Chapter 19: Holy Fuck Batman!

"Bill! What the fuck did you do?" and Mina began beating him severely about the head and shoulders. If she'd had a stick ... whoops ... yup, a stick ... about an inch and a half round and close to two feet long ... right there on the ground ... NOW Mina had a stick and she commenced raising a dust on the seat of his britches.

"Ow! fucking OW!"

"I'll ow your ass! What did you do with the house? ... and well, shit, Bill!" She dropped the stick and hugged him close..."I'm not one little bit scared to admit I'm afraid, Bill."

That stick was just one of about a million similar sticks that were laying on the ground after the tornado had passed. Raining to beat the band but they could still see it ... snaking back and forth about a quarter mile to the north east and sounding like a runaway freight train heading downhill.

Most of the trees that USED to be growing in the wide avenue they were standing in were contributing heavily to the million sticks ... a branch the size of Mina around the tits crashed to the ground less than 10 feet away.

Bill picked Mina up in an over the shoulder carry and sprinted for the edge of the woods. "I could give a shit less about lightning," he hollered as he was hoofing it as fast as a 21 year old in excellent condition could run ... nobody had a stopwatch on him but Olympic Records were broken ... not only in the dash but in the dodging around the larger pieces of mutilated forest that were falling out of the sky.

There was a twisted pile of deadfalls just inside the edge of the twister path and Bill slung Mina like a baseball into the big middle of the pile and leaped in after her. She didn't hit a thing in the timber nest and neither did Bill. There was a nice big area of grass and pine needles ... Mina slid in under the trees and stopped just short of the fawn.

"Hi, Bambi ... you got to share." All three of them hunkered down and waited for the debris to stop falling. It finally did.

"Bill, what was that?"

"A tornado ... OW!..." He rubbed his shoulder. "It's stopped," said Bill.

"Why do I still hear it?" asked Mina.

"Shit! It's getting louder!"

Not more than a hundred yards to the south, a second twister ravaged another path through the woods. A single stem of long grass transfixed the tree trunk just over Mina's head. The sound was audible to both of them. 'KERWHACK' a blade of grass thrown by the wind with enough force so that both ends were outside the tree, while the middle of the stalk was all the way through the tree.

After the tornado had lifted over the colder air of the river, Bill asked, "you were saying... ?"

"Smart Ass!! How did we get here? It's obvious that we're in the past ... these trees are huge and I'm not seeing any sawed off stumps." She turned and spoke to the deer, "Thank you for sharing your space." The deer didn't say anything back.

It was still pouring out but the space under the trees was dry ... still ... the question was, 'How did they get there?' The deer didn't have a clue, and neither did Bill ... all he did was WIND THE WATCH!

"It's the watch ... I wound the watch ... well, and grabbed your hand so I could see your watch." Bill was searching and fumbling around looking for the watch. "I must have dropped it."

"Bill! It's on the end of your chain!"

"Oh ... so it is."

"Make it take us back." She grabbed his hand.

"How do I do that?"

"I don't know ... try something ... unwind it!"

"Well, that doesn't work."

"Reset it."

Bill depressed the stem to open the cover and that was that. No storm, no fawn, no beaten down forest.

They were sitting at the picnic table by the new pool in the backyard in the late spring sunshine ... and then Bill was gone. Mina gave a little shriek. Bill was back.

"Time me, Mina."