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The fire in his lungs finally made Willie stop, but he still couldn't catch his breath. He stumbled off the side of the road to hunch beneath sheltering limbs of a live oak, leaves sparse but still green despite the weather they'd had. He propped himself against the tree before his noodle-weak knees gave out. The little cat inside his jacket shivered and mewed, and its tail slipped out. He tucked it back inside, thinking the waffle-colored tabby had the longest tail he'd ever seen.
Willie peered around the tree, and breathed easier at the empty road. He'd lucked out. Either the nefarious bad guy couldn't turn his truck around quick enough to chase, or he had more important stuff to do. Like maybe steal more kids’ dogs and cats.
"Kinsler? Where are you?" Willie thought the dog was right behind him. "Kin....sler. Come here, boy, come on, let's go home."
Waffles shivered and yowled in answer. "Hey, it's okay, little guy. Kinsler probably caught a whiff of squirrel and took off again. Dang dog lets his nose talk him into trouble. That's what Melinda says."
Melinda would know what to do. For a girl, she was pretty smart. At least Kinsler got away from the dog thief. Maybe he'd sniff his way home.
Willie's teeth chattered. It'd be cool if he had a fur coat and could sniff his way home like Kinsler, but he couldn't see three feet before him through the curtain of rain. He winced when something stung his cheek. He looked at the sky. Pea-size beads of ice peppered the ground and shredded leaves for thirty seconds, and then stopped. His soaked jeans stuck to his legs, and when lightening crackled, he scrambled from beneath the tree. Trees attract lightening. He learned that at the school safety assembly about tornadoes.
Tornadoes were awesome. Not when they hurt people. But the combo of wind and hail and lightening played out like video games where superheroes fought above the clouds, and thundering artillery drove evil doers away. He bet the dark fluff in the south-west sky was a wall cloud. Willie always thought it'd be cool to be a storm chaser.
But storm chasers only talked about the excitement. Nothing, not even hugging the cat in his arms, relieved the feeling of aloneness. He looked up, as if from the bottom of a dark, enormous pit with no way out. Clouds pushed down, down, down until he couldn't breathe, and his stomach clenched the same way a roller coaster flip-flopped your insides. Daddy would know what to do. Melinda would get mad. But Mom wouldn't even know he was lost, or care if he never got home. That sucked the worst of all.
"Don't be a stupid-head." He said it out loud, to buck up his courage, and the cat purred. "Wasn't talking to you, Waffles. But guess we're in this together."
Willie's wet clothes chaffed and itched his legs when he cautiously climbed back onto the road's crest. His shoes slipped every third step but he took care to dodge channels cut in the bank as water sluiced down. Hair dripped into his eyes, making it hard to see. The ditch on both sides of the road collected brown water that churned and nibbled and swallowed whole chocolate-color chunks from the bank. As he watched, the water level rose so fast it lapped nearly to the spot he'd previously stood.
Lightening zippered across the sky, and Willie picked up his pace down the middle of the road heading toward town. Rain took a breather and the wind didn't push quite so hard, but the spider web itch on the back of his neck never let up. Creepy.
Distant headlights drove Willie to the brushy growth off the road. Only the truck guy and his creepy minions dared to be out...and stupid-head kids. He figured these minions wouldn't be cute cartoons, neither.
One step off the solid pavement sent him sliding toward stinky ditch water. Willie wrapped his arms tighter around the purring Waffles, squared his shoulders, and slowed to a determined walk in the opposite lane. Dad said attitude got you through tough situations, so he'd be tough.
The van—it was a van, not the brown truck, he saw with relief—slowed to a crawl. "Drive on, drive on, drive on," he whispered to himself, and kept his eyes averted, sure if he made eye contact, his head would explode.
But the van pulled alongside him, stopped, and the driver cranked down the window. A kid maybe his sister’s age stuck his head out the window. A girl younger than Willie with black braids rode in the passenger seat clutching a stuffed purple dinosaur.
"Storm coming, bad storm. Get in, get safe. Bad storm, high winds predicted. Based on Fujita-Pearson Scale, storm will cause considerable to severe damage. Very dangerous situation. Golf ball size hail which is ice falling from sky, and F2 or F3 tornadoes. Fascinating tornadoes but deadly, too. Why outside? Get in." The boy cocked his head when Willie's rescued cat meowed. "Storm bad for cat, too."
Willie grinned. "Tornadoes are cool. I'm sort of a storm chaser. Want to be one, anyway." Rain began to spit again so he hurried to the rear door, levered it open and climbed inside. "I'm Willie. Sure glad you showed up, it's a long walk back to town." He opened his jacket and the orange cat spilled out, took a couple of unsteady steps, and then shook wet from its fur.
The little girl squealed and clutched her toy. "Grooby hates wet." She turned around in her seat, as much as the belt would allow. "Sixty-seven percent chance tornadoes hit Heartland."
The driver nodded. "Tracy knows numbers. Lenny knows tornadoes. And maps. I’m Lenny. She’s Tracy." His gaze slid away.
Kinsler did that with his eyes, too. Willie hoped Kinsler found a safe spot out of the storm, or sniffed his way home. Dogs were supposed to have some sort of homing instinct. He read about that in The Incredible Journey book.
The boy behind the wheel shoved the stick shift and gears grated before the van shook and began to move.
Willie studied the two kids. They talked weird, but he didn't doubt they were smart about numbers and storms. "We're not going back to town? We could go to my house." He wanted to go home, but at least he was out of the rain. Mom always said beggars can't be choosers, so he couldn't complain.
"Basement?" Lenny kept both hands on the wheel, his knuckles white when sudden wind shook the van. When Willie shook his head, Lenny sped up the van.
What if a tornado hit his house? Melinda was there by herself. "One time we all huddled up in the bathroom. Hail took out the front window but everything else was okay." Ground shifted too much in North Texas to have a basement. He didn't know anyone who had a storm shelter, either. Most times, bad storms magically moved around or turned away from Heartland, and only hit the outskirts.
Tracy fiddled with a tablet, then held it up. Willie could see a multicolored schematic of weather radar moving in real time across a digital map.
Lenny tapped the screen. "Safe spot, there." He slowed the van, peered through the windshield past the flack-flack-flack of wipers, and turned off onto a hidden gravel pathway.
Crowding tree limbs scraped and pushed against the van like witch fingers guarding secrets. Willie yelped when a particularly large limb thumped the windshield. A star-shaped crack appeared. He remembered the drainage ditch on both sides of the road, and hoped the narrow road wouldn't wash out before they got to Lenny's safe spot. And that it truly was safe.
Dad would call the road a pig path. Willie wondered where feral hogs hid when tornadoes threatened.
The three remained silent, bracing themselves as the van struggled up a slight incline to higher ground. Lenny slowed the van, and pointed. "Down there is safe. Tornado jumps over low land."
Willie checked out windows on both sides of the van. The road straddled a man-made dam. A livestock tank on the right gave way to a steep dirt slope on the other, where a cement barn squatted halfway down screened by an army of massive bois d'arc trees. The building seemed solid, all right.
The overgrown drive veered to the left and downward, and Lenny drove slowly, babying the van. But almost immediately, the tires lost traction in the saturated ground. The van skied sideways, crabbing downward until earth completely gave way.
Tracy shrieked, Willie yelled. The van slammed the rear wall of the barn. Waffle’s percussive spit-hiss morphed into banshee yowls after Lenny's head made a melon-like "thonk" on the windshield. Silence.
Then a pack of dogs howled.
