She bent over, curled face down, placing her arms over her head, hoping to ride it out.
****
It may have been thirty minutes, the hail steadily increasing in size, when everything went still all of a sudden. The rain only drizzled, the hail had gone, and the wind didn’t blow. There were two sounds, one was the awful trickling of the deadly river below, but another sounded almost… mechanical. It was loud, yet distant, it sounded like a jet pushing to get off the ground, a sound she was often familiar with, yet like an avalanche that whistled with torrents of wind. It was a distinct sound she had never heard, and in that instance, it was the most awful one she ever had.
Lightning light the night sky, and her jeans warmed for a second time since submerging in the river below, she paid no attention to the new golden puddle forming around her bare feet. The lightning that had cracked lit up a funnel cloud, though to call it a funnel seemed ridiculous. It wasn’t thin and conical like the ones of movies, it was a wall of cloud that swirled in rigged layers of gray cotton, surrounded by a thick layer of paper like debris at its bottom, impossibly wide with tentacles of funnels extending from it.
And it was closer than she had thought, she realized as a chunk of wood flew by close enough to her face she could hear its path wiz by her ear. A violent wind tugged her forward, towards the edge of the roof and then pushed her backwards as she watched the monster, trying to keep her balance. She knew from years of watching The Discovery channel she had only moments before the monster would be upon her, it looked as if it was standing still yet growing larger with each flash of lightning. She was bare, up here there was no safe point and there was no way inside the submerged building. As the closing tornado threatened to pluck her right off the roof she ran the opposite direction and dived away from it, trading one deadly threat for another, hoping the chilly water that had just taken her lover would be her savior.
The water threw her back into the building, shocking her both with its chill and impact, making her vision fuzz before it came back. She realized she was about to swallow a mouthful of water and spat it back out, taking in a shocked, painful breath of air. Reaching into the darkness for something to grasp onto she found nothing but water.
Swept through impossible rapids she clenched her numbing hands on nothing for another wet eternity until her back cracked hard against something metallic. Her hands scrambled as the water pulled her around and found purchase on a thick fold of metal, then she looked down.
The sight was the worst thing she thought she had ever and would ever see. She had latched onto the open window of a submerged red Chevy Impala and now lied across its submerged roof, old enough to still sport the African deer symbol on its front, where the new versions sported the Chevy’s cross. In the driver's seat was a man, his body leaned left with the waters flow, his forehead pushed in along a bloody crack where he had impacted the steering wheel, she could see a split where white skull shown through.
His head laid upon the shoulder of a woman who looked uninjured, but was dead all the same, her lifeless eyes wide open, her stare uneven as if in death she tried to look two different ways giving her an awful comedic chameleon look. In the back, the worse of it all, a puffy cheeked little three year old still gripping his blanket and buckled safely into his car seat, his eyes closed in fain sleep, his thumb floating loose in dead lips. At that point she didn’t care, not for her dead husband, or the fate of her adult child.
She didn’t care, and she let go.
Chapter 10: That Gut Feeling
Travis was trying to pack away the chest pieces into the community box, but he couldn’t keep his hands from shaking and kept knocking them over. The white queen with her damned round shape went rolling off the table and thudding to the carpet, he stared at her wondering if he had enough in him to pick it up and still be able to rise himself. It was this storm, it hurt, and he wasn’t sure if he had taken his pain killers he had planned to.
A large woman he only recognized as a nurse by her white uniform, whom to him smelt of sweat and shit, walked up to him, “I’ll take care of those sir, can you make it back to your room?”
He nodded, turning, shaking, unsure, towards his hallway. As he turned the corner into his hallway his heart beat painfully, his head throbbed with its rhythm. An anxiety attack? He hadn’t had those in years, not since he was a child and needed an inhaler to make him breathe right again. He felt along the hallway, his vision dimming around the corners of his eyes, till he found his golden plated knob and stumbled into his room.
Travis made his way into the bathroom and uncapped his Vicodin in the dark, but when he overturned it, it was empty. His heart lurched in his chest, pain shot through his limbs and he slid onto the floor, gripping the toilet for support as his legs failed him.
His memory cleared for the first time in a decade.
He remembered waking and taking three, returning to use the bathroom and taking three more forgetting he had already done so. He had left for the commons only to return and take three more, or had he taken more? Those were the only trips he remembered, the bottle was empty but should have been half full. Twenty goddamned pills.
This time his stomach lurched and twisted, he could feel the acid spill out of it and run its fiery course up his esophagus. He felt it surge onto his tongue, the taste bitter and unwelcome, chunks of bread and undigested meat slid out of his lips along with a mound of bile that splattered partly into the toilet and onto the rim, the world became dark and numb. Before sound followed the path of all his other senses he heard the sounds of cracking, tearing, breaking and screaming, as if hell itself was rising to meet him.
Chapter 11: I Die
The hail had been pounding the parking lot for at least half an hour if not longer now, chunks of ice smashing against the pavement like unhappy snowballs thrown by soulless children. Power had remained out for the longest time and what few customers where left, the group of four and three more along with a staff of six, where now onto the melting ice cream and Jell-O treats. Ben had Gil snoring on his shoulder, while his other friends played with a deck of cards one of the servers had lent them, trying to keep themselves awake in the early hours of the morning.
They weren’t regular playing cards, it was Yu-gi-oh, a battle of monsters and magic, something to pass the time. Claudia was using a fire pack that made to troll the other member with super strong fire beasts, and Leon used a zombie’s pack with many easy to pull out beasts strong in defense meant for calling out the strongest card in the pack, its name was something long and stupid that Ben couldn’t remember having to do with being a lord or king of the undead.
There was a sound of screeching tires and everyone, except Ben’s sleeping prince, peered out towards the street. Through the rain and hail not much could be seen, there where head lights, hazy in the downpour, but they moved fast up through the strip mall, growing brighter as distance closed, heading straight for the twenty-four-hour restaurant. Too fast, and they weren’t slowing.
As the headlights hit his face Ben realized something else, the car wasn’t touching the ground.
“Shit Gil!” He pulled his lover out of the seat and they hit the carpeted floor hard, his friends scrambled over their seat out of the way as the metal beast crashed through the front with a roar of glass that sounded like water and sprayed the prone duo with pieces of the window. The storm was louder, but not as loud as the car skipping a tire over a pair of back-to-back benches, then storming into a kitchen in a hail of screeching metal that ended with a loud crunch.
A scream by a ghostly wail of horror came from the kitchen as Ben and Gil rose.
“The Fuck?” Gil gasped still waking from his dream world.
Before Ben could answer the hood of the intruding vehicle was alight with a small 'spoof', along with much of the back wall of the restaurant's kitchen. All but his group made their way for the outside, the four teens making for the kitchen, checking booths and tables in the cars path for victims.
/> As they slammed through the kitchen door they were overwhelmed by the smoke from the fire. Claudia pulled the white handle of a nearby fire alarm activating the sprinklers, but it wasn’t enough to stop the gasoline fed inferno. A girl crouched in the corner beyond the car, staring at it in fear, as if the big yellow thing, which Ben now saw was a taxi, would get up and come for her.
“Get out! Over the bar!” Gil shouted at her, she looked at them, under the vehicle, and nodded, climbing over and falling off the metal counter before taking off for the front door. Ben shot a curious glance at the people running back inside before he looked under. There was another young woman under it, he could only tell her sex by her bosom, her face was no longer human looking, it looked more like a puddle of flesh pushed into a bowl, pieces of her face, brain, and shrapnel of skull littered the floor.
He rose and backed away, searching for a driver was impossible, the entire cabin engulfed. Even if he hadn’t been killed by impact he was a roasted corpse by now.
“This thing’s a bomb with a lit fuse," Claudia said, her voice shaking with urgency as shock wore off, “we have to get out of here now.”
They filed out of the kitchen and to the front doors, held open by a person each, “Guys we need to get out of here,” Gil started as he ran towards them first, “that thing in there might….” But he stopped speaking, his voice stolen by what he saw.
The rain and hail had cleared, what was left of the downtowns light, which wasn’t much, was enough to reveal the monstrous swirling cloud that was eating away at the tall buildings across the street, storefronts topped by dozens of apartments. Bricks, pieces of wood, whole cars, tons of debris fell into the parking lot only to be picked back up by the funnel and flung a good distance. The monster sounded like a stone grinder, as hard rock smashed against anything and everything around them. The stuff too heavy pushed to its limit till it fell inward on the building it was meant to support.
“I don’t think we are in the damage path,” Claudia said. “It seems to be following the road.”
“It’s massive,” one of the remaining crew breathed barely audible above the twister.
“Sarah’s deaaad,” the one from the kitchen wailed.
Ignoring her Ben nodded, “It’s following the street, but that thing behind us might blow, we need to get out and make our way around the back of the building, away from it.”
The group looked between him and the monster, it was passing them, but it’d take several moments to do so, its width was impossible, like standing next to a wall of clouds. Ben shook his head with a sigh, taking Gil’s hand he led the four their way around IHOP and away from danger.
At a safe distance Gil stopped with Ben, turning to watch as the rest of the group made off behind them. The sight was as magical as it was horrible, the buildings the thing left behind had once stood dozens of stories tall, now they stood at one to three levels of rubble and human remains. Their own parking lot had missing cars, the IHOP sign had bent in half and toppled upon some kind of large green electrical box, not a single power line that had once lined the roads near the beast still stood.
Ben glanced over the traffic to notice a bus with its lights on facing away from the cyclone, rocking in the heavy winds, surely the driver saw this thing coming. But what could be done?
Chapter 12: Fly
“Come….. emerg….” The bus radio chatter woke Alex, he sat up with a start from his new seat two back from the front, realizing he was supposed to have been awake to watch the weather. It didn’t matter, the driver and everyone else were awake. Amazed he had slept himself, with them rocking in winds so violent and loud he could hardly think. Could this storm get any worse?
Several of the windows in the buss had already cracked from being pelted by golf ball sized hail driven into them by the winds as if a cruel Tiger Woods had used them as target practice.
The winds had reached damaging speeds which he imagined to be in an excess of one hundred miles per hour, he assumed fed by their location in-between San Antonio’s few tall buildings where the wind funneled and sped up through its restricted access. He held his bag to him as he waited, feeling as everyone else looked on their postponed bus home, tired, horrified, and in need of a good piss.
Somewhere behind them in the roar of the wind something large cracked and crashed, car alarms honked, beeped, and wailed. Alex looked back but the back of the bus was windowless, so he pressed his face against the VIA bus window he sat by and tried his hardest to see what had fallen, maybe it had been his arcade but it was impossible to see anything through this mess. The rain headed left, right, and left again.
He was pondering over the oddity of the rains directions when a car skittered through the street out of the mess, it swerved towards the bus and Alex braced himself for impact, but turned at the last minute into a nearby light pole.
“Someone’s got to help that man.” An old lady called from behind him.
“There’s no one in the car” Alex said, the steering wheel bag sat deflating in an empty seat, “the brakes must have failed.”
Behind him the rain parted, and his breath was stolen from him. He wanted to scream but nothing came. He sat and held to his chair with tightened white knuckles just as the back of the bus lifted off of the ground a few feet and twisted to the left. Within the swirling mass of clouds overriding the scream of passengers with its own monstrous sounds, swirled a tighter person sized mass which seemed a lighter color from the rest of it.
He watched this horrifying anomaly hit the bus and shatter the windows, all he could see in front of him was pavement as the bus spun on its nose. Grass, dirt, glass, brick, stones and things which felt fleshy and wet pelted him through the window.
Someone fell towards the front, gripping his arm on the way by. At that he lost hold of his seat and both of them were halted as they slammed upon the bus roof. The old lady was still clinging to his arm but no longer conscious when he pulled free and tried to stand, unable to while the bus spun through the world, the windows full of nothing but cloud, debris and rain, the wind howling against the bus so violently he wondered if it'd be torn apart.
The mammoth vehicle rose with a jerk and threw him from the roof to fall towards the back, on his way past he made for his airborne bag. He hit the rear of the VIA bus with a large crunch in his neck, and all was silent.
Chapter 13: Night Shift
The bar was dead quite, the patrons who hadn’t braved the storm where now stuck until the thing passed, The wind had risen so terribly that it was impossible for it to grow any worse before getting better, something had crashed moments ago and now there where sounds of more things being thrown around. It was like a storm James had been within decades ago as a child, a hurricane. He had left the Florida coast after Andrew with his family; they had never wanted to live in something like that again.
His parents where old and retired, living it up north in Colorado where they had been since Andrew, but San Antonio had been too big a career opportunity to pass up and now he was a successful district manager. Somewhere a window broke and a lady screamed, one of the pipe smokers emerged from the bathroom still trying to do her pants, “Something’s come through the window in the lady’s room!” she said, laughing off her fear.
“Well this is a dick of an evening” Steven said from their table where he now shuffled through the unused poker cards with boredom.
James grimaced, “Sorry about this.”
“Not your fault man, God conspired against us. I don’t suppose the radio is up?”
They looked towards the bartender who shook his head, when he spoke his voice shook with a light Spanish accent, something that only seemed to happen when he was exhausted, “With the wind knocking stuff down there’s the likeliness that the all transmitters are offline, either without power, or just gone.”
The waitress came by, “More drinks?”
James held up a hand to stop her, “Honey, there are about a hundred fire blankets in the ki
tchen’s pantry, there not much but it looks like we’ll have to crash here for the night.”
There was a loud crash which stole their attention and the squealing of metal scraping across pavement, followed by more crashing and honking of alarms. James swore he could hear screaming.
“The fuck was that?” Ted started.
The doors blew in with a roar, their gold plated rims crashing against the walls, James could imagine the holes they had put into the red velvet lined plaster, but it was the least of his problems as the building began to shake and come apart around them.
“What’s going on?” the old lady wailed.
James turned to the kitchen stairway that would lead into the basement down below, but as he did white smoke and crumbling stone filled the doorway, blocking their only escape.
“The balcony, into the River Walk!” the chef, bloodied from a wound on his brow, shouted as he darted out of the crumbling kitchen, somewhere a burglar alarm had tripped and was chirping even over the crumbling restaurant. James wondered if he was feeling wind upon his cheek and knew it was upon them, it’d be a miracle if they made it to the river, and even more of one if that provided any shelter against such a storm. He kept flashing back to the day Andrew pulled apart his house, but San Antonio was too far inland, so there was only one other thing this could be.
And where had been the warnings? Did the city have no warning system this close to tornado alley? Shaking himself out of his thoughts he followed the chef, to watch him and three of his employees disappear into a rain of concrete chunks and bricks that took the balcony with it, the older lady wailed again.
He wanted to scream at her to shut up, slap her a little, violence might make him feel more secure as his world unwound around him. Within seconds of that thought his back was in immense pain and all he could see was the red floor covered in clouds of dust, something roared over him as wind pulled at his hair, something monstrous, something he felt was every bit as evil as Satan himself. He tried to move but found his hands unmoving, his legs cold and unfeeling, only the top his back burned with crushing pain.
Chapter 14: Warzone.
The radio crackled as Vicky drove through the devastated backstreets edging around sixteen oh four, the highway that surrounded the sprawling overpopulated city. “It is said that the EF five has moved through downtown and is now bearing down on our very own station, we are taking shelter in our basement and will broadcast as long as the storm allows…” she turned it down, its path now no consequence to her, whether it made it through the Southside or not she had no one to care about there.