Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [63]
They didn’t belabor, as Peter had feared, the circumstances that had brought them to this moment. As she’d said, it wasn’t about that.
Exhaustion and contentment brought increasingly expansive lulls. Then they lay in silence, both facing the tall window beside Melanie’s bed. When the lightning came and the prairie flashed into existence through the heat-warped glass, Peter would catch the fleeting sense that this house and the two of them lying naked upstairs in bed was all that was left of the world.
Glass rattling in the sill wrenched Peter out of sleep and he returned to consciousness as the peal of thunder faded out.
He sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
The darkness through the window tinged with gray.
A jag of lightning split it down the middle.
Melanie moaned, half-asleep, “What are you doing?”
Peter swung his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his briefs and jeans, still conjoined on the floor.
“I need to go read the Goodland advisories.”
“It’s…five-twenty in the morning.”
“Those sound like major storms out there.”
They hurried down the front porch steps, the grasses thrashing and the air making their eyes water, filled with dust and slivers of chaff.
In the RV, Peter opened the laptop and pulled up the National Weather Service page he’d bookmarked upon his arrival in Hoxie.
“Oh, man,” he said.
“What?”
“Come look.”
BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED
TORNADO WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GOODLAND KS
517 AM MDT MON JUL 17 2006
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GOODLAND HAS ISSUED A
* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
NORTH CENTRAL SHERIDAN COUNTY IN NORTHWEST KANSAS...
* UNTIL 630 AM MDT
* AT 510 AM MDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A TORNADO 15 MILES NORTHWEST OF HOXIE...OR ABOUT 8 MILES WEST OF SELDEN...MOVING EAST AT 15 MPH.
* THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...
SELDEN AROUND 610 AM MDT...
IF YOU ARE AT HOME...SEEK SHELTER IN A BASEMENT IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE...GO TO A SMALL INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR. AVOID WINDOWS AND PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FLYING DEBRIS.
IF IN MOBILE HOMES OR VEHICLES...EVACUATE THEM AND GET INSIDE A STURDY SHELTER. IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS.
“I have to go,” Peter said.
“Right now?”
He closed the laptop. “Right now.”
“I want to come with you.”
“This will be dangerous, Melanie.”
“I know. But I want to see it. Just let me go change into something.”
“We don’t have time.” He jumped up from the sofa and moved into the front of the RV, sat down behind the wheel, fished the keys out of his pocket. “Bring the laptop please,” he said. “You can help me track it.”
They sped through dreaming Hoxie, the wet streets of the hamlet vacated, the houses still dark. Peter ran the single traffic light at the center of town and raced north up Highway 23, pushing the Winnebago harder than he had in years, the RPMs edging into the red.
“There it is,” Peter said.
“Where?”
He pointed out the windshield. To the northwest in the strengthening light, a thunderhead towered over the plain—concentric circles of green-tinted clouds spiraling into the upper reaches of a 60,000-foot supercell out of the bottom of which a curtain of pale gray draped to the prairie floor.
“God,” he said.
“Is this a special one?”
“You never see them like this.”
“On the radar, it looks like the storm is moving just a bit more to the north.”
“Is it still on track to hit Selden?”
“I think so.”
“Then we’ll try to intercept on Highway 9.”
They entered Selden at 5:57 a.m.
Houselights shining. Families gathered on porches to stare at