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For miles and miles, oceans of wheat swayed across the plain in golden swells. In that boundless expanse perhaps only one or two farms might stand out against the pale blue sky; a silo, a house and its accompanying barn, a herd of cattle grazing languidly in the afternoon sun. Most days here passed just like this. The sun shone with impossible brightness, and mere wisps of clouds drifted across the heavens. But it was summer, and the weather could change drastically in a matter of minutes.
The boy, hand to his forehead to shield his eyes, scanned the mobile home park. Children ran through the narrow dirt road with basketballs and jump ropes; fathers fired up their grills for a hamburger-and-hot dog dinner. He grabbed his glass of lemonade, condensation clinging to his palm as ice cubes clacked against his front teeth, and finished it off before shifting his gaze upward. It was a day like all the days in Paradise must be. Yet that thought did not alleviate the chill overwhelming him any more than the burning sun did. The souls of the dead dwelled in Heaven, and the dead man walked in clouds.
If the dead man comes down from the sky
You will be the next to die…
Jump ropers pounded out the singsong rhythm with their feet. The boy understood the legend only from stories told by the Native Americans he encountered in town, rare people who had witnessed the horror of the dead man and survived. "If you see the dead man, you know the end is near," they said, though the horrible man hardly ever returned to earth. The boy was used enough to the dead man's weaker cousins who frequented the plains in the summer months, but this ominous statement stuck in his head and haunted him all summer long, every year.
An unexpected breeze hissed portentously through the dry grass, and swirls of dust rose like earthen spirits that danced with life once again before sinking back into the ground. The boy squinted at the horizon. Clouds began to gather, innocent cumulus clouds to anyone else. He shivered, but the children took no notice of either he or the sky and played on, prancing and giggling with the dust phantoms that almost always preceded the storm. The sun never failed to fool them.
Fifteen minutes later, still several towns and many miles away, the clouds that piled on top of each other like a pyramid of cheerleaders at the high school football game turned coal black.
Ten minutes after that an immense dark anvil stretched across the sky. Supercell, the storm chasers called it, and this time of year the plains were crawling with both.
Radios crackled into life from kitchen windows up and down the trailer park. "Tornado warning…take shelterr…storm cellar…"
Mothers called their children inside,de, though mobile homes were the favorite toys of God's great fingers, as grills were doused. Those who had built storm cellars scurried into them. Squalls of wind swept violently through the park, rattling aluminum siding and thin windows. Fat droplets of rain splattered on his face.
"Jamie!" a voice called, flimsy and easily snatched away by the growing roar. Perhaps a mile or two away the ponderous clouds whorled as if being stirred from above like a giant black stew. Vans equipped with mobile Doppler radar surrounded the storm, and the trackers leapt out with camcorders in the hope of documenting this seldom-witnessed genesis. A portiere of rain and dust dropped over the plain in preparation for the final act. Tongues of lightning forked across the night-black sky while hail stones battered cars and mobile homes like machine gun fire, slashing open his forehead and cheeks.
And then the stormcloud gave birth. At first there was only one sinuous black limb and he was relieved, but within moments a second reached down from the beyond, reanimated with the ancient dirt where proud warriors in pursuit of the long-lost buffalo once gazed upon the dead giant in their last moments. The fear that must have chilled their blood, the horror and awe that rooted him to this spot in the middle of the road, was as powerful as the storm itself.
"Multi-vortex…F-5…" said the radio. Electrical lines snapped in a blue-white flash. The storm chasers dove into their vans and slammed on the gas, tires screeching as they fled the monster in the field.
Farmhouses blew apart as if flattened by the blast wave of a nuclear explosion; they and their concrete foundations vanished into the advancing wall of black, as did a mile-wide stretch of the highway. Dirt slammed into his eyes and mouth. The air was being sucked away.
The boy curled himself into a ball, arms over his head. Wind whistled past his ears, thundered over him, tore at his shirt and his shorts and at his skin.
The dead man set his massive swirling legs upon the earth and began to walk.
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