Chapter 24
Iwent to Kansas and waited two weeks for a tornado to show up.
I’d been there so long, the hotel clerk stopped asking me if I wanted to extend my stay and just did it for me.
Two weeks of flat highways, hotel lobby coffee, and watching the sky like a gambler watching the card dealer.
My phone notifications were all weather updates.
At least it had given me time to drive around and find a lot of good empty fields that I could set up shop in, so to speak.
I had almost given up; the boredom had finally gotten to me, when they announced that a storm was coming.
The news warned us it would be a big tornado and that it should be taken seriously; no one should chase it, but I wasn’t chasing it, I was waiting for it.
I’d found Kansas to be too flat and too quiet, like the Earth over here was permanently holding its breath, forever waiting, bracing itself for what was to come.
But I appreciated how flat the horizon was when I parked my rental car on the edge of a field in the middle of nowhere—miles from the nearest town, with nothing but telephone poles and silos in the distance.
I could see everything for miles around me because no hills blocked my view.
I’d upgraded my recording equipment and set it up for the first time on my new tripod with my fancy camera, quite literally drilling it into the ground in hopes that if I didn’t make it through this, at least the footage would. I checked the angles twice and then waited some more.
The shift wasn’t dramatic at first. It started as a weird thickness in the air, filled with a metallic smell of lightning and wet stone.
The birds had vanished; the insects had gone underground.
Then the sky went from blue to green in under five minutes.
A sickly, haunting shade of green I’d only ever seen in storm documentaries.
Then the wind picked up. Grass bent like it was bowing to something larger than itself.
The horizon rippled, and the clouds churned with a violence I felt in my bones.
It was coming. My hands shook just slightly with that knowledge; my mouth filled with too much saliva, and I had to spit out my nerves.
I left the camera recording and walked further into the field; each step had the wet earth sucking at my boots.
The wind whipped my jacket and the gusts felt like they were trying to spin me around.
I kept walking. The telephone wires above me thrummed overhead and debris started to fly by.
A grocery bag, a cardboard box, something that looked suspiciously like a strip of metal from the bumper of a car.
My body wanted me to crouch or run. I was no stranger to this moment.
The moment my body vehemently protested what I was doing, but my mind told me to stay.
It had happened every single time that I welcomed the inevitable instead of fighting it.
While every instinct in me screamed at me to hide, I kept walking.
Slow, deliberate; my boots crunched over dried stalks and then more soggy earth.
My heart thudded like a drum in my chest. As always, I couldn’t tell if I was terrified or thrilled—or if the two had merged and had become the same thing by now.
They blurred so closely in my brain and felt so similar that they may as well be.
The air was charged with electricity. Every hair on my body stood up like I was being hunted by something otherworldly and furious.
The roar built in the distance, low and growling, like a monster waking up or a freight train barreling toward me with no brakes.
And then I saw it. A wall of rotating darkness touched down just beyond the tree line.
It spun like a goddamn black hole—pulling the sky into its fist. The tornado.
I stood there. Arms open. Wind screaming in my ears. I screamed back. Just like I did on the bridge. Just like I had in the hurricane. I was surprised I still had anything left inside of me to let out but somehow, I had more feelings built up, and they exploded out into the chaos of Mother Nature.
This time I had no words. Just sounds. Raw and broken animalistic sounds.
For every unwelcome touch. The stench of mildew on my thin blanket.
Every snicker from my classmates because I smelled.
Every broken bone. Every hungry night. The words “Danny boy.” Each gust ripped a memory out of me and hurled them into the spinning dark.
I let out so many pieces of myself into the wind I could almost see them getting carried away.
The tornado moved with impossible speed, carving a path of annihilation across the fields. It ripped a barn apart like it was made of paper. Metal shingles flew past me like shrapnel. I dropped to my knees and screamed again, so hard it tore at my throat.
I didn’t move. I didn’t run. But instead of hoping another shingle would fly by and slice my carotid artery, or that a tree would fall and cover my lifeless body under its branches, I found myself enjoying what it felt like to be so close to chaos and live.
I vibrated with it. The intensity of the moment.
The knowledge that people didn’t do what I was currently doing.
I was standing here in the face of God’s madness and telling him to fuck right off.
The funnel veered—missing me by maybe half a mile—but the outflow of wind hit me hard enough to knock me backward into the mud.
I landed flat on my back, choking on dirt, teeth rattling, rain spraying down on me, almost drowning in adrenaline and something close to euphoria.
I stayed down for a long time. The roaring of the tornado faded away, the howling wind died down, and the rain eased up, and I just lay there.
Finally, I rolled over to my stomach, retched up some bile, and then stood up.
I was shaking, soaked in sweat and rain, and covered in mud.
My hair was plastered to my skull. My palms were bleeding from the force of my nails clawing into my skin as I clenched my fists.
All around me the field was shredded. A section of fence lay twisted in front of me like a pipe cleaner.
One of my tripods had toppled over, but the other one miraculously still stood upright, light blinking.
I stumbled toward it, grinning like a lunatic.
I gathered everything up, even the broken pieces, and returned to my car without looking back. The smile never faded.
CARTER
Bro. What the actual fuck was that?
DANNY
A field trip.
CARTER
Are you INSANE? You almost got turned into a human lawn dart.
DANNY
But I didn’t.
“Die Trying #12: Tornado Season”
“This man just walked into a tornado like it was a Sunday stroll. Who hurt you, dude??”
“As someone who lives in Kansas… you’re lucky to be alive. This is NOT a joke. That EF2 ripped through so many farms.”
“Is it weird that I cried? There was something about the way he screamed into the storm that felt… freeing.”
“The man is on his 9th+ life, and I don’t think he even wants it.”
“He said “YOLO” and the tornado said “bet.”
“Wait… Do we… do we need to call someone? Like a hotline or NASA or something?”
“Not the way the wind wrapped around him like it knew him. This broke me.”