Weather Days

by Blu Gilliand

About the Author: Blu Gilliand is the managing editor of Cemetery Dance Magazine and Cemetery Dance Online. His short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Shivers VIII, Mystery Weekly, Shroud, Dark Discoveries, and many more.

Excerpt

I was headed for the basement when my phone buzzed. Thirty more seconds and I would have been downstairs. The signal’s bad down there. I probably would have missed the call.

I think about that sometimes, knowing it would have been better that way. Well, better for me, at least.

I was going to the basement because Rich Thompson told me to. “Get to your safe place,” he said, and his jacket was off and his sleeves were rolled up, so I knew he meant business. Behind him, the map of Alabama had a thick, jagged stripe of green, yellow, and red running through it—mostly red. That stripe was inching its way across the state, and when Rich zoomed in, I saw that the top of it was just west of King County.

I’d been watching that stripe push its way toward us for the last couple of hours. When they first cut in, interrupting the golf tournament I’d been drinking through, Rich had been in full coat and tie mode. As the storms advanced, feeding off that rich Gulf Stream and growing bigger and bolder with each gulp of warm, moisture-rich air, Rich’s tie got loosened and the coat came off. I’d been working up a good Saturday afternoon drunk at that point, watching grown men chase a little white ball around for hundreds of thousands of dollars while I sat in a house with an upside-down mortgage and a fresh set of divorce papers, feeling a little sorry for myself. Bad weather had always scared me, so I’d quit on the beer and got wrapped up in Rich’s play-by-play.

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