Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [64]
“Let me see the laptop.”
He studied the radar loop for thirty seconds and handed the Mac back to Melanie.
“Are we good?” she asked.
He could feel his heart pulsing against the back of his eyes. “Perfect.”
Peter drove the RV across the intersection and onto the opposite shoulder so they faced west toward Selden and the storm. He cut the engine and opened his door and stepped down. Walked twenty feet out from the Winnie, straddled a slash of faded yellow paint in the middle of the road.
Checked his watch: 6:04.
They’d pulled over at a point of prominence on the prairie, the land falling gently away in every direction, so they could see for miles. The front passenger door slammed. He glanced back, saw Melanie walking toward him in a pair of slippers and a lavender nightgown, the thin cotton flickering in the wind.
She smiled, took hold of his hand.
At their backs, the sun crept over the horizon, and when its light hit the storm, the leading shelf cloud turned dirty pink.
It sounded like Selden was getting shelled, the tornado alarm reduced to a dial tone from this distance.
Raindrops specked the pavement.
The alarm hushed.
The swarthy clouds over Selden turned black and a substation exploded in a burst of loose electricity.
Melanie’s grip tightened around Peter’s hand.
Already you could see the counterclockwise churn of debris growing more profuse with every second, and then a black column emerged from the town, carrying pieces of Selden in its swirl which curved for several thousand feet into the sky.
Melanie said, “Oh my God.”
Pellets of hail had begun to bounce off the pavement, a breathy roar becoming audible.
“Should we go?”
He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “The twister’s going to come right down this highway. Right over this spot.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
He handed her the keys to the Winnie. “Head east as fast as you can.”
“Peter—”
“Listen to me. It’s a slow-mover, and there’s a northerly component to its trajectory, so it’ll eventually veer north of the highway.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Melanie, I’ve been trying to get myself into this position for ten years. This is a once in a lifetime kind of—”
“What position? Getting yourself killed by a tornado?”
“I don’t expect you to understand, but I am asking you to please just let me have this moment. Let me do this without interference. I think about it every day. I dream about it all the time. This is what I want. This is all I want.”
“So I just step back, let you commit suicide?”
“I could’ve shot myself years ago. This isn’t about suicide, Melanie.”
“Then what’s it about?”
The twister sounded like sustained thunder, even from three miles away, the condensation funnel widening and darkening, cluttered with all it had scoured out of Selden—cars and stoves and splinters of siding and so many airborne shingles they resembled a flock of birds and God knows what else.
“You better go.”
She shook her head.
“Goddammit, you aren’t going to change—”
She framed his face with her hands. “I’m not trying to change your mind. I honest to God want to stay with you.”
“Melanie.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t you do that. We haven’t known each other long, but I get you, and I think you get me. We aren’t here to save each other, Peter. You know that. That’s not what this is about.”
He stared at her, the wind whipping her hair across her face, pea-size hail clinking on the RV. For a second he considered what it might feel like to love her, but the attendant pain and fear was cost-prohibitive.
He swiped the keys out of her hand, started running toward the RV.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” he said, cranking the engine.
Through the windshield, Selden had vanished behind a shaggy funnel a quarter-mile across.
Peter accelerated toward it, the tornado expanding