Fully Loaded Thrillers

by Blake Crouch

  He’d be fifty-three in October, if he lasted that long, and he put the waitress in the vicinity of forty-five—short and slender with graying blond hair and thin lips conservatively colored with coral lipstick that for some reason reminded him more of an accountant. She wore a white dress shirt and black jeans and her hair had been tugged back into a ponytail.

  “We don’t get many folks, revise that, any folks just passing through our little piece of prairie.”

  Peter sipped his wine, the stem of the glass still warm from the dishwasher.

  Notes of black cherry and dish detergent.

  “No, I’ve been saving up for years to come to Hoxie. It’s the culmination of a lifelong dream.”

  The waitress shot him a slanted stare. “Are you having fun with me?”

  He smiled. “A little bit. I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head and started her retreat toward the kitchen. “I can already tell,” she said, pointing her finger at him, “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”

  Sudden applause issued from the banquet room, signifying what could only mean the end of one fleet admiral’s career. Peter leaned back and sipped his wine and basked in a tremor of contentment, old enough at last to know better than to analyze it, or embrace it longer than it meant to stay.

  He walked back to the motel a little drunk and a lot tired. Friday night, 9:30 p.m., and Hoxie as dead as advertised—no sound but the hum of streetlamps and crickets. He climbed into the RV and sat for awhile in the dark on the foldout sofa. Staring through the window into the prairie, half-expecting to see some suggestion of residential glow out there, but not even a porchlight disrupted the gaping darkness. Around midnight, he got up and stepped into the closet-size john. Brushed the wine stain off his teeth and tried to avoid meeting the eyes in the tiny mirror. Windows to an empty house. Lobotomy eyes. He cracked a window and crawled into bed. The sound of the wind blowing across the prairie moved him like nothing had in days.

  In the morning, he brought yesterday’s coffee to a fast boil in a saucepan and powered up the laptop. The forecast discussion on the National Weather Service’s Goodland, Kansas Website thrilled him—extreme thunderstorm activity expected along the Nebraska border.

  Peter headed north up Highway 23 and reached the town of Cedar Bluffs at noon, the sky still clear, the heat intense and wet. He pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut, nuked a frozen dinner in the microwave, ate lunch, slept off the remnants of a three-wine headache.

  He woke sweating, the sun blazing into the RV. Grabbed a bottled water from the Fridge, drained it in one long gulp.

  That familiar pang of disappointment blossomed in his stomach as he read the updated forecast discussion. The NWS had, as usual, missed the boat. A line of storms were setting up, but over the eastern plains of Colorado, a hundred and seventy miles west of his position. With convection already underway and a supercell forming south of Greeley, the party would be over long before he got there.

  He convinced himself on the five-block stroll from his RV to the Prairie View Café that he was going in hopes they’d reprised the chicken-fried steak and because he’d spent the entire day in his home on wheels. It had nothing to do with the waitress who probably had the night off anyway.

  She stood at a booth scribbling an order onto a pad when he walked into the restaurant. The chimes that jangled over the opening door caught her attention, and she looked at Peter and raised her finger, might even have winked, though he couldn’t say that for certain in the poor light. The thought of it put knots in his stomach. She wore a blue and white dress that seemed such the epitome of her profession it reminded him more of a movie costume. With her hair down tonight and her lips a paler pink than before, perhaps their natural color, he went short of breath as she walked toward him.

  “Hi, Peter.”

  “Melanie.”

  “You want the window booth again or a brand new experience?”

  He thought about it. “I like the booth.”

  She walked him over.

  He slid in.

  “How was your day in scenic Hoxie?” she asked, setting a menu on the table, and he almost responded as he would have to any other human being who tried to engage him, but he didn’t want to just say, “Fine,” because then she’d probably smile and leave and he wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want her to walk away yet.

  “Disappointing,” he confessed.

  “What happened?”

  “It was supposed to storm up near the Nebraska border, but the forecast didn’t pan. Kind of a wasted day.”

  She looked at him askance. “It was a beautiful day, Peter.”

  “Not if you wanted a storm.”

  “No, I guess not. Well, I’ll be back in a bit to tell you about the special. You want something to—”

  “I’m an idiot,” he said, heat flooding his face, wondering if she noticed the color. “I should explain.”

  “No, it’s—”

  “I’m a storm chaser. That’s why I wanted it to—”

  “You mean one of those people who photograph tornadoes?”

  “Sort of.”

  Her face lit up. The awkwardness retreating. “Oh my God, that is so interesting. So you’re one of those guys.”

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled. Strangely, genuinely impressed. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard of in awhile. How’d you pick Hoxie?”

  “You guys got hammered a couple years back with a tornado outbreak.”

  “I was here when those storms swept through. It was awful.”

  “Well, I’ve been all over Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, eastern Kansas.”

  “Searching for that elusive storm?”

  “Something like that. This western part of Kansas is the last region I haven’t spent a ton of time in. Long range models were predicting an active couple of weeks, so I thought why not give it a shot.”

  Melanie glanced over her shoulder at the two other occupied tables, then sat in the booth across from Peter.

  “You ever seen a tornado?”

  “I’ve seen nine of them.”

  “Like in real life?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s the closest you ever got?”

  “A mile away.”

  “What was it like?”

  Like standing next to God, but he didn’t say that.

  “Amazing.”

  She looked at her tables. “I better get back to it.” She got up.

  “Melanie?”

  “Yes?”

  His heart thumped in his chest.

  “I’m going out again tomorrow. Now, there’s no guarantee the weather will cooperate, but—”

  “I’d love to, Peter.”

  “You would?”

  “You must’ve read my mind. I was hoping you’d ask.”

  It was like nothing he’d done in years, and he felt both joy and debilitating regret that in a moment of weakness (or strength) he’d exposed himself.

  The waitress said, “Glass of red?”

  His throat constricting. “Be great.”

  She headed back toward the kitchen, and he stared through the windowglass, watching the prairie darken. Kept telling himself that it was still Saturday night and he was only in Kansas and his RV just five blocks away. As if that piece of news might tether him to the world he knew.

  Melanie lived two miles out of town at the end of a dirt road, spruce trees forming a windbreak along the north and west boundaries of the homestead. It had seemed an idyllic farmhouse from the highway, austere on the morning prairie. Proximity destroyed the illusion. The white paint had chipped almost completely away, and the weathered boards and the rusting tin roof and smiling porch presented more of a ghost house than a livable dwelling.

  Melanie emerged and spent a minute locking the door after her. Came down the bowing steps and through the weeds onto the drive as Peter leaned across the seat to open her door, the pair of coffees he’d bought at the gas station ste
aming into his face.

  “I could barely sleep I was so excited,” she said as they rolled along the dirt road toward the highway.

  “Could turn out to be a bust,” Peter warned. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

  “Well, it’s all about the journey, right?”

  They drove west on the interstate, the sun a blood blister in the side mirrors, its light so watery and diffused you could stare it down. Adult contemporary droned through the speakers at a reasonable volume, the small talk coming just often enough to keep the stretches of silence from passing the point of no return.

  They crossed the border into Colorado at a quarter past eleven and Peter pointed through the windshield. “You see that?”

  “You mean those clouds?”

  “The one that looks like an anvil is going to be a thunderstorm when it grows up.”

  “This is good?”

  “Very good. Major convection underway.”

  Melanie squealed and clapped her hands, something free and childlike in her excitement.

  He took the next exit and pulled over so they could track the gathering storm cells on the laptop—irregular blobs of green with nuclei of hot pinks and fuchsia.

  “They’re still maturing,” he said, running his finger along the screen, tracking the loop of their northwesterly movement on the radar. “We’ll take 385. Should intercept them in about forty minutes. If we’re lucky, they’ll be booming.”

  They went north. The summer sky turned dark. Peter lowered his window, let the musty air rush in. Straining to hear thunder over the engine.

  They pulled onto the shoulder on the outskirts of Wray, Colorado. Peter killed the engine and glanced over at the computer, now in Melanie’s lap.

  “We’re in position,” he said.

  The first fat drops of rain splattered on the windshield as Peter squinted at the screen.

  He opened his door, got out, crossed the road.

  Melanie joined him.

  Strings of lightning bent down and rain sagged from the clouds in ragged black tendrils.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said, and he wondered if she really meant it, if it touched her with even a fraction of the intensity it touched him, or if she was saying what she thought he wanted to hear. He looked up at the clouds streaming over them.

  Lightning touched the plain a mile away, the blast of thunder vibrating the ground beneath their feet.

  Melanie clutched his arm.

  “Should we go back to the car?” she asked, and he couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. You embraced a storm by standing in the middle of the goddamn thing, feeling the rain beat down on your face, letting the wind bully you, trying not to flinch when the thunder dropped right on top of your head.

  “Sure,” he said. “We can go back.”

  They experienced the storm from inside the RV, everything reduced to gray through the rain-streaked glass and nothing to see beyond fifty yards as thunder detonated all around them, the Winnebago creaking and listing against the stronger gusts.

  Melanie reached over and pried Peter’s right hand off the steering wheel and laced her fingers through his. Her hand was small and warm, and he was afraid if he looked at her she would kiss him.

  When the storms had passed, they went on, taking backroads into Kansas, the late afternoon sky going bright and clear, Peter feeling with every passing breath like the RV was shrinking, the air being compressed from his lungs.

  Thirty miles north of Hoxie, he pulled off onto the side of the road.

  “Why are you stopping?” Melanie asked.

  “I just need some air.”

  He walked around the front of the Winnebago, the overworked engine pumping eddies of heat through the radiator. Twenty yards from the road, he stopped. The only disruption in all that prairie a grain mill several miles to the east. Peter took deep breaths until the mayhem in his head had gone quiet and he could hear the grasses scraping at his jeans.

  Melanie said, “You all right, Peter?”

  The sun had dipped below the western horizon.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Uh huh.”

  They traveled in silence for another mile.

  “I mean, did I do something? Because I thought we were having a pretty good time this morning, but now—”

  “No, of course not.”

  “We weren’t having a good time?”

  “No, I mean you didn’t do anything.”

  She stared out her window.

  They cruised south on Highway 23, and the quiet had grown cancerous by the time the headlights of the RV swept across the porch of Melanie’s farmhouse. He shifted into park and turned back the ignition. Melanie unbuckled her seatbelt.

  “Hold on,” Peter said.

  “What?”

  He wanted her out of the RV. Wanted nothing more than to drive back to the motel, crawl into bed.

  “This is my fault,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was my idea. I invited you.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “I thought…”

  “What?”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”

  Melanie put her hand on the door.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching across the open space between the seats, almost touching her, letting his hand rest instead on the edge of her seat. “I just thought I was capable of doing this.”

  “Of doing what? Being with me? Is it so difficult?”

  “Being with anyone is, but when I saw you in the café last night…I don’t know…something shifted. I’ve said more to you in the last couple days than I have to anyone in twenty years.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “If you understood, if you could be in my head for two minutes, it would.”

  The interior lights cut out.

  Peter said, “This morning, you asked me where I lived, and I told you I was from Providence.”

  “So?”

  “That wasn’t really the truth. I lived there a long time ago, but I don’t really live anywhere now. I bought this RV in 1987. Been my home ever since.” Out Peter’s window, a lightning bug flared against the glass. “It’s the hardest thing right now for me not to ask you to get out.”

  Melanie opened her door.

  “I’m not saying I want you to.”

  “I need some air.”

  She climbed out of the Winnebago and walked across the gravel drive, easing down on the front porch steps. Peter looked at the keys dangling from the ignition. He touched them. Opened his door and stepped down into the grass.

  Lightning bugs everywhere.

  A lone cricket screeching maniacally.

  He sat beside her on the steps. Cool and he could smell warm hay carried on the breeze.

  Said, “In the winters, I seek out ice storms and blizzards. Tornadoes and hurricanes in the summertime. I was in Charleston when Hugo roared ashore in ’89. I was in Florida for Andrew in ’92. The Lower Ninth Ward last summer when the levies broke. I’ve spent winters at Paradise Lodge on the south slope of Rainier just to watch it dump nine hundred inches of snow. A couple years ago I stayed a month at the observatory on Mount Washington. Stood in a hundred and forty mile-per-hour wind that almost blew me off the mountain. I feel…dead…all the time, except when I’m in the middle of some storm, watching the clouds swirl, feeling the snow or rain pelt my face. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but this is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I came to Hoxie to do it, and then I met you, and for a minute—I don’t know why—I wanted to share it with you.”

  “Do you have family, Peter?”

  The question caused him to flinch. “I don’t have anyone. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you. I know that. I just want you to understand that it’s not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. The reason it turned out like it did today is ’cause I—”

  “You have issues
.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot of them.”

  “Now why are you crying?”

  “’Cause you hurt my feelings, dummy.” She wiped her face, got up, and hurried into the house, the door slamming after her. He could hear her crying through the thin walls.

  Pushed himself onto his feet and climbed the two flimsy steps to the stoop, where he pulled open the screened door and knocked on the wood of the inner door.

  “Melanie, come on. Can we talk please?”

  The cries more distant now, lost inside the house.

  “I’m coming in, all right?” He tried the door. The knob turned, hinges creaking as he let it swing open. “Melanie?”

  He stepped into a foyer, the air redolent of cardboard.

  There were boxes everywhere—stacked to the ceiling on either side of the hallway that ran past the stairs into the kitchen, leaving the walkway so tight he would’ve had to sidestep to pass through. At first, he thought Melanie must be in the process of moving, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it before, but then his eyes fell on the living room.

  He’d never seen anything like it.

  Four television sets, three DVD players, what probably would have formed a cubic yard of DVDs had they not been spread across the room.

  A leather couch buried beneath stacks of National Geographic and The New Yorker.

  A coffee table caved in under the weight of several full sets of encyclopedias.

  Out from under the couch, a gray cat darted over a pile of clothes that still bore their price tags, disappearing into a dining room paralyzed for the stacks of newspapers, eight grills, still in their boxes, and what he estimated to be over five hundred unopened packages of plastic utensils monopolizing every square inch of table space.

  He made his way through the cramped hall, and as he neared the kitchen the smell of rotting food became overpowering. He held the side of his arm across his nose and mouth, and standing in the doorway, wondered how Melanie even made use of the Fridge and the sink and the oven range what with the linoleum buried under hundreds of pounds of canned food and sacks of flour and sugar, thirty cereal boxes, and on the countertops, a component of the stench—clusters of bananas and apples and what might have been oranges, all shriveled and glazed with blue mold.