by Ninie Hammon
The loudest crack of thunder yet broke overhead at that moment, so loud it made the building’s roof vibrate. Suddenly, the lights in the execution chamber and in the viewing room flickered once, twice and then went out. The windowless viewing room was plunged into total darkness, and the crowd assembled there was silent for a couple of beats, then there were murmurs and the sounds of chairs scooting around.
In the execution room, Oran froze. If the electricity failed, the generator was supposed to come on automatically. Why hadn’t it? Thunder banged harsh and loud outside again.
Into the darkness, an otherworldly sound suddenly rang out, a voice as crisp and clear as a sleigh bell on a snowy morning. Princess sang! Her voice sailed high and free, trailing a haunting melody behind it like the tail on a kite. Her words were the shadow of language, its mirror image, sounds that communicated something achingly tender and remote that existed just a heartbeat or two beyond reality.
The song went on and on. Sometimes so soft it was barely audible, other times, loud, with pure, high notes an opera star would have been hard pressed to reach. Emotion filled every note. Fear. Grief. Loneliness. Serenity. But joy was laced throughout, the canvas on which all the music was painted, the thread that tied the errant pieces together into a whole that was somehow bigger and grander than the sum of its parts.
Oran stood transfixed in the darkness, hypnotized by the sound. No one else moved either. The sound transcended time, so later no one who heard it could say how long it lasted, or exactly what it had sounded like. But everyone who heard it knew it was unique, special, a sound they had never heard before and would never hear again.
The lights blinked again once, on and off. After another blink, they remained on. As soon as the light struck her, Princess fell instantly silent. But it took a moment or two before her song stopped reverberating in the room. The sound was replaced by a hum in the adjoining room, like an old refrigerator kicking on. The generator that was supposed to produce enough electricity to operate Sizzlin’ Suzie was running.
* * * * *
Mac heard a woman singing.
“Don’t theeey know it’s the end of the wooorld? It ended when—”
Skeeter Davis shut up abruptly and it was quiet again, no sound but a roaring echo in his ears.
He tried to open his eyes but the effort was too much. He’d had such a vivid dream! There’d been wind and running from it. Screaming and dirt. A nightmare.
Joy!
Mac’s eyes popped open again. There was something sticky all over his face. He reached up and wiped it off so he could see. But what he saw was wrong, the horizon line was sideways. No, he was sideways.
When he tried to move, he heard a sound, a low moan beside him. Turning his head seemed to take forever, but when he did, he saw his daughter, slathered in mud, lying on the slanted seat next to him. She’d somehow got turned completely around, with her head next to the passenger side door and her feet almost in his lap.
It all came back to him in a rush and his heart stampeded in his chest in terror. The twister, racing toward the edge, and then …
But there was no wind now, just an eerie silence. He was lying up against the car door because the car was sitting sideways, not all the way over on its side, but not level.
He reached out a trembling hand.
“Joy?” He touched her leg. It was warm. “Joy!” She moved, her eyes fluttered open but didn’t focus, then blinked shut again. “Joy, it’s Daddy. Wake up.”
“Daddy?” she mumbled, but didn’t open her eyes.
That was enough, though. More than enough.
There was movement behind him. He turned and saw a mud-splattered Wanda Ingram lying in the backseat of the car, covered in something. Straw. She was breathing, he could see that, but when he called her name, she didn’t answer, and her right arm appeared to be bent at an unnatural angle.
He might have broken bones as well. Joy might, too. But they were alive.
In a great rush, relief flooded over him, warm in his belly where he’d been tied in a knot in fear. He took a great gasp of air and let it out slowly. They’d made it!
He turned back toward the hole where the windshield had been, still unable to get his bearings. There was nothing in front of him but a stretch of empty, plowed dirt. His side of the car was lower than the other side. The car must be in a ditch or something. The view out the raised passenger window was clouds and a brooding, gray sky. He looked out his own side window and saw the same thing that filled the backseat—straw. No, hay.
The car was resting on a pile of hay in a field.
Mr. Wilson had been blown … how far? Who knew? The outside edge of the storm had clipped the car, tossed it into the air and it had landed in a haystack. The absolute absurdity of that sent Mac into a gale of semi-hysterical laughter.
Maybe he better check to see if two black feet were sticking out …
Hysteria overtook him and he laughed harder, howled, his eyes watering. The Big Ugly had …
Big Ugly. Mac stopped laughing. Princess!
* * * * *
As the siren began to wail in Graham, the tornado chucked Jonas Cunningham’s orange Allis Chalmers tractor into a cherry orchard stripped bare of leaves and bark, gobbled up Joe Hanson’s chicken-feeding barns and all 11,000 of his laying hens—left behind the straw nests, though, and most of the eggs, unbroken—and created an instant farm pond a quarter mile away with the water it had sucked out of Boundary Oak Lake. The twister covered the four miles between the shattered remains of Wanda Ingram’s house and town in just less than four minutes.
Then it slammed into Graham, cut a swath of annihilation a mile wide through the southeast quadrant between South Main Street and US 270.
With debris as a battering ram, it ripped open the massive fifteen-story concrete grain elevator on the edge of town as easily as tearing into a Kleenex box and devoured hundreds of thousands of bushels of corn. The twister’s color morphed like a chameleon from bubbling black to bright yellow before it plowed through the Ford dealership next to the elevator, tossing brand new Thunderbirds around like a drunken juggler while it sand-blasted their shiny paint down to bare metal with the corn pellets.
Hours after it sucked up clothing from the Pretty Woman manufacturing plant beside the dealership, skirts, blouses, and scarves rained out of the upper atmosphere onto rooftops, cars, and fields as much as thirty miles away. It hurled ladder trucks, pumper trucks, and ambulances into the air when it rumbled through the fire station, and heaved two smashed school buses onto the basketball court of what once had been the high school gymnasium. Its savage winds picked up an eighteen-ton road grader and chucked it onto the ninth green at the country club.
It set off bombs, too.
After it yanked the gasoline pumps out of the ground at the Texaco station, a tentacle of spilled gas ignited with a little whump sound, then followed the fuel fuse back to the underground storage tanks. The explosion could be heard for miles.
But the second explosion was even bigger, when the tornado hurled a propane tanker like a Molotov cocktail into the meat-packing plant.
Chewing its way through residential neighborhoods next, the writhing black wall swallowed houses with porch swings, bikes on the front lawn, and flower beds out back, and then vomited unrecognizable rubble, tangled heaps of shattered wood, twisted trees, mangled furniture, and the crushed remains of flattened vehicles.
And all the while it made a thunderous roaring sound. That’s what the survivors remembered. Few of them saw the tornado; all of them heard it. When they talked about it later, when they relived the horror in dreams, woke up screaming in sweat-tangled sheets in the midnight dark, or suffered paralyzing daytime flashbacks, it was the sound that haunted them. They tried to tack words onto it, to describe it, but descriptions rely on comparisons and there was nothing to compare it to. A cement mixer full of rocks, a run-away train, a buffalo stampede, Niagara Falls, an avalanche, a rocket engine. It was a more terrify
ing sound than any of those, the pitted voice of death, destruction, and utter devastation, louder than all their descriptions combined. Those who lived to tell about it heard that roar as they huddled in basements or air raid shelters, a rumble that grew louder and louder until it vibrated the very earth, and when they pleaded with God to spare their lives, they screamed their prayers so God could hear them over the thunderous roar.
Any structure that took a direct hit from the twister’s central vortex was vaporized. Mac’s church disappeared in an instant; shrapnel from its stained glass windows sliced six inches deep into the brick wall of an elementary school on the other side of town. Farther out from the meteor crater of the twister’s center, it slathered the lone remaining wall of an apartment complex with ice cream from the shattered dairy plant down the street and wadded up eleven mobile homes into smashed balls of tin. The two-mile wide backflow of the monster ripped off roofs, uprooted trees, and broke out windows all over Graham, even after it passed.
The devastation took less than three minutes; the dust had not yet settled from where it blasted its way into town before the tornado rumbled back out the other side. Its yellow color slowly fading, but its hunger unsated by its savage feeding frenzy, the twister shifted trajectory slightly and roared straight down US 270 toward the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for Women. The 761 inmates in the Iron House were not exactly innocents, but only one of them had been sentenced to die that day.
Chapter 30
Jackson Prentiss looked at his watch. Emily would be frying any minute now. And he’d missed it! He’d missed the execution, missed the opportunity to laugh in her face, missed forever the chance to show her she hadn’t beat him.
He didn’t swear or pound his fists, though. His anger was deeper than a physical show of emotion. It was a burning down in his guts that consumed him from the inside out.
The scar-faced little tramp had surely looked for him in the audience. In her eyes, his absence was some kind of admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that she had won.
He’d wanted her to ride a lightning bolt into the bowels of hell with the sound of his laughter echoing in her ears and the sight of her precious Angel snuggled up next to him.
He shook his head in frustration and spoke aloud to the sound of the hail knocking dents in the hood of his car. “Long as that child lives, she’s testimony to what that ugly little tramp did to me.”
He suddenly stopped breathing. The thought burst full-blown in his head as his best ideas always did, and he leaned his head back and laughed out loud at the exquisite irony of it.
As long as that child lived … well, that could be remedied. Oh, yes, it most surely could be fixed. Just like he fixed that Jew lawyer who got in his way. Emily stole Angela and gave her a whole new life. Well, he’d take away from the kid what Emily had given. Emily’s death would mean nothing if the child she died to save had … some kind of accident. Or maybe was outright murdered. Yes, a gruesome murder. Why not? Nobody in the world would make a connection between the famous Jackson Prentiss and some teenage girl in Oklahoma.
He smiled then; his plan put out the burning flame of rage in his belly and he was content. He would win. In the end, he always did.
* * * * *
Princess’s singing had almost unhinged Oran. He turned toward the wall and stared out the window until he could compose his face. What he saw in the next handful of seconds through that window would stalk the dark corridors of his nightmares for the rest of his life.
The golden orb of afternoon sun had just dropped below the leading edge of the storm system that formed a bubbling canopy over the Iron House and everything north and south of it stretching out fifty miles. The sunlight shining on the underside of the storm painted tattered wisps of clouds the pink and golden shades of a prairie sunset. The sun also backlit the monstrous thing heading north across the empty prairie, past the prison—toward the Indian Bluffs.
The thing was cast in stark relief, its form outlined by the slanted sunlight, a malevolent, swirling pillar that extended from the ground up through a gigantic hole in the boiling black overcast. It trailed a vast dust cloud in its wake like the plume of water behind a speedboat. Whipping silver strands of lightning flashed down from the bubbling caldron of black clouds above it, the spitting snakes of Medusa’s hair; internal lightning flashed within the cloud bank, blinking on and off like Christmas lights behind a curtain. The thing’s color boiled and changed as it roared past, a kaleidoscope of purplish black, gray, bruise-green and rust, all streaked with the bright yellow of a bug’s guts on a car grill.
It suddenly hit Oran what he was looking at. He recognized the thing for what it was: a mammoth tornado, more immense and ferocious than anything he ever dared to envision, a black finger writing death in the dirt as it gobbled up the world.
All at once, he was afraid he was going to scream. He put his hands to his face, palms against his mouth to stifle the sound. But he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the horror, stood transfixed as the nightmare twister hurled across the prairie three miles away, a stampeding elephant thundering toward the hills.
* * * * *
It had stopped hailing. Jackson shoved open the car door and climbed out. It was still raining, though, so he took off his suit jacket to use as an umbrella and stood looking at the wreck. A brand new Pontiac, smashed on one side where it had hit the ditch, bunged up and dented all over by the hail.
With a disgusted sigh, he turned the direction he’d been traveling before the car spun around, peered through the rain and was relieved to see that the town he’d been trying so hard to get to was only another quarter mile or so down the road. He set out at a brisk walk to find somebody to haul his car out of the ditch, holding his coat out over his head and watching his step so he didn’t slip in the mud.
It began to rain harder and he cranked up his walk to a jog. His suit jacket would be ruined! Then the rain became a torrential deluge; instantly soaked him to the skin. He could see nothing but the road a few feet in front of him. He hurried on, slogging through the mud, and finally the outline of the town appeared in the downpour.
Though he could barely see, when he drew nearer to the town he could tell it was a strange little burg. The buildings were all on the left side of the dirt street; none at all on the right overlooking the prairie and prison. At the far end of the block, he could just make out another row of buildings facing him.
He passed a sign that proclaimed “Welcome to Laramie Junction, Oklahoma,” but there was no welcoming committee waiting there for him. The place was totally deserted; there wasn’t a single car. And what he could see of the buildings looked odd, too, old fashioned. Squinting into the blowing rain, he could pick out what looked like a general store, a hotel and a … blacksmith shop? And were those hitching posts out front? It was like a town out of the old West! What in the … ? Then he got it. This was a place like Williamsburg, Virginia, a tourist attraction, where people wandered around in period costumes to delight the visitors. Well, on some back street somewhere there’d better be a garage, one with a wrecker.
As he hurried toward the nearest business, the Laramie Junction General Store, the rain and wind stopped abruptly, like somebody’d turned off the faucet and unplugged the fan. The afternoon sun had dropped below the cloud bank overhead and sent shafts of light to cast the wet buildings in a sparkling, golden glow. Not a breath of wind disturbed the profusion of dripping red cannas and Indian paintbrushes in the flowerbeds beside the raised wooden sidewalks. It was so eerily quiet his footsteps echoed on the old wood as he hurried up the steps before it started to rain again. The slanting sunlight sent his shadow leaping out ahead of him, stretching it all the way to the door.
And for no reason at all, Jackson felt a chill ripple down his spine.
He crossed the sidewalk in long strides, eager to get inside where it was dry. Reaching out his hand, he turned the doorknob and it swung inward easily.
Jackson froze. In the open doorway was
… a mound of dirt level with the sidewalk, brush, bushes, and the hillside beyond. If he stepped through the door he’d be right back outside again. It wasn’t a building at all, just the false front of one, like a movie set.
He heard it then. A sound like a rushing train, a rocket engine, a cement mixer full of rocks. It was the pitted voice of mindless devastation. His ears popped and he smelled wet dirt.
He turned and looked down at the open prairie. A wall of bubbling, black destruction was hurling past the prison straight at him, so huge it ate up all the world.
Terror almost stopped his heart. He had time to know it was death, that it had come for him and there was no escape, nowhere to hide in this fake town where nothing was real.
He leapt through the doorway and out the back side of the wall in unrestrained panic, trailing behind him a wailing shriek. He raced across the muddy dirt pile and began to claw his way up the hillside. He slipped, fell, scrambled to his feet and kept climbing. As the roar grew louder, he screamed and wept at the same time, blubbering, “Please no, not me! ”
The mile-wide leviathan rumbling across the prairie lifted off the ground as it neared the Indian Bluffs, like a heron taking flight. The dust plume it had stirred behind it on the ground ended abruptly and the dirt began to settle out of the air.
It climbed higher and higher, still spinning savagely, still roaring forward, though slower now, its outside edges becoming less and less defined. It passed far above the top of the Indian Bluffs, but its downdraft toppled trees and exploded Laramie Junction in a swirling rumble of shattered walls and splintered boards. The whole general store section flew backward onto the hillside, slammed into Jackson as he fled in terror, knocked him to the ground and collapsed around him.
The twister continued to rise into the sky. As the speed of its whirling winds gradually decreased, it rained debris it had carried with it for miles—hunks of mangled metal, fence posts, barn doors, shingles, bricks, a fine mist of corn kernels and pieces of featherless chickens. The eight-mile-high rotating column above it slowly dissipated; the tip of the monster tornado finally reached the black ceiling of bubbling, boiling cloud, melded into it and was no more.
