Yesterdays Gone: SEASON TWO (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (Yesterday's Gone)

Adam! Vic!”  
    Where are they?
    She wondered if they’d landed safe as she had, or if they’d been torn to pieces inside the belly of the twister or carried God knows how high, before being flung violently to their deaths.
    Her cry brought nothing but a windy silence punctuated by the beating of her own heart. The ground beneath her was a mixture of dirt, mud, and the few remaining roots of vegetation. She could vaguely make out small mountains of debris in the distance, probably the remains of the store and every bit of surrounding life. Her eyes strained to find bodies among the tall piles, but a thick fog rolled in from the west and blanketed the world from all sides, imprisoning her vision beneath a gauze of white.  
    Then, all of a sudden, her stomach inverted and her terror thickened at the   sound behind her. In that instant, Callie went from feeling like a single speck on an infinite landscape of nothing to a walking bulls-eye, targeted by an unseen enemy.
    Click, click, click.
    The sound echoed, scurrying in every direction. She turned, scanning the inscrutable for any signs of the creatures, but could see nothing.
    She’d heard the clicking in the thick of the tornado, too, though she saw no evidence of the creatures anywhere from within the storm’s angry eye. But the storm itself seemed almost alive, sentient in its precision and utter destruction, like it was looking for them. It had certainly found them; maybe the fog had come to finish the job.
    “Charlie!” she cried again, as wisps of white fog swirled around her, like cold fingers on her crawling skin.
    A shiver ran through her and she balled her fists, tensing at every shadow, real and imagined. She was a blind woman entering an arena and waiting for arrows to pierce her from all sides. She wanted to call out again, but each time she spoke, it seemed as though the fog sensed it and thickened to strangle her words.  
    “Charlie!” she called again, damn the consequences.
    Nothing.
    Then, the fog seemed to part in the distance, opening the curtain to reveal a hint of a structure. Is that the store? Another building? Positive identification was too hard as the fog further dimmed her vision and perception of distance. She continued to inch toward the shape, hoping to find Charlie, Adam, or hell, she’d even settle for Vic.  
    Click, click, click.
    The noise now sounded like it was coming from behind, so Callie accelerated her pace, moving faster toward the shape in the fog. It loomed impossibly tall as she drew closer. She squinted her eyes, trying to pull sense from the inscrutable.  
    I don’t remember passing anything that tall. Is it a radio tower?  
    Radio towers were so commonplace in the urban landscape, they almost blended into the background unless you were looking directly at them. But this shape seemed too solid   for a radio tower. She moved faster still, out of curiosity as much as an instinct to evade death and desire to find her companions, until the shape’s truth was finally unveiled.  
    Oh my God!
    It was a tower, alright, but not man-made. Now she knew where all the debris had gone. Cars, shards of building, trees, grass, glass, windows, rock, power lines, and everything else were all twisted together, impossibly woven into a giant tower as wide as a shopping center and so tall it vanished into the fog overhead.
    It was 20 stories if it was an inch.
    Icy talons slithered around her soul and slowed her heart’s beat to a snare of terror. Whatever had done this, whether it was nature or supernatural, was powerful, and there was no doubt it was indeed sentient. It knew exactly what it was doing.  
    This kind of organization couldn't happen by accident. It had to be by design.

    **

    Callie wasn’t sure how long she stared at the tower. Her internal clock, which had been pretty damn accurate most of her life, was haywire. And the fog wasn’t helping.
    She called for Charlie and the others a few more times, continuously moving toward where she thought the highway had to be. Soon, another shadow appeared, and this time, lights came along with it. Truck lights, approaching, maybe 40 yards away.  
    Charlie?
    She waved her hands frantically and called out his name, though she couldn’t be certain the driver could see her in the blanket of murk.  
    The vehicle, which she could now tell was a van, slowed. The driver had seen her. As it got closer, she realized it wasn’t Charlie, Adam, or Vic.
    Her heart raced as