Covered in insulation from the collapsed ceiling, soggy with rain and unable to comprehend what happened, Ashley didn’t know where to turn, where to go and what was to come. “I’ve never screamed like I did that morning. My first thought is that the entire house was about to crumble on top of us.” Making matters worse? She’d removed her contacts before going to bed—and her glasses were nowhere to be found. She was blind.
Rachel came to the rescue, helping guide Ashley outside while giving her a sweatshirt to ward off rain now falling both in and out of the ruins of their house. They could hear Mack screaming. But they could not see her.
“We just could not get to Mack,” Rachel says. “I said, ‘Ashley, we’ve got to get out of this house and find some help.’ We took nothing with us. We didn’t even have shoes. So, we went outside and tried to call 911. But we could not get anyone on the phone.”
“You’re always taught, in an emergency, call 911, and 911 will always be there to help you,” Ashley says. “No calls were going through. Nothing. That was a nightmare. They’re the ones who are supposed to save you.” Instead, it was Storm Page. “I have never been so out of my mind because I’m thinking the house is going to crash in and Mack is going to die,” Ashley says. “That’s all I can think. And that’s when the van pulls up.”
Storm was already having a different-than-normal morning, what with his kids’ school being canceled and coming in to work an hour earlier. Then, there was that change in his normal route. “For some reason I went left that day instead of right, and I was cutting up Wilson Street.” There, he found Ashley and Rachel sprinting toward his van, screaming for help.
From outside the house, Storm pinpointed Mack’s location easily. “She said, ‘I’m in the corner and I can’t move, and I’m scared,’” Storm says. “The house was creaking so much, as I’m sure you can imagine, and the rain was coming through. I knew there was no chance to get to her from the outside door. I mean, the house was actually leaning on the door jamb.”
Unbeknownst to the rescue attempt already underway, Mack was convinced that all she needed to do was turn the deadbolt. “I just kept trying it over and over and over. That was my horror movie moment. I couldn’t get out, but I could literally see the morning sky and the rain coming in. There were tree branches everywhere and leaves all over the place,” she says.
Then, she saw something else: the beam of a flashlight cutting through the branches of the tree holding her hostage. Mack knew Ashley and Rachel were outside, trying to call 911. Neither of them had a flashlight; they’d escaped the house with nothing but their phones and the clothes on their backs. “I didn’t know who that was in our house,” Mack says.
Whoever it was, Mack realized she was no longer alone. “I said, ‘Hello?’ That’s when I heard his voice. I said, ‘I’m in here! I’m in the corner and I’m scared. The door won’t open and I can’t get out.’” Rather than attempt prying the door open from the outside, Storm had used a second door, this one undamaged, to get into the house. The precarious lean of the house had him concerned. What if, in pushing toward Mack from the outside, he further destabilized the structure?
“We were scared,” Rachel says, “because we thought the house was going to collapse.” Mack had precious little room to move. Yet just moments after seeing the flashlight and shouting for help, Storm was there. “He’d crawled through the branches to get to me,” she says. “I was saying, ‘Please be careful, please be careful.’ I scooted as far away as I could to let him in.”
Storm tried the deadbolt. Nothing happened. Then, he took a small step backward and rammed his shoulder into the door. Nothing happened. He tried again. Then… “When that door opened, and that air hit me, I just thought, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’”