They sped through dreaming Hoxie, the wet streets of the hamlet vacated, the houses still dark. Peter ran the single traffic light at the center of town and raced north up Highway 23, pushing the Winnebago harder than he had in years, the RPMs edging into the red.
“There it is,” Peter said.
“Where?”
He pointed out the windshield. To the northwest in the strengthening light, a thunderhead towered over the plain—concentric circles of green-tinted clouds spiraling into the upper reaches of a 60,000-foot supercell out of the bottom of which a curtain of pale gray draped to the prairie floor.
“God,” he said.
“Is this a special one?”
“You never see them like this.”
“On the radar, it looks like the storm is moving just a bit more to the north.”
“Is it still on track to hit Selden?”
“I think so.”
“Then we’ll try to intercept on Highway 9.”
They entered Selden at 5:57 a.m.
Houselights shining. Families gathered on porches to stare at the sky and listen to the eerie wail of the tornado alarm that blared through town. Peter bypassed the miniscule business district and turned onto Highway 9. They screamed east for three miles, Selden shrinking in the rearview mirror, and then he eased off the highway where it intersected with a dirt road.
“Let me see the laptop.”
He studied the radar loop for thirty seconds and handed the Mac back to Melanie.
“Are we good?” she asked.
He could feel his heart pulsing against the back of his eyes. “Perfect.”
Peter drove the RV across the intersection and onto the opposite shoulder so they faced west toward Selden and the storm. He cut the engine and opened his door and stepped down. Walked twenty feet out from the Winnie, straddled a slash of faded yellow paint in the middle of the road.
Checked his watch: 6:04.
They’d pulled over at a point of prominence on the prairie, the land falling gently away in every direction, so they could see for miles. The front passenger door slammed. He glanced back, saw Melanie walking toward him in a pair of slippers and a lavender nightgown, the thin cotton flickering in the wind.
She smiled, took hold of his hand.
At their backs, the sun crept over the horizon, and when its light hit the storm, the leading shelf cloud turned dirty pink.
It sounded like Selden was getting shelled, the tornado alarm reduced to a dial tone from this distance.
Raindrops specked the pavement.
The alarm hushed.
The swarthy clouds over Selden turned black and a substation exploded in a burst of loose electricity.
Melanie’s grip tightened around Peter’s hand.
Already you could see the counterclockwise churn of debris growing more profuse with every second, and then a black column emerged from the town, carrying pieces of Selden in its swirl which curved for several thousand feet into the sky.
Melanie said, “Oh my God.”
Pellets of hail had begun to bounce off the pavement, a breathy roar becoming audible.
“Should we go?”
He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “The twister’s going to come right down this highway. Right over this spot.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
He handed her the keys to the Winnie. “Head east as fast as you can.”
“Peter—”
“Listen to me. It’s a slow-mover, and there’s a northerly component to its trajectory, so it’ll eventually veer north of the highway.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Melanie, I’ve been trying to get myself into this position for ten years. This is a once in a lifetime kind of—”
“What position? Getting yourself killed by a tornado?”
“I don’t expect you to understand, but I am asking you to please just let me have this moment. Let me do this without interference. I think about it every day. I dream about it all the time. This is what I want. This is all I want.”
“So I just step back, let you commit suicide?”
“I could’ve shot myself years ago. This isn’t about suicide, Melanie.”
“Then what’s it about?”
The twister sounded like sustained thunder, even from three miles away, the condensation funnel widening and darkening, cluttered with all it had scoured out of Selden—cars and stoves and splinters of siding and so many airborne shingles they resembled a flock of birds and God knows what else.
“You better go.”
She shook her head.
“Goddammit, you aren’t going to change—”
She framed his face with her hands. “I’m not trying to change your mind. I honest to God want to stay with you.”
“Melanie.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t you do that. We haven’t known each other long, but I get you, and I think you get me. We aren’t here to save each other, Peter. You know that. That’s not what this is about.”
He stared at her, the wind whipping her hair across her face, pea-size hail clinking on the RV. For a second he considered what it might feel like to love her, but the attendant pain and fear was cost-prohibitive.
He swiped the keys out of her hand, started running toward the RV.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” he said, cranking the engine.
Through the windshield, Selden had vanished behind a shaggy funnel a quarter-mile across.
Peter accelerated toward it, the tornado expanding until it consumed the view west.
He said, “Christ, it’s big.”
“How far?”
“About a mile I’d say.”
He drove another quarter mile and then brought the RV to a full stop in the highway.
“What are you doing?”
“Just having one last look out in the open.”
Peter left the engine running, shoved his door open against the wind, and jumped out.
He ran down the middle of the road for thirty seconds and looked up.
A wall of rotating gray.
Godlike noise.
A thousand jet engines amplified through megaphones, and already the wind slinging roadside trash across the pavement and filling the air with dust. He counted the telephone poles that ran along the highway. After fourteen, they disappeared. The fourteenth vanished, and seconds later, the top half of number thirteen snapped off and was sucked up into the vortex in a spray of blue sparks.
He sprinted back to the Winnie and climbed up into the seat. Slammed the door. Strapped himself in. Melanie’s face was white.
“You’re sure you—”
“Yes, just go.”
Peter shifted into drive, pushed the accelerator into the floorboard.
Melanie produced a deep exhalation and grabbed the edges of her seat.
By the time they’d gone the span of four telephone poles, the oncoming roar drowned out the straining engine.
Two hundred yards from the funnel, grains of dirt and sand began to patter the sides of the RV, the sky rotting into darkness.
At a hundred yards, uprooted grass streamed sideways through the sky and he could feel the north wind in the steering wheel, muscling the side of the Winnie which had begun to rock imperceptibly on its shocks.
He glanced at Melanie, her eyes shut, knuckles blanching.
The speedometer needle trembled at eighty-five as they entered the vortex and he thought he heard Melanie scream but it was the hysterical voice of the twister.
The RV pitched and slammed onto its right side, pavement skinning metal, debris hammering the undercarriage. Peter could feel the pressure drop in his ears and his lungs, and Melanie had her legs drawn into her chest, head buried between her knees, bracing, yellow sparks firing on the other side of her window.
In the swirling gray madness, a potted plant shot past with the velocity of a cannon ball and the walls of the RV creaked and a window exploded in back.
Then the sparks disappeared and the grinding went quiet, the sudden acceleration beyond anything Peter had experienced, pressing him into the cushion of his seat, the roar escalating to a screaming hiss, now pitch black through the windshield and nothing to see but the glow of the dash.