she found out? For that matter what were her parents going to do? They are the only family Jeff had and he was a member of their family in every way.
Except for the fact that they fucked once.
Once.
A member of their family was gone.
A member of their family was gone.
She thought about when Gail was in her coma. For some reason she never thought her sister was going to die. Sometimes at night she would catch her mom crying and overhear her parents talking about losing her but with Karen it was never a thought. She couldn’t explain why but it was just a feeling. That’s why she has always had what many considered a cruel and flippant attitude about what happen to her younger sister and why she never acted as excited as others when she came out of it. She just sort of knew it was a matter of time.
She has the same feelings about Jeff now.
She was hoping beyond anything she was wrong this time.
That sort of feeling doesn’t repeat twice in a life… Does it?
The winds were pounding in every direction changing from minute to minute and keeping Karen’s eyes closed and pulling Fox closer to her was the only thing her body was telling itself to do. Besides that she was in motor function breakdown. All the other things were attacks, they weren’t really helping.
She gave out a whisper in the storm. An action so unlike her no matter the situation.
‘Please let him be alive.’
But her mind is racing to the point of telling herself that Jeff was dead.
He’s dead.
He has to be dead.
Only death can be felt within her.
She is just a random old lady who died being hit by lightning.
Just another number to be counted up when everything is said and done.
Her burial will be one of another number without name or visitor to say a word.
The type of people who study storms will take years to finish their work with this one. Some will make a career out of it.
There will be Weather Channel specials.
The History Channel miniseries will be on six times a day for months.
The Discovery Channel will take the beyond human angle.
And then a couple religious channels will funnel many books out into the market to say this is Gods direct strike against our acceptance of homosexual lifestyles and the hedonistic ways of the world. “When the world is this self-gratifying what should we expect?”
It will backfire on them as lot of people in the area will turn away from those types of groups. They don’t lose their religion as much as smarten up to those who have always represented it so false fully with hate and misdirection from what it truly is and that is teachings of love and acceptance.
After this he will no longer finds time for disaster movie marathons. Something no one ever questions him on. They know the answer to why he doesn’t like them anymore and not in the way Karen has never liked them.
He can feel his ears and they felt like huge weights nailed to the side of his head. He was hearing a loud humming noise banging around inside those weights.
The last time he felt like this was a few years ago when him and Karen stopped off at a roadside bar on the way back from a concert in Miami and he ended up getting his ass kicked by three guys, saved by Karen stepping in with a threat of setting the whole place on fire with a flaming chair soaked in Voka.
She learned that watching too much ECW on Netflix.
Before he opened his eyes the only thing that battered his brain was that he must have been knocked out. But as his hearing corrected itself and he opened his eyes to see fully, first to a haze and then clear sight, he could see through a broken window that the storm was still raging outside.
Outside?
Inside?
He felt a little like he was floating outside twisted up in the storm.
Jeff raises himself to rest on his knees and looks around to see that he somehow ended up inside what appears to have been a used bookstore before the storm.
You can always tell if you have found yourself in a used bookstore by the biggest sections being romance and Star Trek novels.
This particular one was a very popular local used bookstore. Known primarily for being a mixture of being one part used sci-fi paperbacks, one part graphic novels, and one part romance novels.
That’s three parts in a joyous makes no sense love feast.
Maybe not “Even Stranger” but strange still was him spotting that he had been lying unconscious on a bed of Honeysuckle plants.
He cupped a handful of fallen flower peddles in his hands and started licking them.
Why?
Why not sucking them, wouldn’t that be more fitting?
But then that’s another Why?
Why not more whys, everything else is insane about this day.
They are just an ordinary family on vacation. One of many who will go home and talk about what happen on the vacation they saved up for as it was a lesson of survival and learning what death is about.
History sometimes tries to change the way people see a place. The image of the Great Smokey Mountains and its surroundings will be changed forever by a vengeful spirit of nature.
The original plan was to go on cruise departing from Florida that would have stopped in the Bahamas but a relative talked them out of the idea. The kid suggested they still go to Florida and just check out the Wizardly World but the mom and dad are more Gaiman Books Of Magic fans when it comes to fictional young wizards.
Florida has other things to offer but some can be just as dangerous as this storm.
Then it was going to be short trip from West Virginia to Washington D.C. to check out the nation’s capital but the dad was ranting about all the politicians he wanted to spit on and that idea went out the window.
No one wants to bail out a family member on vacation.
Though that also would give you something to talk about when you got back home.
They have been pinned in and holed up from the beginning of the storm inside a police station. How the world twists things when innocents find safety in the shelter of a jail cell. That’s one of those life noticing things.
A family of three, the town drunk, and two officers in one cramped little cell waiting. And none of them have any idea about the little fire that’s heating up the kerosene tanks outside the stations backside.
Inside what was once a small drive through chapel a small group of hotel exploding by mudslide wave survivors are trying to figure out what life left them with after all of that psychosis.
I’m leaving you with the next paragraph after that last one kind of sucked.
“Psychosis” Indeed.
In these minutes of a crazy sort of rest the biggest chore wasn’t trying to deal with those they have lost but calming their hearts down. That was the chore at the moment. Trying to refocus into what life is or at least what it was.
“Was” was a very important word there.
Doing these things was taxing most of them beyond even what has already happen to them.
The small chapel building held up pretty good as Cades raged with the full fury of a disfigurement of what Mother Nature was giving him power for.
Remember Cades? Sorry the long wait between Tin Universe #10 and Tin Universe #11 might make a need for a quick reread of parts one through three of the story.
That’s my fault.
Sorry again.
Sitting for the most part in silence within the chapel was a few remaining cheerleaders- missing more than a few members from their squad, thus the “remaining”, a hotel maid suddenly obsessed with a soaking wet prayer book she found under a big pink crucifix, and then there was Karen and Fox.
They were sitting in the floor learning against a wall shoulder to shoulder to stay close.
Fox had regained consciousness as Karen was walking her into the chapel building. She has stopped talking about drunken midgets and started talking about how nice Jeff’s no butt was.
Very bad maybe.
But here, now, it very much comes down to simply- Alive is good and the only good.
One of the cheerleaders, this being the oldest one and the only one over the age of 17, comes over to where Fox and Karen are sitting, ‘What do we do now?’
How they became the “Is there one else to do the job?” leadership in this situation they don’t know.
Karen looked up at the young girl, ‘Wait, hope, try not to go mad.’
‘But I’m…’
Karen slams her fist against the wall they were leaning against, making Fox jump, ‘Hurtons are the best!’ and then Karen screamed at the young girl, ‘What do I look like YOUR FUCKING MOM!?’
The teen slowly walked away in tears and Karen could frankly care less.
Fox shook her head like a cat that had just had its head rubbed to many times. She put her arm around Karen, ‘Remember hope. That bullshit says he’s still alive.’
Karen isn’t too hard or strong to cry. She has run out of tears. She’s been crying ever since they left the rental car but she didn’t have time to even notice herself.
There are very few inside the little chapel to see life grasping for moments to say it’s still there but there is not one person outside to see that the small tacky drive through chapel was now covered in white roses protecting it from the further rages of vengeance and remembrance.
Having a destiny sometimes has its perks. Like when you get unknowing protection
Tin Universe Monthly #11 Page 3