attack thing is racing through a lot of people’s lives on this day.
Jeff was running from the road towards the hotel parking lot, or maybe running was overdoing it, he was moving as quickly as he could, there wasn’t a lot of thinking but it flashed through his thoughts that there was no way they could know this wave was about to hit and when the giant wave of water, mud, debris, and a few bodies did hit the back of the hotel it sounded like an explosion. The shock wave of that alone knocked him to one knee.
How it didn’t knock him fully on his ass he didn’t know.
A large portion of the wave washed over the hotel and hit the parking lot. Jeff turned for a second and he locked eyes with the young woman trapped between the two vehicles he had been trying to help just before the wave hit him hard. He wanted to say how sorry he was but in her eyes she told him she understood.
The force of the wave cracked Jeff’s ribs the second it came into contact with him. The slow motion thing you always hear in stories and see in movies is true. Jeff could feel each fracture of his ribs. They happen more or less all at once but in these seconds each crack shot to his brain as quick as a pinch with a pair of vice grips.
Within more seconds Jeff was thrown back into the road bouncing several times as if the pavement was a kid’s trampoline. At the point where his face had identified the surface it was touching was indeed road another surge of water came off another mountain edge.
The new surge of water swept him down and over a hill into an overflowing creek nearby that more resembled a lake at this time. He tried fighting to keep from going over the hill but by the time he reached the creek he didn’t have much left.
He disappeared under the water in an instant choking, with fighting, trying not to give up.
It would be a week later when the body of the women trapped between the trucks would be found wedged up the undercarriage of a semi truck eight miles from the hotel. She would just be a name on a long list of bodies being found. Bodies battered, bodies not only wiped from life but wiped from any appearance of who they once were.
She had hope in her eyes. He had hope in his eyes. But what they shared more than anything else was the fear of the moment and in that brief moment of eye contact before the wave washed completely over the hotel that contact of humanity had put them both in a sort of peace that only a few ever taste.
This was her story. These brief mentions of life in rain and in pain only belong to her. No family, no friends, no scars or scuff marks left behind on the world. In town in search of work after losing her factory job but she wouldn’t even have that much on the lips of strangers to speak of her when buried.
There are transgressions of reporting and storytelling and one of the biggest is forgetting that it isn’t just the names and stories which die on these days. Everyone can’t have a story or even a mention but letting some random lives seep in keeps things human.
He is just a random young man but that doesn’t make him any less important than anyone else. Having never cared for what he weared, he isn’t known as the comic book t-shirt guy. Having never cared for how he looks, he isn’t known as the one with the mohawk.
He was on his way back from his job at one of the many tourist trap t-shirt shops in the area. The job was his first since dropping out of college. He had lucked up finding it just as the last of his money had run out from saving his left over Pell Grant funds.
When the lightning and rain first started he ran for a nearby restaurant for shelter and to wait out the storm. He does it all the time because he walks just about anywhere he needs to go. There are tactics you learn when footing it is how you travel.
By the time he reached the door of the restaurant and got inside that is when the tornados started one after the other. He along with everyone in the restaurant watched as out of the sky grew down funnel cloud after funnel cloud. It was an almost unbelievable sight to see.
But they were seeing it.
Everyone ran for the back work areas of the restaurant but for most of them it was already too late. Their reactions didn’t overpower their astonishment at what they were seeing fast enough. A tornado hit the restaurant which was almost completely surrounded by glass windows and swiped it away like a hand waving at part of a sandcastle.
He survived with one of the waitresses because they just made it into the shift manager’s office. They didn’t even have time to shut the door and that also allowed them the view of watching what happen to everyone else. The ones just sucked up and out, the ones slammed against walls to never move again, and the young girl screaming for them to help her and she crawled towards the door and just before she reached it one of the glass rotisserie ovens tipped over to land on top of her.
From second to second, moment to moment everyone is just wishing and begging for a chance to breathe.
Mind flashes of please give me time to smile, to shed more tears, to scream or yell or deny what is happening.
The hotel was now flooding like a massive play box with holes in it. Like someone had just dropped them into a huge fishbowl. But danger was also leaking fear as the barriers everyone had put up to barricade the hotels doors and windows were now trapping them in a fast filling water deathtrap.
Fox and Karen along with others are rushing to try and free the entrance from the objects they had blocked it with but the pressure of the water now inside was wedging the stuff in tight.
This moment had went straight from “What the fuck?” to “What the fuck?” without a “What the fuck?” between but there were a couple “What the fucks?”
The water was already waist high or above on everyone. Small kids screaming were being held high by people who were tall and strong enough to hold them up.
But to be fair the kids weren’t the only ones screaming.
One of the cheerleaders was onto of the reception desk and was helping a pregnant woman up on it to join her. In these situations there is always a pregnant woman. Good thing in this situation there was also a cheerleader playing hero. The rest of the squad wasn’t playing heroes.
Did you see what I did there?
Oh, come on, the first season was pretty good.
Without warning the entranceway of the hotel exploded sending everyone flooding outside. Out went people, furniture, and a very large quantity of water. As everyone was trying to catch their bearings, because not many of them have had the chance since the first lightening strike- they though were happy to be alive.
More than a few quickly noticed how much worse it actually was outside in the winds, hail, flying debris of all sizes, and rain. Sort of being a piece of meat that jumped from one blender into an even bigger one. The elbow room was better but the blades were still there.
Apt failure there.
Then another wave hit the back of the hotel and this time it did not sound like an explosion. The sound in fact was more of a silence and the impact shredded the hotel like a set of Lincoln Logs hit by a shotgun blast.
With remains of the hotel flying everywhere a piece of something, in fact a small box of Canadian coins, caught Fox square in the back of her head putting her into a unconscious state as she was getting off the parking lot surface.
Karen found sight of her fallen friend. She got to her as fast as she could and grabbed Fox under her arms. With an adrenaline rush right out of a main event wrestling match she dragged her behind the former hotels parking lot wall as more large and small pieces of debris pounded against the lot walling.
Fox was babbling something about a midget in Vancouver who loved whisky a little too much for his own good. This is the type of thing Fox would never tell the people in the new life she was trying to build because of the other stories it could led to but no one could hear her over the winds and rain so it didn’t matter.
Karen pulled Fox closer up into her arms. She watched bodies and bits of stuff wash into the road and down into the former creek; which was now a full blown raging river.
Why do these things keep happening to them was her
thinking. It seemed like every since Fox and her became friends again the whole world was hitting them with stuff to try and keep them apart.
She blamed her sister.
No, really.
Her thinking was this had to be Gail’s fault.
All of it.
Karen was holding Fox very tight not even noticing the blood staining her t-shirt. She was just sitting with her eyes closed knowing that she maybe about to die and thinking Fox maybe the lucky one right now because either her hearing was damaged or she was losing touch with reality because all she could do was think about Jeff and how much he loved old disaster movies like Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.
And she hated them. Thought they were total crap.
Then she thought about how much she would miss him and she didn’t want to miss him. She hated the idea of even thinking about missing him. He was her best friend. She didn’t want to miss her best friend. She wanted to get Fox out of this. Make sure she was safe but she didn’t want a world without the guy who knows her better than anyone else in the world.
The rain was hitting with cold stinging pecks and she was wondering if she would ever watch any disaster movie she hated again. It was something they did together and now he was gone. The joy would be sucked out of that former fun.
God it danced into her mind from sisterly thoughts of blaming her sister to what was Gail going to do when
Tin Universe Monthly #11 Page 2
