The Meteorologist

THE METEOROLOGIST

a short story by

Blake Crouch

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Blake Crouch on Smashwords

Copyright 2011 by Blake Crouch

Cover art copyright 2011 by Jeroen ten
Berge

All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR BLAKE CROUCH

Crouch quite simply is a marvel. Highest
possible recommendation.

BOOKREPORTER

Blake Crouch is the most exciting new
thriller writer I've read in years.

DAVID MORRELL

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

For more information about the author, please
visit www.blakecrouch.com.

For more information about the artist, please
visit www.jeroentenberge.com.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you
share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it,
or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return
to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting the author's work.

* * * * *

THE METEOROLOGIST

Summer of the year two thousand and six found
him on the plains of west Kansas, veering onto the off-ramp at Exit
95. Hoxie (pop. 1200) lay sixteen miles due north of the
interstate, the blaring inconsequence of the town only underscored
by its station on the prairie. It was a black freckle on the
roadmap, the sort of place one passes through in wonderment that
people actually live there.

Peter secured permission from the owner of
Hoxie’s only motel to squat in their parking lot for fifteen
dollars a day. Paid for three in advance and emerged from the small
office into an evening that had failed to release the preceding
hours’ blistering store of heat. Across the empty parking lot,
slats of sunlight glinted off the chrome hubcaps of his ’87
Winnebago Chalet. Peter considered the microwave inside and the TV
dinners in the freezer, any of which he’d had twenty times before.
It had been a long day behind the wheel—492 miles—and since the
thought of eating dinner alone in the RV depressed the hell out of
him, he started walking.

The downtown went for three blocks, and as he
moved along the sidewalk, he kept glimpsing prairie—down alleys
between the buildings, beyond the dirt streets lined with shabby
houses. The sun struck all that grass in glancing blows, and the
color changed as the wind blew across it. Green to gold, back to
green again. Endless.

Where the business district stopped, he eased
down onto a bench and stared sixty or seventy miles to the south at
a supercell creeping silently across the plains like an atomic
sunset.

Bad lighting. Jazz so easy-listening he
couldn’t help but to think of that single video of soft-core he
kept behind the respectable DVD collection in the RV—a bride and
the best man trapped in an elevator the day of her wedding.

The waitress was wiping a table in the back,
and she called out, “Sit wherever you like!”

He slid into a window booth as a trio of
skateboarders rolled by, his eyes following their movement, then
catching on the bulbous, powder-blue water tower that loomed behind
the school. It felt good to be out of the RV. He stretched his legs
under the table, let his heels rest on the cushion of the opposite
seat.

Voices slipped through a cracked door in the
rear wall of the restaurant, and he thought it might be a waiter
calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering he was
the only customer, that seemed unlikely.

He left the table and walked over to the door
and nudged it open.

“B-eleven.”

“Hit.”

Peered into a private room half the size of
the main dining room. A crowd of thirty or forty sat transfixed by
two men on a makeshift stage, absorbed in a fierce game of
Battleship.

The waitress came up behind him, ice rattling
in the pitcher of water she held.

“It’s a very important match,” she whispered.
“They’ve been having this tournament every Friday for the last few
months. Tonight’s the championship.”

Peter chuckled. “Seems pretty intense in
there. Money on the line?”

“Actually quite a lot.”

He returned to his table and let the waitress
stumble through the longest description of a dinner special he’d
ever endured—basically chicken-fried steak in two hundred
words.

When she finished her spiel, he decided to
splurge—ordered the special and a glass of Woodbridge from an
unspecified vintage. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen and
returned with his wine and a basket of steaming bread.

“You didn’t just move here, did you?” she
asked.

“No.”

“Hmm.”

“What is it?” She’d told him her name when
she first brought the menu, but he hadn’t really been paying
attention. In fact, he hadn’t even looked at her until now.

He’d be fifty-three in October, if he lasted
that long, and he put the waitress in the vicinity of
forty-five—short and slender with graying blond hair and thin lips
conservatively colored with coral lipstick that for some reason
reminded him more of an accountant. She wore a white dress shirt
and black jeans and her hair had been tugged back into a
ponytail.

“We don’t get many folks, revise that,
any
folks just passing through our little piece of
prairie.”

Peter sipped his wine, the stem of the glass
still warm from the dishwasher.

Notes of black cherry and dish detergent.

“No, I’ve been saving up for years to come to
Hoxie. It’s the culmination of a lifelong dream.”

The waitress shot him a slanted stare. “Are
you having fun with me?”

He smiled. “A little bit. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head and started her retreat
toward the kitchen. “I can already tell,” she said, pointing her
finger at him, “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”

Sudden applause issued from the banquet room,
signifying what could only mean the end of one fleet admiral’s
career. Peter leaned back and sipped his wine and basked in a
tremor of contentment, old enough at last to know better than to
analyze it, or embrace it longer than it meant to stay.

He walked back to the motel a little drunk
and a lot tired. Friday night, 9:30 p.m., and Hoxie as dead as
advertised—no sound but the hum of streetlamps and crickets. He
climbed into the RV and sat for awhile in the dark on the foldout
sofa. Staring through the window into the prairie, half-expecting
to see some suggestion of residential glow out there, but not even
a porchlight disrupted the gaping darkness. Around midnight, he got
up and stepped into the closet-size john. Brushed the wine stain
off his teeth and tried to avoid meeting the eyes in the tiny
mirror. Windows to an empty house. Lobotomy eyes. He cracked a
window and crawled into bed. The sound of the wind blowing across
the prairie moved him like nothing had in days.

In the morning, he brought yesterday’s coffee
to a fast boil in a saucepan and powered up the laptop. The
forecast discussion on the National Weather Service’s Goodland,
Kansas Website thrilled him—extreme thunderstorm activity expected
along the Nebraska border.

Peter headed north up Highway 23 and reached
the town of Cedar Bluffs at noon, the sky still clear, the heat
intense and wet. He pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned
Pizza Hut, nuked a frozen dinner in the microwave, ate lunch, slept
off the remnants of a three-wine headache.

He woke sweating, the sun blazing into the
RV. Grabbed a bottled water from the Fridge, drained it in one long
gulp.

That familiar pang of disappointment
blossomed in his stomach as he read the updated forecast
discussion. The NWS had, as usual, missed the boat. A line of
storms were setting up, but over the eastern plains of Colorado, a
hundred and seventy miles west of his position. With convection
already underway and a supercell forming south of Greeley, the
party would be over long before he got there.

He convinced himself on the five-block stroll
from his RV to the Prairie View Café that he was going in hopes
they’d reprised the chicken-fried steak and because he’d spent the
entire day in his home on wheels. It had nothing to do with the
waitress who probably had the night off anyway.

She stood at a booth scribbling an order onto
a pad when he walked into the restaurant. The chimes that jangled
over the opening door caught her attention, and she looked at Peter
and raised her finger, might even have winked, though he couldn’t
say that for certain in the poor light. The thought of it put knots
in his stomach. She wore a blue and white dress that seemed such
the epitome of her profession it reminded him more of a movie
costume. With her hair down tonight and her lips a paler pink than
before, perhaps their natural color, he went short of breath as she
walked toward him.

“Hi, Peter.”

“Melanie.”

“You want the window booth again or a brand
new experience?”

He thought about it. “I like the booth.”

She walked him over.

He slid in.

“How was your day in scenic Hoxie?” she
asked, setting a menu on the table, and he almost responded as he
would have to any other human being who tried to engage him, but he
didn’t want to just say, “Fine,” because then she’d probably smile
and leave and he wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want her to walk
away yet.

“Disappointing,” he confessed.

“What happened?”

“It was supposed to storm up near the
Nebraska border, but the forecast didn’t pan. Kind of a wasted
day.”

She looked at him askance. “It was a
beautiful day, Peter.”

“Not if you wanted a storm.”

“No, I guess not. Well, I’ll be back in a bit
to tell you about the special. You want something to—”

“I’m an idiot,” he said, heat flooding his
face, wondering if she noticed the color. “I should explain.”

“No, it’s—”

“I’m a storm chaser. That’s why I wanted it
to—”

“You mean one of those people who photograph
tornadoes?”

“Sort of.”

Her face lit up. The awkwardness retreating.
“Oh my God, that is so interesting. So you’re one of those
guys.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled. Strangely, genuinely impressed.
“That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard of in awhile. How’d you pick
Hoxie?”

“You guys got hammered a couple years back
with a tornado outbreak.”

“I was here when those storms swept through.
It was awful.”

“Well, I’ve been all over Oklahoma, the Texas
panhandle, eastern Kansas.”

“Searching for that elusive storm?”

“Something like that. This western part of
Kansas is the last region I haven’t spent a ton of time in. Long
range models were predicting an active couple of weeks, so I
thought why not give it a shot.”

Melanie glanced over her shoulder at the two
other occupied tables, then sat in the booth across from Peter.

“You ever seen a tornado?”

“I’ve seen nine of them.”

“Like in real life?”

“Yep.”

“What’s the closest you ever got?”

“A mile away.”

“What was it like?”

Like standing next to God, but he didn’t say
that.

“Amazing.”

She looked at her tables. “I better get back
to it.” She got up.

“Melanie?”

“Yes?”

His heart thumped in his chest.

“I’m going out again tomorrow. Now, there’s
no guarantee the weather will cooperate, but—”

“I’d love to, Peter.”

“You would?”

“You must’ve read my mind. I was hoping you’d
ask.”

It was like nothing he’d done in years, and
he felt both joy and debilitating regret that in a moment of
weakness (or strength) he’d exposed himself.

The waitress said, “Glass of red?”

His throat constricting. “Be great.”

She headed back toward the kitchen, and he
stared through the windowglass, watching the prairie darken. Kept
telling himself that it was still Saturday night and he was only in
Kansas and his RV just five blocks away. As if that piece of news
might tether him to the world he knew.

Melanie lived two miles out of town at the
end of a dirt road, spruce trees forming a windbreak along the
north and west boundaries of the homestead. It had seemed an
idyllic farmhouse from the highway, austere on the morning prairie.
Proximity destroyed the illusion. The white paint had chipped
almost completely away, and the weathered boards and the rusting
tin roof and smiling porch presented more of a ghost house than a
livable dwelling.