"To anywhere we want?"
Nick nodded. Yes. Anywhere they wanted, he thought, but anywhere would most likely turn out to be somewhere in Nebraska.
"Wow!" Tom said happily. "Okay! Yeah! Wow!"
They got on Route 283 going north and had ridden only two and a half hours when thunderheads began to build up in the west. The storm came at them quickly, riding on a gauzy caul of rain. Nick couldn't hear the thunderclaps, but he could see forks of lightning stabbing down from the clouds. They were bright enough to dazzle the eyes with bluish-purple afterimages. As they approached the outskirts of Rosston, where Nick meant to turn east on Route 64, the veil of rain under the clouds disappeared and the sky turned a still and queerly ominous shade of yellow. The wind, which had been freshening against his left cheek, died away altogether. He began to feel extremely nervous without knowing why, and oddly clumsy. No one had ever told him that one of the few instincts man still shares with the lower animals is exactly that response to a sudden and radical drop in the air pressure.
Then Tom was tugging at his sleeve, tugging him frantically. Nick looked over at him. He was startled to see that all the color had gone out of Tom's face. His eyes were huge, floating saucers.
"Tornado! " Tom screamed. "There's a tornado coming! "
Nick looked for a funnel and saw none. He turned back to Tom, trying to think of a way to reassure him. But Tom was gone. He was riding his bike into the field at the right of the road, beating a twisted, flattened path through the high grass.
Goddamned fool, Nick thought angrily. You're going to break your f**king axle!
Tom was making for a barn with an attached silo which stood at the end of a dirt road about a quarter of a mile long. Nick, still feeling nervous, pedaled his own bike up the highway, lifted it over the cattle-gate, and then pedaled up the dirt feeder road to the barn. Tom's bike lay on the dirt fill outside. He hadn't even bothered to put the kickstand down. Nick would have chalked this up to simple forgetfulness if he hadn't seen Tom use the kickstand several times before. He's scared right out of what little mind he has, Nick thought.
His own uneasiness made him take one last look over his shoulder, and what he saw coming froze him coldly in his tracks.
A horrible darkness was coming out of the west. It was not a cloud; it was more like a total absence of light. It was in the shape of a funnel, and at first glance it looked a thousand feet high. It was wider at the top than at the bottom; the bottom was not quite touching the earth. At its summit, the very clouds seemed to be fleeing from it, as if it possessed some mysterious power of repulsion.
As Nick watched, it touched down about three quarters of a mile away and a long blue building with a roof made of corrugated metal - an auto supply place, or perhaps a lumber storage shed - exploded with a loud bang. He could not hear this, of course, but the vibration struck him, rocking him back on his feet. And the building seemed to explode inward, as if the funnel had sucked all the air out of it. The next moment the tin roof broke in two. The sections whirled upward, spinning and spinning like a top gone insane. Fascinated, Nick craned his neck to follow their progress.
I am looking at whatever it is in my worst dreams, Nick thought, and it is not a man at all, although it may sometimes look like a man. What it really is is a tornado. One almighty big black twister ripping out of the west, sucking up anything and everything unlucky enough to be in its path. It's -
Then he was grabbed by both arms and literally jerked off his feet and into the barn. He looked around at Tom Cullen and was momentarily surprised to see him. In his fascination with the storm, he had quite forgotten that Tom Cullen existed.
"Downstairs!" Tom panted. "Quick! Quick! Oh my laws, yes! Tornado! Tornado! "
At last Nick was fully, consciously afraid, ripped out of the half-entranced state he had been in and aware again of where he was and who he was with. As he let Tom lead him to the stairs going down into the barn's storm cellar, he became aware of a strange, thrumming vibration. It was the closest thing to sound he had ever experienced. It was like a nagging ache in the center of his brain. Then, as he went down the stairs behind Tom, he saw something he would never forget: the plank siding of the barn being pulled out board by board, pulled out and whirled up into the cloudy air, like rotted brown teeth being pulled out by invisible forceps. The hay littered on the floor began to rise and whirl in a dozen miniature tornado funnels, nodding and dipping and skipping. That thrumming vibration grew ever more persistent.