She had maybe fifteen minutes before things really ripped loose.

Since early afternoon, a front of cold air nearly five-hundred miles long had been pushing its way down from Canada and crawling its way across several regions of the Midwest that had, until this evening, been dry for this time of year. As the front moved into Ohio, rising air began picking up particles of dirt and sections of small, fallen branches, eventually creating a spiraling vortex of debris that rose churning into the night air. As the front moved closer to central Ohio, it grew in intensity, picking up more of Nature’s debris and feeding on itself until it formed a massive, whistling, rolling wall that mounted to a height of four thousand feet. On the ground, visibility was decreased to less than half a mile.

This was what greeted Lucy as she left the bar and ran, stumbling and cursing, to her car.

As it bulldozed forward, the cold front drove itself like a spike into the remaining dry air. As they collided, the air masses of differing density struggled to overpower one another. This disturbance caused a massive low-pressure system to form, wheeling counter-clockwise of most of the center of the state. Ultimately, the warmer air rising from the ground penetrated the colder mass above, boiling into towering cumulonimbus clouds that rose taller and wider until they appeared to be dark angry mountains against the sky, as large as Everest but not quite as friendly-looking. The great mountain chain of clouds flattened against the tropopause, spreading out and breaking up into a series of massive, anvil-shaped thunderheads.

As the storm matured and gathered strength, it separated into several furious cells that moved together as a disorganized and unfocused yet single unit: mature cells forming at the storm’s center, with newer ones developing on the periphery. In the cells that approached Licking County, the anvil-shaped top of one of the cells began to bulge upward, creating what meteorologists would, the following morning, refer to as an “overshoot”—an augury of sorts, an indication that the rising torrents of air at the storm’s center had become so powerful so quickly that they had broken through the tropopause and moved into the stratosphere. On the underside of the storm, ugly, bulging, pulsating pouches appeared, bellwethers for massive, heavy rainfall and damaging hail, possibly even windbursts or tornadoes.

Massive cells of rain were hovering over the county, evaporating as quickly as they fell, blasting the area with localized microbursts that uprooted smaller trees and peeled shingles from roofs still sporting them. Hailstones spilled from the sky, shattering windows and pounding dents into the hoods of automobiles. Drivers on their way home from work had to pull over because visibility was reduced to damn near nothing, then throw themselves prone across the car seats in the event their windshields shattered.

As the world exploded in bursts of lightning and screaming wind and flying debris, Lucy drove on, taking almost no notice. The weather seemed to have kept everyone but her inside; she hadn’t passed another car since pulling out of the bar’s parking lot—which was a blessing because she crossed the center line three times her first five minutes on the road. Probably should have eaten something earlier, she thought. No matter. If she ran off the road and wrapped her car around a tree, she might cheer in the moments before death.