“Why?”
“Because we have a time and a place and today’s date. Maybe that’s where Telly’s going be.”
The professor nodded agreement. “I have a hand-held GPS unit you can use.”
He pulled open a convenient drawer and produced the device.
Emma’s heart leaped, then crashed. “But how’s he going to get there? His car is here.”
“Stop arguing and let’s go!” Ryan’s expression was a study of impatience. “If we hurry, we can make it before four twenty-two – easy!”
The professor was looking out the window. “Just be cautious, you two. Looks like a storm coming up.”
Ryan snickered. “C’mon…how bad can it be?”
3
Ryan was realizing it could be pretty darn bad…
What had he been thinking?
Ahead of him, Emma straddled her bike as they pedaled west on the two-lane county blacktop. She’d traded her prescription glasses for sunglasses – she seemed to have a pocket for everything in those cargo pants – but didn’t need them anymore. The gray and black mass of cloud taking over the sky made her look tiny and fragile. The sun was gone. A thin line of clear sky was visible along the eastern horizon under the edge of the cloud shelf. The rest of the sky was darkness. Worse than darkness – the air seemed to have taken on a sickly, greenish cast.
Even though they were nearing the map point, Ryan was now thinking they should have simply headed home. He thought about their old farmhouse with its sturdy storm cellar, and knew that was where he wanted to be.
Boy, right about now he was feeling like a real chicken, but no way could Emma ever suspect that. She had such confidence and was no dummy herself… no way he could let her know he was thinking he’d made a big mistake.
“What’d you think of that Doctor Polonius?” Emma called back over her shoulder.
“You mean, Doctor P-polonius?” he said with a grin.
When she gave him a sharp look, he killed the smile and pedaled harder, gaining on her. “Just joking. I thought he was kind of cool.”
She shook her head. “You didn't think he was, you know, a little creepy?”
Creepy? What was she talking about? The guy knew card tricks.
“I don’t trust him,” she added.
“What’s trust got to do with–?”
Lightning forked in the distance.
Okay, that did it.
“Emma, stop!”
She pulled to a halt and waited for him. Thunder rumbled as he reached her.
“We need to get home.”
She shook her head. “What? Why? We’ve got to be almost there.”
“I just saw lightning.”
“So did I. And I counted. It’s a long way off.”
“You can’t depend on that. This storm looks mean. And look at the air – see that green? We could have a twister coming.”
They’d lived in Kansas all their lives. They knew about tornadoes, had even seen one in the distance once. Ryan admitted to being a weather geek and knew all about them. All the signs he was seeing now screamed, Get to shelter!
“How much farther?”
He checked the professor’s GPS device. According to the coordinates they’d punched in, they were close. She was right about that.
“Not far.” He pointed ahead. “Some kind of little crossroad up ahead – atop that rise. The spot is maybe a hundred yards or so to the right from there. But look, we can come back later.”
She made a face. “Later?” She pulled out her phone and checked the display. “It’s four-seventeen. Only five minutes left.”
“Left till what?”
“Till Telly arrives.”
Telly-Telly-Telly… okay, he cared for Telly too. He wasn’t the perfect big-brother figure in the usual sense, but perfect for Ryan. Totally amazing at Halo, and he’d even let Ryan play Call of Duty when he was little, which Mom and Dad had forbidden. Any time Ryan had needed help with a school project, Telly was there. But…
Ryan spread his arms toward the cornfields that stretched away around them. They’d reached the rise and he could see like forever all directions. On a similar hillock a little more than a mile away to the southwest he spotted a familiar-looking farmhouse – their home.
“You don’t know he’s coming, Em. The coordinates come from the Professor’s printer.” A thought struck him. “And so does this GPS. C’mon, you’re the one who doesn’t trust him.”
“Yeah, but Telly obviously does.”
“And Telly’s missing. Look around you, Em. Where’s he coming from? There’s nothing out here! The time and coordinates must mean something else.” He pointed toward their house. “That’s where we should be. If we cut across the field we can make it home ahead of the storm.”
“Five minutes, Ryan! Please?”
What was it with her and Telly? Did she really have some sort of psychic connection? Nah. No such thing. She was just being irrational, was all.
As usual.
“You’re gonna get us killed!”
“Five freakin’ minutes!”
She turned and began pedaling toward the crossroads.
Suppressing a screech of anger and – he owned up to it – fear, he followed. He wasn’t about to leave his sister out here alone.
She reached the intersection and stopped. When he pulled up beside her she was pointing to the right along a dirt path.
“That way?”
But Ryan was looking at the low clouds off to their left. A blocky section had lowered from the base of the storm – sort of like a short, thick, stubby stalk left on a mushroom. And it was rotating.
“Oh, God! A wall cloud!”
Emma turned to look where he was pointing. “What?”
“That’s called a wall cloud. It’s usually where tornadoes come from!”
“How do you know this stuff?” she said.
And sure enough, as they watched in growing horror, a wide pale funnel took shape from the wall cloud and lowered to the ground. When it touched down it turned dark, almost black. It kept thickening and thickening as clouds of torn-up dirt swirled around its ever-widening base.
This wasn’t a thin, ropy funnel, snaking back and forth like in The Wizard of Oz. This was a wedge tornado… the worst kind. They had the strongest winds and did the most damage. This one seemed miles away. But already a dull roar filled the air as it rolled across the far fields, moving left to right…
Emma grabbed his shoulder. “It’s heading for our house!”
That was when her cell phone rang – the old-fashioned big-black- telephone-ring she assigned to her mother’s phone.
“It’s mom!” Emma punched on her keypad, trying to answer the call but her hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
“They wanna know where we are!” yelled Ryan. “They see the funnel!”
His stomach knotted until he realized the tornado was farther away than their house. And sure enough, it moved behind their house, framing its white siding against its wide black base.
“I just lost the signal!” Emma cried.
“The twister might have taken out the tower,” Ryan said in his most level tone, though his mouth was dry with fear for his folks. “But look, I think it’s passing behind our house.”
“Oh, thank God!”
But then the funnel stopped moving – or seemed to.
Oh, no. Not good. Not good at all. A tornado was always on the move, most often from southwest to northeast. They said if a tornado didn’t look like it was moving, it meant it was either heading directly away from you or – worst case – straight at you.
Ryan focused on the wedge cloud – a monster and, from the look of it, nearly a mile wide at its base. Was the base widening? If so, that meant it was most likely approaching them. Hard to tell with all the debris swirling around it at ground level.
And then it became clear that it was widening… definitely widening. And the roaring grew louder, like a huge jet engine. That meant it was c
oming this way.
Oh, no!
His knees went rubbery as he realized their house stood between them and the funnel… dead in its path. The enormous wedge of destruction dwarfed their home as it bore down on it.
“Em! Call home!” He heard his voice rise to a scream. “Call them!”
But as her shaking fingers stabbed the buttons, Ryan saw shingles began to tear free from their roof and fly into the swirling debris cloud. Emma screamed as the roof came off and shattered into spinning splinters. Seconds later his own scream joined hers when the house literally dissolved before their eyes.
Gone… their home was gone… swallowed by the monster that continued on its inexorable course toward them.
Toward them…
“We’ve got to go!” he shouted – the roar was deafening now.
“Mom!” She screamed as she stared at the onrushing funnel. “Dad!”
“They’re in the storm cellar! They’re safe!” He prayed that was true. “But we aren’t! That thing’s coming straight for us!” He grabbed her shoulder and shook her. “Come on!”
Then the hail began, marble-size lumps of ice, pelting them. They hurt.
Emma shook herself from her daze and turned her bike. She began to pedal like mad up the dirt path, away from the funnel. Head down against the icy onslaught, Ryan followed, his mind racing ahead, searching for an escape from their inevitable doom.
And they were doomed.
He’d read where the average tornado moved at thirty miles an hour. This one was anything but average as it roared toward them like a runaway freight train. Bits of debris began to swirl through the hail. He didn’t dare look back for fear of being blinded by flying junk – some of it from his house – but the roar was so loud now he was sure his eardrums would explode. He could barely think. Any second now they’d be sucked into the air and–
Light flashed ahead.
What?
So bright, like a miniature sun burning low in the air amid the hail and debris just ahead to their right. It flared out of nowhere. Ryan’s heart stuttered as he leaned forward on his bike. He’d never heard of a fireball being part of a tornado. Was this what people saw right before they got sucked up into oblivion?
He yelled to Emma. He doubted she’d hear him over the roar, but it didn’t matter. She’d already seen it. How could you miss it? It started out basketball size but now had blossomed into a five-foot globe. Suddenly it flattened to a disc. Then is seemed to collapse into itself. Concave. A hole appeared within it. It looked familiar. Like that picture at Telly’s…
A fire-ringed hole in the air. And were those–?
Yes! He could see shapes inside the ring. People! And they were looking at them!
But that couldn’t be. As Ryan wondered if fear of death was making him see things, the hallucination took an even more bizarre turn as two poles, each with a semicircular arc at its end, speared toward them from the opening. The semicircles jammed against their torsos, then pincered closed around them just as the oncoming vortex took hold.
Ryan felt his bike ripped from under him, spinning away as the funnel sucked it up. He would have gone with it if not for the metal ring encircling his waist. He glanced to his left and saw Emma in the same situation. The poles attached to the pincers were in turn attached to ropes. Tethered to otherworldly lifelines, he and Emma had become a pair of kicking, screaming human kites.
He felt himself tugged forward… away from the swirling maw of the black monster at his heels, toward the ring of orange fire. For an instant Ryan feared both, then realized anything was better than the certain death of the vortex.
He squinted ahead and gasped as he saw two figures wearing yellow jumpsuits and large goggles within the burning circle. Like deep-sea fishermen, they were reeling him and Emma in, hauling them toward the hole in the air. Or trying to. The cacophony of the tornado raged at his back. It wasn’t giving up. It sucked at him, trying to rip his tether from the jumpsuited guy’s grasp.
Other figures joined them, grabbing the ropes and fighting the storm, refusing to let it win. Finally he was dragged through the ring of fire.
Where was Emma?
Where was he?
It looked like a room, but that was impossible. They were out in the cornfields…
No, they’d been in the cornfields, but no longer. They’d entered some kind of room in the air. Blank walls ahead and to the right, and on the left a glass window opening into another room full of unfamiliar equipment. A tall, strange-looking man in a white labcoat was speaking to a shorter man who was shaking his head as he flipped switches on some odd control panel set into the wall.
“Doctor Koertig!” one of the jumpsuited men shouted. “They’re in! Close the gate!”
Both men beyond the glass became more agitated, with the taller man pointing and gesticulating. He seemed to be in charge of this operation, whatever it was, and looked alarmed at what was happening. Obviously something had gone wrong and he wasn’t happy about it.
“Close the gate!” The cry rose to a chorus from all those hanging onto the ropes as hail and debris began to fly into the room. “Close it now!”
Ryan felt himself being dragged backward. Those holding the ropes shouted and struggled against the draw of the vortex, their feet scrabbling and sliding along the floor as they began to lose the tug of war with the storm.
The guy behind the glass – he seemed to be the key. Why wasn’t he–?
Ryan saw him roll up his sleeve, hold up his right hand, then use his left to yank if off just below the elbow.
Ryan gaped, expecting a gush of blood, but nothing happened. The guy was so casual, as if he did it all the time. From somewhere out of sight he produced another forearm – long and thin with what looked like a crab claw jutting from the end – and calmly attached it to the stump. He worked the claw, opening and closing it a couple of times, then he pulled open an access plate in the control panel and reached inside. He twisted his arm this way and that, then stood back. He gestured to the shorter man who flipped the same switch he’d been flipping before.
A sudden cheer went up from those holding the ropes. The wind diminished and the hideous roar of the twister began to fade. Looking back over his shoulder, Ryan saw his sister slump to the floor as the wall beyond her irised shut. And then he joined her.
Ryan never, ever hugged his sister, but an instant later they were sobbing in each other’s arms, shedding tears of relief, grief, terror, and bafflement. Ryan had no idea where they were, but he was pretty damn sure they weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Part Two
Not Kansas
4
“Okay, you two,” said a man’s voice. “You can’t stay here. Let’s go.”
Rough hands pulled them to their feet, but Ryan still clung to his sister, even as they were propelled forward toward an arched doorway. He was about to ask these strange people who they were when suddenly a siren began to whoop-whoop-whoop! – a deafening sound that seemed to send everyone around them into a panic. The strobing red light in the ceiling added to the atmosphere of alarm.
“It’s the humans!” one of the goggled men shouted over the din. “Gotta be them!”
They were pulled apart and pushed back toward the wall that had opened for them. There the jumpsuited people began to pat them down.
A nearby man shouted, “Would someone shut that damn thing off!”
The siren and flashing light stopped, but the men continued patting Ryan’s clothes, squeezing his pockets with their gloved hands.
“What are you carrying?” one said. “What have you got on you?”
“Nothing!” Ryan said. “What are you looking for?”
“Empty your pockets!”
Ryan complied, showing his cards, some loose change, and his wallet. They guy pawed through the few singles and the school ID card in that, then looked up at the ugly guy in the white coat, the one they’d called Dr. Koertig.
“He’s clean!”
 
; Clean? What were they talking about?
The doctor leaned toward a microphone. A German-accented voice came through a speaker in the ceiling. “We’ll see about that. Child, step over by the sensor.”
Sensor to sense what? he wondered. As he looked over his shoulder.
“Where?”
“Over there,” said the man next to him, slapping him on the back of the head – not hard, but not gentle either. “Move it!”
Ryan did as he was told and tensed for a blast of the siren again, but all remained quiet.
“Very well,” said the doctor. “Not him. Must be the girl. You, come away from the sensor. Female, take his place.”
Ryan and Emma switched places. She looked dazed. He felt like she looked. And why not? One minute facing certain death, the next…
Nothing happened when Emma stood by the sensor.
“False alarm,” said one of the jumpsuits.
“I find that hard to believe. We cannot take this lightly. Switch them again.”
“What’s this all about?” Ryan said.
“Not your worry, brat,” the nearest jumpsuit replied. “Our worry. A big one.”
“How big?”
He slapped the back of Ryan’s head again. “Shut up.”
Ryan and Emma were switched back and forth twice more without setting off the alarm before Dr. Koertig was satisfied.
“Clean the room. Bring them to me.”
One of the jumpsuits grabbed his upper arm and began to drag him through the arch. Ryan slipped on debris and melting hailstones as he was pulled along and propelled into a dark, narrow passageway. Behind him, he heard Emma resisting them.
“I’m not going anywhere until I find out where I am!”
“You’ll do as you’re told!” said a voice.
“Ow! Get your hands off me!”
Ryan tried to break free but his captor was way too strong.
“What is this?” he yelled. “Who are you? Where are we?”
But the guy just ignored him.
“Ryan!” cried Emma, somewhere behind him, sounding frantic.
Either they were hurting her or she was really freaked out. She didn’t put up with being pushed around. He’d heard that her first week in middle school some eighth-grade girl had tried to knock her books out her arms and Emma had chased her down the hall, throwing books at her head and shouting, You want my books? Here! And here’s another! No one ever tried that again.
Definitely Not Kansas (Nocturnia Book 1) Page 3