The Breathtaker (31 page)
S
OPHIE PLASTERED
herself against her seat as the van went into a deadly skid, slewing sideways across the road. They spun around,
thwunk, thwunk,
crack-thumping over potholes. A disabling fear descended as the vehicle ground to a halt, and then, with a creaking groan, everything went still.
Pain shot up her spine. She licked her lips and could taste the blood on her teeth. Raising her hands to her face, she noticed that some of her purple nail polish was chipped, an incongruous thought. She heard a sound like rapidly flowing water. It got louder. Deeper tones became audible. The windshield was crazed into a thousand fractures, and through the jewel-like glass she thought she saw insects swirling in the sweep of the van’s headlights. Only those weren’t insects, she soon realized, but chunks of debris caught up in the ferocious updraft.
“Fuck.” Rick rubbed his forehead, and she looked at him uncomprehendingly. He gazed back, the corners of his mouth drawing up like curtains.
She became terrified of him all over again. The van shook with pulses of inflow wind, and she could hear the crisp
snap
of kindling. She turned to look out her window at the pitch-dark. A transformer exploded nearby, blue sparks shooting out like fireworks, and for an instant, she could see the wedge-shaped tornado trundling toward them, churning up the atmosphere. She got that shaky feeling in the pit of her stomach, like a bubble that wouldn’t pop. Her hands went numb. There was glass in her hair. Her heart raced harder than she’d ever imagined possible. Lightning the color of tiger lilies strobed across the sky as the tornado hit the first in a long line of telephone poles, blue sparks spitting out horizontally into the air. One by one, the telephone poles got sucked up into the gyrating vortex and pitched away.
Rick keyed the ignition, released the emergency brake, and the engine roared to life with a coarse, deafening sound. She groped for the door, but he grabbed her by the arm and wouldn’t let go. She tried desperately to break away, a shriek clawing at her throat.
With a sudden inrush of air, the door flew open, and a gaunt figure aimed his gun inside. His face was spattered with blood, his hair was plastered to his skull and his wet uniform was stuck to his body.
“Daddy?”
she screamed.
Rick pressed the accelerator to the floor, and the van tore out of the ditch. Her father jumped on the rocker panel and held on tight. Sophie fumbled with her seat belt, while her father girded himself, every muscle straining against the slapping door. Then he aimed his gun and squeezed the trigger.
The sound was deafening.
Rick’s lower lip blew off.
Sophie’s eyes grew glassy with shock.
Blood flew everywhere.
The van danced across the road in a shower of sparks.
Sophie unbuckled her seat belt, but Rick only tightened his grip, the pain making her eyes water.
Another bump, and her father almost lost his balance.
Feeling a cold ache around her heart, she bit down savagely on Rick’s arm, sinking her teeth into the sweaty, straining muscles until she could taste a warm gush of blood at the back of her throat.
He wrenched his arm away. Screaming and quivering with outrage. The sight of his mangled face curdled her blood. Those missing teeth, that shattered lip.
Her father hooked her around the middle, held on tight, and together they leaped into chaos. She felt as if she were falling off the planet at a million miles an hour. They hit the ground rolling, her arms clamped tight around his neck. They bumped over the wet grass until the field finally caught them. Sophie sputtered for air in a tangle of wildflowers, a searing pain registering in her lungs.
Try again, try again.
Air scudded into her lungs. She clasped her twitching fingers around her father’s neck and gave a faint grateful cry.
He helped her upright, then the two of them staggered in the wind. Green sky, purple lightning. The air around them twisting and screaming.
Which way?
She heard the sound of squealing tires and looked back at the Doppler van. It was caught in the updraft, tires spinning futilely as Rick tried to get away.
Her father wrapped an arm around her. “Don’t look back!” he said. “Run!”
R
ICK WAS
caught in a vicious riptide, the howling wedge right in front of him now. The wind was screaming into the updraft at around 80 mph, mud and leaves whipping past like a powerful current. He could hear that classic freight train sound as he downshifted.
Frantic. Perspiring.
The bitch… the bitch was playing him like a yo-yo. She was illuminated by a series of exploding transformers, sparks accelerating into her base as a line of telephone poles got sucked into that gigantic vortex of spinning debris.
Gulping at the air like a banked trout, he put the van into reverse, whipped around in his seat and stomped on the gas.
“No, no, no!”
He tried to speed away from the heaving cloud base, where multiple vortices sprouted beneath the indigo-blue wall cloud, each tendril large enough to be called a tornado in its own right. He felt blasted out of his head. This wasn’t supposed to happen. A cloud of splinters hit the van, then something cracked overhead—the satellite dish. He could feel his arteries bursting with blood as he tried desperately to get away.
All the windows broke at once with a loud crash. Both doors were forced outward by the air pressure and jammed shut. He was sprayed with glass fragments, some of the cuts going deep. His world spun. Equipment collided in midair, computer circuitry exploding upon impact.
Thwunk, thwunk, thwunk.
He stomped on the gas, a muffled roar in his ears, but the wheels spun around uselessly on the wet road. Visibility was bad, traction even worse. Both tires blew out, throwing the van into a crooked skid, and he felt the vibration in his bones as his very worst fears squeezed his lungs.
“No!!!”
The van was riding on two wheels now, its chassis slowly twisting. Rick’s nails split and snapped as he dug his fingers into the steering wheel and tried to level it out.
“Come on, come on… you bitch!”
The van blew sideways and slammed into the wedge with a deafening impact. He took a shuddering breath as it inhaled him whole.
The wind lifted the vehicle into the air with a spine-melting moan. Rick’s hair snapped like fur touched by static, and air pockets bubbled beneath his skin as the van’s frame crunched and buckled. His brain flooded with pain messages. He could hear the roof of the van ripping off, sending up a shower of sparks. Then a great hiss of air suctioned him out of the hole in the roof, and the van fell away like discarded litter.
He was upside down, right side up in a tumult of steam. Limbs flailing slow-motion. Above it all. Gazing into the lightning-dappled darkness. Suspended in a whirl of shattered glass and coiling barbed wire, splintered two-by-fours and dirty hailstones. Arms windmilling. Legs pinwheeling. Time slowed to a crawl in the tingling dark. And then, with horrible clarity, he felt the descent before it happened.
T
HE ENORMOUS
wedge was uprooting saplings now, tossing them around like Popsicle sticks. Blinking the dirt from his eyes, Charlie scooped his daughter up in his arms and ran with her through the grass, their breath steaming ahead of them like paper cutouts. Something was wrong. Her right cheek was swollen and bruised, there was blood in her mouth; he wanted to shoot Rick all over again. He waded through the sodden, flapping field for what seemed like an eternity—holding her with bone-white, raw-knuckled resolve—until they finally splashed out onto the road.
The rain was coming down sideways now, streaming across their faces. He set Sophie down and looked around for the truck. Blinking the rain from his eyes, he spotted the cones of its headlights slicing into a furry darkness. “Run!” he shouted.
Sophie didn’t want to let go of his hand. She stretched her arm out as they pulled away so that their fingers grazed one another. They leaped inside the truck, slamming the doors, and the cab instantly filled with the sound of their breathing.
“Hurry, Daddy!”
He keyed the ignition and pumped the gas, but the engine stalled out.
“Daddy?”
The air was the color of dirty water. A big piece of weatherboard danced along the ground, then flapped away like an awkward bird. The tops of the trees all bent in one direction—away from the enormous wedge that was corkscrewing across the land.
“Hurry!”
Not far from them stood a lone cottonwood tree, its shiny leaves wagging like a thousand tongues. The trunk was massive and grew into a wildly swaying crown, around which birds flew in roller-coaster formation. Only those weren’t birds, he realized, but tractor tires and tree limbs. The very air was being scissored apart.
“Daddy?” Her voice grew plump with tension.
He keyed the ignition, pumped the gas, and the engine finally sparked to life. He shifted into reverse, jammed on the accelerator, and they sped backward down the ruler-straight road.
“Look out!” she shrieked.
Behind them, a telephone pole bent like a pipe cleaner before the wind, then reached its breaking point and snapped in half, sawdust spritzing into the air as it came bounding toward them. Charlie veered out of the way just as the top half of the pole bounced over the road, missing them by a hairbreadth. He turned the truck around, debris banging off the fenders. The engine began to sputter and pop. The ominously rising temp gauge stared back at him.
“Move, you piece of shit…”
The gust front nailed the intersection, traffic light swinging to and fro on its flimsy cables. Near the highway entrance ramp, scraggly patches of squawbush and hawthorn bowed at a forty-five-degree angle in front of a used-car lot. Lightning zapped all around them, while the rain began to gain in vertical growth. Then it really started going nuts. Definitely hairy. There were lightning flashes inside the funnel cloud, behind it, to either side… like a huge spark plug igniting some humongous engine in the sky. The debris cloud whipped up so much dust it was throttle-down turns in the dark. Charlie kept one eye on the monster and the other on a good ditch to jump into.
Then he heard it: the sound of hell clawing for a handhold. The sound of space collapsing. Dust billowed past their windows—a series of shapes and flying mirages. The noise became deafening. Something somersaulted directly overhead, then landed in front of them and kept moving. A Mazda from the used-car lot barreled across the street and struck the guardrail in a spray of sparks. Next a Dodge Caravan rose up into the air and slammed earthward, spanking grille-first on the pavement with a terrible pounding thud that Charlie could feel in his skeleton. Automobiles from the car lot staggered across the road, bounding toward them like broken-down drunks.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
“Holy shit!” He alternately hit the gas and slammed on the brakes while car parts flew at them from the whirling debris cloud, tumbling out of the darkness. Car after car barreled through the air, spinning end over end like kids’ blocks and spewing streams of gasoline and brake fluid all over the road. The image was bizarre—luminous and hyperreal. Twisted, torn steel blown scraping across the asphalt like metal fingers. Automobiles raining down from the sky. Half of Detroit gone airborne.
Charlie jammed into reverse, nailed the throttle and backed down the road, while something else pirouetted into the sky—the sweeping headlights of a turning car. He slammed on the brakes, cranked the wheel hard, then skidded sideways just as an apple-green Pontiac came bearing down on them.
Sophie’s screams were like paper cuts—sharp, deep and bloodless. The airborne Pontiac hit the ground directly behind them, its shuddering chassis slamming down hard, its cage collapsing with a ringing sound like a cathedral bell. Metal grinding metal, windshield glass exploding, it continued to roll… crumpling and folding like an accordion. Alligator treads spitting from the wheel wells as the tires buckled and split.
“Get us out of here!” She covered her eyes.
He braked and swerved, then pushed his daughter down on the floorboards just as the truck began to shudder. Their ears popped from the mounting pressure as the truck lifted up, just the back end. The tornado had ahold of them, and they were going up.
Jesus, they’d come so far, and now this.
The tornado had them. They were going to die.
He could’ve sworn the floorboards and doors were wobbling back and forth. The air smelled of things hidden underneath a house for a very long time. They were floating in an inky river, so thick and substantial he could almost touch it. Then the truck snap-crackled to life, rearing up and bucking across the road. Debris shot into the flatbed like bullets. They were whirling and vaulting, and then, when they thunked back down onto the ground again, Charlie bit his tongue and drew blood. A flurry of motion, and suddenly… unbelievably, everything went still.
They sat in the eerie gathering calm. He waited for a moment, then peered at the sky. The tornado was slowly shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller as it churned uneasily away from them. Then it snaked back into the clouds, leaving a vaporous trail in its wake. A foggy haze, like the exhaust from a racing engine.
Charlie sat motionless for a moment, then lifted Sophie up off the floorboards. “You okay?”
A weak smile. “Yeah.”
“Looks like we made it.”
She laughed and hugged him tightly.
He would never let go this time.
T
HEY DROVE
along in silence. The traffic was tied up in knots due to cars wrapped around light poles and draped over billboards. Charlie let his daughter rest her head against his shoulder. Her inhalations were shallow, and she jumped at the slightest rumble of thunder. Her fingers were torn and bruised. Her jaw was swollen, and her lower bicuspid was missing; the monster had taken her tooth. It disturbed him deeply, how she’d lost her innocence today.
“Are we going home now?” She lifted her drowsy head.
“Shh, sweetie. I’m taking you to the hospital.”
Her eyes reflected the sun’s last fiery glow. “I’m okay, Dad. I’d rather go home.”
“Shh. Sit back and relax.”
She gave a reluctant nod and sank back against him. “But we’ll go home after the hospital, right?”
“You have my word.”
“I love you,” she said softly.
“I love you, too, baby.” He allowed himself to relax just a bit and was immediately overcome with a draining sense of weariness. He could smell the stink of his own sweat, a raw clay odor. He was covered in mud, battered and bruised, but they’d made it. They were alive. It was a miracle. He’d finally managed to get through to the hospital, and Willa was fine. She was relieved to hear that Sophie was okay. They’d all made it. The sky strobed with gaudy colors, scuds of clouds like freshly raked coals pouring into the retreating thunderstorm. The air smelled sweet as mint, and the evening star had risen above the plains. He was happy to be alive. Humbly grateful, his heart and head synchronous once again.
Then he saw it. The brown Doppler van. He swerved over to the side of the road and hit the brakes.
“What is it?” She stirred, hair matted up on one side.
The Doppler van lay upside down in a muddy field. The radiator shroud was dented, and the tires were in shreds.
She sat forward in her seat. “Dad?”
“Be right back.”
“What’s wrong?” Her eyes grew wide. Her lashes were wet.
“Everything’s gonna be okay.” He hugged her one-armed. “Don’t worry, sweetie.”
“Please don’t leave me here.”
He drew his gun. “I’ll be within earshot.”
“Careful,” she whispered. “Okay?”
He flew down the slope into the wild-growing grass, drenched pink in the dying light. He approached the overturned vehicle with extreme caution. The tie rod jutted out like a broken bone, and the snarling bumper was pushed up nearly two feet. Above the wreck, a fantastic rainbow filled the sky.
Carefully aiming his .38, Charlie said, “Step out of the vehicle! Now! Put your hands up where I can see them!”
The windows were shattered. The roof was torn off. He swept his gun before him as he slowly circled the wreck, then bent to have a closer look.
The interior of the van appeared to be empty. Charlie straightened up, feeling a chill like wet leaves, and scanned the horizon with its fringe of backlit farms. A languid cloud of monarch butterflies caught the dying light as the sun edged beneath the horizon. In places, the tornado had reduced the grass to stubble, leaving a miles-long damage path through mostly untamed prairie.
He glanced back at the truck, where his daughter was watching him with wide, frightened eyes. The sunset made her face look on fire. The silver locket was tucked inside his shirt pocket; he wouldn’t give it back to her until he’d washed the blood off. He wouldn’t tell her about her grandfather, either, until everything had settled down.
“Daddy?”
“I’m right here.”
She gave him a sad little wave. The moment would remain forever frozen in his mind.
He took one last look around, then holstered his weapon. He’d have to call local law. Let them deal with it. His daughter was waiting. Then he noticed the distant heap of white against the cold, dark earth.
He drew his weapon again and jogged across the field. He jogged over furrows banked with sodden leaves and debris, the sharp odor of freshly plowed earth filling his nostrils. His boots sank into the soft dirt, and his breath came out shallow and fast as he moved further and further away from the road. Away from Sophie. He tiptoed along the edges of a rut, anticipation crackling up his spine, then stooped in the gathering gloom.
The flannel shirt was gone. So were the shoes and socks. The mangled victim wore only a pair of blue jeans, the rest of his outfit having been apparently sucked away in the wind. Charlie let out a quick troubled breath as he crouched for a better look. Stalks of wheat peppered the victim’s chest like the needles of a startled porcupine. The battered face was unrecognizable. Most disturbing of all was the severe angulation of the neck and the caved-in appearance of the skull from where the body had been dropped from a great height. The eyes—shiny black as feeding insects—were fixed and dilated. He was dead, all right, whoever he was.
Charlie turned the body over. Old scars crisscrossed the trunk and upper arms, some as thick as fingers. Grim evidence of childhood abuse. He stepped hard on his anger and let the body fall. The broken legs were trapped inside a tangle of barbed wire. They were going to have to cut through the rusty wire to get to the pants pockets, where a wallet or other ID might be found.
Very faintly he could hear sirens off in the distance. Examining the victim’s ruined mouth, he parted the lips and found an absence of teeth, then he ran his finger carefully up over the maxillary arch. This had to be Rick. Had to be. Doppler van nearby. Same color hair. Absence of teeth. Small red marks over the bridge of the nose where his glasses had recently rested.
Hair lifting in the breeze, Charlie had a sudden thought. He reached for the corpse’s right arm, picked it up, turned it over, and there it was—a perfect bite mark. Sophie’s tooth impressions sunk in the chalky white flesh, those lateral incisors distinctive for their slight overlap.
This was Rick Kripner, all right. Of that there could be no doubt. Charlie released the cold limb and tried to find the still center of himself, but his heart wouldn’t stop thundering in his ears. He’d found his killer… still he wasn’t satisfied. His eyes lingered suspiciously on the broken body before him—the dead eyes, the becalmed face. Nothing made any sense. Nothing would ever make sense to him again. Rick Kripner had been such an ordinary guy.
He stood up, exhaustion welling inside him. The distant sirens were getting louder now. He glanced down at his feet, where a Styrofoam cup was partially buried in the dirt.
Styrofoam, arrowheads.
Greater battles than theirs had been fought on this hallowed ground. History was just another place the wind blew through.
“Daddy?”
“Be right there.”
He detected a troubling shift in the atmosphere and felt the sudden uplift, like a tap on the shoulder. A friendly tap. A warning.
He turned, but there was no one there—just a crow that appeared to be watching him. He stood for a moment scanning the horizon, where distant bur oaks flared in the wind. Then a playful breeze slapped his hat off his head, and he caught it one-handed before it blew away.
The wind moved on, unhurried and graceful, disturbing his thinning hair along with his complacency; it eddied and spilled across this broken land, stroking the slumped shoulders of the prairie in an ancient dance. It gave him a start. It gave him the gift of breath, and then it moved on.