Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Stormfront
Written for Day 22 of the April challenge at 31_days. The prompt was "cleaning up the mess":
The Lady of Storms swept across Eerie’s skyline, her heavy grey skirts brushing over the treetops and leaving a layer of thick green ice in her wake. Electricity crackled over the clustered houses which seemed to draw closer together beneath the murky light, a futile attempt to find safety in numbers.
In his studio at WERD-TV, Weatherman Wally leapt back in surprise as his map burst into flames at the northern end. For a long moment he stared, horror-struck, as the tiny die-cast model depicting Everything Corn began to blacken and burn.
Simon and Mars had been collecting a carry-out order at the Dragon of the Black Pool when the blizzard hit, hurling golfball-sized hailstones with enough force to crack the windshields of the parked cars that lined both sides of the street. They’d watched through the restaurant’s circular windows as lightning struck the red and white awning outside Grandma’s Kitchen in a blaze of blue-white energy. The Amish couple in front of them, who’d been about to settle their tab with a platinum American Express when it happened, were trying to call the Eerie Fire Department on their mobile phones, but the ferocity of the storm must have interfered with the signal.
When chocolate pudding began to pour from the sky, smothering the flames and making the whole street smell like baking brownies, they hung up, turned to the cashier, and signed the proffered credit card slip, adding a substantial roll of bills to the tip jar on the counter. The waiter beamed at them as they took their leave, before turning to offer a cheery greeting to the boys.
“You saw that, right?” asked Mars, pointing outside.
“Oh yes,” said the waiter. “Lovely couple. They eat here a couple of times a week.”
“I mean the weather!” Mars shouted. Simon trod on his foot and he subsided, a little.
The waiter looked out on the scorched street and the charred and chocolate’d buildings beyond, shrugged, and made a rueful face.
“That’s April for you,” he said. “The weather is so changeable this time of year. Order for collection, was it?”
“Yes please,” said Simon, “It’s in the name of Teller.”
Not too long after, while the boys ate egg rolls and pork fried rice in the flickering light of a made-for-TV movie filtered through poor satellite reception, Wally sat slumped in a plastic chair while his boss growled and waved his hands dramatically and talked in doom-laden terms about the cost-benefit analysis of a lightning strike versus clearing up several tonnes of chocolate pudding from downtown Eerie.
Things might not have looked so bad, thought Wally, if the first thing he’d grabbed from the employee fridge hadn’t been the station manager’s mid-afternoon snack.
The Lady of Storms swept across Eerie’s skyline, her heavy grey skirts brushing over the treetops and leaving a layer of thick green ice in her wake. Electricity crackled over the clustered houses which seemed to draw closer together beneath the murky light, a futile attempt to find safety in numbers.
In his studio at WERD-TV, Weatherman Wally leapt back in surprise as his map burst into flames at the northern end. For a long moment he stared, horror-struck, as the tiny die-cast model depicting Everything Corn began to blacken and burn.
Simon and Mars had been collecting a carry-out order at the Dragon of the Black Pool when the blizzard hit, hurling golfball-sized hailstones with enough force to crack the windshields of the parked cars that lined both sides of the street. They’d watched through the restaurant’s circular windows as lightning struck the red and white awning outside Grandma’s Kitchen in a blaze of blue-white energy. The Amish couple in front of them, who’d been about to settle their tab with a platinum American Express when it happened, were trying to call the Eerie Fire Department on their mobile phones, but the ferocity of the storm must have interfered with the signal.
When chocolate pudding began to pour from the sky, smothering the flames and making the whole street smell like baking brownies, they hung up, turned to the cashier, and signed the proffered credit card slip, adding a substantial roll of bills to the tip jar on the counter. The waiter beamed at them as they took their leave, before turning to offer a cheery greeting to the boys.
“You saw that, right?” asked Mars, pointing outside.
“Oh yes,” said the waiter. “Lovely couple. They eat here a couple of times a week.”
“I mean the weather!” Mars shouted. Simon trod on his foot and he subsided, a little.
The waiter looked out on the scorched street and the charred and chocolate’d buildings beyond, shrugged, and made a rueful face.
“That’s April for you,” he said. “The weather is so changeable this time of year. Order for collection, was it?”
“Yes please,” said Simon, “It’s in the name of Teller.”
Not too long after, while the boys ate egg rolls and pork fried rice in the flickering light of a made-for-TV movie filtered through poor satellite reception, Wally sat slumped in a plastic chair while his boss growled and waved his hands dramatically and talked in doom-laden terms about the cost-benefit analysis of a lightning strike versus clearing up several tonnes of chocolate pudding from downtown Eerie.
Things might not have looked so bad, thought Wally, if the first thing he’d grabbed from the employee fridge hadn’t been the station manager’s mid-afternoon snack.