ASIN: B00ML4QEDK
DISCLAIMER:
Jigsaw World is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are all fictitious and are purely the product of the Author's imagination.
Any resemblance of the persons, events or locations depicted in this book to those of events, locations or actual persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
The Reader should suspend their sensitivity to socially and politically unacceptable actions and behaviors, because this book contains references and descriptions of actions that our culture would not necessarily find acceptable, such as murder, sociopathic manipulations, and criminal activities.
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Dark Storms
Tom stared out of the window at the approaching storm. He was lucky to have found this shelter, even if he was currently sharing it with four other refugees from the weather. The clouds were weaving strange patterns in the sky as they sought their prey along the highway.
As the clouds roiled above, one could see faces in the shapes above, some almost human, others, not so much. Nobody that Tom had ever talked to could explain the obvious intelligence and predatory nature of storms these days. On the other hand, everyone who could see knew that being caught out in the storm was certain death.
The storm was focusing in on a delivery truck, which was traveling at high speed down the nearby highway, moving directly toward this stone house from which Tom was watching. The clouds twisted above the truck like tentacles or worms, the strong gusting wind was rocking the vehicle from side to side in its headlong flight, and the lightning strikes were getting closer and closer to their target.
Tendrils of the dark clouds and the vehicle converged less than a thousand feet from the door of the shelter. The lightning that was generated by the cloud was released in a second upon contact with the truck; a glaring arc like the world's biggest arc welder lit the rapidly darkening world. The truck seemed not so much to blow up as to vaporize.
Tom turned away from the window as the cloud tendrils were being reabsorbed back into the parent clouds, and the clouds began to drift lazily about in the sky in a lazy interlude before finding their next target. The pretty little blonde teenager named Nancy was huddled in the far corner of the room with her mother, Susan, and the bald and portly Gilbert Taylor sat nonchalantly on the couch drinking the hooch of whoever owned this house. The serious expression on Bailey's face put the lie to the idea that dogs, at least collie-shepherd mixes, were incapable of higher thought and the resultant concerns that higher thought brings.
Tom had been traveling about the countryside the last few months, a very unusual habit in these troubling times, but Tom was an unusual man, and quite possibly troubled to boot. Most people stuck close to home these days, ready to bolt for safety at the first sign of trouble. Everyone had a knot in their stomachs about the future, even though most did not know why.
Not that Tom was in any way a peculiar man. While it was true that he seemed to have a nose for when one of these activities was going to happen, this was in no way a unique ability. Somewhere between one in ten and one in twenty of the people he had met had this ability to some degree. What made him a bit unusual was that he depended on it. The others always seemed to distrust their nose and stayed in 'safe' areas most of the time. The other people in this house must have been caught short of safety. Lord knows why Bailey was here.
Tom could feel that the danger was over for the moment. When the events were about to happen, he could feel that the world was thinner, as though it were a painting by an unknown artist god, and the time and place where the event was about to happen was where the brush had laid down a thinner coat of paint. Sometimes, when the temperature was in that niche between cold and hot and was 72 degrees in an almost warm spring day, it would suddenly begin to feel chilly like the 72 degrees in an almost cold autumn day.
