Автор : Crouch Blake Название книги: The Meteorologist Читать на сайте: https://mir-knigi.org/author/crouch-blake/the-meteorologist THE METEOROLOGIST _a short story by_ Blake Crouch SMASHWORDS EDITION * * * * * PUBLISHED BY: Blake Crouch on Smashwords Copyright 2011 by Blake Crouch Cover art copyright 2011 by Jeroen ten Berge All rights reserved. _PRAISE FOR BLAKE CROUCH_ Crouch quite simply is a marvel. Highest possible recommendation. BOOKREPORTER Blake Crouch is the most exciting new thriller writer I've read in years. DAVID MORRELL THE METEOROLOGIST is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. For more information about the author, please visit www.blakecrouch.com. For more information about the artist, please visit www.jeroentenberge.com. Smashwords Edition License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work. * * * * * THE METEOROLOGIST Summer of the year two thousand and six found him on the plains of west Kansas, veering onto the off-ramp at Exit 95. Hoxie (pop. 1200) lay sixteen miles due north of the interstate, the blaring inconsequence of the town only underscored by its station on the prairie. It was a black freckle on the roadmap, the sort of place one passes through in wonderment that people actually live there. Peter secured permission from the owner of Hoxie’s only motel to squat in their parking lot for fifteen dollars a day. Paid for three in advance and emerged from the small office into an evening that had failed to release the preceding hours’ blistering store of heat. Across the empty parking lot, slats of sunlight glinted off the chrome hubcaps of his ’87 Winnebago Chalet. Peter considered the microwave inside and the TV dinners in the freezer, any of which he’d had twenty times before. It had been a long day behind the wheel—492 miles—and since the thought of eating dinner alone in the RV depressed the hell out of him, he started walking. The downtown went for three blocks, and as he moved along the sidewalk, he kept glimpsing prairie—down alleys between the buildings, beyond the dirt streets lined with shabby houses. The sun struck all that grass in glancing blows, and the color changed as the wind blew across it. Green to gold, back to green again. Endless. Where the business district stopped, he eased down onto a bench and stared sixty or seventy miles to the south at a supercell creeping silently across the plains like an atomic sunset. Bad lighting. Jazz so easy-listening he couldn’t help but to think of that single video of soft-core he kept behind the respectable DVD collection in the RV—a bride and the best man trapped in an elevator the day of her wedding. The waitress was wiping a table in the back, and she called out, “Sit wherever you like!” He slid into a window booth as a trio of skateboarders rolled by, his eyes following their movement, then catching on the bulbous, powder-blue water tower that loomed behind the school. It felt good to be out of the RV. He stretched his legs under the table, let his heels rest on the cushion of the opposite seat. Voices slipped through a cracked door in the rear wall of the restaurant, and he thought it might be a waiter calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering he was the only customer, that seemed unlikely. He left the table and walked over to the door and nudged it open. “B-eleven.” “Hit.” Peered into a private room half the size of the main dining room. A crowd of thirty or forty sat transfixed by two men on a makeshift stage, absorbed in a fierce game of Battleship. The waitress came up behind him, ice rattling in the pitcher of water she held. “It’s a very important match,” she whispered. “They’ve been having this tournament every Friday for the last few months. Tonight’s the championship.” Peter chuckled. “Seems pretty intense in there. Money on the line?” “Actually quite a lot.” He returned to his table and let the waitress stumble through the longest description of a dinner special he’d ever endured—basically chicken-fried steak in two hundred words. When she finished her spiel, he decided to splurge—ordered the special and a glass of Woodbridge from an unspecified vintage. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen and returned with his wine and a basket of steaming bread. “You didn’t just move here, did you?” she asked. “No.” “Hmm.” “What is it?” She’d told him her name when she first brought the menu, but he hadn’t really been paying attention. In fact, he hadn’t even looked at her until now. He’d be fifty-three in October, if he lasted that long, and he put the waitress in the vicinity of forty-five—short and slender with graying blond hair and thin lips conservatively colored with coral lipstick that for some reason reminded him more of an accountant. She wore a white dress shirt and black jeans and her hair had been tugged back into a ponytail. “We don’t get many folks, revise that, _any_ folks just passing through our little piece of prairie.” Peter sipped his wine, the stem of the glass still warm from the dishwasher. Notes of black cherry and dish detergent. “No, I’ve been saving up for years to come to Hoxie. It’s the culmination of a lifelong dream.” The waitress shot him a slanted stare. “Are you having fun with me?” He smiled. “A little bit. I’m sorry.” She shook her head and started her retreat toward the kitchen. “I can already tell,” she said, pointing her finger at him, “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.” Sudden applause issued from the banquet room, signifying what could only mean the end of one fleet admiral’s career. Peter leaned back and sipped his wine and basked in a tremor of contentment, old enough at last to know better than to analyze it, or embrace it longer than it meant to stay. He walked back to the motel a little drunk and a lot tired. Friday night, 9:30 p.m., and Hoxie as dead as advertised—no sound but the hum of streetlamps and crickets. He climbed into the RV and sat for awhile in the dark on the foldout sofa. Staring through the window into the prairie, half-expecting to see some suggestion of residential glow out there, but not even a porchlight disrupted the gaping darkness. Around midnight, he got up and stepped into the closet-size john. Brushed the wine stain off his teeth and tried to avoid meeting the eyes in the tiny mirror. Windows to an empty house. Lobotomy eyes. He cracked a window and crawled into bed. The sound of the wind blowing across the prairie moved him like nothing had in days. In the morning, he brought yesterday’s coffee to a fast boil in a saucepan and powered up the laptop. The forecast discussion on the National Weather Service’s Goodland, Kansas Website thrilled him—extreme thunderstorm activity expected along the Nebraska border. Peter headed north up Highway 23 and reached the town of Cedar Bluffs at noon, the sky still clear, the heat intense and wet. He pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut, nuked a frozen dinner in the microwave, ate lunch, slept off the remnants of a three-wine headache. He woke sweating, the sun blazing into the RV. Grabbed a bottled water from the Fridge, drained it in one long gulp. That familiar pang of disappointment blossomed in his stomach as he read the updated forecast discussion. The NWS had, as usual, missed the boat. A line of storms were setting up, but over the eastern plains of Colorado, a hundred and seventy miles west of his position. With convection already underway and a supercell forming south of Greeley, the party would be over long before he got there. He convinced himself on the five-block stroll from his RV to the Prairie View Cafe that he was going in hopes they’d reprised the chicken-fried steak and because he’d spent the entire day in his home on wheels. It had nothing to do with the waitress who probably had the night off anyway. She stood at a booth scribbling an order onto a pad when he walked into the restaurant. The chimes that jangled over the opening door caught her attention, and she looked at Peter and raised her finger, might even have winked, though he couldn’t say that for certain in the poor light. The thought of it put knots in his stomach. She wore a blue and white dress that seemed such the epitome of her profession it reminded him more of a movie costume. With her hair down tonight and her lips a paler pink than before, perhaps their natural color, he went short of breath as she walked toward him. “Hi, Peter.” “Melanie.” “You want the window booth again or a brand new experience?” He thought about it. “I like the booth.” She walked him over. He slid in. “How was your day in scenic Hoxie?” she asked, setting a menu on the table, and he almost responded as he would have to any other human being who tried to engage him, but he didn’t want to just say, “Fine,” because then she’d probably smile and leave and he wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want her to walk away yet. “Disappointing,” he confessed. “What happened?” “It was supposed to storm up near the Nebraska border, but the forecast didn’t pan. Kind of a wasted day.” She looked at him askance. “It was a beautiful day, Peter.” “Not if you wanted a storm.” “No, I guess not. Well, I’ll be back in a bit to tell you about the special. You want something to—” “I’m an idiot,” he said, heat flooding his face, wondering if she noticed the color. “I should explain.” “No, it’s—” “I’m a storm chaser. That’s why I wanted it to—” “You mean one of those people who photograph tornadoes?” “Sort of.” Her face lit up. The awkwardness retreating. “Oh my God, that is so interesting. So you’re one of those guys.” “Yeah.” She smiled. Strangely, genuinely impressed. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard of in awhile. How’d you pick Hoxie?” “You guys got hammered a couple years back with a tornado outbreak.” “I was here when those storms swept through. It was awful.” “Well, I’ve been all over Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, eastern Kansas.” “Searching for that elusive storm?” “Something like that. This western part of Kansas is the last region I haven’t spent a ton of time in. Long range models were predicting an active couple of weeks, so I thought why not give it a shot.” Melanie glanced over her shoulder at the two other occupied tables, then sat in the booth across from Peter. “You ever seen a tornado?” “I’ve seen nine of them.” “Like in real life?” “Yep.” “What’s the closest you ever got?” “A mile away.” “What was it like?” Like standing next to God, but he didn’t say that. “Amazing.” She looked at her tables. “I better get back to it.” She got up. “Melanie?” “Yes?” His heart thumped in his chest. “I’m going out again tomorrow. Now, there’s no guarantee the weather will cooperate, but—” “I’d love to, Peter.” “You would?” “You must’ve read my mind. I was hoping you’d ask.” It was like nothing he’d done in years, and he felt both joy and debilitating regret that in a moment of weakness (or strength) he’d exposed himself. The waitress said, “Glass of red?” His throat constricting. “Be great.” She headed back toward the kitchen, and he stared through the windowglass, watching the prairie darken. Kept telling himself that it was still Saturday night and he was only in Kansas and his RV just five blocks away. As if that piece of news might tether him to the world he knew. Melanie lived two miles out of town at the end of a dirt road, spruce trees forming a windbreak along the north and west boundaries of the homestead. It had seemed an idyllic farmhouse from the highway, austere on the morning prairie. Proximity destroyed the illusion. The white paint had chipped almost completely away, and the weathered boards and the rusting tin roof and smiling porch presented more of a ghost house than a livable dwelling. Melanie emerged and spent a minute locking the door after her. Came down the bowing steps and through the weeds onto the drive as Peter leaned across the seat to open her door, the pair of coffees he’d bought at the gas station steaming into his face. “I could barely sleep I was so excited,” she said as they rolled along the dirt road toward the highway. “Could turn out to be a bust,” Peter warned. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.” “Well, it’s all about the journey, right?” They drove west on the interstate, the sun a blood blister in the side mirrors, its light so watery and diffused you could stare it down. Adult contemporary droned through the speakers at a reasonable volume, the small talk coming just often enough to keep the stretches of silence from passing the point of no return. They crossed the border into Colorado at a quarter past eleven and Peter pointed through the windshield. “You see that?” “You mean those clouds?” “The one that looks like an anvil is going to be a thunderstorm when it grows up.” “This is good?” “Very good. Major convection underway.” Melanie squealed and clapped her hands, something free and childlike in her excitement. He took the next exit and pulled over so they could track the gathering storm cells on the laptop—irregular blobs of green with nuclei of hot pinks and fuchsia. “They’re still maturing,” he said, running his finger along the screen, tracking the loop of their northwesterly movement on the radar. “We’ll take 385. Should intercept them in about forty minutes. If we’re lucky, they’ll be booming.” They went north. The summer sky turned dark. Peter lowered his window, let the musty air rush in. Straining to hear thunder over the engine. They pulled onto the shoulder on the outskirts of Wray, Colorado. Peter killed the engine and glanced over at the computer, now in Melanie’s lap. “We’re in position,” he said. The first fat drops of rain splattered on the windshield as Peter squinted at the screen. He opened his door, got out, crossed the road. Melanie joined him. Strings of lightning bent down and rain sagged from the clouds in ragged black tendrils. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, and he wondered if she really meant it, if it touched her with even a fraction of the intensity it touched him, or if she was saying what she thought he wanted to hear. He looked up at the clouds streaming over them. Lightning touched the plain a mile away, the blast of thunder vibrating the ground beneath their feet. Melanie clutched his arm. “Should we go back to the car?” she asked, and he couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. You embraced a storm by standing in the middle of the goddamn thing, feeling the rain beat down on your face, letting the wind bully you, trying not to flinch when the thunder dropped right on top of your head. “Sure,” he said. “We can go back.” They experienced the storm from inside the RV, everything reduced to gray through the rain-streaked glass and nothing to see beyond fifty yards as thunder detonated all around them, the Winnebago creaking and listing against the stronger gusts. Melanie reached over and pried Peter’s right hand off the steering wheel and laced her fingers through his. Her hand was small and warm, and he was afraid if he looked at her she would kiss him. When the storms had passed, they went on, taking backroads into Kansas, the late afternoon sky going bright and clear, Peter feeling with every passing breath like the RV was shrinking, the air being compressed from his lungs. Thirty miles north of Hoxie, he pulled off onto the side of the road. “Why are you stopping?” Melanie asked. “I just need some air.” He walked around the front of the Winnebago, the overworked engine pumping eddies of heat through the radiator. Twenty yards from the road, he stopped. The only disruption in all that prairie a grain mill several miles to the east. Peter took deep breaths until the mayhem in his head had gone quiet and he could hear the grasses scraping at his jeans. Melanie said, “You all right, Peter?” The sun had dipped below the western horizon. “Yeah. You?” “Uh huh.” They traveled in silence for another mile. “I mean, did I do something? Because I thought we were having a pretty good time this morning, but now—” “No, of course not.” “We weren’t having a good time?” “No, I mean you didn’t do anything.” She stared out her window. They cruised south on Highway 23, and the quiet had grown cancerous by the time the headlights of the RV swept across the porch of Melanie’s farmhouse. He shifted into park and turned back the ignition. Melanie unbuckled her seatbelt. “Hold on,” Peter said. “What?” He wanted her out of the RV. Wanted nothing more than to drive back to the motel, crawl into bed. “This is my fault,” he said. “What are you talking about?” “It was my idea. I invited you.” “Yeah, you did.” “I thought…” “What?” “I shouldn’t have asked you to come.” Melanie put her hand on the door. “It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching across the open space between the seats, almost touching her, letting his hand rest instead on the edge of her seat. “I just thought I was capable of doing this.” “Of doing what? _Being_ with me? Is it so difficult?” “Being with anyone is, but when I saw you in the cafe last night…I don’t know…something shifted. I’ve said more to you in the last couple days than I have to anyone in twenty years.” “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” “If you understood, if you could be in my head for two minutes, it would.” The interior lights cut out. Peter said, “This morning, you asked me where I lived, and I told you I was from Providence.” “So?” “That wasn’t really the truth. I lived there a long time ago, but I don’t really live anywhere now. I bought this RV in 1987. Been my home ever since.” Out Peter’s window, a lightning bug flared against the glass. “It’s the hardest thing right now for me not to ask you to get out.” Melanie opened her door. “I’m not saying I want you to.” “_I_ need some air.” She climbed out of the Winnebago and walked across the gravel drive, easing down on the front porch steps. Peter looked at the keys dangling from the ignition. He touched them. Opened his door and stepped down into the grass. Lightning bugs everywhere. A lone cricket screeching maniacally. He sat beside her on the steps. Cool and he could smell warm hay carried on the breeze. Said, “In the winters, I seek out ice storms and blizzards. Tornadoes and hurricanes in the summertime. I was in Charleston when Hugo roared ashore in ’89. I was in Florida for Andrew in ’92. The Lower Ninth Ward last summer when the levies broke. I’ve spent winters at Paradise Lodge on the south slope of Rainier just to watch it dump nine hundred inches of snow. A couple years ago I stayed a month at the observatory on Mount Washington. Stood in a hundred and forty mile-per-hour wind that almost blew me off the mountain. I feel…dead…all the time, except when I’m in the middle of some storm, watching the clouds swirl, feeling the snow or rain pelt my face. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but this is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I came to Hoxie to do it, and then I met you, and for a minute—I don’t know why—I wanted to share it with you.” “Do you have family, Peter?” The question caused him to flinch. “I don’t have anyone. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you. I know that. I just want you to understand that it’s not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. The reason it turned out like it did today is ’cause I—” “You have issues.” “Yeah.” “A lot of them.” “Now why are you crying?” “’Cause you hurt my feelings, dummy.” She wiped her face, got up, and hurried into the house, the door slamming after her. He could hear her crying through the thin walls. Pushed himself onto his feet and climbed the two flimsy steps to the stoop, where he pulled open the screened door and knocked on the wood of the inner door. “Melanie, come on. Can we talk please?” The cries more distant now, lost inside the house. “I’m coming in, all right?” He tried the door. The knob turned, hinges creaking as he let it swing open. “Melanie?” He stepped into a foyer, the air redolent of cardboard. There were boxes everywhere—stacked to the ceiling on either side of the hallway that ran past the stairs into the kitchen, leaving the walkway so tight he would’ve had to sidestep to pass through. At first, he thought Melanie must be in the process of moving, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it before, but then his eyes fell on the living room. He’d never seen anything like it. Four television sets, three DVD players, what probably would have formed a cubic yard of DVDs had they not been spread across the room. A leather couch buried beneath stacks of _National Geographic_ and _The New Yorker_. A coffee table caved in under the weight of several full sets of encyclopedias. Out from under the couch, a gray cat darted over a pile of clothes that still bore their price tags, disappearing into a dining room paralyzed for the stacks of newspapers, eight grills, still in their boxes, and what he estimated to be over five hundred unopened packages of plastic utensils monopolizing every square inch of table space. He made his way through the cramped hall, and as he neared the kitchen the smell of rotting food became overpowering. He held the side of his arm across his nose and mouth, and standing in the doorway, wondered how Melanie even made use of the Fridge and the sink and the oven range what with the linoleum buried under hundreds of pounds of canned food and sacks of flour and sugar, thirty cereal boxes, and on the countertops, a component of the stench—clusters of bananas and apples and what might have been oranges, all shriveled and glazed with blue mold. “What are you doing?” He spun around. Melanie stood at the foot of the stairs, her face red. “I knocked on the door, I—” “Did you hear me say come in?” “No.” “Get out.” “Melanie—” “Get out of my house!” Tears ran down the sides of her face and she breathed so hard he could see her chest billowing under her button-down shirt. “All right,” he said. He started down the hallway between the walls of cardboard boxes, Melanie backing toward the stairs as he approached the foyer. She collapsed on a lower step and buried her head between her knees, her shoulders bobbing as she wept. At the door, Peter glanced back. Melanie hadn’t lifted her head, and that cat was slinking between her ankles in figure-eights and purring like it meant to sooth her. He said, “For the record, I think you’re beautiful.” She wouldn’t lift her head, and her words came spliced with tears. “Please, Peter. I just need you to leave. I can’t stand this. I can’t stand you seeing this.” “It’s okay, Mel. You don’t have anything—” “What?” She looked up. “To be ashamed of? Is that what you were going to—” “No, I—” Her eyes bugged, her face darkened into scarlet, and she sprang up off the stairs and grabbed his shirt, balling the fabric in her hands and shoving him into the doorframe. “Do not fuck with me,” she whispered. “I’m not. I swear.” “No one. No one has come in here…” It felt like two concurrent slaps, both hands slamming into his cheeks, open-palmed, squeezing his face, drawing it down, her lips barely chapped, her tongue warm. She didn’t kiss him as hard as he feared, though since he hadn’t touched his lips to those of another human being’s in twenty years, three months, and eight days, a point of reference was lacking. They broke apart, breathless. Melanie leaned her forehead against his sternum, and Peter stared over the top of her head at the cat who watched him from midway up the stairs. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked. “Yes. No.” He touched the point of her chin. Lifted her head. She stared up at him through a sheet of tears that evacuated from her eyes when she blinked. “I haven’t always lived like this.” “Me either.” “When you walked into the restaurant…I don’t know how to put it in—” “You don’t have to put it any way. I know.” “Are you lonely, Peter?” “All the time.” “Do you want to come upstairs with me?” “Melanie, I haven’t…in a long time.” “Makes two of us.” “I’m not even sure if—” She put her finger to his lips. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not about that.” He came almost instantly and he told her he was sorry, that he knew this would happen and that he had tried to warn her. He lay between her legs in the dark in an upstairs bedroom, his hamstrings trembling, their chests heaving against each other. “Peter, shut up. It’s okay.” He pulled away but she clasped her legs around his back. “Please,” she whispered. “Not yet.” He rested his head on her shoulder as the bedroom flashed with electric blue. Out on the prairie it sounded like someone was moving furniture around—distant thunder. “Do you want to leave?” she asked. “No.” “Is that the truth?” “It is actually.” He turned his head so he could see the lightning flicker across the stacks of boxes that diminished the bedroom into something the size of a walk-in closet. “Peter?” “Yes?” “Why’d you leave Providence?” “I was the head meteorologist at WPRI. Two months after...” When he didn’t finish the sentence, she ran her fingers through his hair and said, “After what?” “Can I just leave it at that?” “Of course.” “Two months after, I had a nervous breakdown on-air. You can find the footage on YouTube. Over a half-million views last time I checked. I left town, never looked back. How long have you lived here?” “Nine years. You want to know what happened?” “Do you want to tell me? Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.” She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I can feel your heart beating against my chest. It feels good.” Later, they lay in bed listening to the rain on the tin roof, Peter sliding his fingers down the side of her arm as he had touched his wife in a previous life, and telling her about the time he almost died when Hurricane Bertha hit Kure Beach on the North Carolina coast. He’d ventured out to the end of a seven hundred-foot pier in the eyewall, clinging to the rail as twenty-foot waves crashed into the framework and hundred mile-per-hour rain and seaspray lacerated his face. He’d heard the outer pilings begin to crack and started the long crawl back to shore, just reaching the beach as the wind and waves tore the pier off the pilings. He told her about the night he spent on the summit of Mount Mitchell in the ’93 Superstorm, about the time he almost killed himself when a southern blizzard didn’t pan out, about the calm and silent eye of Andrew and its perfect black circle of starry sky, about a December night in Fairbanks, Alaska, when the thermometer hit -58° F, and in the freezing fog his spit would crackle midair, striking the pavement as a blob of sleet. She laughed at that one, thought he was pulling her leg. They didn’t belabor, as Peter had feared, the circumstances that had brought them to this moment. As she’d said, it wasn’t about that. Exhaustion and contentment brought increasingly expansive lulls. Then they lay in silence, both facing the tall window beside Melanie’s bed. When the lightning came and the prairie flashed into existence through the heat-warped glass, Peter would catch the fleeting sense that this house and the two of them lying naked upstairs in bed was all that was left of the world. Glass rattling in the sill wrenched Peter out of sleep and he returned to consciousness as the peal of thunder faded out. He sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes. The darkness through the window tinged with gray. A jag of lightning split it down the middle. Melanie moaned, half-asleep, “What are you doing?” Peter swung his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his briefs and jeans, still conjoined on the floor. “I need to go read the Goodland advisories.” “It’s…five-twenty in the morning.” “Those sound like major storms out there.” They hurried down the front porch steps, the grasses thrashing and the air making their eyes water, filled with dust and slivers of chaff. In the RV, Peter opened the laptop and pulled up the National Weather Service page he’d bookmarked upon his arrival in Hoxie. “Oh, man,” he said. “What?” “Come look.” BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED TORNADO WARNING NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GOODLAND KS 517 AM MDT MON JUL 17 2006 THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GOODLAND HAS ISSUED A * TORNADO WARNING FOR... NORTH CENTRAL SHERIDAN COUNTY IN NORTHWEST KANSAS... * UNTIL 630 AM MDT * AT 510 AM MDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A TORNADO 15 MILES NORTHWEST OF HOXIE...OR ABOUT 8 MILES WEST OF SELDEN...MOVING EAST AT 15 MPH. * THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR... SELDEN AROUND 610 AM MDT... IF YOU ARE AT HOME...SEEK SHELTER IN A BASEMENT IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE...GO TO A SMALL INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR. AVOID WINDOWS AND PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FLYING DEBRIS. IF IN MOBILE HOMES OR VEHICLES...EVACUATE THEM AND GET INSIDE A STURDY SHELTER. IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS. “I have to go,” Peter said. “Right now?” He closed the laptop. “Right now.” “I want to come with you.” “This will be dangerous, Melanie.” “I know. But I want to see it. Just let me go change into something.” “We don’t have time.” He jumped up from the sofa and moved into the front of the RV, sat down behind the wheel, fished the keys out of his pocket. “Bring the laptop please,” he said. “You can help me track it.” 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. 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 Читайте больше книг на сайте онлайн-библиотеки mir-knigi.org