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Samantha Stanfield had been monitoring the weather reports all day. Her home was in Dyersburg, but her father, Joseph, Sr., 69, lived alone up on Harness Road in a place he'd spent his whole life. His wife and parents were buried in a little graveyard out back.Because it was east of a bluff, his house had always managed to avoid the strafing of storms. Local lore held that tornadoes were forced to go around the bluff to the north or south. So whenever bad weather was afoot, Samantha and her husband would pack up the kids and drive the seven miles to ride out the storm at Poppy's. His house was the center for all family gatherings anyway. Holiday dinners, out-of-towners' visits, birthday parties -- any special occasion would always be hosted at Poppy's. It was family headquarters. And Poppy's neighbors -- Sid Bruce, Steve Harness, and the Taylors -- had grown up together. They were as close as family. But by early evening the reports coming in had Samantha concerned. Tornadoes had touched down in points that made a direct line toward Harness Road. When the sirens in Dyersburg went off, she called her father.
"Ah," Poppy said. "It'll never hit out here." Then the line went dead.
Samantha called him right back. It rang and rang. Finally he answered.
"Honey!" Poppy said, urgency in his voice. "I'm going to have to get off here! I think the roof's about to come off the house." He screamed something she could not make out, and the line went dead again -- for good.
Just 15 minutes into Crash, Vanice and Larry Parker, sitting with the windows still open, heard click-click-clicking noises outside. "It's hailing," Vanice said.
"Golly, it sure is," Larry said.
Then they heard a roaring, grinding sound like a huge cement truck backing toward the house.
"Is that a tornado?" Larry asked. "It sounds like it."
"I don't know," Vanice said.
As they ran down the hall toward the west-facing bedroom, they saw it. Huge, dark, sucking up the earth and coming right for them. This wasn't any familiar funnel dancing across the landscape. It was an apocalyptic black curtain cutting off the sky, whipping round and round, snapping trees in half, tearing everything up. They had nowhere to go, no basement, nowhere to hide. Larry tried pulling the mattress off the bed to cover them in the tub, but it was too heavy and he couldn't budge it.
He and Vanice lay down side by side in the bathtub. She wrapped her arms around her husband. The porcelain was still wet from Vanice's bath. The roar got louder. Louder than they thought noise could get. Their ears started popping as air being sucked into the vortex created a low-pressure zone. They could feel the whole house vibrating in their bones, shaking as violently as in an earthquake. Larry reached up and took hold of the faucet. He grasped it as if it were his last hold upon the earth. A split second later the lights went out.
"Hold on!" Larry yelled. "Here it is!"
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