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

lingering Friend Zone with the fat of his boner.

    **

    As they drove into the Walmart parking lot, the clouds continued their war on the sun, now shrouding it completely in gloom.
    They hopped from the cabin and Charlie immediately noticed that the temperature had dropped again, another 10 degrees at least. The wind started to howl, blowing his hair into his eyes.
    “That’s weird,” Adam said, looking up.  
    Their eyes went to the sky and saw what Adam had already seen. The clouds weren’t just moving fast. They were … forming into something. In the distance, they heard what sounded like a train gathering velocity and volume.
    “What the fuck is that?” Vic said.
    The clouds swirled and churned, blacker than clouds had any right to be. There were some weird storms and clouds after the world vanished, but Charlie hadn’t seen anything like this. The clouds looked like snakes slithering and weaving in and out of one another, spreading across the sky and racing toward them. The snakes began to reach down, forming into an inverted triangle, reaching down to touch the tree-line about a quarter mile on the other end of the highway.
    No, not a triangle. A funnel.
    “Shit!” Charlie said, “It’s a tornado!”
    “Get in the truck,” Vic said.
    “No, it’s going too fast; get in the store!” Callie said, and began to run to the front doors, which were closed since the store’s power was out. She forced the doors open and called out, “Come on!”
    Charlie, Vic, and Adam couldn’t tear their eyes away from the scene. As the funnel hit the ground, it grew wider, and objects began to get caught in the vortex of swirling darkness and destruction, then sucked into the ceiling of the churning abyss above.
    The wind around them howled louder, sounding more like wolves than wind. “Come on!” Charlie shouted, leading the way into the store as Vic and Adam followed. Charlie pulled the doors shut once they all crossed the threshold.  
    “We supposed to get in a doorway or something?” Adam asked, looking around the store in a half daze.
    “Find something heavy to get under,” Charlie suggested, though he wasn’t certain of the what-to-do-in-a-tornado advice he’d heard, and ignored, a few dozen times in his life.
    The wind outside intensified, whistling loudly as it found its way into the store through vents in the ceiling. Rain began to pelt the windows, doors, and roof. Something slammed hard into the doors, cracking, but not breaking the glass, and was whisked away by the wind again before Charlie could see what it was.  

    The howling grew louder as the concussion of a train thundered through the store.
    The four of them looked at one another, no one saying a word.
    The sound grew so loud, it hurt to hear it.
    “Do you hear that?” Callie asked, her head tilted to the side.
    “Who can’t? This twister shit is fuckin’ loud!” Vic said.
    “No, no. Not the train sound, or the howling! It’s...it’s something else!” Callie shouted.
    Charlie adjusted the frequency of his ears and heard something just above the sound of the howling storm. It was barely there, like the faint crackle and static of a distant radio. But it was familiar, too familiar, in a very unnerving way. Charlie couldn’t put his finger on what made the sound so familiar, but it made his flesh pimple with goosebumps and jolted his heart-rate into overdrive.
    The mysterious sound grew louder, like the storm outside. Then the lightbulb went off.
    Oh my god! Oh my fucking god!
    “What is that? ” Adam cried, his face perplexed with confusion and dread.
    “It sounds like . . .” Callie began.
    “CLICKING!” Charlie finished. “The monsters!”
    “What the fuck?” Vic said, aiming his rifle at the windows, toward the unseen enemy lurking in the storm.
    Something slammed into one of the windows, shattering it as if it had been blasted by a bazooka. Vic trained his scope at the impact site and squeezed off a round that sailed straight through the new opening into the raging whirlwind of rain and debris outside. No kill. No hit. Nothing. Instead, the air pressure vacuum created by the blown-out window channeled flying chunks of glass, dirt, rocks, and other wreckage directly down upon them. The onslaught of winged shrapnel tore at Charlie’s face and eyes, scratching him like a demon-possessed razor with a million blades. The rain joined the debris in drenching him from head to foot. “Find cover!” he bellowed as he