DUST DEVIL

Isabelle Mason

It was too much. Everything was getting out of control. It was too much.
        The readings were off the charts, and the precipitation outside was beginning to harden, smacking against the car like golf balls. The cracks of every attack ricocheted throughout the vehicle, hammering against their eardrums. Mother nature continuously tightened her grip upon them as they tried to run from the destruction they had created.
        Looking again, Cassie could barely think as the clattering of danger clawed at their vehicle, her eyes glued to the screen in her hands as her best friend raced against this demon they had created. The numbers had to have been wrong. There was no way that their experiment had turned this thing from an EF 1 into an EF 5. It wasn’t possible.
        Unless they had got it wrong.
        Outside, things turned catastrophic. All around her, all she could see, was the wrath of destruction brought about by her unbridled curiosity.
        Once again, she had put the team in danger. Her friends from university, who had so much faith in her science project. Now, she had pulled them right into the path of a tornado. All because she was certain there was a way to tame it. To kill it.
        Hindsight wouldn’t help her now. Regret was the last thing she needed to think about as she peered out of the fogged-up windscreen, the wipers struggling to push against the unrelenting force of mother nature outside.
        Streaks of brown and black sped past them, tumbling and twisting right over their heads. She knew that one collision with those streaks would break the windscreen and compromise their safety. The one thing that stood between her and the horror waiting outside was a pane of glass. Though this did little to reassure her.
        She was certain that they had been wrong.
        Turning around and struggling against the pressure of the seat belt, Cassie looked at the devil looming behind them. Demonic, grey and angry. With every surge across the open country, his thirst for destruction doubled. He was vicious and he was hungry.
        And Cassie had fed that hunger to become insatiable.
        She got it wrong.