A thin white rope descended almost all the way to the field ahead, then held. Hesitated. The top end of it whipped around a little and the bottom rose with it, and Josiah was sure the thing was about to retreat when it dropped with sudden strength and a spray of brown soil shot into the air. The windows on the truck were vibrating now, and the trees alongside the road were bending with the force of the wind once again. Only they were bending the wrong way, he realized, they were leaning in toward the cloud instead of away from it.
For a moment he let off the gas. He was beside Wesley Chapel now, where Danny had pulled in and watched a tornado go by, and now Josiah was staring down another one. He’d heard plenty about such storms—they weren’t uncommon in southern Indiana—but he’d never seen one himself. The thing looked nothing like the funnel shape you always heard of. No, it was just a rope. A white rope connecting earth to sky, and moving forward. Moving east. Moving toward him.
He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and saw Danny’s car coming on down the road. Shaw had turned around and started in pursuit of him. What in the hell did he think he could do?
Still, he was catching up. The tornado sat no more than a half mile away now to the west, the direction Josiah needed to go. It was moving but without great speed. Seemed relaxed, almost. Low-key about the way it was tearing through the land. He watched it come up on one lone tree, saw the treetop bend toward it, and then the cloud was over it and the tree disappeared from sight. An instant later it had cleared the tree, and the trunk remained, but almost all of the branches that had made up the top were gone. The cloud chewed back into the farmland.
It looks like a power washer, Josiah thought, it looks exactly like a damn power-washer jet. A thin white rope with an invisible and incredible chisel at the end of it, blasting that field away like it was so much dirt on a deck board.
He looked in the rearview again and saw Danny’s car closing in fast.
Can’t just sit here, boy. Work left to be done, isn’t there? You bold enough to do it? You got the strength, the will?
Sure he did. Sure. Josiah turned left, away from the chapel, and laid into the Ranger’s accelerator once again. Ahead of him, the tornado was nearing the road. The base of the white rope had turned brown, and Josiah could see an outer ring of debris circling it. Some awful large objects in that outer ring. All around him the air hummed with a mighty locomotive’s roar.
Danny was right, he thought, damn things really do sound just like a train.
He could see the spot where the cloud was likely to cross the road, and he knew that if he made it there first, he’d be fine, and Shaw, still trailing behind, would likely be dead. It was a teenage boy’s game, nothing more, a bit of that old chicken run. Wasn’t nobody else had Josiah’s nerves in the game back then, and wasn’t nobody else who had them now. He eyed the likely intersection between storm and road and put the full weight of his right leg into the gas pedal, heard the overextended six-cylinder moaning.
You make it through, boy, you are home free. That storm will block everybody trying to come at you from the east, don’t you see? The road will be yours. Just got to make it, just got to show the strength and will, keep those hands steady on the wheel and the foot heavy on the gas…
He was right alongside it now, and when he chanced a final glance up at the rearview, he saw Eric Shaw was falling back. Slowing down, afraid to take this run.
“We knew that,” he said. “He don’t have the strength of will, does he, Campbell? Man doesn’t have what we have.”
The truck was at eighty-five now and no more than two hundred feet from clear of the storm. The driver’s window clouded over with brown dust and then the windshield was covered, too, and Josiah couldn’t see a damn thing but that didn’t matter, because he knew the other side would be clear. He let out a howl of pure pleasure and bent over the wheel, knowing that he’d made it. Wasn’t another man alive would have taken this drive, but he’d not only taken it, he’d made it.
That taste of pure victory was the last thing he knew in the instant before the truck began to slide to the left, and he had time for just one more thought, a final, unspoken question: Why am I moving this way? This isn’t the way I wanted to go…
This tornado didn’t have the funnel shape of that first one, looked like an angry white whip, and Eric could not believe it when he saw the pickup turn left and head directly toward it.
“What are you doing?” Eric said. “What are you doing, you crazy bastard?”
The Ranger was accelerating, speeding into the storm, which was now almost to the road. Eric blew through the stop sign and swung left as well, sped up for a moment, and then saw what would happen and let his foot off the gas pedal, saying, “Don’t let it, no, don’t let it…”
The cloud crossed the field and met the road and enveloped Josiah Bradford’s truck. For one instant, there was nothing but the cloud, and Eric had time to form a they-can-survive-this hope and then the truck exploded.
The blast was muted by the roar of the storm, but even so, Eric heard it and felt it. The whole car shook and the pavement vibrated beneath its wheels and a burst of orange flame showed itself in the center of the cloud. The wind took the heat and sucked it upward, the flame climbing the center of the white rope into the sky like it was a fuse dangling from the heavens. Then the cloud was past and the flame within it was gone and Eric could see the truck again.
It was upside down on the side of the road, at least forty feet from where it had met the funnel cloud. The roof supports had caved in and it rested flat on the ground, the white paint blistered off to reveal charred metal beneath. Flames crackled across the chassis and licked out of the cab.
Eric couldn’t scream. He stared at the burning wreck and wanted to scream but could not. His jaw worked and his breath came almost against the will of his body, but he was silent. He was hardly aware that his car was being dragged until he felt the right wheels slip off the road, and then he realized the storm had been pulling him toward it. Then it was too far away and its grip loosened and left the car sitting half on the road.
He fumbled the driver’s door open and got out and ran to the truck. A light rain had started to fall again, a sprinkle that had not the slightest effect on the flames. He got within fifteen feet before the heat drove him back, and he heard himself sobbing now, looking down at the smoldering metal.
No one could have survived it.
He stood there for a long time, with his hands held up to shield his face from the heat. The flame roared and crackled and then burned down, and there seemed to be nothing left of the cab at all. He stepped closer and saw a thin rod of white amidst all the black char, knew it was bone, and fell to his knees and vomited in the grass.
He was down there on his hands and his knees when he heard the voice. Not the scream from Claire that he’d been fearing, but a whisper that now felt familiar.
You brought me home. Been a long time coming. Too many years I was gone. But you brought me home.
He jerked up and stared at the smoldering truck and saw nothing inside, just all that ash and heat and thin black smoke, and then his eyes rose and he saw Campbell Bradford standing just beyond, close enough to the truck that he could touch it but unaffected by the flames.