Then came darkness and silence.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Krysty scooped Dean under one arm, carrying the kicking boy to the right-hand side of the street, heading for a detached house that still had a third of its roof in place. There was no door and she dived in, seeing in the pulsing gloom that most of the staircase remained.
“Under there!” she yelled, throwing the boy under the cover and jumping on top of him.
J.B. and Mildred went for the building opposite, spotting Ryan crashing into the storefront next door. The noise of the rushing tornado was cataclysmic, so overwhelming that there was a temptation to give up and lie down and await the lethal embrace of the storm’s heart.
There was an odd display unit near the door, and they both went for it, hugging each other tightly.
Mildred was praying, though nobody could hear her desperate words-nobody but herself and God.
Emma had looked at the raging tornado as though she saw her own death riding toward her. For a moment she resisted Jak’s hand as he pulled at her to try to steer her toward safety. Then she allowed him to drag her to the same side of the street as Krysty and Dean, where they both flattened themselves against the front wall, directly beneath the broken window. There had been no time to find anywhere safer.
Doc was last and slowest of the companions to seek shelter, hindered by one of the ghoulies, its eyes and mouth stretched in a rictus of terror, who blocked him off from getting under cover in one of the buildings.
“Damn you! Get out of my buggering way!” Doc spit, pressing the Le Mat deep into the mutie’s stomach and squeezing the scattergun trigger. The.63-caliber round almost cut the ghoulie in two, wrapping his pulverized intestines around the shattered remnants of his spine.
Doc pushed the dying man aside, his knees creaking as he powered himself into a laborious, clumsy sprint for safety in a doorway.
RYAN CRIED OUT IN VAIN as the pressure in his ears rose and fell sharply, while the heart of the tornado passed directly over the building where he’d run for shelter, with its still, small voice of calm.
The roaring sound stopped for a few long seconds, then resumed again, and he was aware of dozens of predark shingles, finally loosing their hold on the remnants of the roof, and whirling around like discarded playing cards.
The joists of the first floor of the building were a dozen feet above his head, stained with mold, several of them either rotted away or taken for fuel like the boards.
The cellar was roughly twenty feet square, and Ryan had landed more or less in its center, immediately sinking to midthigh in the cold slimy ooze.
Only when he looked around him did Ryan realize that one of the murderous gang of ghoulies had made the same mistake, leaping for safety from the teeth of the storm, landing in the deep lake of mud that filled the basement.
The man, barely five feet tall, had landed near one of the walls and had immediately tried to reach the furrowed brickwork and breeze blocks to steady himself. But he’d failed and had gone facedown in the stinking tentacles.
Ryan kept himself very still, remembering Trader’s advice about quicksand. Throw yourself flat and don’t try to struggle-you’d just drown yourself that much quicker.
It looked like the ghoulie had followed that advice which, unusually for Trader, didn’t seem very sound.
The mutie was dying in front of Ryan’s eye, the sucking pit of mud pulling him down, bubbling and heaving like a sentient creature as it shrouded him.
Ryan had bolstered the SIG-Sauer and sheathed the panga, waiting with all the patience he could muster for his friends to come and rescue him. He had no doubt that they would have been able to see off the attacking ghoulies.
What Ryan hadn’t reckoned on was the tornado, blindly erratic, revolving about its own axis and coming back along precisely the same path.
THE NOISE WAS WORSE, the buffeting shock far more powerful. Once again it brought rain racing ahead of it, like a solid wall, bursting over the derelict suburbs of the Hole, bringing down walls and roofs, filling the very air itself with a bedlam of screaming chaos.