Race the Sky

by Michael Galloway

  “What’s your friend’s last name?” Jared said suddenly as he tapped his shoe on the floor. He flexed the muscles in his arms and the dragon tattoo jumped to life.

  “Why?” She said.

  “What? Don’t you trust me? I just want to pray for him.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Okay.” Jared looked at the pastor and then narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Pastor?”

  “Probably,” the pastor replied.

  “I think Madeline here has a dark cloud hanging over her. God wants you to be free, Maddie. He wants your Mom to be free. Here, let’s pray together,” Jared said.

  “No,” she said. She drew back as if the dragon on Jared’s arm was breathing fire.

  “Let’s pray for unity. Lead us, Pastor.”

  The pastor bowed his head but before he could say anything other than “Oh, Lord,” she left the office. Her thought life was a tempest full of anger, humiliation, and resolve. At first she thought she had a potential ally in Pastor Anbusch, but now she knew where he really stood. If I have to expose Jared for who he really is, then so be it, she thought. Mom will come around eventually. Right? Somehow the idea terrified her.

  She struggled to put her car key into the lock. When she finally got it open the car took several turns just to start. She stomped on the gas and left the parking lot with a screech of the tires.

  * * *

  As she drove off down the highway, rain continued to fall. An occasional bolt of lightning hit the ground in the farm fields next to town. Just before she turned down her home street, she heard something hit the roof of her car. At first she thought it was hail, but no other sounds came except for the rain. Seconds later a bolt of lightning smashed into the road just behind her car. The ensuing crash of thunder nearly caused her to swerve off of the road and into a ditch.

  Frantically, she dug around in her purse for her cell phone. The rain buffeted her car in torrents. She slowed her car down to avoid hydroplaning and flipped her windshield wipers on high. They battled furiously against the rain and barely kept up. Once she found her phone, she dialed John’s number.

  “Where are you?” She said, her voice rattled.

  “At work. Something wrong?” John said.

  “I stopped by the accident site and I found something interesting.” She looked over at the passenger seat. “I found a piece of burned metal.”

  “Really?”

  “What kind of car did Rebekah drive?”

  “A dark green Honda Civic. Why?”

  “Well, after the crash site I went to the church. I looked at the bumper of Jared’s truck. I think I found a match for your friend’s vehicle on his bumper. Then I went in to confront Jared about what happened this weekend but when I got there he was yelling at someone on the phone. When he hung up, another guy spoke up. They talked about a list and putting people on it. I think his name might have been Dr. Amalynth. Does the name ring a bell to you?”

  “No.”

  Just then another bolt of lightning hit a few feet in front of her car. She swerved again to avoid it, but stayed on the road.

  “What was that?” John yelled.

  “Something hit my car a few minutes ago. And then a lightning bolt tried to take me out. Do you think God’s mad at me?”

  “What makes you say a crazy thing like that?”

  “Something I read.”

  “Are you almost home?”

  “I’m getting close. But if I don’t make it carry on for me, please?”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “John, it’s the second bolt in two minutes.”

  “What?”

  “They keep hitting at the car.”

  John remained silent for a few seconds. “Hold it. I just thought of something. Head for a gas station.”

  “A gas station?”

  “Just trust me.”

  She drove past her apartment and pulled into one of the two gas stations in town. She parked under the awning that stretched over the gas pumps and turned her car off. “Okay, I’m here. Now what?”

  John was quiet for a moment. “This is going to sound weird, but I remember there was a witness who said they saw a lot of lightning near where Rebekah went off the road. But I couldn’t get them to make a statement. Then I tried to confront the chief of police about it, but he kept stalling and wouldn’t tell me anything. He kept telling me there were hardly any witnesses. But they kept coming forward anyway.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Jason Whitmore. He’s not the chief anymore though.”

  “Whitmore?” Her voice was incredulous. “He was at the healing service with his wife. He’s always at those events. I think he was even an usher at the service you went to.”

  “I thought that was him. Great,” John said with a sarcastic tone to his voice. “Has the lightning stopped?”

  She looked out her driver side window and watched for anything suspicious. The downpour continued and obscured her view of anything over fifty feet away. “I…I think so. I’m going to try heading home now.”

  “No. Wait until the rain stops and stay on the line with me. I think I just figured something out.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  John sat in his truck in the apartment parking lot waiting for Madeline. He spoke on the phone with Captain, but knew the conversation would have to end as soon as she showed up.

  “They did what at the service?” Captain said.

  “Jared stood up in front and said he wanted God to throw the switch,” John said.

  “What was he gonna do? Electrocute them?”

  “No, no. He was talking about grace or something. It was really weird. We took off after that.”

  “Are you going back?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then I can stop at the store.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to pick up something special.”

  “Why? What are you planning?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “You’re gonna get me in trouble aren’t you? I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

  Madeline emerged from the security entrance of the apartment building and walked over to the passenger side of the truck. John ended the call and stretched to hide a smile.

  “Who was that?” She said in a kind but curious manner.

  “Captain.”

  “You hung up so fast. Were you talking about me?”

  “Oh no. Just about future events.”

  “Such as…?”

  John smiled. “We better get going before it’s dinner time at Janet’s place.”

  Madeline climbed inside and buckled herself in. “Before we go, I want to show you some pictures.” She handed him her digital camera. “Here.”

  He thumbed through the images of the accident scene and then stopped on the picture of the metal casing she found by the road. He felt a lump in his throat. He wiped his eye and handed the camera back over to her. “That’s interesting. About the metal. Did you keep it?”

  “It’s in my apartment. Want me to go get it?”

  “Not right now.”

  “So what did you figure out yesterday? About the lightning?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I get these crazy theories.” His voice trailed off.

  “Like?”

  “Like God’s trying to send me a message.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

  “I don’t know what I believe.”

  After backing out of his parking spot, he avoided her eyes and focused on the road. The rest of the drive to Janet’s place was spent discussing anything but the accident site.

  * * *

  Janet’s primary place of residence was no longer her own home. Over the past two weeks she had battled pneumonia, broken the big toe on her right foot, and now had a rehab stint. When John entered into her nursing home room, he sensed this incident was the most serious of all.
He could see she was in visible pain, despite the best medication and her best efforts to hide it. It also looked as if she lost ten pounds since the last time he saw her.

  In her room, there were two beds, divided by a pale blue fabric curtain. Each half of the room had a flat screen television on the wall along with two chairs and a dresser for furniture. On the wall adjacent to Janet’s bed a cork bulletin board held a handful of notes, a lone get-well card, and a calendar. A clear glass vase of purple and yellow asters on the dresser added a splash of color to an otherwise drab environment. Next to the vase sat a translucent glass hawk with its wings lifted for takeoff. John recognized it as one of the birds from her shelves of knickknacks.

  Janet smiled as they greeted her but her eyes were not as bright as they were before. “It’s good to see you two,” she said with a bit of a struggle. She pressed the button to raise the head portion of the bed so she could talk to them easier. “I wanted to tell you a few things.”

  John and Madeline each dragged a wood-and-vinyl chair up to side of the bed. Madeline leaned in, picked up Janet’s hand, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  “I’ve been praying a lot lately. More than usual,” Janet said in an offhand way. “It’s been a long week. And I’ve been praying about your situation.” She took a deep breath and her voice became solemn. “But the answer I keep getting back is that the time has passed for talking.”

  Madeline’s eyes grew wide, but then she scrunched her eyebrows together.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but it’s time to stand back,” Janet said.

  “But I’ve just begun to fight. I…”

  Janet put up a hand and gave Madeline a firm but polite smile. “Maddie, pray. You can’t do anything else now. Remember a few months ago how you came to me with tears in your eyes because you tried warning people about him? And you told me how no one listened?”

  Madeline nodded.

  “You’ve done your part, now let God do His. Let Him deal with Jared.”

  Madeline drew back and let go of Janet’s hand. She gave John a perplexed look.

  John shrugged his shoulders but still looked at Madeline. “It was really weird the last time I went with you.”

  “Where did you go?” Janet said.

  “I went to a service with her and her mom. The last thing I remember was us flying out of there because Jared asked God to “throw the switch.””

  Janet turned to look out the window with a grin on her face. “He just never stops, does he?” She then looked back at Madeline with thoughtful eyes. The brightness returned in them if only for a moment. “How is your mom, by the way?”

  “She’s okay. But we couldn’t get her to leave,” Madeline replied.

  Janet reached out and grabbed Madeline’s hand. “She’ll come around. Like I said before, give her time. Remember, she’s as stubborn as I am.”

  “There has to be a way of stopping him.”

  “It’s not your battle anymore.”

  “But it is my battle. It’s my Mom!”

  Janet coughed hard and wheezed. She took a huff off of a nebulizer mask that hung over the railing of her bed. “I wish I could help you understand.”

  “Did you…” John’s voice trailed off.

  “What?” Janet said.

  “Did you see what happened in Ingot? There was a…storm. Took out part of the town.”

  Janet coughed again. “I heard. Wasn’t that sad?”

  “Maybe it’s none of my business…but did you stop praying for them?”

  “What day did it happen?”

  John glanced at the calendar on the bulletin board. “It would have been the 20th.”

  “The 20th? I think that’s the day I went to the hospital. I was probably so out of it. I might have forgotten. They had me on some pretty strong pain meds.”

  Just then the staff nurse walked into the room. She was a slender woman just out of college, with bright red short hair and a rose-colored uniform. Her movements were swift and efficient.

  “Sorry. They scheduled me for some tests. I might be gone a while,” Janet said. “Please forgive me. I want to talk more.”

  Madeline squeezed Janet’s hand again. The nurse wrote her name on the whiteboard next to Janet’s bed. She then flipped up the foot rests on Janet’s wheelchair and smiled at Madeline. Madeline and the nurse then helped Janet into the wheelchair.

  “We’ll come back another time. Maybe tomorrow,” Madeline said.

  “It was good to see you again,” John added.

  Janet reached over with both hands and gripped Madeline’s hands tight. “And one more thing. Dear, it’s not what Jared is going to do. It’s what he’s already done.”

  When she let go of Madeline’s hands, she smiled at John one last time. “Keep this girl safe.” Then she departed the room.

  * * *

  Most of the way back to the apartment Madeline was silent. As they approached her building, she spoke up. “What do you think she meant back there when she said “it’s what he’s already done?””

  “I have no idea,” John replied. He began to wonder if there really would be a next time with Janet because the scene reminded him of his grandmother’s last days in a nursing home. Just then, his cell phone rang. It was Captain and against his better judgment, he answered it.

  “Where are you?” Captain said in a calm voice. Often, that was the first sign of trouble.

  “We’re heading back to Madeline’s apartment,” John said.

  “Good. You might want to avoid the funhouse for a while.” Already, Captain was using code words. Another sign of trouble.

  “Why is that?”

  “The package has been delivered.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Madeline gave John a puzzled look.

  “You’re right,” Captain continued. “It wasn’t just one. There was a case worth. Hey, what’s up with their music leader? She’s one creepy chick.”

  John smiled and nodded his head as if Captain could see him. “Well, we’re here. Gotta go. Talk later.”

  “Okay.”

  John hung up the phone and smiled at Madeline.

  She narrowed her eyes at John as they pulled into the parking lot of her apartment building. “What are you two planning?”

  “Nothing. He was just talking about a circus.”

  “A circus? The funhouse at the circus? There aren’t any circuses within a hundred miles of here.”

  John looked away and opened his door. “Captain’s always picking up random flyers off of store counters. And it’s usually nothing but trouble. Here, let’s head upstairs and talk some more.”

  * * *

  Inside her apartment they held hands the entire time. She showed John a blown-up shot of Jared’s truck bumper and pointed out the dent on the corner. She zoomed in on the paint flecks to see if he recognized the color. Then she handed him the metal pipe she found at Rebekah’s accident site.

  He took it from her and turned it over in his hands. Part of the metal was melted and misshapen but the entire piece was blackened as if it had been subjected to intense heat or maybe a car fire. It was an inch in diameter and it bent easily when he squeezed it. He held it up to the light and attempted to read the letters imprinted along one of the edges.

  “Is it a piece from the car?” She said.

  “No. It’s too lightweight for that. If it was the tailpipe it would have been a lot heavier.”

  She went into the kitchen and returned with an empty plastic garbage bag. She set it on the coffee table and he slid the pipe inside.

  “It almost looks like…” He stopped in midsentence.

  “A what?”

  “I thought for a moment that it looked like a rocket. Wait a minute. When you were driving the other day and the lightning was hitting near you, did you notice anything else weird going on?”

  She paused to reflect. “I did hear something hit the roof of my car.”

  “Was it hail?”


  “No. It sounded kind of like…metal.”

  “Can I see that close-up of the bumper again?”

  She handed him a printed-out version of the photo she took with her digital camera. A chill started near his heart and spread through his body as if he just downed a glass of ice water in a single gulp. “The paint definitely matches the color of her car. God, I hope he didn’t bump her off the road.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  John, Captain, and Madeline sat on the couch in John’s house and together they stared at a pair of laptop screens. Next to the laptops lay John’s ragged road atlas. Even though it was missing a cover, the atlas was something he never chased without since the GPS application on his phone would often stop working in rural areas or utter the phrase “GPS signal lost” at the worst possible time. In his early chasing days, he often grew frustrated with applications on his phone that misdirected him onto dead-end roads or led him in strange contorted loops.

  “These numbers are off the charts,” John said as he stepped through several computer models online. He looked at the predictions for the next thirty-six hours. “They’re projecting a 90 knot mid-level jet to be screaming overhead during peak heating. The CAPE values are average, though.”

  He tilted the laptop screen toward Madeline and pointed to a graphic that showed a curved ski-jump-like shape to the mid-level winds. The blue and purple colors of the graph put the end of the ski-jump right on top of Omaha, Nebraska. Unfortunately, he could tell by the look in her eyes that the data meant little to her.

  “The forecast soundings look off to me, John,” Captain said as he flipped through more screens of data on the neighboring laptop.

  “Off in a good way or a bad way?”

  “Off, as in I think it’s going to look worse in a couple of days.”

  “At least we won’t have to drive very far to get in the middle of the action,” John said to Madeline. “The whole region is under a moderate risk and we’re still two days out. There’s a chance they might bump it up another category, too.”

  “You mean on Saturday?” Madeline said, suddenly interested again.

  “Looks like it. If we can lose the stratus in the morning.”

  “That’s not going to work.”

  “How is that not going to work? It’s not like you can tell the storms to hold up another day.”