“Mothafutha!” he yelled through the slick palm of his hand, blood spraying between fingers, his watery eyes pinned onto Eli with deadly reprisal.

“Hot damn,” Eli said under his breath, surprised at the potency of the unintended impact, and bolted for the door.

A boulder slammed into the side of his head and he flew into a wall hung with plaques and a framed visage of Jesus Christ. The impact caused the wall to shudder and Eli went down, the sharp, heavy corner of Jesus’s image smacking into his forehead before flipping flat onto the carpet. Brock’s foot stomped onto the glass, cracking Jesus in two, and grabbing Eli by the lapels of his cheap coat, pulled him skyward.

“Wait for it,” Brock whispered, almost calmly, and then a second boulder pounded into Eli’s guts. He folded over, breath stolen from his lungs. As he dipped, a black knee shot into the bridge of his nose, and a pistol shot popped in his brain. He collapsed to the floor in a limp heap, doing all he could to keep on hands and knees as he gasped. The room swayed, the frayed carpet blurred and shifting beneath him. He watched with a sort of wonder as a trail of blood dotted the coarse fabric beneath his face.

Reflexively – a pure survival instinct – Eli shifted the air around him.

Someone kicked him in the side but it hardly registered. One of the smaller ones must have done it. A coward’s move.

“He’s fucking hard as stone,” a voice said.

Afraid to be hurt, but more afraid of arousing suspicion, Eli let go of the air, and immediately felt himself sag, as if his body had gained a hundred pounds of pain.

“You’re just a pussy,” a deeper voice said, and another kick came, this one heavy and pointed, dipped in the slick sheen of a tuxedo shoe.

This time the attack connected. Pain burst through Eli’s side. He felt a rib crack as he crashed to the floor, sucking desperately for breath. He clutched his guts, his chest, and wanted to bellow for help before things got worse. Part of him knew he could end this now. Bring up fire and wind and drive them away, through walls if he must…

And reveal yourself? a voice asked, a voice that lived deep within the chambers of his heart, a voice that sounded suspiciously like a teenage Carrie Foster. Attack my future husband? That would make my day memorable, wouldn’t it? The groom, on fire, screaming bloody murder as groomsman were blown down the aisle, hmm? While the organ played Vicente Avella, perhaps?

Eli rolled onto his back, terrified, slowly pulling thin ribbons of oxygen into his lungs. “Okay,” he croaked, not knowing if his words were loud enough to hear, if they were being spoken at all. “Okay,” he repeated, more clearly this time.

Four white faces appeared above him, all staring down at the shell of the man he’d become, the tattered remnants of his human spirit. Parker’s chin was slathered in blood. His nose had swelled and was heading toward a dark shade of purple, but there was nothing Eli could do about that now.

“Okay what, asshole?” Parker growled, his eyes clear once more, his teeth clenched.

Eli raised a hand toward those faces, as if warding off evil spirits. “Okay, I’ll leave,” he said as loud as he could muster. Certainly audible. “I’ll leave,” he repeated, then added, “Forever, okay?” He fought back a sob, then said it again, as much as for himself as for them, knowing he meant it. “I’ll leave forever.”

Brock looked to Parker, who said nothing. Tuck pulled at Brock’s arm. “We need to go, man. The wedding is, like, starting.”

But Brock only squeezed his meaty fingers into thick, hairy-knuckled fists, and Eli thought that maybe things like reason and schedule and marriage vows were no longer at the forefront of the brothers’ minds.

Eli rose slowly to his knees, hands still raised in mock defense, in total surrender. “I’ll go, man. Just… I mean, you’re supposed to be getting married. What about Carrie? What about her? Don’t you give a shit about her? This is supposed to be spec…”

Parker arched his back and shot his leg out like a piston, slamming the heel of his shoe into Eli’s face. Eli felt his nose crack and twist, his jaw shift unnaturally, some string of key muscle and cartilage tearing free from the hinge. Two hard jagged teeth rolled loosely onto his tongue. White light fluttered in his mind like a strobe, and his eyes rolled back into his head.

Eli sank like dead weight, his body limp, his brain scrambling for consciousness. Blood ran freely from one nostril, his lip was badly split, and red saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth, down his cheek, and onto the urine-stained carpet. He gagged on the trickle of warm blood sliding down his throat, coughed once (spitting out at least one tooth in the process), then sickly swallowed. His face was numb, his nerves bullied into a state of shock. He knew he’d been badly, badly hurt.

Parker knelt in front of him, madness in his eyes, and Eli hated himself for the fear that leapt into his chest, the instinctive squeeze of his bladder whose release he fought against with every fiber of self-worth left in him. He lifted his hands, pleading.

“Please…” he said, more terrified than he’d ever been. Even more scared than the time they’d beaten him in the alley behind that bar, the same night Carrie had told him of her engagement. The night he knew his life with her was over. It was then that Parker had first warned him to stay clear of Carrie, of his best friend, of the very one he was supposed to protect. But he couldn’t protect anyone. That had been made painfully clear, first that night in the alley, and now in this small, stinking office of the small church.

Eli had never felt more despair. Had never felt more hollow.

He dropped his hands and sighed, deciding it no longer mattered what they did to him. All the damage had been done, and he was broken inside. Shattered glass and shadows. He rolled over and hoped, for a moment, to rise, but instead let his face sink into the musty carpeting, too hurt to do anything more.

“Think he’s had enough.” Brock’s voice. Eli could imagine him putting a hand on his brother’s arm. “Let’s get you cleaned up and get this shit over with.”

Eli scoffed, kept his face to the carpet. A tear pooled in his eye and he didn’t fight its departure.

“Not yet,” Parker said.

And just as Eli was thinking what part of him they would attack next—was wondering, with a sense of inquisitive fascination, if Parker meant to actually kill him… he heard a loud scream from outside the door.

“What the hell was that?” One of the dickheads.

“I don’t…” Brock started, then stopped. They all stopped.

Because that was when they heard the air siren, and the mounting screams that followed the first, hot on its wailing heels.

PASTOR WILLARD RAISED his arms and yelled over the heightening voices, the weeping children, the discordant shouts of panic, the distant warning cry of the siren. “Please! Please, be calm!” The interior of the chapel had taken on a green hue, reflecting the light coming in through windows, now filled with the most ominous sky he’d ever seen. Where did this weather come from? he thought, pushing the sudden burn of fear deep down while praying silently to his God.

Faces turned to him, pale and alarmed.

“We need to get out of here,” one man said.

“Pastor, what should we do?” asked a pretty lady in a blue dress, her arm clamped onto the narrow bicep of an elderly man, who seemed confused as to what all the yelling was about.

Pastor Willard stepped forward, looked through the large windows at the building storm, the strange light that shone through the center of the sky’s cloud-wrinkled face. “Let’s just take our seats, please. Come on, this will be better if we remain calm.” He smiled at them reassuringly. His sheep looking to him for guidance, for someone to lead. “Come on now, let’s…”

His words were cut off as the roof of the church erupted in a hard clattering that echoed ominously throughout the open chapel, filling the room with a cacophonous, nerve-shattering racket. An image came to him of a thousand baby demons, born of the storm and formed by ice, banging their fists on the roof and walls of the Lord’s house, commanding entry, demanding souls to take.

“What is it?” a child yelled, but the others said nothing, simply looked toward the ceiling as if waiting for it to cave inward, allow full access to the battering sky.

“It’s hail,” the pastor said quietly, then, clearing his throat and repeating the words with assertion, “it’s just hail.” He searched the group for faces he knew, for someone he could trust. He spotted the Marksons, who were smarter than most and had run a cattle farm in the county for decades. He decided to deputize them both. “Martha? Tom? Come on, you’ve both seen hail before. We all have.”

Tom Markson nodded, as if trying to figure out why the pastor was addressing him specifically, then realization come upon him. He looked to his wife and nodded as she immediately started touching the shoulders of children, whispering reassuringly.

“That’s right,” Tom said, nodding ever more vigorously. “That’s just hail, folks. I think we should all have a seat like the pastor said.”

Pastor Willard smiled, feeling as if things were coming to hand, when he happened to glance over the heads of the group and out the large windows toward the beating heart of the storm. Lightning flashed, illuminating the sunken dark shadows of the tumultuous clouds. Revealed what lay hidden there.

A massive, twisting funnel extended down from the ceiling of boiling sky, pushed its way earthward. The tip of it curled like a witch’s finger, digging a hard gray fingernail across the earth. The pastor could see, through a swirl of dirt at the twister’s base, black specks rising from the ground to feed it, pulled upward like confetti falling in reverse.

Those are corn stalks, he thought.

But deep down, sulking within his hidden subconscious – where nightmares fester and all of our greatest fears are harbored – was the truth. Cars! His subconscious shrieked, piercing his brain like an ice pick. Houses! Livestock!

And then: People!

“Oh no.” The words fell from his mouth like a dead prayer, and all heads followed his wide-eyed gaze out the windows…

… and inside the small church, hell broke loose.