Too
many citizens were ready to believe that their beloved town would not
survive the third time around. The third tornado that month was in
the making. The town had not yet fully recovered from the first two
tornados.
It
was a small town. The population had never reached ten-thousand. It
was too small to qualify to have a mayor, nor any elected official.
The Executive Council of three was appointed by the Governor of the
State. The chief executive officers, appointed by the Council, were
one Sheriff and one Deputy Sheriff. The official means of transport
these two appointed law enforcement officials shared, was one Police
car and one Police bicycle.
The
Governor was seriously considering closing down the town,
permanently. If this third tornado struck with the destructiveness of
the first two that month, it would be the last straw. Everybody was
strongly advised to leave the town, and, if even remotely possible,
to never return.
The
town's two-hundred-year-old cemetery had been flooded in ankle-deep
water by the first tornado. The second tornado had increased that
depth to knee-deep.
The
population total had been decimated; by how many was yet to be
officially calculated.
Elizabeth
Sneddon had lived all her life there. She was well-past retirement
age, but she still ran her veterinary clinic. For the last thirty
years, and counting. She had no plans to close down. She was going to
comply with the first half of the Governor's recommendation, but not
the second. She was determined to return. Her clinic was, and had
always been, the only one in the town. The animals needed her. Most
of her patients had always been stray animals in the town.
Her
favourite stray was a bird that dropped down from the sky during that
first tornado. It was the size of a sparrow. Blue head, black wings,
silver tail feathers. Its wing was dislocated. Elizabeth had, by
sheer luck, heard the bird slam against a clinic window as the
tornado was dying out. She went outside and brought the soaking-wet
creature inside. She re-set the dislocated wing, and named the bird
Raindrops, for obvious reason. Ever since, Raindrops visited the
clinic a few times a week.
Too
few citizens owned pets to sustain the clinic. Elizabeth relied
wholly on out-of-town wealthy pet owners who could not resist the
ever-so-low priced services Elizabeth provided.
The
Governor was providing free bus transportation for everyone who chose
to leave their own vehicles at home, and for others who did not own
vehicles.
Elizabeth
was one of those who chose. She did not own a vehicle. She had long
ago stopped driving, even the clinic's animal-pickup. She had long
ago stopped renewing her licence to drive a vehicle.
The
small town never had a vehicle traffic problem. The citizen-packed
bus had no trouble moving along through the town. The highway was a
problem, from the beginning. People from far away Cities were
fleeing, too. It was an unusually long wait for the bus to merge into
the highway traffic. On the highway, all was proceeding well until a
crash ahead brought all traffic to a standstill.
For
the first thirty-or-so minutes, the vehicle radios and other
electronic devices continually repeated appeals for patience, along
with providing their weather updates of the approaching tornado.
They
said the swirling gusts of wind and the swiftly moving dark clouds
above were not to be taken seriously as long as the sun was appearing
between the clouds.
After
those first thirty-or-so minutes, the broadcast news was that
everyone should leave their vehicles and walk ahead to the crash
site. At the crash site, there would be busses to transport everyone.
The tornado was on its malevolent, devastating way, on schedule.
The
bus driver noted that while she advised everyone to disembark and
walk away, she would remain in the bus with anyone who chose to
remain in the bus during the tornado. All the passengers chose to
walk away. Elizabeth, too; and she chose to be the last to disembark
the bus.
Elizabeth
was mildly amused at the total absence of fear in her. Even through
the first two tornados. She had hunkered down inside her clinic, and
had survived with no permanent damage to herself or the clinic. She
had been lucky, twice, in the middle of the disaster, she told
herself. Why not just as lucky this time, now that she would be far
away?
She
told herself that luck did not explain the total absence of fear in
her. She told herself that that total absence was probably because at
her advanced age she had lost all the brain cells that triggered
fear.
She
walked along the road, some distance behind the last stranger ahead
of her. She saw the body of a cat, sprawled in the wild weeds a few
steps away from the side of the road. Elizabeth, stopped. She looked
at the corpse. She felt it deserved a few moments of awe-filled sad
silence. She always observed this sad silence in her clinic. She
never got used to it. The pain always hurt with the paralyzing
intensity of a first time. Elizabeth's self-survival instinct had
developed a yoga-like automatic trigger-to-end the pain within
seconds. She walked along.
The
corpse was a step-or-two behind her when she sensed it moved. She
stopped and looked back. The animal was slowly crawling away up into
the undergrowth. She followed it, notwithstanding the voice within
her warning her that in those circumstances she was not being fully
intelligent.
The
wind gusts were stronger and more frequent. The sun's appearances
between the rain clouds were less and less frequent. There were
occasional drops of spitefully stinging rain.
Elizabeth
was making her way uphill through wild, lashing grass and weeds,
after the cat, which was appearing and disappearing ahead,
intermittently. Elizabeth paused.
She
came to her senses; perhaps because of the spitefully stinging rain
drops becoming more frequent. She stopped. She decided to turn back.
She saw the cat, ahead of her, sitting on its haunches, and staring
at her. She rejected the impulse to go to it. She was about to turn
back, when the cat meowed at her, and slowly turned away and ducked
out of sight in the tall wild vegetation.
Elizabeth
did not try to resist the impulse to hasten to the cat's location.
The sun was completely hidden by the clouds. The noisy wind was
threatening to twist and fling Elizabeth off into the air. The
spitefully stinging rain drops were turning into spitefully angry
blinding sheets of opaque solid water.
When
she reached the last spot where she saw the cat, she looked in the
direction it had disappeared.
She
saw the spaceship hidden among trees! The cat was sitting on its
haunches in the open doorway, looking at Elizabeth. The ship burst
into a blaze of lights all over it. Raindrops flew from behind
Elizabeth, straight through the doorway, disappearing behind the cat.
Elizabeth Sneddon ran to the doorway and entered, seconds before the
tornado burst upon the scene with a destructive ferocity many times
greater than an atomic bomb.
Contact
Ezra (Unless
you
type
the
author's name in
the subject
line
of the message we
won't know where to send it.)
