Free Frankenstorm: Deranged by Ray Garton

1
    Quentin ripped through Humboldt County like a horde of demons.
    The roof of the café and gift shop at the Sequoia Park Zoo was peeled off the building. The roar of the wind could not drown out the cries of the animals in the zoo—the hooting and howling of gibbons, the shrieking of birds. The storm destroyed much of the Barnyard petting zoo, flattening fences and tearing down porticos.
    The Old Town Shelter was the only part of Old Town that had not been evacuated. The police knew they wouldn’t be able to get all the homeless out of the area. They had hiding places where they would lay low to avoid having to move. Most of them were scared of the police and hid from them. They were suspicious of relocations and especially evacuations. The shelter remained open for those who would inevitably come out of their hiding places and need food and shelter from the storm.
    It was in a white clapboard building in a First Street storefront. It had been a flophouse back in another time. Now it stood between a restaurant supply store and FleshArt Tattoos and Piercing in the most consistently disheveled and run-down part of Old Town.
    It was dark and crowded inside. Much of the light they had came from kerosene lanterns and battery-operated lights positioned here and there, stable and unwavering, but the rest came from flashlights and handheld lanterns and flew all over the place as the lights were moved around. Someone led them in singing old campfire songs they remembered from Boy Scouts and summer camps, while waxed paper cups of hot chocolate were handed out.
    Something crashed into the front of the building with a sound that some would later describe as a bomb going off. It was a power pole, but it did not fall into the building—it was hurled into the building like a missile. It slammed into one of the front pillars in the old building as sparks flew from two overturned kerosene lanterns. The explosive crash was immediately followed by the screaming of voices in pain.
    Flashlight beams cut through the dark and converged on the damage.
    Someone shouted, “Get that lantern! It’s burning !”
    And then there were flames, and screaming, and a frantic explosion of movement.
    The steeple of St. Bernard’s Church was sheared off at the base and thrown several blocks, where it crashed through the roof of a sewing machine store and repair shop.
    A twenty-three-foot-long Airstream Flying Cloud was lifted from the Redwood Empire RV and Motorhome Park and flung a distance of two miles by the storm, until it crashed and slid loudly through a Safeway grocery store parking lot, spraying sparks as it gouged the pavement.
    It was a night when more than rain was falling from the sky and the wind was out for blood.
    A single pair of headlights moved cautiously through the street, slowly up one block, then down another, fighting the wind, easing through the downpour, as if searching the streets for something....

2
    Sheriff Mitchell Kaufman worried about his blood pressure as he drove through the storm. He was so tense at the wheel that the muscles of his back, neck, and shoulders burned and his chest felt tight. His blood pressure was probably high and climbing. His cholesterol level probably felt pretty good about itself in comparison.
    His patrol car was rocked and jostled by the wind as he drove slowly through the eastern part of town. Farther west, closer to the bay, much of the town was already flooding. Even here, the gutters had become creeks.
    Kaufman had lived in Eureka his whole life. With a population of a little more than 27,000, it was the biggest coastal city in the state north of San Francisco, but it was still a rural town more than a 160 years after its founding. As sheriff, Kaufman’s responsibility was the entire county of Humboldt, which was home to nearly 135,000 people. Tonight, with the power outages and flooding and other damage done by the hurricane, all of those people would be a lot more stressed than usual, which