AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is my entry for The 750 Word Project. This story consists of exactly 750 words.
Thanks to jezzaz and other event organizers.
All characters are over 18.
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I was chomping my last McNugget when the woman screamed. She was a bosomy, big-bottomed blonde in a Sooners hoodie.
A burly gent with a mullet, also wearing Sooners attire, boomed, "Hol-ee shit, it's coming right at us!"
People were gaping westward. I turned to the window.
Before I saw it, I heard it: like a giant steam-powered Hoover on rails. Then I saw it: a dark twisting taproot sprouting from a roiling black bloom in the sky.
A pale-faced manager with a wispy mustache and thinning bouffant appeared in the dining room. His name tag read "Jeff." Jeff announced a tornado had been sighted in the vicinity.
"It's right there," pointed out the mulleted gent, prompting another scream from the blonde.
The manager urged everyone to take shelter in the restaurant's walk-in freezer. A panicked scurry commenced.
I remained at the window, watching the twister pirouette across the prairie. A native Philadelphian, I was no good at judging distances out on these flatlands, but the tornado seemed a good mile or so away. The odds of this particular building having a bullseye on it seemed low, I thought. So, despite the uproar, I felt serene.
"Mesmerizing, isn't it?" said a voice, husky but feminine.
She was tall, leggy—almost gangly—but pretty, with tawny skin and sleek black hair to her ass. I guessed she was part Indian, maybe full-blooded.
I nodded. "Beautiful, in a way."
In the distance, a little white farmstead exploded—house, barn, windmill and all—sucked up into the vortex and spit out in shards. I thought I saw a cow go airborne. Suddenly, I felt the danger of the situation.
I thought to take the girl on my motorcycle, to speed away—safer, probably, than waiting in some freezer like a sitting duck. But suddenly, a thick darkness fell, a torrential rain, a punishing hail. We lost sight of the tornado, but its rumble grew ever louder.
The girl and I scurried to the meat freezer.