by Daniel Pyle
He spent the next several hours looking for one of Dani’s toys, sifting and overturning and digging. It wouldn’t do to have something for one girl and not the other. Any daddy knew that. He found a plastic tiara and an illustrated copy of The Wizard of Oz they sometimes read at bedtime, but the tiara was broken and the book was split down the spine and missing the second half. It struck him later that the book would have been a ridiculously thoughtless gift anyway. He did finally find an old music box Dani kept on her dresser. He didn’t think it was one of her favorite things exactly, but it still worked, and he guessed it was better than nothing.
He carried the two items to a recliner he’d uncovered earlier and sat down. The cushion squished and seeped water, but he didn’t particularly care. His jeans were already damp and muddy, and a little water never hurt anything.
His eyelids drooped, unbelievably heavy. The sun had slipped past the midway point in the sky and started its descent toward the western horizon. Del guessed it was probably a little bit past noon. His stomach had stopped rumbling and started twisting. He knew he’d need to eat something soon, but skipping a meal or two wasn’t going to kill him. The hunger was good. The hunger had kept him awake this long.
From the recliner, he could see the spot in the back yard where they’d buried the three creatures. Later, after he’d gotten some rest, he supposed he might care more about what they had been and where they’d come from, but right now all he could think about was the way they’d cried and the reflective fur that had showed him his own, disjointed face.
He sat there staring across the yard for what must have been an hour. Maybe he fell asleep for a few minutes, although he didn’t think so. All he knew for sure was that by the time he noticed the movement in the trees off to the right, his face felt sunburned and his stomach was screaming at him.
The thing in the trees moved again. Branches cracked and leaves fluttered. Del thought it might be a deer or maybe even a cow or horse that had wondered through a tornado-torn fence.
It wasn’t a deer. Or a cow or a horse.
The dust devil spun out of the woods and into the back yard.
Del blinked.
The mini cyclone must have been ten or fifteen feet tall. It had picked up enough dirt and foliage to make itself visible, but you could still see right through it. Del had seen dust devils before, of course. You didn’t grow up in Kansas and not see at least a few in your lifetime, but usually the things were smaller and spun out of existence before you could get a really good look at them. This one hovered in place for a full minute or more before zigging toward the lone wall still pointing into the sky and then zagging back across the property.
It moved toward the tree (what Del had started to think of as the burial tree) and the small mound of dirt beneath. The dust devil whirred above the mini grave, picking up more dirt and getting darker.
Del sat forward in the wet recliner.
He wasn’t seeing this. Couldn’t be. He’d fallen asleep and this was all just a very weird dream. He put the stuffed frog and the music box in his lap and pinched himself on the upper thigh as hard as he could.
The pinch hurt. A lot. He rubbed his leg and hissed air through his teeth.
Across the property, a corner of the shower curtain poked out of the dirt. Then another. Del wanted to scream at the dust devil to stop it, that it was desecrating sacred ground, but that was insane. The whole situation was insane.
More of the curtain appeared, and then suddenly the entire thing flew into the air, spinning within the cyclone, flapping like a flag in a high wind. From this distance and as dark as the dust devil had gotten, Del couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought he saw three pale shapes twisting inside the tiny tornado. If he got up and ran across the yard, would he see the three creatures in there? He thought he might, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to get up, and it was too late anyway. As quickly as it had come, the dust devil disappeared. It zipped across the yard, carrying the twisted shower curtain with it, and spun back into the woods.
Del waited for a few minutes, trying to convince himself that he’d been imagining things, that he was sleep deprived and a bit delirious, before getting up and crossing the back yard. He carried the frog and the music box with him, clutched to his chest.
Beneath the burial tree, he found a hole, a lot of swirled dirt, and nothing else. The shower curtain was gone. And the three dead creatures with it.
He turned to the trees where the dust devil had disappeared, looked back at the hole, then finally shook his head and walked toward the car.
Sleep. He had to get some sleep. Maybe this would all make a little more sense when he woke up.
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t.
He opened the rental’s back door and climbed inside. He turned the key on the bottom of the music box and put the box down on the floorboard. He curled up on the seat, hugging Lucy’s frog.
Dani’s music box tinkled. Then sleep swooped in and overtook him.
• • •
The roar that woke him sounded like a revving engine. It came closer and got louder, more like an approaching train.
Del blinked his eyes and straightened his stiff back. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sleeping, but it had definitely gotten darker outside. Not quite night yet, but getting there for sure.
He sat up, still holding Lucy’s frog, wondering if he was hearing Jackson’s grumbling truck but simultaneously doubting that even a truck in serious need of a new muffler could make that much noise.
He turned around in his seat and looked through the back windshield.
The tornado filled half the sky. It churned at the bottom, plucking trees from the ground and sucking them into its black, spinning body. It rose into the dark, monstrous clouds swirling through the sky above, at least a mile wide at the base, probably two times that wide at the top.
Del sucked in a ragged breath and felt bursts of adrenaline course through his body.
Another tornado? It couldn’t be. Did the universe really hate him this much?
His first worthwhile thought was that he should slip into the driver’s seat and put the pedal to the metal. But it was too late for that. The tornado had already reached FR 125 less than half a mile to the west, and it was moving fast. He might be able to back out of the driveway before the cyclone reached him, but he’d get no farther than that.
He knew he ought to get out of the car, find a ditch or some other hollow to lie low in until the twister passed, but there were no ditches out here, no valleys or stream beds. The land spread out flat and wide for miles.
And if the car couldn’t outdrive the tornado, he sure as hell couldn’t outrun it.
He guessed the only option left was to get into the footwell, cover his head, and pray.
He lifted Dani’s music box off the floor and contorted his body into the space between the front and back seats. Then he covered his head and neck as best he could, knowing it probably wouldn’t do any good, that a tornado that size would suck the car right off the ground and put it down miles away in dozens of pieces.
Something slapped against the windshield. He turned his head, peeked through his arms and saw a broken section of billboard sporting most of the red and blue Pepsi logo. The billboard slipped up the windshield, pulled away, and disappeared into the sky.
Del trembled and wrapped his arms more tightly around his head.
By the time the tornado reached him, the car was shaking and bouncing and the noise had reached deafening levels. A second object slammed into the windshield and cracked the glass, but Del didn’t bother looking to see what had done the damage. He tried to push himself under the front seats, though there was nowhere near enough room and it probably wouldn’t have done him any good anyway.
The car rocked from side to side, back and forth. It lifted off the ground and slammed back down with enough force to pop Del up onto the back seat. He scrambled back into the footwell and screamed.
The car lifted ag
ain, but it didn’t drop this time. It spun into the sky and flipped end over end. Del flew up against the roof and then over the backs of the front seats and into the steering column. His back hit the steering wheel, and his head crunched into the driver-side window. The combination of impacts sent jolts of pain through most of his body. He fell sideways across the front seats. The gearshift punched into his side, and he heard a crack he thought must have been one of his ribs.
Something broke through the back window, tore off the headrest inches from Del’s face, and continued through the front windshield. It looked like part of a telephone pole. Safety glass fell across his body and pattered against the dashboard, and the screaming winds got louder still.
Del lifted his head just enough to see the pole shoot through the sky ahead and then splinter when another gust of wind caught it from the side and snapped it in half.
The hole in the windshield sucked at him like a vacuum. He wrapped his arms around the back of the driver’s seat and held on for dear life.
The car flipped again, this time the opposite way, and Del ended up back in the back seat. He scrambled for something to hold on to. He found a seatbelt and thought about trying to buckle himself in. But he didn’t think his shaking hands would cooperate. Instead, he wrapped the belt around his arm half a dozen times and tied it tight, cutting off circulation to his hand, not caring.
Something smacked the back door and left a basketball-sized indentation. More safety glass rained down across his head.
Del tried to keep himself low, out of the way of any further projectiles, but every time the car spun or lurched, he ended up back on top of the seat, sometimes sitting up, sometimes upside down and staring into the footwell.
He’d lost the frog and the music box, although he didn’t remember it happening. He supposed they might still be in the car somewhere, maybe in the front seat, but it was probably more likely that they’d gotten sucked through a window. It didn’t matter, of course, they were just inanimate things, but somehow losing them felt like a failure.
He clutched the seatbelt and screamed again.
Something fluttered outside the window. He barely saw it at first and thought it must be a bed sheet or a sun-bleached tarp, but when it flapped its enormous, membranous wings and flew closer to the window, Del got a better look.
The creature had half a dozen knobby legs curling out of a segmented, ant-like body. Its head was pointed and insectile, and the huge black sockets on either side looked withered and dead. It unhinged its jaw like a snake and revealed an unnaturally huge mouth full of rows and rows of tiny, jagged teeth. He had no way of knowing for sure, but he thought it must have had a wingspan of at least five feet.
Del knew then that he must have died, that he was in Hell and this winged thing was his own personal demon tormentor.
The car stopped spinning for a second, and Del could see more of the creatures in the distance, flitting through the cyclone, darting around speeding debris, pumping their wings and climbing up or folding them in and diving down. He saw one creature with a litter of kitten-sized, caterpillar-like things clinging to its chest—maybe feeding, maybe just holding on for the ride—and coughed out a bile-flavored breath.
The beast outside the rental’s window flapped its wings again. For just a second, Del thought he could see his reflection in its belly and chest. Then it turned, and the reflection disappeared.
A second creature flew in behind the first. It held a bundle in its spindly arms. Del thought it looked like something wrapped in a frosted shower curtain. But that couldn’t be, could it? What were the chances that—
And that was when the car came to a sudden, jolting stop and folded in around Del.
He could barely hear the sounds of the screeching metal and breaking glass against the tornado. The seatbelt kept him tethered to the back seat but could do nothing about the crumpling roof. It hit the back of his head and knocked him onto the seat. He hit face first and felt his nose break. As blood spilled across his mouth and chin, he thought he saw one of the flying beasts diving toward the jagged hole that had once been a window frame, and then he fell back on the seat and lost consciousness.
• • •
When he opened his eyes, the sky had cleared. He saw a sliver of it through the gap between the car’s roof and the tops of the back seats.
He was in a narrow, cocoon-like space. the steering wheel and dashboard had shifted into the front seats and pushed everything back toward the trunk. The back seat was mostly intact, and he could see a few inches of floorboard between it and the rearranged front.
Blood pooled in his mouth. He turned his head to the side and spat it out. His arm ached. When he looked at it, he saw a hand so bluish-purple it was almost black. He untied the seatbelt and hoped it wasn’t too late, that he hadn’t killed off the hand.
Before he tried to get up, he tested his arms, legs, and neck. There was plenty of pain, but nothing seemed broken except his nose and maybe a few ribs. He pushed up on his elbow, winced at the throbbing ache in his side, and finally managed to turn himself onto his belly.
Blood dripped out of his nose and across the bits of glass in the footwell. He ran his good hand across his nostrils. His other hand had started to tingle. He guessed that was a good thing, but the sensation just about drove him crazy. For a minute, all he could do was cradle the hand to his chest and try to ignore the pins and needles.
When he thought he could manage it, he pushed up on his forearms and tried to open the car door. It squeaked open, but only an inch or so before hitting something outside. Del certainly wasn’t going to make it through that narrow crack.
He looked back over his shoulder at the other door, which was the only other obvious point of exit. He kicked at it. Nothing.
It took a series of painful movements, but he was finally able to turn himself and wrap his fingers around the door handle. He pulled on it and pushed the door with his shoulder.
It squeaked and moved the tiniest fraction of an inch.
He pushed harder, strained until he thought he might pass out again.
With a single metallic pop, the door swung open and fell away from the car, free from its hinges. Del followed it, crawling out of the car and flopping onto his back.
Tree limbs swayed overhead, mostly stripped of their leaves, littered with bits of paper, cloth, wood, and other unrecognizable materials.
Del lay there for several minutes, not sure where he was and not caring, only happy to be alive and relatively uninjured.
He saw the sun through a gap in the trees. It had found the horizon and turned a dark shade of red-orange. A few clouds floated above, and a whole bank of them sped eastward, but the sky to the west looked clear and peaceful.
Del decided he ought to try to get up and figure out where he was, find some civilization, a hospital. Being careful with his ribs, he got to his knees and then to his feet.
He wobbled, almost fell, and caught himself on the trunk of the totaled rental sedan, which had come to rest wedged between two trees. The front half looked like it had run into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour.
Del couldn’t believe he’d lived through this. The crash should have pulped him.
When he regained his balance, he took his weight off the car and walked through the trees. He had no idea where the nearest road might be, how many miles from his home the tornado had carried him. If he’d known whether he was north or south of I-70, he guessed he could have found the interstate eventually, but he didn’t. All he could do was start walking until he saw something he recognized or came across a road or house.
He pushed through a pair of dense bushes. The trees opened up ahead. He saw a fringe of undergrowth and a field of alfalfa beyond that. He stumbled out of the woods, looking for a farmhouse, afraid any structure he found would be demolished and lifeless.
But before he could spot a house (or the remains of one), he saw something else in the field ahead. It flapped in the breeze.
A shower curtain.
Del remembered the creatures he’d seen inside the tornado. They’d been figments of his imagination, had to have been, but he recalled one holding a curtain-wrapped bundle in its monstrous arms. Like a gift. Or a newborn baby.
He approached the curtain one hesitant step after another. It lay in a section of field the tornado had beaten flat, like a crop circle. Beneath the curtain: three, unmoving lumps, one adult sized and the other two smaller. A stuffed frog sat atop the shower curtain on one of the smaller mounds, and a music box lay slightly off-kilter on the other.
Del dropped to his knees a few steps shy of the shower curtain and wailed. He got down on his hands and cried into the torn and uprooted alfalfa. When his wobbly arms wouldn’t support him anymore, he laid himself down and flipped onto his back.
He sobbed, stared at the blurry sky overhead, and listened to the shower curtain flap in the dying wind.
WILD RELEASE
* * *
KEITH GOUVEIA
“Go go go!” Ray Torres shouted as his men frantically chopped down trees and cleared underbrush. “I need an ETA on the water tankers. You there! Get that bulldozer out of the way. We need to get this backfire going. Hustle!”
The forest was an eclectic combination of coniferous and broad-leaved trees, numerous species of fungi, ferns, and shrubs. Plenty of fuel for a raging fire.
He felt guilty simply directing his men when they had been going non-stop for six hours, doing their very best to combat the encroaching forest fire. The blaze—ignited by three, bored teenagers already in custody—had consumed twenty percent of the forest surrounding the Great Lakes and was threatening the Canadian border. If they couldn’t get control of it, the raging fire would garner natural disaster status. Firefighters from both countries worked together to fight back the wildfire before it caused further damage.
