Connected.
"Damn!" Kimberly said, closing her flip-phone from another dropped call. The reception out in the mountains was spotty at her place. Usually she could get a good signal next to her bedroom window, but looking out, the blue sky had taken on a dark, ominous hue from a storm rolling in.
"Oh jeez, its here." Kimberly said, rushing over to her vanity and grabbing her digital camcorder and sprinting out into the yard. Overhead, was the rolling shelf cloud of a monster super cell that she had been tracking since early that morning. Unfortunately her boyfriend decided to call at a time when she had missed an opportune time to catch the monstrous storm moving in, so that she could check if it had strengthened or dissipated at all once it hit the mountains.
There was no time for that now.
She began taking pictures of what appeared to be the inflow on the storm. The wind was beginning to pick up, blowing up dust and sand into the storm. It all whipped her in the back of the head. She was all accustomed to it. It was what she did, she lived to catch storms with all their fury. She especially loved the super cells that formed in late June and July. She had yet to see one produce a tornado though. She had caught plenty of downbursts, microbursts and gustanados, but the season was still in full swing. The lightning was breathtaking too, and this super cell had tons of it. The lightning core usually makes its appearance before the hail/rain core which is the source of the outflow winds. She was in the cusp, the inflow was still hitting her, but she could see the lightning strike nearer and nearer. She soon knew it would grow too dangerous for her to be outside. With this storm came hail, upwards to the size of a golfball. If this storm had intensified, it would put her at great risk and who knows what size the hail would come down in….
You need to get inside.
Turning off her camcorder, she began to step slowly backwards towards the house, she caught a glimpse of a wall cloud. Sure, she had seen some before, but none of them rotated with such intensity as this one did. She stopped in her tracks.
"Get inside Kim!" She heard a voice call out. She turned around and found no one there. Her farm had been abandoned for years since her parents left it to her when they died years ago, and being an only child, she had no siblings. Who could be calling her…
She shook her head of the thought and watched the wall cloud and it continued to rotate.
"My God, she's gonna spit a tornado out. I gotta get this…" She turned her camcorder back on. Just then, a bolt of lightning struck a fence post right at the entrance to her farm. Kim jump at the bright flash of light and the loud wood-spitting crack that followed. The hairs on her neck stood straight up as her body began to feel…tingly?
Suddenly she was knocked to the ground from what felt like another person and at the same moment a bolt of lightning struck the very spot she had been standing just moments before. She was temporarily seeing spots from the brightness of the bolt and every hair on her body stood on end. Without further ado, she got up and ran into her house, scared of the storm outside and of what had pushed her over and saved her life.
"GET IN THE BASEMENT NOW!" A voice screamed inside her head. She didn't argue, she raced down in her basement and braced herself for the worst.
*Hours Later*
Her house was obliterated. All that stood there were mangled pieces of wood. The tornado that her wall cloud produced had to be an F3 if not an F4 from the way it had completely destroyed her house. Good thing she had taken her cell phone with her, she called her boyfriend who lived in a nearby town and told him of the news. Within ten minutes she saw his pickup racing down her driveway, now mangled with fallen trees and debris from her house. Travis got out of his truck.
"My God, Kimmy, you okay?"
"I'm fine Travis. Shaken but I'm fine. I have some rather interesting footage that we need to check out…"
*Later on in the week*
Kimberly was staying with her boyfriend's family, when she dug out of camcorder and took the little SD card out of it. She pop it into her boyfriend's laptop and began to watch the footage of the storm that produced the tornado that obliterated her house when something caught her eye. The camera had picked up the lightning bolt, but upon closer examination there was a man's face. Using her boyfriend's enhancing software she was able to make the face and it was a recognizable one.
"HOLY SHIT!"
It was the face of Michael Jackson.
Good guess Kim. Amazing what technology can do isn't it?
"Kim? What's wrong?"
Bug-eyed Kimberly looked up at Travis.
"Uh…uh…what?"
"You screamed, is something wrong?"
"Um…no, I guess I just didn't realize how close the lightning was, was all…"
"Oh…well someday you'll have to show that to me. But not tonight, I'm going back to bed. G'night baby."
"G'night hon." Kimberly muttered then turned back to the screen. A smile came upon her face. She really did have a guardian angel. Michael Jackson.
"Goodnight Michael." Kim said, shutting down the computer and laying down upon the couch, curling up with her boyfriends Cowboys blanket.
"Goodnight Kimberly." A voice whispered. Kimberly drifted off to sleep.