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.
Lightning flashed and the view out his window made him cry.
It would have been invisible but for the lightning. The RV was upright and tilted left. At an inconceivable speed, they orbited the center of the tornado—a cylinder of still, clear air with walls of rotating clouds made brilliant by the ribbons of lightning that streaked across the funnel. Inside, smaller tornadoes were constantly forming and writhing and dying away, and he glimpsed a gray thread at the base of the funnel that he realized was Highway 9, eight hundred feet below.
Peter was still squeezing the steering wheel, holding onto some illusion of control. He let go, tucked his hands under his arms, and stared through the window. Drinking it all in. Fighting to stay with the moment, this last moment, but he kept seeing their faces—clarity where for two decades there had been only blur.
Darkness again.
By the dashboard glow, Peter saw coins rising out of the drink holders.
His stomach lifted into his throat, and he had the inescapable sense that they were plunging earthward—exhilaration and fear and unbearable weightlessness.
Then the G-force struck, crushing his arms and legs, pinning his chin to his chest, and it occurred to him that he couldn’t breathe, that no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t going to be able to stop his eyes from rolling back into his head, and he wondered if he would lose consciousness before they hit the ground.
He felt no pain. He looked down at his arms resting on the seat, bits of glass caught up and glittering in the blond hairs. Wondered if he should try to raise them. If he wanted to know so soon. He decided that he did. He tried. They raised and he held his hands in front of his face and let his arms rotate at the elbows. Next, he let his neck wobble on his head. He wiggled his toes. Like an infant discovering its new body, he thought, running his tongue across his teeth, everything still intact.
He looked over at Melanie. Her eyes were closed and she had slumped against the door, her hair covered in shards of glass.
The nightgown barely swelled over her heart. She breathed.
He watched her for awhile, watched her sleep, and then begin to stir, her eyes opening, struggling to sit up, moving her fingers and toes, touching herself just as he had—a delicate evaluation of what worked and what did not.
At last she looked over at him, her face bleeding where the glass had cut, but otherwise in one piece.
She raised her eyebrows and he knew the question, shook his head.
They were sitting upright in a beat to shit RV, still buckled into their seats. Glass busted out of the passenger and driver side windows, sunlight passing in blinding shears through fractures in the windshield.
And they had not smiled like this before. Not in their lives. Like they’d borne witness to a private miracle. Been made to see. Called forth from their tombs.
There was nothing but grassland and morning sky as far as they could see, and the sound of wind moving through the tall grasses and the coolness of that wind was everywhere and upon everything.
BLAKE CROUCH is the author of DESERT PLACES, LOCKED DOORS, and ABANDON, which was an IndieBound Notable Selection last summer, all published by St. Martin's Press. His newest thriller, SNOWBOUND, also from St. Martin's, was released in June 2010. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Thriller 2, and other anthologies, including the new Shivers anthology from Cemetery Dance. In 2009, he co-wrote "Serial" with J.A. Konrath, which has been downloaded over 250,000 times and topped the Kindle bestseller list for 4 weeks. That story and DESERT PLACES have also been optioned for film. Blake lives in Durango, Colorado. His website is www.blakecrouch.com.
Blake Crouch’s Works
Andrew Z. Thomas thrillers
Desert Places
Locked Doors
Break You
Stirred
Other works
Draculas with J.A. Konrath, Jeff Strand and F. Paul Wilson
Abandon
Snowbound
Famous
Perfect Little Town (horror novella)
Serial Uncut with J.A. Konrath and Jack Kilborn
Serial with Jack Kilborn
Bad Girl (short story)
Killers
Killers Uncut
Serial Killers Uncut
Four Live Rounds (collected stories)
Shining Rock (short story)
*69 (short story)
On the Good, Red Road (short story)
Remaking (short story)
The Meteorologist (short story)
The Pain of Others (thriller novella)
Six in the Cylinder (collected stories)
Fully Loaded (complete collected stories)
Visit Blake at www.BlakeCrouch.com