A Zoom Zip Architecture

By Gray West

Zane Truax is a twentysomething with many advantages: hes bright, educated, and creative. So why cant he maintain some direction in his life? Is it the social anxiety or the misanthropy? Maybe its the fear of spending his prime years as a pushy, business-suited go-getter with a midlevel career in marketing. He exists on the fringes of society, working menial jobs in order to survive. Along with his only friend, the panic-ridden but supportive Brock DeKalb, Zane fills his free time exploring lonely backroads and ruins of the American Midwest. But an unexplainable encounter in a crumbling prairie farmhouse changes his outlook permanently.

He becomes determined to save his towns forgotten places from the developers who would destroy them forever. But how? With no money, powerful contacts, or social capital, can one person still make a difference?

Not all ghosts can be seen. Sometimes they can only be felt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543475197

Gray West

Gray West is an awkward man. Pasty complexion. A bit portly. He took one of those online quizzes that purport to match people with their spirit animals, and got mole. Was a bit offended by that initially, but when he remembered that he spends a lot of time writing in dark places, twitching, half-blind, hunched over a keyboard with the light of a computer screen reflecting from his thick glasses, he was like, Oh. A Zoom Zip Architecture is his debut novel. He lives in a ramshackle historic home with his wife, their three cats, and countless ghosts that just wont shut up at night.

Book preview

A ZOOM ZIP ARCHITECTURE

Gray West

Copyright © 2018 by Gray West.

Library of Congress Control Number:                    2017919793

ISBN:                      Hardcover                      978-1-5434-7521-0

                                Softcover                         978-1-5434-7520-3

                                eBook                              978-1-5434-7519-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/02/2018

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1   The End

Chapter 2   AD 2001

Chapter 3   Abigail

Chapter 4   Hauser’s Wood

Chapter 5   The Book of Hackett

Chapter 6   Ruins

Chapter 7   A Switch

Chapter 8   The Voice

Chapter 9   A Corny Tale

Chapter 10   Dark Thoughts

Chapter 11   Veronica Glazer

Chapter 12   Zane’s Legion

Chapter 14   Woe

Chapter 15   Gray West

Chapter 16   Revelations

Chapter 17   The Tremendous Truaxes

Chapter 18   Winter

Chapter 19   Zoom Zip

Chapter 20   Resolutions

Chapter 21   Nightmare

Chapter 22   Plans

Chapter 23   The Reverend

Chapter 24   Skeletons

Chapter 25   Hall of Mayors

Chapter 26   Choices

Chapter 27   No. 5 Carderville School

Chapter 28   Ghost Stories

Chapter 29   AD 2101

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams.

—Ivan Chtcheglov

Formulary for a New Urbanism (1953)

CHAPTER 1

The End

Oh, you want me to tell all about my life story? Well, it’s pretty much too late to get into all that, but how ’bout this: I was born in 1899, and then jus’ yest’rday I finally knew it was time for me to die. Time for me to go. I’m a hundred and two years old, and that’s about twenty-five years too long for some folks, apparen’ly.

I been in this town my whole life. Been here since this was a workin’ farm. Been here since all this was farms, all ’round, far out as you could see. Since before all the farmers sold off their land and somebody chopped it up and sold off the pieces to a hunnert different people. I could hear the crick and the wind when it was real quiet, and I could hear the horses whinny way off in the pasture, but now I can’t hear none of that no more. There ain’t no more horses, and there ain’t no pasture, and the crick’s covered up by a culvert, and all I can hear is those semitrucks fartin’ on over the highway.

I’m a fixture in this town. When people give directions, they say, Turn left when you see the farmhouse at the old Longman place. How are people gonna know how to get to Nickerson’s Drugstore when I’m gone? This is a landmark.

I’ve always been here. I always liked it quiet, peaceful by myself out in the country. Guess I’m like a homebody, you could say, and I ain’t never been nowhere else. Daleville always been good enough to me, and plus I always had my friends here. So many people been here and gone now that I can’t hardly remember most of their names anymore.

The Murphys. Now they was some nice folks. They lived with me about fifteen years, but then they had to take off and left me on my own, and I had to take care of myself since then. Don’t matter. I’m an Indiana boy. I can take care of myself fine.

I’m guessin’ you really don’t even care about this stuff anyways. You’re prob’ly just here for some kinda spectacle, to watch an old man go out. See how it happens. Jes’ plain curiosity. You think maybe you’re gonna see my soul fly up outta me like a mist when I go? I don’t think you’ll see it, my friend.

You try to tell people about your life story when you’re as old as me, and nobody wants to listen. ’Cause when you’re real old and broke down, they don’t listen or they can’t hear what you’re tryin’ to say, and it just seems like you can’t get the point across the way you want to. Which don’t bother me too much usually, but sometimes I get lonely too. And then somebody come to visit, and I try to tell them about somethin’ I remember from a ways back. Something that’s pert’nent to the moment though, because I ain’t senile, thank God—I’m just old. And the Lehmanns, who used to live here even farther back before the Murphys, used to tell their kids, Listen to the older generation ’cuz they’re the link to history. Those kids never did though.

Not like I ever did when I was young either, and now that I’m old, nobody listens to me when being the link to history is pretty much all’s I got left as far as usefulness goes.

I’ll tell you this though, and you best listen. Like I am now, someday you will be.

So sometimes somebody feel sorry for me and come to visit, and I try to tell them about the time Josie Lehmann let one of them horses in the front room. And they don’t listen because they’re thinking about whatever it is that concerns people nowadays. And then I start to get mad, and maybe I stomp or bang the walls, slam a door real hard or something. So then they run off, and they’re afraid of me, and they don’t come back anymore. Not like I would ever hurt anybody, but what can you do?

I’m too tired to hurt anybody. Too tired, and I don’t even like standing anymore, and my joints hurt. I was plain when I was younger but still kinda handsome—tall and strong and angular. Now it feels like my outsides are trying to sag all the way off my frame.

Anyways.

So I think that’s about all I got time for. Seems like it’s time for me to go. I thought I was okay with that before, and now I’m not so sure. It’s a sunny day outside, blue skies. It’s the first warm day of spring that we got, and I wish I had a little more time to think about all this. Jus’ one more day. Even jus’ one more hour? I still have some use in me, you’d see.

I could hear them coming before, and now I can see them. A dump truck and a bulldozer just rolled up outside. A fire truck and one of them sports utility vehicles.

I jus’ can’t stop thinking about what it’s gonna be like. Is it going to hurt? Even more than I already hurt? Will it jus’ be POW! and then all dark, forever? Or maybe not even darkness, ’cuz if you don’t have eyes or a mind left to see anything, then you can’t see any dark anyway. Just nothin’, and that’s it? I keep tryin’ to picture nothin’, and it ain’t workin’. I guess it’d be just like it was before I was here. I don’t remember any of that, and it was okay. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t have to worry.

The waitin’ is getting to me. It’s messin’ with my head. I really hope there is something else after this. I don’t want to be gone. The Lehmanns, they always talked about their God and what’s supposed to come next. How your soul never really dies and if you been good, you go to a nice place. Which sounds great, but I always figured it was jus’ wishful thinkin’, and anyways it probably don’t even work like that for me. Some nice heaven though, where all your holes are patched and you’re nice and dry inside, and you get a fresh coat a’ paint on the outside? And you could just sit back in the sun and tell your stories? Wouldn’t be bad at all. I heard some people say houses do have souls, but I’m thinkin’ that’s not exactly what they meant.

I heard some other people sayin’ ’bout how you live forever if you get famous. Well, I can cross that off. Maybe if even just a few people remember me, I’ll keep living on, kinda. But that won’t do me much good if I don’t even know about it, now will it? If I don’t know I’m livin’ on, but other folks keep me alive, am I still really livin’? If people say, Turn left at the old Longman place, does that still count?

And do the Murphys even think about me anymore? The Lehmanns? The Gustwillers? The Popes, the McMillans, the Longmans? Do they ever wonder if I’m still here, and ever think about some of the clothes and pots and pans they left behind to rot and rust? Or think about the little daughter and the eight dogs they left buried in the yard? Well, if they do remember, I hope they know how I took good care of them, kept them dry all those years, kept them warm. How I watched over them. I kinda doubt they would though. Those kids are off livin’ their own lives.

I just wish it was over already and I didn’t have to think about this anymore. I been thinking about it every now and then for all my life, and now the time’s come when I’m really gonna find out. It’s funny to think that this is really the last couple minutes. Like when I watched that moon shot on the television in the sixties: the countdown is on.

The fire chief got out of the truck. Back when I was young, the fire trucks looked a lot different, but I guess this ain’t my time anymore. Chief’s talkin’ to the other firemen about a controlled burn. So I’m thinkin’ they’re gonna set me on fire, and then once I burnt up, they’re gonna push everything over with a bulldozer, knock it into the hole where my cellar was, and then cover it up with dirt. It’ll look like nothin’ is left. Let the grass grow over it for a couple seasons, and then you’ll never be able to tell I was here.

I was here. Remember me.

CHAPTER 2

AD 2001

It was sunny, real deep blue skies just above north-central Indiana but tall clouds the color of fresh-laid tarvy were grumbling in the west, headed thisaway. And that isn’t just meant to be foreshadowing of the trials and tribulations that I, Zane Truax, face in this novel: it was really ready to rain like a son of a gun. And there I was with a shopping bag and my highly-sensitive-to-moisture metal detector, sitting on the curb like a dumbass outside of a Mitchell’s Superstore, hoping my ride was going to get there before the storm did.

Zane is actually my middle name. My parents were both high school teachers, and they thought it would be great to name me Holden, like Holden Caulfield? I think they hoped that I would take after him, seeing through everyone’s façade and whatnot. And for a while, that was okay. I could even see some similarities between me and my literary namesake. We both hated the fakeness of forced social interactions, and small talk, and having to pretend to like everyone even though you’ve just met them and you can tell that they’re not really anyone you’d want to spend longer than five minutes with.

When I got to high school myself and we read The Catcher in the Rye in an honors English class, it was funny for a while, after classmates made the connection between my name and the book, to do my Holden impression and say, Yeah, I think you’re a real goddam phony, if you want to know the truth. The problem is that it was funny for them a lot longer than it was funny for me, and after repeating my spiel about a thousand times, I started wishing that my parents had given me a different name. Then I got older, and the personal associations between me and Holden Caulfield just started to drift away. It sort of stopped defining my personality at some point. It’s great to hold idealistic personal convictions and curse the darkness and all that, but now I have to make money to eat and pay the bills and everything. So I started going by Zane.

Sorry, let me back up. Even with this new, more mature-sounding first name, I guess making money has still been a problem ever since I graduated from college. I guess I’m what you call an introvert. Not shy necessarily. I just don’t care about running my mouth off forever like most people, and I like to spend time by myself. Don’t need anyone to entertain me, and I keep busy with my own things. I have exactly one good friend, Brock, who is actually the one I’m waiting on right now.

When I do need to have social interactions with other people, my thoughts come out all jumbled a lot of the time, especially if I’m talking to people that I don’t know very well. It’s like I’m just spitting out this stream of consciousness that’s in my head, without filters or organization. And then I look at the confused expression on the other person’s face, and I wonder what they’re thinking about me. How they’re judging me, going, This guy must have something wrong with him, some sort of mental problem. And worrying about that makes things even worse, so I just kinda trail off my thoughts and then shut up and sit around, feeling embarrassed for myself. I have a much easier time expressing myself in writing than I do in person because I just need that little extra bit of time to compose my thoughts. Asynchronous communication is my thing.

In school, being the quiet type isn’t usually a problem. The teachers actually like it if you sit there and listen, and I can get lost in my thoughts. In America, in the working world though, the people who get rewarded are the pushy, loudmouth, asshole types. Anyone else gets looked down on as not aggressive enough, not a go-getter, not a team player. So my job experiences haven’t been the greatest, and I floated around to a couple of different low-level graphic design jobs, doing logos or brochures or whatever until my boss decides I’m not enough of a go-getter and cuts me loose.

About two years ago, I did make a little money suing an ex-employer of mine, MediaPimpz. Not a huge amount, but enough to live on for a little while without having to work. One day my boss pulled me into his office and closed the door and started yelling at me, venting, for not keeping up with current design trends or something, and how some client didn’t like the work I submitted, and basically laying the failure of some whole project on me. After a few such incidents with bosses, I learned to start carrying a small tape recorder and documenting these tirades. Then I filed a lawsuit alleging that the original job posting to which I had replied created an employment contract with its unmitigated promises of a super cool and fun environment that will make you love coming to work every morning! and that the chewing out constituted a breach of said contract. I probably didn’t have a leg to stand on, legally speaking, but MediaPimpz’s lawyer weighed the possibility of a drawn-out trial and negative publicity against a payout of, say, $30,000 and decided on the latter to make me go away.

Now the bullet point in the current MediaPimpz job posting regarding the fun work environment is followed by an asterisk and the mouseprint disclaimer, *at the discretion of management.

Most people would look at 30K and think, That isn’t even enough to live on for one year! Well, I’m low maintenance. I don’t have a car. Partly because cars are just a total waste of money and resources, partly because I can no longer get a loan after I stopped paying some of my bills and wrecked my credit rating. If I’m being completely honest, it’s really more because of the second reason than the first, but I definitely do hate cars, and I hate driving. I despise feeling that I have to work just so that I can pay for a car, and I only have the car so I can drive myself to work. Maybe in the 1920s when driving was a new thing, having a car would have been something to get excited about. But in 2001, a car is just a ball and chain that drags me down. So I sold it. Now I get around by bike, or by bus, or by bumming rides from Brock.

I was really hoping he’d show up soon. I’d been sitting on the curb outside this gray concrete big-box store for half an hour, watching the storm blow in. It was getting close, and I could see flashes of lightning behind the clouds in the distance. Still no thunder, so it was outside the realm of the general lightning-strike-distance calculation, the one where you count the number of seconds between seeing the strike and hearing the thunder and then divide by five. That tells you how many miles away the lightning is. The main thing irritating me was seeing all these old Republican-type people shooting me looks as they came and went from the store to their cars, judging me. They probably thought that since I wasn’t at work or school on a Friday morning, I must’ve been a vagrant or some kind of a troublemaking teen, even though I’m twenty-four years old and far beyond the teen years. Those kids, they were probably saying. Why can’t they just act like decent human beings? Well, I was silently judging them right back: Hey, Mrs. Blue Hair! Did you see something on a TV commercial that you just couldn’t live without? Those commercials get in your head, make you feel like you were falling behind your friends in the consumption game? You wouldn’t want to miss out on living the full, happy life that only some piece of plastic garbage can provide. Just think of the possibilities when you hold it in your hands. And then you’ll take it home, use it for a week or two, and then stick it in some dusty cabinet somewhere, forgotten for years until you finally sell it in a yard sale for a quarter.

Did I mention that I’m a bit of a misanthrope? Yeah, I admit it. But being a misanthrope comes with its own set of advantages, one of which is not caring about how many friends I have or having the latest products to impress them with. And definitely no girlfriend. The ladies look down on a guy who doesn’t have a car, and I look down on them right back for being slaves to advertising and consumerism.

Besides not owning a car, I keep my costs low in lots of other ways that I think are pretty creative. I buy clothes from thrift stores. This is one area of my life where marketing’s lies actually work in my favor. The marketeers tell the go-getters that it’s a new season and their clothes are no longer in style, so they’ll need to freshen up their wardrobes if they want to impress the boss and land that big promotion. Then these folks gather up all the gently used clothing that they purchased only last spring and donate it to the nearest thrift shop. That’s when I swoop in and buy five shirts, two pairs of pants, a pair of shoes, and a belt for the same price that I’d pay for one new shirt at the mall. Sure, I’m not up-to-date with my fashion. Do I even care? Not a bit. Plus this is Indiana. We’re generally behind the coasts by about ten years in fashion anyway. So 90 percent of the people I meet wouldn’t know the difference.

Beads of sweat were starting to roll down the crack of my ass, and I shifted the metal detector to my other shoulder. This was the first really warm day of spring so far, and the heat reflecting from the ocean of parking lots wasn’t helping any. My thrift-store Banana Republic shirt (the one that I removed the embroidered logo from with a stitch ripper—if they want to advertise on my shirt, they should be paying me) was already showing patches of wetness in front. Even though it was a short-sleeved shirt, the humidity made it feel like I was wearing a slightly damp wool blanket. There’s that white and wispy old cliché in Indiana: If you don’t like the weather now, just wait five minutes. Well, it had been almost an hour, and that storm still hadn’t showed to cool things down any. It pulled up short, like it was waiting for something.

Where the hell was Brock? I took a deep breath and started my Zen waiting routine. Anytime I get upset or anxious about anything, I remind myself that (1) I don’t really have a job to worry about or any deadlines or responsibilities to speak of; (2) I hate whiners, so I don’t want to be one; and (3) he’ll get here when he gets here. I should live in the moment and enjoy this.

I tried to visualize Brock’s exact point in space at this moment. His truck is somewhere on the road, probably, headed in this direction. Maybe stopped at a red light down the street … I craned my neck to look. Some lady with an overstuffed shopping cart screamed at her kids to stop biting each other, and it broke my focus.

That storm was getting closer. Lightning strike … one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six … rumble, rumble. So that lightning strike was just over a mile away. I got up to move to a bench in an alcove near the store entrance. Wouldn’t be able to see as well from there, but at least I wouldn’t get rained on when the skies opened up. Just as I was about to sit, I heard the singular metallic clanging pattern of Brock’s beat-to-hell pickup as it pulled alongside the curb.

HOLDEN! Brock was yelling out the window. They’ve been looking all over for you at Pencey Prep. Brock and I went to the same public school, so he knew all about my feelings for The Catcher in the Rye and that whole deal.

Thanks, ya cock! I yelled back. We’ll pretend that the reason I occasionally refer to Brock as cock is because his downward-pointing nose reminds me of a chicken’s beak. That’s the only way I can get away with this in a young adult novel. I don’t want your parents sending around petitions to get this removed from the library shelves. I laid the metal detector gently in the truck’s bed and covered it with a plastic tarp before stepping onto the rusty running board and hoisting myself inside, sweeping a pile of crumpled papers, a map, an inside-out shirt, two empty cans, and some CD cases onto the floor as I did so.

Brock looked at the mess and said, Guh. I had that just the way I wanted it, man.

I ignored him. How goes Mrs. Glazer’s place?

Almost one whole room cleared out. We can move in pretty soon. Brock pulled out of the parking lot as I settled back into my seat. This was another of my many clever methods of keeping living expenses down. Brock’s dad’s college friend was one of those guys who flip houses. That is, they bought it as cheap as possible, fixed it up a little, and then sold it for a profit. So Mr. Armisen (the house flipper) got ahold of this hoarder’s place. The lady who had lived there previously, Mrs. Glazer, had some mental problems, in that she never threw anything away. Her house was stacked, floor to ceiling in most places, with trash. Literally. It wasn’t even useful stuff. It was old newspapers and books that had gotten wet when the ceiling sagged to let water in during thunderstorms; bundles of moldy children’s clothes; scratched LPs; broken furniture; cracked plates, cups, serving dishes; about forty straw brooms (not that she ever cleaned); dead potted plants; old soda cans, water bottles, cardboard food containers, candy wrappers; and a lot of things I couldn’t even identify. There were only narrow passages through the garbage, leading from room to room. At some point, her toilet had stopped working. She wanted to have a plumber in to fix it, but everyone she called took one look at the roaches crawling all over everything and bolted. I guess she continued to do her thing in the toilet for a while until it filled up. Then she started saving her waste in little baby food jars and storing them in the basement. Believe me when I say it was a hellacious sight, and that’s why Mr. Armisen got the whole two-thousand-square-foot house for about eighteen thousand dollars. He was asking around for someone to fix the place up, and I guess Brock and I are not as smart as the plumbers because we agreed to do the work in exchange for a small stipend and being allowed to live in the place rent-free while we did the cleanup and repairs. We figured that it would take the two of us at least a year to remove all the trash, strip everything down to bare walls and floors, repaint, refinish, fix the roof, and everything. Mr. Armisen wasn’t putting too much pressure on us as long as we kept making progress and got the job done eventually.

Did I mention that Mrs. Glazer had died in there? Yeah. A neighbor called the police when they smelled something like rot coming from the place, and when the cops broke down the door, they found her buried under a stack of old televisions, flattened by her own hoard. Some of the twenty cats she also kept in the house had eaten part of her too, when they got hungry. I guess she used to cut open a whole forty-pound bag of kibble and dump it on the floor for them. When she passed away and that last pile of food was eaten, she was meat.

Living in a place where something like that happened might freak some people out, but I guess I have a bit of a morbid side. I know it’s kind of a contradiction, but I’d love to see a ghost, even though I don’t have a reason to believe in them myself. Seeing a ghost or hearing a voice or something would be like confirmation that there is some sort of existence after death, but all the evidence that people have shown me just seems like wishful thinking at best and complete delusion at worst. Like orb photos? Dust in the air. EVP recordings? Just your brain’s way of finding patterns in random noise. Electromagnetic fluctuations? Electromagnetic fields are always fluctuating, just like the temperature, which explains cold spots. And the people who recount their own personal haunting stories? Well, everyone loves to hear a good ghost story, but that doesn’t make them true. I would need to see some sort of paranormal activity myself, and even then I know that there would probably be some rational explanation. Still, the potential for something like that was exciting. And the creepy or uneasy feelings that I’d get from thinking about it kept my life interesting, just a little more exciting than the typical day-to-day.

My paranormal fascination is also what prompted this little adventure we were on—Brock and I were headed to a storied cemetery way out in the country, to see what there was to see. Discovering and exploring abandoned places was a hobby of mine. I’d been doing research on the ghost stories and legends surrounding this latest location for a week.

This weather doesn’t look good, said Brock, crouching over the steering wheel to peer up through the windshield.

It’s fine, a little rain. Probably blow over by the time we get to Hauser’s Wood.

"That looks like more than a little rain, man."

Well, if you’d gotten here earlier …

Brock didn’t respond but drove west toward the storm clouds, the truck bouncing and rattling its way outside the Broadacre municipal limits on Route 124. We passed the cloned houses of the suburbs. Most people from these parts thought of Broadacre as the big city since it was the largest settlement for miles around, but it was really just a middle-sized town by the strict, legal definition. The population has been declining from its peak of 41,413 in 1963 and is less than 20,000 today. Nobody wants to stay in Indiana anymore. They either move north to Chicago or south to Indianapolis. Or they get out of the Midwest entirely, if they can. There have been some moves toward redevelopment in the area recently, some new industries moving in, but I don’t know. We’ll see how that goes.

Whatdja get from Mitchell’s? Brock jerked his head, motioning toward the plastic bag I carried. By the way, it’s really Mitchell Superstore, but in Indiana we put an extra s on the end of company names, to make them possessives. I don’t know why—don’t judge me. Kroger becomes Kroger’s, Marsh is Marsh’s, so Mitchell is Mitchell’s. Sometimes people who have lived here even longer than Brock and I put yet another possessive at the end, saying Mitchell’s’es, which even I have to admit doesn’t make any sense at all.

Tracing paper, charcoal sticks … Just then, we hit the edge of the rain. Fat drops splattered against the windshield. It was actually a bit of an improvement to the visibility because Brock never washes his truck and there was bug mess and dirt smeared all over the glass. He turned on the wipers and tuned the radio to WWAI, the only FM station we can receive clearly in Broadacre, hoping for a weather broadcast but getting old-school rap instead.

Fresh! I said, not entirely ironically.

Brock looked concerned. He was always the cautious one, and since he had in his youth survived a tornado touchdown that demolished his elementary school’s gymnasium while he and twenty-five other kids plus their teacher huddled in the girls’ bathroom just down the hall, I couldn’t really blame him. Tornados are common enough in Indiana that safety procedures were drilled into us from a young age. The rain intensified from a clatter to a racket. I’m gonna go back.

Come on, it’s just rain.

This looks like tornado weather. Brock was looking for a place to turn around. Outside, the rain swirled. It was still too early in the growing season for tall corn to block the vistas on either side of the road, so we could see winds buffeting trees far out in the distance. No sign of a funnel cloud yet though.

Wait till we get the weather report, I said. I was whining a bit now. Brock shook his head, and we sped on. Our excursion had been planned for a month, I had been looking forward to this intensely, and I guess my survival instinct just wasn’t as honed as Brock’s. Just then, dissonant tones of a weather warning interrupted the Fat Boys’ dope beats.

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN INDIANAPOLIS HAS ISSUED A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR CARROLL COUNTY, HOWARD COUNTY, MIAMI COUNTY, SALAMONIE COUNTY …