Free The Meteorologist by Blake Crouch

THE METEOROLOGIST
    a short story by
    Blake Crouch
     
    SMASHWORDS EDITION
     
    * * * * *
     
    PUBLISHED BY:
    Blake Crouch on Smashwords
     
    Copyright 2011 by Blake Crouch
    Cover art copyright 2011 by Jeroen ten
Berge
    All rights reserved.
     
    PRAISE FOR BLAKE CROUCH
     
    Crouch quite simply is a marvel. Highest
possible recommendation.
    BOOKREPORTER
     
    Blake Crouch is the most exciting new
thriller writer I've read in years.
    DAVID MORRELL
     
     
    THE METEOROLOGIST is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
     
    For more information about the author, please
visit www.blakecrouch.com.
    For more information about the artist, please
visit www.jeroentenberge.com.
     
    Smashwords Edition License Notes
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respecting the author's work.
     
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
     
    THE METEOROLOGIST
     
    Summer of the year two thousand and six found
him on the plains of west Kansas, veering onto the off-ramp at Exit
95. Hoxie (pop. 1200) lay sixteen miles due north of the
interstate, the blaring inconsequence of the town only underscored
by its station on the prairie. It was a black freckle on the
roadmap, the sort of place one passes through in wonderment that
people actually live there.
    Peter secured permission from the owner of
Hoxie’s only motel to squat in their parking lot for fifteen
dollars a day. Paid for three in advance and emerged from the small
office into an evening that had failed to release the preceding
hours’ blistering store of heat. Across the empty parking lot,
slats of sunlight glinted off the chrome hubcaps of his ’87
Winnebago Chalet. Peter considered the microwave inside and the TV
dinners in the freezer, any of which he’d had twenty times before.
It had been a long day behind the wheel—492 miles—and since the
thought of eating dinner alone in the RV depressed the hell out of
him, he started walking.
    The downtown went for three blocks, and as he
moved along the sidewalk, he kept glimpsing prairie—down alleys
between the buildings, beyond the dirt streets lined with shabby
houses. The sun struck all that grass in glancing blows, and the
color changed as the wind blew across it. Green to gold, back to
green again. Endless.
    Where the business district stopped, he eased
down onto a bench and stared sixty or seventy miles to the south at
a supercell creeping silently across the plains like an atomic
sunset.
     
    Bad lighting. Jazz so easy-listening he
couldn’t help but to think of that single video of soft-core he
kept behind the respectable DVD collection in the RV—a bride and
the best man trapped in an elevator the day of her wedding.
    The waitress was wiping a table in the back,
and she called out, “Sit wherever you like!”
    He slid into a window booth as a trio of
skateboarders rolled by, his eyes following their movement, then
catching on the bulbous, powder-blue water tower that loomed behind
the school. It felt good to be out of the RV. He stretched his legs
under the table, let his heels rest on the cushion of the opposite
seat.
    Voices slipped through a cracked door in the
rear wall of the restaurant, and he thought it might be a waiter
calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering he was
the only customer, that seemed unlikely.
    He left the table and walked over to the door
and nudged it open.
    “B-eleven.”
    “Hit.”
    Peered