Max is looking at the bike, too.
"Almost there," Chloe exclaims quickly, pointing at the battered Blackwell stadium that's rising in the east. "Come on, Max."
They come on, and soon reach the football field, missing whole swaths of its turf. Some bleachers lie knocked over. Others missing the seats. On the other side of the street, Blackwell's main building despite being made of brick, has been ground down to its foundations. Same went for the pool and the dorm buildings. It's as if the tornado stopped to do an extra thorough job here. It can be seen off to the northeast now, probably above Posh Bay and moving in the direction of the hospital and Pan Estates.
Max halts in the middle of the road, staring in horror at the destroyed school. The thoughts that have been circling around, spiraling, thoughts that hit Chloe and from which she tried to drag Max away by hurrying away from the empty playground, seem to finally catch up to Max here. The water streaming down her face is no longer just rain.
"Chloe," she sobs. "Look. Look what I've done."
Chloe wraps her arm around Max's shoulders, leading her across the street towards the dorms.
"No, Max, listen. This wasn't you. I'm pretty sure this one is actually on me."
"What? How? What are you talking about?"
"I'll explain later. Let's find this motherfucker right now."
It doesn't take long to find the totem. Out of the entire grove of the surrounding trees, it's the only thing left standing. Out of the entire town, maybe. Like a grave stone. Here lies the town of Arcadia Bay. Home, Shithole, Prison. 1839-2013, or whatever. It stands there, staring at them with all of its eyes, a whale face on top, daring them to come closer.
The tornado couldn't do it. How are they going to destroy the thing?
"Fire," Chloe says, from about fifty feet away. "Fire and the Raven."
"Everything is wet," Max says.
"Shit, you're right. There's gotta be something dry under all that rubble. Come on!"
They go up to the destroyed dorm and stop in front of it. It's a jutting, jagged mess of torn, twisted concrete, broken wood and shattered glass.
"Chloe," Max says. "That does not look safe."
"Good thing I have a superhero to watch my back," Chloe says, looking for a foothold. "Be right back."
She grabs hold of a concrete block and begins to climb. Shit shifts and rolls under her, setting off small avalanches. One of those becomes a big avalanche, and she nearly gets impaled on a rebar.
"Careful, Chloe!" Max exclaims. Chloe glances back at her. She looks tense, terrified, ready to rewind. Maybe already rewinding. Maybe more than once.
She gives her thumbs up, hoping it looks confident and reassuring. Around her, there is nothing dry or useful at all. Climbing higher will likely put her out of Max's range, but it can't be helped. From the top of the pile, she sees a fissure in the rubble, created by the dorm's second story floor, pushed by down by some extra weight at one end of the hallway, rising at the other end until it cracked. Peering inside, she can see a portion of the first floor hallway that's intact.
"There might be an empty space under here, Max," she reports. "Maybe some intact rooms. I'll go check it out."
"Chloe, it's unstable. It can collapse on top of you any moment."
"I think it's done collapsing for the moment," Chloe says, though she has no reason to think that at all.
She has to lie down flat on her stomach and slide in sideways, which makes her think that if the ceiling does decide to collapse, there is not a great chance of a quick escape. As she drops inside, she's covered with a thick layer of wet dust. The hallway lies dark and silent, the only sound being the muffled noise of the departing EF6 tornado coming through the crack in the ceiling. She can't see the end of it in the darkness. The beam of her phone flashlight does not penetrate that far, either, but it does reveal several doors, some of which have caved in. In several places, water drips from the ceiling. The air is thick with floating dust.
"OK, find something dry to burn and get out," she says, covering her mouth with her beanie.
She finds the end of the hallway pretty quickly. It's completely collapsed just beyond the bathrooms. To the right of that, the doorway to the showers, doorless, a "Tornado Shelter" sign still on the wall next to it, is plugged with debris. A flip flop is sitting on top of the pile. She backs away from it. She tries the nearest intact door, gingerly. It opens inward with a creak. The number flashes in the glancing light of her flashlight beam. 111. Nathan Prescott's room. She remembers Max going through it while she stood lookout.
Fuck, was that yesterday?
It's mostly preserved, except rubble that rolled in through the windows, and broken glass all over the floor.
Chloe rips the projector screen off the wall, realizes that it's plastic of some expensive sort and abandons it where it falls on the floor. That shit is not gonna burn. This nudie mag probably will though. She grabs that off the floor, grabs a binder full of photos, pulls a New Romantics poster off the wall, pulls a sheet off Nathan's bed, rolls everything up into a bundle inside the sheet, and ties it into a knot. It should be good enough.
With one last sweep of a flashlight around the room, she backs out into the hallway again and towards the weak light coming in through the crack in the ceiling. Except she's not getting back out that way. The crack is in the ceiling. Not very smart of her to drop in here without a rope or something.
As if to confirm this, or maybe to say the rope would not help her, or to show her how much she fucking knows talking about shit not collapsing anymore, or maybe to just kill her, the ceiling gets tired of holding it's weight up. As she stands gawking up at the crack, something crashes in the hallway behind her, and the next thing she knows the crack is coming toward her, and it's not good news.
She dives forward towards the door at the last moment as a concrete waterfall lands where she stood a moment ago, filling in the hallway with a great rumble. She is saved by the door jamb, but by no means unharmed. She feels like she has a bruise everywhere and lungs full of dust. Her coughs are powdery and dry. She can't spit.
"Chloe!" Max screams from somewhere above, though there is no longer any fissure that she can see.
"I'm fine," she shouts back. "Just gotta find another exit."
"God, Chloe. I couldn't get there in time... I thought after everything..."
"Nah, I'm done dying for the moment," Chloe shouts, trying to be funny, but it comes out sounding sad instead, which shouldn't even be possible when shouting.
There are sounds of shifting things.
"Chloe, there are tons of rubble here. I keep removing pieces but there is always more underneath."
"Yeah, don't worry about it. There is nothing under you anymore, anyway. It's rubble floor to ceiling."
"Are you sure you're not crushed?"
"I'll prove it to you when I get out of here. Now get down from there and wait for my signal!"
She looks around. She's in the main stairwell. The entrance is blocked of course; she could tell from the outside. There is a door on the other side of the stairwell, leading into the lounge. She makes her way there and through it with minimal effort. Except for the cave ins through the windows, the room is mostly untouched. The TV is upright. The couch and armchairs are covered in dust, but undamaged. The adjoining room with the vending machines is in worse shape. Something came through the wall, which knocked all of the vending machines over and filled half the room with debris. At the top of the debris pile in the corner, though, near the ceiling, she sees an opening.
She picks up a freed can of Dr. Amauri from the floor, opens it with a thundering hiss and rinse all of the concrete out of her mouth with the half of it. The other half she consumes in one glorious gulp. It's even still cold. Tossing the can, she climbs on top of the overturned vending machine, then on a pile of rubble, crawling painfully on her hands and knees, with the bundle of fuel, until she gets to the hole at the top. The hole is dark. She flashes her light in it. It's a room, but she can't tell much more. There might be a weak light on the opposite end of it. Or there might be a loose brick that she steps on and gets buried alive.
Pushing the bundle in through the hole, she follows.
It's a tight fit. As tight as it was at the barn, a thought comes, making her pause as she's squeezing through. At the barn? What fucking barn? There's no answer, but suddenly she feels weird, sketchy about everything. What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck is this place? Why am I trying to destroy the Tobanga? What is that going to do? Put the buildings back together? Bring Rachel back from the dead? And is the shit in this bundle even going be enough to burn it down? Or even to burn at all?
The questions seem scarier in that small, dark room.
Dark room.
Rachel in the dark room.
She crawls forward faster, towards the light, cuts her knee on something sharp, then her hand.
"Fuck!"
By the time she reaches the source of the weak light - a door, cracked down the middle - she's crying.
The door is locked. She kicks it where the crack is, but it doesn't budge. She leans on it with her back and looks around. She is in a small windowless office. There is a desk with a computer and an overturned wire shelving unit with contents spilled all over the floor. The hole she crawled out of is above that, in the corner.
She has to shimmy around the desk to get the chair. Lifting it - the fucker is heavy - she has to basically roll it over the desk and dump it on the other side. Shimmying back, she lifts it again and hits the door with it. It doesn't seem to do much, so she hits it again, about running out of energy in the process. Exhausted, she sits on top of it and tries to ram the door by rolling it backwards across the room. There is not enough space here to gather momentum. She pushes the chair to the side, backs up and runs at the door, ramming it with her shoulder. It hurts like a bastard. She may have broke it or her collarbone. The crack on the door seems to become a millimeter wider, and she can see more light through t now, but that's still not nearly enough.
"Fucking fuck!" she screams, kicking it with the heel of her boot.
"Chloe!"
"Max!? Amazeballs! Can you get this fucker open?"
"Back away from the door, Chloe."
She does, expecting some weird magic shit like what Max did in Wells's office maybe, but instead there is a loud bang. The door shudders, but holds. Just when Chloe thinks that Max is about to have as much success with the fucking door as she did, there is another bang and this time an axe blade appears in the crack, chipping a whole side of it off.
"Here is Johnny!" Max shouts in a faux baritone, then gives it another whack. Sitting on the concrete floor with her back to the desk, hurting everywhere, Chloe laughs.
"You rock, Max!"
A few more hits of the axe make the hole in the door wide enough for Chloe to send the bundle through, and then herself. She finds herself in what's left of Samuel's shed, or the custodial room. The wall on the right is missing, and she can see the wooded slope through the space.
Max collapses to the floor, panting.
"Damn," she rasps. "Axing is a lot of work."
"You axe-murderer, you," Chloe says. She picks up the axe. "Actually, I might know what else we can murder with this. Thanks, Samuel."
"I hope he's OK," Max says, putting a bit of a damper on the otherwise cheerful evening. "What's in the bundle?"
"Sheets and stuff from the Prescott room," Chloe replies. "I hope he's not OK."
Max doesn't say anything.
Chloe looks around. "What other useful things is Samuel keeping here?"
She sees a box marked Sammy's Stuff, and in it, among the lost shades and magazines, photos of Rachel.
"You're a sight for sore eyes," she says quietly. But that's not what she had in mind. Samuel is a janitor. He mows grass. She looks around at the shelves, remembers an overturned shelving unit on the other side of the door. She hacks at the knob until she knocks it off and it flies across the room and rolls out of sight. Inside the office, which looks even smaller in the outside light, she goes to the shelving unit and rummages through the stuff thrown on the floor, until she finds it. A can of lawnmower fuel. She feels liquid inside. It's at least half-full.
"Oh, you're in trouble now, fucker," she says through her teeth.
Back in the outer room, Max is back on her feet. They climb outside through the hole in the wall. Chloe's got the axe in one hand, a can of gasoline and the bundle of burnables in the other. She's covered in concrete dust to the point where she looks like a statue come to life. She looks over at the Tobanga on top of its now barren hillock. Behind it, miles away now, the tornado is spinning silently, as though in slow motion. The rain is presently just a drizzle, and half of it seems to be dust, settling.
Chop it down first, or just set the bastard on fire?
Definitely chop.
"Come on, Max," she says. "Let's finish this."
As they get close to the totem, she checks the perimeter. Even though there is nothing left standing in the radius of probably 200 yards, she's feeling like she's being watched. Being hated. She's suddenly freezing again. Her hands shake. She wants to drop everything and run away.
Nothing is holding you here anymore, a thought comes. You wanted to leave. You were ready to give everything to leave this place. Go. You're free. Leave Arcadia now and never look back.
But she's not free.
Not yet.
She made a promise.
She drops the bundle and can to the ground, grasps the axe handle with both hands, swings it high and brings it down at an angle, at about the knee level. The blade is sharp. It bites deep into the wood with a dull thud that reverberates through her arms.
"Chloe!" Max's voice behind her, weakly.
Max has the mother of all nosebleeds. As Chloe rushes to catch her, leaving the axe stuck in the totem, she sags to the ground, unconscious.
"Max! Max!"
She's breathing, but will not wake up.
"Hold on, Max."
Folding her jacket and sliding it under Max's head, Chloe leaves her there and goes back to the axe. Pushing her foot into the totem, she pulls the blade out and hacks again. Pull out, hack. Pull out, hack. Hack, hack, hack. Over and over, until finally a swing of the axe knocks the totem sideways and to the ground.
"Yes!" She shouts, exhausted. "Look, Max. We got the bastard. Now just…"
The bracelet around her wrist stops her dead in her tracks.
It's Rachel's bracelet.
Why does she have it?
"Max," she spins around.
Max is not where she left her.
There is nothing but her jacket there.. She looks around frantically, but there is nothing moving in the barren wasteland around her.
Nothing at all.
She realizes that the tornado is gone, too.
What? How? I still have to burn it down…
No.
No fucking way.
I don't want to make that trade.
"You hear me?" She shouts. "I said no!"
There is a buzz. And another one. It's coming from her pocket.
Incredulous, she reaches in and pulls out her phone.
There is a text.
Chloe, wake up.
I need you to wake up.
She stands there, staring at the text, at the bracelet, and at the text again.
It's from Steph Gingrich.