Chapter 21: The Secret
Morning broke, Barbra couldn’t believe it, the mayor’s office where she had spent half of her career as emergency management lied as rubble. One hundred and fifty known fatalities, at least two thousand missing and that didn’t surprise her. What surprised her is this old building which had lasted through so many decades now lied in rubble. It was this that made the rest of the destruction so unsurprising, if a tornado could tear up such a sturdy building none of the cheap modern day buildings where safe.
The River Walk overflowed with rubble of the buildings that had once surrounded it, the hotels and the restaurants wiped out or buried. It’d take years for them to clear out the large draw of Latino vacationers that had once been the main made river. She supposed Fiesta and battle of lowers would be a street parade affair for now, but in truth they’d probably lose popularity to another city.
Right now she had more personal concerns, one letter, one paper letter that wasn’t saved onto any of the computers ruined in the storm, one piece of paper in a yellow envelope that if found by another could be devastating to her position, could cause her to look like the cause of hundreds of deaths, and she was combing through the remains of her office to find it.
It was hard to locate anything, after all her office was the rubble of multiple offices now. Having been a tornado and it could have carried that letter miles away.
Chapter 22: Miles Away
Freddie was zombified, which was the best way he’d ever be able to describe it, he had watched the world come down around him during his security job at Wells Fargo, and now alive but numb he only walk the road without heading. Maybe he was trying for home, but his car was gone, not destroyed, just gone, and he wouldn’t make it.
His foot slid on something, it made a maddening sound like ripping paper and sliding a knife down a cutting board. He looked at his feet and noted it was paper, a yellow envelope he had ripped open the bottom crease of when he stepped on it.
He picked it up, curious, with a target for the first time since the twister had torn his sanity away from him, and pulled the white ledger out. The envelope was listed from a government office, it contained two typed letters printed out by an ink jet with black smudges which made it look like it had been manhandled before it had dried. He read,
“Dear Mayor Castro,
This morning we saw what horror the off kilter weather of San Antonio can hold for our people. An f1 possibly f2 hit 151 just miles from my home and tore up a few homes in the middle of the night. Anyone asleep, which at four in the morning was most everyone, had no clue. In fact at four I was awake during the storm and the T.V. had little information. I wouldn't have even known we'd been under a tornado watch aside from the fact I grace upon the internet once in a while to see what the chasers are up to.
Can you imagine if that residential neighborhood had been hit by an f3, an f4, the god almighty f5? We wouldn't be talking about a roof in the street, we'd talking about dozens of dead people. And why? Because everyone's asleep, and no one has any warnings!
We have always been on the edge of tornado alley, but thanks to climate change it has grown, it is consuming us and to further this danger there is no tornado season, count the number of tornadoes between the supposed tornado seasons now, it is growing.
It is only a matter of time before "the big one" hits San Antonio, and like all our most dangerous thunderstorms it will happen while we are asleep. This can be helped by one simple upgrade to our emergency preparedness, a tornado siren. Simple, not that expensive, easy to run and to maintain, and most northern cities require them. The emergency committee of San Antonio seems less concerned with these tornado threats than they should be. The question is, what will it take to become prepared, do people have to die first?
You're the mayor, you can take control and we need to ready our city for the oncoming dangers rather than wait till it is far too late.
Will you be the heroic mayor who worked to save people? Or the mayor who decided it was time to act after several perished under said threat? Tornado sirens, there's no if’s, there's just when, when are we going to become prepared?
Signed your Citizen.
Natalie Sais.”
Freddie was gripping the paper too tight, wrinkling the wet note, he couldn’t believe he had just read a note that pre-empted and described last night’s horror. He looked towards the rising sun against orange skies, small harmless clouds dotted the horizon that would be blue most the day.
Catching his breath he switched to the second letter.
“Dear Mrs. Sais.
I am Barbara Hemingworth, I appreciate your note to the mayor but I am in charge of emergency management and must receive all letters concerning our organization.
We also appreciate your concern for our citizens’ safety, however we note that tornado sirens are not a workable management of our tornado safety. San Antonio is such a spread out metropolis we would have to put up hundreds of sirens for everyone to be covered. Only those outdoor and awake would be alerted by their soundings.
So while fire stations and bases have sirens that would be set off during said emergencies, to install more into the city would be too expensive. Instead we are creating a system that would allow us to text an update about severe weather, through apps and text listings you must subscribe to. There are also radio and T.V. warnings already in place.
Thank you again for your concern.
Hemingworth.”
His mouth hung ajar, he closed it. There had been no sirens, San Antonio had none, he hadn’t had a T.V. in his office, but he had a radio and its signal had disintegrated an hour before his office had done so around him. He lifted his phone to check for a text, but it read ‘no service’.
In the middle of the city and no service. Pissed he threw the plastic piece of crap and watched it bounce off some nearby rubble back onto the asphalt. Looking at the evidence he held in his hands Freddie realized it was important to get this to a news station as soon as possible, he was sure a few where downtown that had survived the twister, but before he did so he needed to save copies. Maybe he could take pictures of it.
Cursing himself; he went to retrieve his tossed phone, hoping the Samsung would remain Nokia strong.
Epilogue: Never Stop
Alex woke, his eyes where blinded by light, which surprised him, it had been night moments ago.
It all came to him as he sat up from the side of the bus, the twister, the flying, and the moment of pain. But there was no pain now. He could feel his hands, his feet, his neck which had impacted something in the last moment, but nothing hurt.
Alex stood, the soft ground below him gave as dirt did, causing him to pause. His feet should have been standing on metal and glass, maybe he could be standing outside a window and onto pavement, but soft ground? Like dirt and grass? He looked down, his breath caught in his throat at what he saw.
He was no longer right, no longer within the world he knew. His skin and clothes though holding the same color they once did where brighter, shimmering with an almost white light. He couldn’t quite see through himself but knew what was on the other side of him as if he could. He turned still, just to be sure.
And there he lied, crumpled into a heap on the side of the bus, clutching his comic book bag. His comics had spilled out, some of the priceless ones ruined beyond hope. He cursed himself for bringing them along and bent to collect what he could. His fingers passed through them as if they where air and he gasped, they continued through the bag, through himself, through the thin seat, metal hull, and the pavement until they were stopped by what felt like dirt, topsoil solid to him as it had been when he was alive.
“Can’t touch anything human made from this side.” A man’s voice said from behind him causing him to turn from his crouch in surprise. Through the floor of the bus which now acted as a wall walked a man as shimmering and white as he was. He was a good looking man that looked to be in his forties, with receding hair that wasn’t
quite medium length but long enough to wave in the wind. He was about average height with a slight musculature about him as if he lifted heavy objects for a living, and wore a wisp of an amused smile upon his face while his eyes twinkled with interest at everything they took in. Eyeing the man’s hair Alex waved around his hand, he could still feel air. The man nodded, “You can still feel nature, anything produced by her, but nothing constructed or mutated by man from your prior life. Buildings, cars, electronics.”
“No video games?” Alex asked, what a horrid afterlife that would be. As he thought this something ethereal whisked by, small and paper like, almost like a piece of bag caught in the wind, it made a full circle around him and whisked out of life.
“It’s starting, follow me,” the man turned and walked back through the bottom of the bus the way he had come in. Alex held his hand before him as he followed, his hands passed through like he was walking through a waterfall without the parting of the bus’s hull. After wondering about this he closed his eyes moved forward, opening them when he was outside where there were more of those wisps of papers circling around him. He was half distracted by the tons of wreckage around him, downtown San Antonio lied in ruin. Where was the tower? But his attention came back to the weird flying ethereal objects.
“What is this?” he asked waving at the paper like things, it dodged his hand in reaction. Was it alive?
The man who was now with two others shrugged, “Some call it the light, we,” he smirked again, “we call it the last tornado, because everyone we’ve seen are tornado victims. It’s like a wormhole, I'd guess, I mean we have theories but we’ve never been in.” The man reached up and put his hand through the wall parting the flow, the paper like things that where now increasing in number and seemed to reach up for the sun swam around the his wrists, reacting to him like no man made substance would ever do again, “My favorite theory is that it takes you to the afterlife of your choosing,” he pulled back out, “so if your life dream is games, then why not the greatest never ending arcade of your dreams?”
Alex thought of that, the joy of being able to play, never needing coinage, never having time limits, playing forever. As if in reaction to his thoughts the circulating walls between them strengthened, now it looked less like bits of paper and more like white clouds billowing, circling around him, “the last tornado” he breathed, and was lifted off the ground, but for a moment he held on by pure will as the three turned around. The one he had spoken to, a younger looking man with a well grown black beard and a cap on, and one with a smooth face but one hell of a jaw line, with a wave of hair that flipped around at the front of his bangs, “Wait!” they turned back to him, “Who are you guys?”
The man who had spoken to him waved him off with a flip of the wrists, “Oh, scientists, no one important.” The man with the square jaw nodded in agreement, a light smile upon his face.
“You are all dead, like me, where is your…” he tried to think up a new word they hadn’t used, “vortex?”
The older man smiled, bigger and brighter this time, “Our vortexes are right here on earth. We haven’t moved on to whatever is on the other side because,” he paused, looking towards his companions and over the ruins of San Antonio, “we will never stop chasing.”
With that the strange trio turned around and walked off as Alex lifted further from the earth. As the light washed away reality, he saw them move towards a truck in the middle of the road as ethereal as they where, to help each other lift some kind of large red cone with PVC piping and what looked to be wind speedometers atop it into the vehicles bed. Then light overcame everything.
The end
###
Note From Author
I thank you for purchasing my first published work and look forward to entertaining you for as long as these hands of mine work a keyboard. A few things about the world you read, of course to notate it is a fictional novel, so I took liberties with the areas of San Antonio and the actions of weather and so on. While some places or names I name are real they are all used on a fictional sense and any likeness of this to reality is because fact is following fiction, which was following a theory based off the fact of Global Warming and the increasing violence of our tornado seasons.
That said the two notes at the end are based off fact. The first note is nearly the same note, tweaked and edited, that I sent to the San Antonio mayor which instead was retrieved by an Emergency Management councilwoman. The note sent back was nearly the same reply I retrieved from her only I created it into a new note through my own words and changed her name because I was fearful of some god awful slander issue from a sensitive and lawyered politician. But it is fact the letter she sent back stated she thought, or the council thought, that placing tornado sirens within the city where a waste of time, effort, and money. In other words, we aren’t worth it.
If the tornado that will one day devastate this city hits, it will happen, as most of our severe weather does, between 9pm and 3am. People will be asleep and will not awake to texts or app alerts, or be watching TV or listening to a radio. Taken from their sleep to whatever, if anything, waits beyond, not knowing they were killed by the unpreparedness of a whole city.
And lastly I had written this whole novella about a year ago during that storm season. When Moore was hit hard by the F5 I decided that this novel needed to be looked at and published before a real tornado hit San Antonio and instead of being a warning of caution the story became a lame story in the aftermath of truth. While I was cleaning it up one last time disaster struck El Reno not days later, taking the lives of many.
Of those taken where a group of storm chasers I had followed for a long while. I learned of Tim Samaras after becoming infatuated by storm chasing thanks to the movie Twister, and followed him from then on, an admirer of his work and that out of the show they where put onto, Storm Chasers, they played up the science and played down the drama. Tim Samaras, considered by many the original storm chaser and a storm scientist, along with his ten year partner Carl Young, and Tim’s son Paul, where caught by an EF5 which made a surprising one hundred and eighty degree turn into a line of storm chasers as it hit its record breaking width of 2.6 miles.
Many chasers didn’t make it out and where thrown by the storm, many where left with serious injuries like the member of The Weather Channel’s chasing vehicle, The Twistex team of three where the only group of chasers to suffer fatalities, the first storm chaser and his team became the first chasers to die during the chase. Due to this and the immense respect I have for Tim Samaras and how he has improved our storm warning systems with his probe research, I added the epilogue in memory and dedication to three amazing chasers.
I meant and mean no disrespect to any of them or their family and have hoped to cause them none.
To close, anyone close to me would tell you I am an atheist, but if there was an afterlife I’d hope it wasn’t heaven and hell, but instead whatever dream you wanted to live.
~Joshua Winters
Vs 1.4: This version is 1.4, it is an edited upload of the original version and VS 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, using an editing program that will hopefully solve all writing issues. In any case it is the last update I will add to this novella, and again, thank you for reading.
About Author
Joshua Winters
Author Joshua Winters is a single father and aspiring author hoping to find his way in the world of writing.
He currently resides in San Antonio Texas with his son and mother.
To learn more about the author please visit,
Official Facebook Page
Other Works
Dead Ends: A collection of horror shorts full of dread and insanity.
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