Chapter 29 #3
“You've got to be shitting me.” Dad squirmed. The tornado was growing larger, but not because it was expanding.
Chunks of hail fell from the sky around us, clanging across the neighborhood as they hit roofs. Thunk. One as big as a cantaloupe hit the grass next to Mom's foot. She grabbed me and led me toward the garage.
“Get in the car, sweetie, and put your seatbelt on,” she ordered in a hurried voice.
Dad came after us right as I had the passenger door open.
“What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy? We've got to get into the main closet right now,” he said.
“We have to leave,” Mom said.
“We're just going to leave Dad?”
“He's a vegetable, Jake! Think about Wade!”
“We don't abandon our family,” he responded.
“There's nowhere safe here,” she said.
“We've got an anchored brick house! It's the best shelter we can get right now.”
“We have a better chance in the car if we leave now.”
“It's too late! If the wind doesn't get us, the hail will,” Dad said.
Mom relented and pulled me out of the car.
She held on to my arm as we crossed the yard toward our back door.
The three of us looked behind, and another series of lightning bolts revealed the tornado spinning furiously toward us with tentacles of dirt and water vapor flaring around its edges, carrying scattered black dots of debris.
The whole sky was touching the ground. One side of the wedge tilted forty-five degrees while the other side, over a mile away, was even more slanted, trying to swallow as much of the world as it could.
How could something that big be real and not an illusion?
By now the lightning was nonstop, striking behind the tornado and in front of it, making it look alternately black and white.
The rocket-launch noise intensified as the tornado picked up and disintegrated a farmhouse effortlessly, creating a dark swirl as the debris was lofted into the vortex.
It raged toward our neighborhood, crawling over the highway and swallowing headlights and lives into the void.
I could feel the wind trying to pull us into it.
Even worse, there had been no warning or alarm.
The rest of the neighborhood didn't even know what was coming.
“It's going to hit us dead-on,” Mom said without any hope in her voice.
“I need to tell Tramel!” I stopped recording and started texting with one hand while my mother pulled me by the other. The wind blew the phone right out of my palm, and it somersaulted across the ground into the night.
“Help me empty the closet,” she said as we entered the living room, where the furniture and mounted TV were vibrating.
Mom ran to the closet under the stairs and tore the door open.
Piles of old magazines and books spilled out in front of heavy boxes and my old stuffed lion, Sam.
As “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” played on the living room stereo, we grabbed what we could and tossed it out like our lives depended on it.
As it turns out, they did.
Dad ran into Grandpa's room and guided him back into the living room, patting him on the back. “We're just taking a little side trip to the closet, Pops,” he said.
“Are we going to be okay, Dad?” I asked. He looked at me with a kind of terror I had never seen in his eyes before and said, “God, I hope so, buddy.”
“Go get the comforter and pillows from our bed,” Mom told me. The jetlike roar continued to grow louder, drowning out the music, and all I could think was a bowling ball the size of Jupiter was barreling straight at us.
I hurried across the sisal carpet in their bedroom.
The heavy oil paintings of countryside bluebonnets on the wall and the framed family pictures on the dresser vibrated.
Dismembered tree branches and leaves slapped against the window, and the wind whistled like a boiling teapot.
I began to feel dizzy, like I wasn't physically there.
This couldn't be real. This was something that happened in movies or in the news.
This was a bad dream, and that awful bowling-ball sound would stop once I woke up.
I pulled the thick, clunky comforter off their king-sized bed and reached for their pillows, only able to grab two by their corners with my free hand.
I was wrestling with the pillows and comforter in my arms when the music died and everything went black, leaving a faded blue imprint of the room in my vision. The circuit breaker made a bent, metallic hum. The constant pulsing of lightning lit up the room instead.
Flash-flash-flash-flash. An uncomfortable fuzz creeped deep into my ears.
The toilet and sink in the bathroom started gurgling.
Water rushed through all the pipes around me.
A low-pitched buzzing whooshed across the house like a chainsaw as the air was sucked out through the insulation strips in the doors and windows.
It was here.
The windows smashed open, sending glass flying all over the bedroom and snapping me out of my daze.
Metal and dirt and wood pounded the brick exterior and the walls around me with the blitz of an angry poltergeist. This wasn't a bad dream.
It was real, and there was no way out of it.
Mom screamed my name from the other room.
I dropped the pillows and, pulling myself away from the wind, ran out with the comforter, guided through the darkness by lightning.
“Get in NOW, NOW, NOW.” Mom was crying in a way I hadn't seen besides at her dad's funeral.
She shoved me into the closet, where Grandpa and Dad were already sitting.
She gave me Sam the Lion and wrapped the comforter over me.
I hadn't held Sam since I was three. We sat against the wall and waited a long minute for it to finish passing.
Even underneath the comforter I could see all the lightning from under the closet door.
We listened as the chairs in the other room scraped across the floor. Plates smashed against the walls. Cabinet doors thrashed back and forth. Furniture tipped over. I could feel Dad's hand on my head. “Don't let go of Wade,” he said. Mom squeezed me harder.
“Please make it go away,” she begged softly in between her sobs. The nails in the roof screeched as the wind ripped them out of the wood.
“We'll be okay! It's passing!” Dad said, and his grip around us tightened. I prayed he was right and the tornado was almost done.
But the roar got louder and louder. I felt like an ant approaching the edge of Niagara Falls.
Just when I thought it couldn't possibly get any louder, it wailed at an even higher decibel level until my ears began to cramp.
I put my arms over my legs to stop them from shaking, and then I realized it wasn't my legs—it was the ground quaking beneath us.
“We're gonna make it! Don't let go!” Dad shouted over the wind.
My mom continued to cry, “Please, no,” like she knew this was the end.
She was right.
The house exploded. The roof and the stairway above us raptured into the air, and with them went Sam, the comforter, and my T-shirt.
It sounded like a hole in the universe ripped open.
A cosmic, soul-devouring roar that muted my mom's scream.
My eardrums ruptured as a burst of frigid air enveloped me, sending shivers up and down my spine.
Now we were really in the tornado.
It smelled evil. An acrid cocktail of dirt, grass, livestock, splintered mesquite, and natural gas rushed into my nose. A cloud of shredded pink insulation rained furiously down on me.
“OW, OW, OW, OW, OW!” Flying objects zinged around me and pelted me relentlessly with the speed of a machine gun, every single blow tearing into my skin.
No matter how hard I pushed the bottoms of my palms against my ears, the unbearable aching inside them would not stop.
The wind started to lift me across the wooden floor that was being sucked into the air piece by piece.
I felt my mom's hand grab onto my ankle and pull me back down.
Something tugged at my stomach through my esophagus.
Sparks danced around me from colliding metallic debris.
This was it. This was how I was going to die.
The closet door was gone. So were Dad and Grandpa. Beyond the ripped doorframe, as lightning struck all around me, a gust of pool chairs, uprooted trees, and a basketball goal skidded across from me at the speed of a firehose spray.
I swear on my life, I saw a living room with a family singing Christmas carols around a piano fly right above me.
And after that, something big and bulky crashed through the doorframe and into the ground next to me—a cow, looking straight into my soul.
In that moment, we had an understanding that neither of us expected to end our day, or our lives, in this closet.
She lifted a hoof toward me and mooed as if she was begging for a chance, then levitated back up into the vortex.
I remember not being able to breathe. I remember not feeling my mom holding me anymore.
The last thing I remember, before I completely blacked out, was our Santa sleigh decoration flying straight toward me with all nine reindeer.
___________
In the darkness, little stings erupted all over my body.
A shrill, electric ring blared in my aching ears.
I felt a wet, agonizing burn all over my face and my torso.
A stabbing pain throbbed in my chest. Something was broken there.
Natural gas—and the putrid, unforgettable odor of death—filled the air.
My eyes opened, dirt falling out of them, everything a blur.
A circuit of L shapes glowed white before me among a haze of dark, sorrowful blue that I had never seen before.
There was silence, except for the sprinkling of rain and gushing of water from broken plumbing. I could see my breath in the frosty air. Pain stabbed all over my chest when I tried to breathe or move. I craned my neck a little and something wooden brushed my cheek.
I was upside down in a tree, or what had been a tree.
All the leaves and bark were gone. I could taste dirt and copper in my mouth.
I pulled my head upward, the stabs in my chest piercing me even deeper, and saw my naked body covered in mud and blood.
Chunks of a mangled car engine hung above me.
Wrapped tightly around me were the Santa sleigh and reindeer that had hit me.
The rain was pelting my open gashes. That was what was stinging me.
The more I woke up, the worse everything hurt.
When the blur in my eyes gave way to focus, I saw the L shapes for what they were: foundations of all the homes and their driveways in my neighborhood.
There wasn't a single trace of the houses themselves anywhere.
All the other trees were gone or stripped into skeletal hands sticking out of the earth, tilting and knotted with long, thin scraps of ragged metal.
My neighborhood was in such an unrecognizable state that I didn't know where my own home was.
The blue haze came from the full moon, which cast its mournful light between the floating rain clouds.
The grass and topsoil across the neighborhood were gone.
There was only scoured, muddy earth and puddles, every single one carrying a reflection of the moon, which made the ground look like a chessboard of moons.
Near the tree, the abraded face of Dad's garden gnome peeked out from the mud it was buried into.
Then I realized my parents were gone.
The piercing, desperate cry of a woman on the other side of the neighborhood shattered the silence.
A dog yelped and barked from another side.
Closer to me, a man started wailing and begging for help.
The pain all over my body exploded like a supernova and I, too, began to scream until I blacked out once more.