bit of whiplash when the tires found traction again. With a jerk and a metallic screech, we halted, sitting in the middle of the street collecting slime in the truck bed.
“What happened?!” I called through the vent.
“It’s stalled, he’s trying to start it!” Bart bellowed back at me. The liquid was starting to drip into my eyes, so I squinted and shook my hair.
Mikey was still laying in shock, and Not Mikey had vanished. The dude was gone.
“Where’d he go?!” with emphasis on the “he.” Mikey didn’t respond, he just kept squinting at the sky.
“Mikey, what happened to your friend!” His whiskers held black beads of liquid millimeters from his pudgy, flushed face. I was desperately searching for Not Mikey’s real name.
“Wake up Mikey! What are you looking at!” I demanded, enraged that this buffoon who couldn’t even keep it together in a simple storm. Then I looked up, and as the black rain paused, I saw a red sky peeking through the top of the clouds. It was an eye, the eye of the storm, and it was bleeding red, sunset light into the tempest.
And it was right over our heads. I traced the whirlwind down to the ground, realizing that the horizon was gone. We were inside a pitch black
vortex, and 30 feet or so away, I saw a body lying in the street. It was Not Mikey.
“Hey!”
“Hey!” I screamed again.
His body twitched. I saw him pull his sprawled arms to his chest, and his torso off the pavement.
“Get up!” I yelled, my throat going hoarse.
He didn’t move, he stayed propped up like that on his hands. A slow cascade of air noise and rain crashed into us, coming from his direction. When I glanced up again, the eye had moved off ahead of us. We were lagging behind it, and were about to be swallowed up in the spiral. Then Jeff started the truck back up.
...
I can only imagine what his last breath felt like. Maybe the tornado had sucked the air right out of his lungs. Unable to see, unable to breathe, being hurled through the air weightlessly, what a horrifying way to die.
In the dimension of a second, I saw his body pulled from the surface of the Earth. Completely different to taking off inside a plane, or a rocket
for that matter. You’re pushing yourself when you break the sound barrier, you feel that thump. You’re defying everything mother nature ever said,
and it feels good.
I never found out his real name either. Some witness I make. It’s like I watched a stranger die.
No. I can’t stop yet, I have to get this out. As awful as this may sound, it’s cathartic for me. After Jeff got the car moving, we followed the eye
down the street. It seemed like the walls of the storm were trapping us in, making us follow the dark tornado.
My hands clenched the rusted tailgate so hard that I must have cut my palm. I didn’t feel or notice it, it just happened. The wind gusts became even more intense alongside the car, sending shock-waves through the grass. I remember an old, dead tree, right before we turned the corner by the Wilson’s house. We drove right past the fat stick, and it was splattered black before the whole thing disintegrated in the wind. It broke apart like
nothing had been holding it together. Branch after dead branch tore away from the trunk to fly away, while the crunching sounds rang out, even in
the noise.
Splinters and wood-chips slashed at our cheeks, well I say “our” but Mikey was laying down and the other two had their windows rolled up. So they probably didn’t notice. As far as I can tell, I was kneeling in the bed, elbows locked, blood running from my right hand, and face sandy from sawdust, when I blacked out.
I was in my blue co-pilot seat, full space suit. No countdown, no warning, no nothing. I was dropped right back into my memory of liftoff. My memory of the space shuttle launch. We gained altitude so quickly, it was like a gunshot. My skeleton felt like it was being sucked out my butt.
And the vibration. My lord, the rumble felt like the whole thing was going to break apart, sort of like how that tree had just shattered before my
eyes. My legs got heavy, like they were filling up with blood, so I started to count.
“WHOOOOOOPPPPSS!” I felt week and sleepy as I sucked in air.
One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.
“POOOOSH, WHOOOOOOPPPPSS!” And again, and again, I sounded like an air-pump. But it kept me awake.
Over the radio, I heard Captain Verner laugh. He was loving every mind-bending second of it, and cackled like a madman. Houston called to see if he was alright.
“Verner are you okay, over?” The guy called with a funny robotic accent we’d heard a thousand times before.
“Yes, over!” He shouted back, singing his loud answer.
The shuttle came with special lensing for the windows, but when Falcon 12 burst through the cloud top, we still had to adjust our visors so the sun didn’t blind us. And that’s when the real heat came in. Along with the temperture, our view of the earth changed. Instead of green and lush like
when we lifted off, the clouds turned the surface a white-hot bright, and the blue sky was black and blurry.
Breaking out of the atmosphere only took 130 seconds on paper, but it was really a jarring eternity. Once the booster rockets broke-off, we were up there, finally. I was in space.
Only I wasn’t in space. I couldn’t watch the rockets fall off our escaping vessel, and I couldn’t see Earth’s blue tint anymore. I was waking up inside of a monster.
...
Once or twice I’ve wound up somewhere unfamiliar, after a night of heavy drinking. There’s always a twinge of doubt, a nagging worry that I committed super-felony grade vandalism or some other crime while I was knocked out, even though nobody ever comes to take me to jail. It's one of the reasons why I quit drinking altogether.
When I woke up on the street, with gravel and bits of wood in my mouth, that same twinge was throbbing in my brain. Blood that had filled my skull throbbed when I pulled my head up, and my right temple felt bruised. The storm was still in full force, the howling air still hungered for my life, it seemed.
Standing on shaky legs, I turned to my left to see Jeff’s truck parked in the street, and the front door to my parents house left wide open. In the empty lot beside the house, tire tracks cut through the grass. I hobbled towards the curb at first, before noticing my own vehicle was missing. The car I’d parked there only two hours before had vanished, along with every car that the four of us had left behind here.
Suddenly, in the middle of this wind-torn catastrophe, I realized that Jeff and Bart had left me out here on the street, just like they left Not-Mikey in the road before. I must have been blown out of the truck bed, I rationalized. With every step from the curb to the front door, my resentment of those two pricks grew. They deserve the worst punishment known to man, those bastards. I had lost any kind of love for them.
But as I reached the cement steps, the ones just feet from our old, cracked front door, I remembered someone who had awkwardly followed me up those very stairs. That same someone, I found out, was still lying in the bed of Jeff’s rusty truck. I had almost left him without a second thought, I had almost abandoned him to save my own skin.
For that reason alone, I had to go back. Either I returned for Mikey, or I left my soul behind with him to die. I ran to that orange pile of rust, faster than I believed I could ever run. Mikey’s gaze was still glued to the orange hole in the storm above, and he was sweating liberally in his state of shock. I didn’t even try to talk to him, I just yanked on the handle until the gate came down.
By his boots, I dragged the overgrown fat kid out of his puddle of sweat and congealed black goo. I hoisted his lard-wrapped arms over my
head and prepared to carry him fireman-style, when I saw the the front door swing open out of the corner of my eye. With what little strength I had, I lifted Mikey’s body up and onto my back.
Glancing
at the door again, I saw a figure, stained in black, beckoning out to me with his arms. He seemed to be trying to come outside, but someone was holding him back. Another step forward with Mikey on my back, another spine crushing step, and I recognized the figure as my father, covered in sludge. Everyone must have gotten covered with the stuff while setting up the Barbecue. I thought.
“Hurry up, Charlie! Let go of me and help him!” I heard him order the people hanging around his belly.
Another step, and another, I felt the storm tightening its stranglehold on me and the house. I heard the truck shaking behind me, its rust-covered panels clanging together in fear. The walls of our house were painted black, but I could still see some small, yellow spots in the coating. They flexed in and out under the pressure of the air, like the house was made of Jello.
I put my right foot down on the curb and slipped, dropping the delirious Mikey onto my back. His limp body kept me pressed into the sludge-
swamped grass. From the porch, my father stretched out his hand, desperate to pull me in, I could see it by the way he clenched his face and drooled out the corner of his mouth. Mikey’s weight crushed me, but I tried to pull myself forward.
After freeing my left shoulder from the country-boy’s mass, I turned to free the other, and caught a glimpse of the red eye above us. It was closing, bringing the black walls of the tornado in from all sides.
A horrible sound of splitting wood erupted from the back of the house, and the hands that held my father back let go