DAN [REDACTED]

“If you can’t tell what direction a twister is heading, the answer is straight at you.”

My mother’s warnings rang through my head as I stared at the dark behemoth of dust and dirt and death that screamed in indignant fury of all those who ever felt themselves safe in their meager underground panic rooms. All the photos and videos captured by the news or distant relatives - images of some distant, lumbering funnel cloud a few miles out - they paled in comparison to the true visual of that force of nature dragged down upon the earth as if it’s only purpose were to put us all back down into it where we belong. As far on as the flat of the land, there was no sky, no sliver of sunlight; only a thunderous torrential mass that twisted and congealed to strike down upon the ground to submerge and bury in mud and stone any who might find themselves in its unalterable path. And it was there, staring into the terrible face of the destruction of my home, of my life, that I found, too, the face that had been absent from my headcount.

They sat upon that old rusty train car where I had seen them so many times, where they had once cracked their dark jokes and more than a few cans of ill-advised booze, but now merely cracked a viscous, triumphant smile as they stared out into the factory grounds in hungry anticipation. Their eyes held that manic glee I had tried in vain to disregard, those gaudy glasses a vibrant beacon in the nightmare I had found myself in. I watched as the rocks flung about by the storm sliced across their form, leaving cuts and bruises that they didn’t so much as flinch at, even as I saw those steady streams of blood turn brown and clumped with the soil that swirled around them.

I almost thought to warn them. To scream above the wind for them to run, to save themself. Isn’t that stupid? I reckon some part of me wanted so desperately to believe that they were somehow unaware of the wrath of god that towered behind them. Wanted to hold onto that intrinsic belief gathered from all my decades spent upon this earth that what I was witnessing was anything other than the apparent truth. That humans couldn’t conjure up such an omen as the one that shook the very ground I stood upon. All these years later, I still don’t believe they can.

But I do believe that whatever stared me down from atop their throne of twisted old steel was far, far from human.

“I know I do! How about you?”

“What do we know..?” /lyr