Chapter 2: The Storm

So now we return to that particularly Wednesday where everything began. Why was it so boring, you ask? Well, for starters, the whole day seemed to be moving at a slug's pace; every class seemed to go on and on and on. Even worse was that there was nothing to be excited about after school. The day was exceedingly hot, and the air quality was so bad that anyone with even half a brain thought it best to just stay indoors and watch TV. Of course, one might expect a kid nowadays to have no problem with that, but after the rather splendid day that was about a week ago, everybody, right down to the most introverted of kids, wanted to go outside.

The students of Mr. Bradley's pre-algebra class were bracing for an extra-boring day because it was test day, and that meant answering over a hundred different problems in tiny print on sheets of paper. Almost everyone had studied the night away and were exhausted as they filled Mr. Bradley's room and sat at their desks. Only one student seemed to be wide awake and ready, and I don't think it takes a genius to figure out which one it was . . .

Zach took his seat near the back of the classroom and immediately began reviewing his notes, cutting himself off completely from the conversations the other students were having while Mr. Bradley did some last-minute preparations. As he was scanning a particularly difficult set of equations, he saw Jack enter the classroom from his right. He had not spoken to Jack ever since the basketball day, which had happened about a week ago. Not that he blamed him for the big fuss his mother had made—he had, after all, heeded Jack's call like a lamb to a slaughter. But after the lecture his parents had given him, Zach thought it best to just stay away from kids like Jack. It would be better, he assumed, for both his health and his intellect.

Overhead, the bell rang.

It was about thirty minutes into class when it all started.

Everyone's attention was on their tests, their noses pointed downwards, their faces either expressionless or full of anxiety. Some were answering questions by filling out blank dots labeled from A to D; others were writing out problems on a piece of scratch paper Mr. Bradley had provided. And a few were simply staring at their tests as if all the answers might come to them out of the blue. In the back of the classroom, Zach was flying past every problem thrown at him with quiet satisfaction. At its front, Mr. Bradley sat at his desk, calmly working on his computer and occasionally taking peeks at his students.

If you were sitting where Mr. Bradley was, you would have seen a row of three pointed windows to your right. These windows gave way to the basketball court just below the classroom and the field beyond it. Marking the end of the field—and Harrison-Wayne's property as well—was a tall wooden fence. Beyond the fence was the neighborhood, with its fancy modern houses and their swimming pools.

As the minutes slowly ticked by, Mr. Bradley, his eyes strained and tired of staring at the monitor, decided to take a quick glance out the window. What he saw glued him to it: clouds—big black thunderheads—on the horizon. They were far away, but he could see that they were quickly approaching the school like a stampede of dark horses. Puzzled, Mr. Bradley decided to look up the forecast to see if there had been a mishap—it had promised an entirely sunny day with no clouds whatsoever—and came away even more puzzled: the forecast still declared that the day would be completely sunny. Mr. Bradley scratched his head the way a cartoon character would when they were confused and looked back out the window.

A thick caul of rain was now drizzling down from the thunderheads. From within them, Mr. Bradley saw small, bright flashes of white light. Following these flashes was the unmistakable rumble of thunder that sent adrenaline pumping through Mr. Bradley's system; he had always enjoyed the sound of thunder, and whenever a storm passed over he would always open a window or two at home. This adrenaline, however, felt rather unwelcome. It was unwelcome because this storm seemed to have just come right out of the blue. He turned towards his students and saw that some of them were looking out in awe and disbelief. A few were mumbling to themselves and each other.

"Go back to your tests, everybody. It's just a little summer rain," Mr. Bradley said with some uncertainty. He looked back outside and saw that the clouds were now very close, dwarfing the school with their tremendous size. They had just passed the wooden fence and were now above the field, soaking the grass with their heavy rain.

A thick, jagged bolt of lightning suddenly streaked its way down to the earth, briefly lighting up the classroom and startling some of the students. The thunderclap after it was deafening compared to the rumbles Mr. Bradley had heard earlier, causing the whole classroom to tremble as if it were a living creature afraid of the sound. This was followed by more lightning bolts. And after each, more pounding thunderclaps.

At last, the clouds were now over the school, blotting out the sun and turning day into late evening. The rain they showered tapped the windows and sounded like rattling pebbles as it hit the roof. The lightning was now so close that it left purple-black afterimages in the eyes of anyone who saw it directly. And now all of Mr. Bradley's class watched the storm as it raged on around them, except for a very irritated Zach.

The rain and lightning continued on for about five minutes, and then it all stopped together as if God had pulled the storm's plug. The clouds, however, remained, but they were now a strange greenish-gray color. Mr. Bradley looked out and saw the edge of the clouds in the distance with a pale blue sky beyond them.

Storm's over, I guess, he thought.

While the rest of the class marveled at the show the clouds were putting on, Zach was having difficulty focusing. He had always had a problem focusing when things, especially loud things, were going on around him, which is why he always preferred the quietest spaces possible. Once the test had begun, Zach had expected total silence save for the occasional cough or throat-clearing from one of his classmates but not the storm. It seemed to have come just for the sole purpose of bugging him, driving his attention away from the test, which was a big chapter-test. Of course, Zach could have flopped it and still passed the class with an A; but as we already know, Zach was a boy who took everything the school threw at him very seriously. He did not want anything to impede his chances of success, and he hated it when something did.

When the thunder first came quietly, Zach simply ignored it, thinking it was maybe a truck with a bad engine or someone rolling a garbage can up their driveway. Once it had gotten closer and louder, all of the critical thinking skills in his head had become jumbled, as if they had been put into a blender. What made it worse was the thunderclaps, which seemed to toss any equations or numbers out of his memory when they hit, leaving him stuck on problems that he could have easily solved with a single stroke: Boom! There goes all of problem 25. Crack! Oops, it seems that Zach forgot what the quadratic formula was. What made it especially worse, however, was everyone voicing their opinions on the storm, none of them even trying to sound discreet despite Mr. Bradley's objections.

"Woah, that nearly scared the shit out of me."

"Jesus, that blinded me."

"I thought it was gonna be sunny today."

"I'm scared, Ashley, can you hold my hand?"

It took all of Zach's willpower to not lose his composure and yell at them to be quiet, but that willpower was fading. Fading fast.

It finally broke about three minutes after the storm had passed.

Everyone was slowly returning to their tests, their little conversations quieting. Zach felt relaxation pass over him and his anger diminish as he turned back to his own test, quickly piecing together all of the thoughts that had been broken due to all the constant banter and thunder.

And then someone shouted at the top of his lungs: "Tornado! Jesus Christ, there's a tornado!"

That did it. Zach looked up from his test as quick as a blink and said, or rather shouted as loud as the tornado yeller: "Will you all just be quiet and let me work for once?"

Michael Wilson, he of the second row, said: "But dude, there really is one! Look!" He pointed out the window. Several of the students looked towards his finger, but Zach didn't.

"That's absurd, Michael," he said. "A tornado in California is an extremely rare thing. The air is too dry and the wind shears are too weak for one to occur. Besides, we're near the mountains. A tornado is impossible in this area."

"But look, man! Look!" Michael jabbed his finger towards the window and Zach finally looked out, exasperated and rolling his eyes at Michael's utter foolishness.

Except he wasn't being foolish at all.

A huge gray funnel cloud at least a thousand feet high had formed above the neighborhood, its bottom thinner and longer than the top. It was rotating very quickly, carrying with it dust and small debris. It wasn't touching the ground just yet, but Zach could tell that it was very close to doing so and watched it with a mixture of shock and confusion. Others were doing the same as well, some of them walking up to the windows to get a better look.

"T—that's impossible," Zach muttered. He tried to retain his schoolboy calmness but found it slightly difficult. "It's a fake, right? It's all just some sort of cheap special effect, is that it?"

No one answered.

"Is someone going to speak up? Jack, tell me, is this some sort of prank you're all playing?"

Still no answer. Zach grew impatient. "Is someone going to say anything or not?" he demanded.

"Well, what do you want us to tell you?" Jack said, almost hysterically. Zach did not say anything more and watched as the funnel cloud—now a full-on tornado—finally touched down right on top of a house, tearing off its roof and then shattering the rest of it to splinters of wood and lath. He saw its pieces quickly spiral their way up the tornado and quickly disappear into its murky clouds. At this, someone next to Zach yelled "We gotta get out of here!" and quickly sprinted out the door, completely ignoring their things. The rest of the class ignored them and only watched as the tornado slowly made its way through the neighborhood, fascinated by it, almost hypnotized.

The alarm suddenly sprang to life, bringing about shrill buzzes that made some of the girls squeal and jump. Mr. Bradley, who had been watching the tornado as still as a mannequin in a shop window, finally began to take action. "Alright, everybody, let's get outta here fast. Move, people, move!" he shouted. He clapped his hands and everyone went. Zach left his desk just as the tornado tore another house to pieces and lifted up a blue car as if it had been made of styrofoam. As he was heading to the door, he heard the windows rattle madly in their frames as if begging to be let open.

The hallway was filled with students all running west towards the stairs like a school of fish in a channel, many of them shouting and screaming incoherently. A few tripped and fell and were trampled. A few more were standing around with their heads up high, searching for their friends or their love interests. Zach paid no attention to any of these people and quickly jumped into the tight river of uniform-clad students, desperate to flee. All around him, all around everyone, the alarm blared on and on like a lunatic cicada whose chirp has been amplified.

Down the hall Zach went, feeling as though he was being squeezed by all the jostling warm bodies as they made their way to the junction that led to the stairs. About halfway to the junction, something snagged his train of thought the way a rosebush snags a shirt and made him stop cold. His books. He had forgotten his books, the ones that cost his father a hefty price to buy. They were still in his bag, and he had left his bag next to his desk in his haste. Quickly, he turned around and started to head back to the classroom, not minding all of the students bumping into his shoulders left and right. When he was near the door, a hand gripped his arm. It was the English teacher who had had a conversation with him about imagination. He looked calm, but frantic as well.

"What are you doing? Don't you see what's going on out there?"

Zach tried to pull from the teacher's grasp but could not. "I have to get my books! They're in there!" He pointed towards the door.

"Do they matter right now?" the teacher asked.

"Yes, they do. Now let me go!" Zach pulled his arm again, this time much more strongly, and he slipped from the teacher's grip. The teacher tried to protest, but Zach ignored him and dipped into the classroom.

Crazy kid, the teacher thought. He ran down the hall and flew down the stairs.

Outside it was chaos.

Students were spilling out Harrison-Wayne's front door and fleeing in all directions of the compass, some by car and some by foot. The wind was incredibly powerful, forcing trees to bow in its direction and carrying with it old newspapers, grocery bags, dead leaves, and other pieces of junk. North of the school was the tornado, which was still in the neighborhood but had moved to its edge. It was enormous now, rivaling the size of even the biggest tornadoes recorded. As it went along, it shredded up more houses and picked up trees and lampposts and vehicles and threw them wildly in the air like a child having a bad temper-tantrum. It sounded like an oncoming monster train that refuses to stop even when its operators attempt to make it. And below it was a huge brown cloud of dirt and dust that moved wherever it went.

While running towards her house to warn her father, Olivia Nelson saw a huge portion of a fence—the fence that made up Harrison-Wayne's border—fly at her from her left and ducked; had she not, she would have been decapitated. It flew over her head and hit the asphalt, turning into pointed wooden stakes.

After recovering from this near-death experience, Olivia took a glance behind her and saw the rest of the fence in the tornado, looking like a long, flat, brown snake. It tried to curl around the tornado, failed, and then broke into three big pieces that were swallowed by the tornado's rotating clouds.

Olivia turned back and made a run for it.

When Zach re-entered the classroom, he made the mistake of looking out the window and was once again mesmerized by the tornado. It seemed to make everything around him nonexistent and make him watch as it did its violent work.

It had just destroyed the property fence and was now barreling its way across the field, bringing up with it large chunks of dirt as it did so. It was like a demon of wind, fascinating and furious, tearing up anything and everything simply because it could. It meant to charge through the school just as it had charged through the neighborhood as if to show off its raw, undaunted power to the tiny humans who viewed it. Zach felt the floor below him shake harder and harder the closer it got.

The tornado reached the blacktop, where six tall basketball hoops stood, as if in defiance. It tore them out of the ground one by one indifferently like a dentist pulling out rotten teeth from a mouth. Upon seeing this, Zach snapped out of his mesmerization and realized just how long he had been watching the tornado—it had seemingly stolen away his perception of time as well. He ran to his desk, snatched up his backpack by the strap, and quickly made his way back to the door, first by running parallel to the windows as they vibrated madly to the point of bursting.

Then it happened.

One of the windows had finally gotten tired of being closed up and swung itself open inwards, the latch breaking off of it and falling to the floor with a tink that was inaudible in the howling wind. The window slammed into Zach's face as he was running, causing him to stagger backwards in disarray and slump onto a desk. As he clutched his forehead in pain his vision grew blurry, and he felt an incredible dizziness sweep over him as the tornado finally made contact with the classroom, breaking all of the windows and showering him with small shards of glass. Then his vision grew darker and darker, and finally, he blacked out completely.

The last thing he heard was the sound of breaking plaster.

Zach woke up a few minutes later with a throbbing headache. He felt something swelling on the place above his left eye and felt a sting when he touched it: a small bruise had grown there and would probably stay there for at least a few days. He could not remember what had happened to him; one minute he was running away from the tornado, and the next he was on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. Then he heard the roaring wind, and that reminded him of just how close the tornado was to touching the school. At this, he got up as quickly as he could, his hand gripping the edge of his desk to help lift himself up, his consciousness still murky but slowly returning.

Looking out the window yet again, Zach saw a huge wall of swirling gray clouds going from right to left. They made his headache fly out of his head completely like a bird released from its cage and woke him up fully. They almost made him stand frozen in awe yet again, but this time they didn't hold him for long.

The tornado! Zach thought, frightened. It hasn't touched the school just yet! I still might be able to get away! Quickly and without much thought, Zach turned away and resumed his previous course of action—he grabbed his backpack, ran parallel to the windows, stepping over small fragments of glass while doing so, and reached the door. Once there, he yanked it open expecting to see the hallway on the other side. What he saw instead both shocked and perplexed him: Another wall of swirling clouds going from right to left. They seemed to be higher than the ceiling and lower than the floor, and when Zach poked his head out the door he saw nothing else but them.

Perhaps, he thought, the tornado is already here! It's going to tear apart the school! For a moment he shut his eyes, believed that all was lost, and waited for the destruction of his classroom and his inevitable death. One second passed; then two; then three. Nothing happened. Confused, Zach looked around again and then cautiously peered downwards, trembling lightly. He saw that the clouds were all racing around a tiny brown spot far below him, and that was what made him understand.

He was not just close to the tornado; he was in the tornado.

Somehow, through some extravagant miracle, the tornado had picked up his entire classroom and sent it, along with him, hurling hundreds of feet in the air.

Once this got through Zach's head, he screamed, slammed the door shut, and then propped his back against it, trying to get a grasp of his new alien situation. He felt like a man who has uncovered every mystery of the world suddenly discover something even he could not fathom. His whole body felt weak, as though the tornado had sucked all of the energy out of him. The only noise he made came from his deep panting.

After sliding down the door and landing on his rear, Zach tried to find some sort of justification for everything around him. Perhaps he was simply dreaming in bed at home, or maybe he had eaten a bad piece of food—he had eaten a breakfast of sausage and eggs—and was now feeling the effects rather intensely. Or maybe everything around him was real and he was going to become one of those lucky people who managed to survive the unthinkable. He knew people who had survived scenarios that would otherwise kill a man—lightning strikes and tsunamis and skydiving accidents and, well, tornados. But he couldn't be a part of that, now could he? He knew that tornados could pick up things that weighed tons as easily as one picks up a plastic toy, but he also knew that most buildings were toast when going against them. Even if a building managed to remain in one piece while being sucked up by one, it would only remain in one piece for a very short time.

So, with this thought in mind, Zach sat frozen and waited—waited for the classroom to break apart and hurl into doom. He sat for a minute that felt more like an hour, his head down, and when nothing happened—again—he looked in front of him and through the broken windows.

He saw all kinds of things flying about, things he couldn't really recognize because they were flying so quickly. Upon seeing them Zach felt an unusual sort of curiosity build up inside of him. Despite knowing that he was inside one of the most powerful types of storm known to man, some absurd, insane part of him wanted to get a closer look at what exactly the things in the tornado were.

No, no, don't do that, he thought, shaking his head, and yet he could not help but slowly rise up and head towards the window, the room wobbling slightly but otherwise remaining surprisingly steady. Walking past the desks, he saw that the classroom was still arranged, somehow, save for the test papers and pencils strewed everywhere. Above him, the lights swayed back and forth lightly.

Looking into the huge swirling shaft of the tornado, the wind blowing through his brown hair, Zach saw all of the things one would expect to find—uprooted trees, pieces of buildings, and the like—and more . . . unusual, if not impossible things as well. They all floated past Zach for only a few seconds, but they left him speechless and gaping like a fish out of water.

A man running on a treadmill, his ears covered with headphones. When Zach crossed his line of sight he waved, as though everything going on around him was just a daily occurrence.

A woman reclining in a bathtub with a mountain of bubbles covering her chest. Her eyes were closed and her head was leaning back against the lip of the tub.

A boy on a bike, his legs working hard on the pedals. He seemed to know what the danger was but hadn't quite realized that the danger he was fleeing had already gotten him.

A section from inside a bank that consisted of a floor and a huge wall with a big, circular iron vault door. Two men in masks were pointing shotguns at a scared-looking security guard who was holding up his hands. For a second Zach was sure that the two men would fire, but then a wooden beam crashed into them, sending them flying away screaming. The security guard wiped his brow in relief.

A group of men playing cards at a table, some with cigarettes in their mouths.

A dog with its leash still attached to its collar.

And then there was the car.

It was a sleek red Chevrolet Camaro, its headlights flashing on and off and its horn beeping desperately. Its radio was on and it was playing a classic jazz tune that Zach didn't recognize. No one was inside it. It cruised past Zach's classroom, as though it were on a road, and then vanished into the wall of churning clouds, its noises diminishing in the wind. For a moment it was forgotten by Zach, and then it reappeared right across from him on the far side of the cloud-wall, still cruising. Then something big—another car, possibly—struck the Camaro on its side, and it careened towards Zach while spinning, as though it were a top. Zach jumped away, landed on his chest, and covered his head with both hands as the left fender crashed into the wall below the windows. Heavy gray bricks flew, dust trailing them, but fortunately none of them hit Zach. The ruined Camaro was then taken away by the wind and disappeared behind the clouds once more.

Zach got up, brushed the pieces of brick from his hair, and saw that the car had created a huge hole under the window he had stood in front of, turning it into a rudimentary second door to the classroom. As he looked through it, the room suddenly began to tilt to his left, as if on a gimbal. He lost his balance and fell on his side. The desks all began to slide on the floor, some crashing into one another and others tipping over. Mr. Bradley's own desk tipped over as well, and all of his things—his monitor, his books, his placemat—spilled onto the floor, the monitor's screen breaking and the books splaying open. The wind picked up, sending papers flying around everywhere like wild feathers.

The room then began to tilt upwards, and Zach and the desks began to slide towards the wall opposite to the one with the windows. Zach rolled across the floor like a man on fire until his back hit the wall, and then he sat up and watched as the desks piled against each other to his left, creating a small structure that looked like a strange abstract art piece of metal and polished wood. Zach worried that the room was planning to do a reverse somersault in the tornado, but fortunately, it began to right itself up again before it could.

During this time the room had been rotating very slowly to the point where Zach couldn't feel it. Now it seemed to gain speed, rotating faster and faster and making Zach feel slightly nauseous. As it did so it went higher up the sky, towards the clouds that made up the larger portion of the tornado's funnel. The air around him, thin to begin with, grew thinner by each passing second, causing him to breathe harder. The centrifugal force made by the rotating pressed him against the wall.

A flash of light caught the corner of his eye, and following it was a noise Zach was all too familiar with—a thunderclap, loud and bold in the tornado. Looking at the clouds Zach saw snarls of lightning. They weren't as big as the lightning bolts from the storm, but they were no less deadly, no, he wasn't stupid enough to believe that. And with the room hurling right in their direction, who knew where they would strike first?

As if to answer his question, a ray of white lightning suddenly came through the wall to his right, lanced across the room, and hit the floor, creating a smoking black sunflower that smelled of ozone. Another bolt struck the upper-left corner of the room, this time not coming through the room but taking away a large chunk of it, leaving behind a hole with burn marks on its edge. Then yet another came, and another, and another. Soon the room was being bombarded by lightning strikes, some coming through the classroom and others chipping away at it an inch or two at a time.

Zach screamed and pressed his knees to his chest, trying everything in his power to not be hit by a passing bolt. Around him, cracks began to snake their way across the walls, creating black rivers and dark valleys; on the ceiling, the same thing was happening. One of these ceiling-cracks was zig-zagging its way towards Zach, who watched it breathlessly from below. Before it could get to the place he was under, the crack forked into two, and the two new cracks ended at the place above his left and right. Looking up at the triangle-shaped section of ceiling the cracks had made, Zach heard the sound of groaning wood; and then, before he could even think about moving, the whole section fell on him, a plume of sawdust trailing it, sending him off to an early sleep once again . . .

He woke up several hours later in blackness.

When he opened his eyes, Zach's first thought was that the blackness he saw was what everyone called the afterlife. Then he felt the smooth drywall ceiling on his face and realized that he was not dead but buried under rubble. He had survived the tornado. He was alive. For how long though, he didn't know. He knew that sometimes when the body was injured during a great catastrophe, it would numb the pain until the catastrophe passed over. He wondered worriedly that some vital part of him was gravely injured and bleeding out all over the floor in a pool of crimson.

Quickly regaining his consciousness, Zach put his hands against the piece of fallen ceiling and began to push. Nothing happened. He pushed harder, small beads of sweat forming on his brow, and the ceiling began to shift. It was heavy, but Zach knew that if he remained, he would surely die—the paramedics who usually came to look for survivors would probably arrive too late to save him if he did nothing. He put all of the muscle in his arms to work and continued to push until the ceiling finally fell away before him with a dull thud.

The first thing that got Zach's attention was the bright golden sunlight pouring in through the windows. He shielded his eyes from it and looked down at his legs. They were still buried under some chunks of rubble, making him look as though he was sitting in a strange, chunky bed sheet. He took the rubble off of them piece by piece, and when he was done he inspected them.

They were still intact, surprisingly; nothing more than a few red slashes here and there. Relieved, Zach checked the rest of his body thoroughly, looking for any part of him that had been torn open or impaled. He saw nothing. Everything was still untouched and in the way they were when he started the day. Satisfied with this, Zach got to his feet, wobbled slightly, and looked around.

The classroom was a mess, to say the least. All of the desks were in a huge cluster at one end of the room, and there were huge cracks running everywhere, some with slanted sunlight coming through them. On the floor were pieces of rubble, broken lights, and everyone's test papers, now all torn up. To his left, Zach saw a fallen air conditioner, its black cord coming out of it like a limp tail, and wondered with great unwillingness what might have happened if he had been under it.

Zach turned his attention away from the mess and to the windows. Outside them, he saw something that made him cock his head like a dog with curiosity: Birch trees, hundreds upon hundreds of them, with large ferns growing alongside them. Never before had he seen so many birches in one place, let alone anywhere in the state of California; he assumed they grew somewhere up north in Alaska or down east in Virginia. His head still cocked, Zach went to the window to make sure they were really there and not some trick of his mind.

They appeared to be real enough, their zebra-like trunks seeming to glow in the sunlight. Still skeptical of their reality, Zach slowly walked out to them through the window with the hole underneath it. He went up to one of the trees and caressed it with his index and middle finger. It was as real, alright, as real as the clothes on his skin—he could feel the smoothness of the white bark and the roughness of the black stripes. He stepped back from the tree in disbelief.

Zach turned around and inspected the classroom. It was just as ruined on the outside as it did on the inside, looking as though it had flown through the depths of hell. Each corner of the room sagged outwards, as though it had been placed into a giant crusher and then removed before it could be completely flattened. Huge scorch marks dotted it, and the cracks from inside could be seen outside, channeling their way through the structure. All in all, it looked brittle enough to collapse like a house of cards in a faint breeze if given a good enough shove.

But this grisly sight didn't bother Zach much. What mattered now was where he was. Never before had he seen so much green before; the only green he ever saw came from the parks or lawns or mountains during the spring at home. And the smell of the place was arousing—the cold sweet-mintiness of birch mixed in with a little sharpness of moist earth. It was a natural scent, and it helped to clear up his mind. Clear up his mind enough to make him remember the events that had taken place a few hours ago.

"Hello?" Zach called. Silence save for a few twittering birds in the trees. He called out again and still nothing. He scanned the woods, hoping to see someone who might've seen the classroom fall from the tornado, but saw nothing but birch trees, standing tall and thin like white straws planted into the ground. He called out one last time and then gave up. He would just have to wait for someone to come.

For how long, though?

Did anyone actually know where he was? And if they didn't, then what would he do?

Signing, Zach said to himself, "Well, I guess if no one can find me, then I'll just have to find them," and started off into the woods, not knowing where he was going; there was no path anywhere in sight. About thirty seconds later he returned to the classroom, having remembered something important.

His backpack.

Zach walked through the forest, looking for any sign of human life. Most of the life he did see came in the form of squirrels or the occasional deer that fled upon seeing him, but other than that there was nothing. He was growing impatient, and he wondered what may happen if he failed to find any sort of help while walking. Occasionally he sent out a hello, but just like before no response came back. He wondered how long he was going to be there.

I guess I'll just have to sleep in the classroom, he thought sourly. Better than out here, in the middle of . . . wherever I am.

Where was he, exactly? Surely the tornado couldn't have carried him to Alaska or Virginia, where the birch forests were. No, that was preposterous. Maybe he had landed in an animal shelter of some kind, one that was hidden from the public. Or maybe he was inside someone's secret forest, and they had seen his arrival and were searching for him. No—that felt especially preposterous . . . just as preposterous as the tornado lifting the classroom and carrying it with its windy arms, just as preposterous as him surviving it in one piece. In the end, he didn't give much of a fig about his location: he just wanted to get out of wherever he was as soon as possible.

Half an hour later, Zach saw three large stones standing like monuments, moss and green lichen growing on their smooth surfaces like infections. He walked up to them and sat against the tallest of them, his aching legs spread out in an upside-down V before him. He didn't know how far he had walked, exactly, but it didn't matter at that moment and he rested, feeling the cool stone on his back and the soft earth on his hands. In his mind, the events of the tornado played over and over again, and he had an idea that they wouldn't stop for quite some time.

About five minutes later, Zach was standing and just about to get moving again when he heard the faint sound of rustling leaves from behind the rock in front of him. Having heard this same rustling sound several times before, he assumed it to be a squirrel and ignored it. Then it began to get louder and closer, and he turned in its direction. It sounded like it was passing through the ferns quickly, as if on the run, and he froze with anticipation, his eyes bulging. He had no idea of what kind of creatures lived in these woods, and he didn't know what he, Zach, or it would do when it arrived. Whatever it was, it was large, and he expected the worst.

Suddenly the thing popped out from behind the rock, and Zach saw that it wasn't a creature at all but a man. He was tall, slim, had brown combed hair, and was wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, black suspenders, a white dress shirt, and, popping out distinctly from the rest of the clothing like a joyful exclamation, a velvet bow tie. When he saw Zach he jerked to a stop, slipping a little on the fallen leaves, a flabbergasted expression on his face that mirrored Zach's own.

"Well . . . hello there," the strange man said.