No warning

No one had seen anything about this in the forecast. Rock was at his friend Walt Webber's house, and they each looked south across Russellville and much of the Arkansas River Valley from Webber's property on Crowe Mountain. There had been no warning either was aware of, but there was an unimaginable tornado headed their way. It was miles wide and stretched into the valley below from purple and orange clouds. As they watched, they could see it had spawned a dozen or more smaller funnel clouds, each rushing about like infant raptors from the Jurassic Park franchise.
Next Rock knew, he and Walt were in the house. He watched Walt run into a bedroom, where he gathered a set of golf irons and clinched them to his chest as he lay in the midday darkness beside his and his wife's kingsize bed.
"Don't you think it would be safer here in the hallway?" Rock said.

The singer

A neighbor of Rock's, a musician of some sort, told Rock of a somewhat crazed man who recently sung for him. Rock heard the story and then watched a corresponding video of the man begging the neighbor to come outside and hear him sing.
In it, Rock saw the man standing beside a telephone pole and singing acapella, and he sounded as if he had never sung before. The man's voice was terrible.

Into the future

This wasn't the first time Rock had been presented with an opportunity to advance time by a total of four hundred and ninety-five years, but until now he had never accepted it. What was odd was that the future version of his house no longer allowed him to watch the Cincinnati Reds on his television.
Rock surfed through the channels and settled on a show from the 1950s. George Lindsey, the man who played Goober on The Andy Griffith Show, was among its stars.

This can't last

Another day was done, and as Rock watched hundreds of his employees walk from his vast, dimly-lighted office complex, he still had no idea what anyone there did. He sat at his desk, with his cat Joe nearby, and wondered if he would ever figure it out.

It couldn't last. Rock knew that much. He stood to leave and told the men and women around him to wrap things up.

"It's time to go," he said. "We've done all we can do."

Missing cats

The research project had been underway for years. It involved Rock's cats and the food he agreed to feed them, but he had forgotten about it long ago. All he remembered was that he was supposed to compile data important to someone. The thing was, Rock didn't know where most of his cats were. It seemed as if he hadn't seen Pam or Samantha for years. He knew this would be hard to explain.

The church

Rock was never able to explain to anyone why he walked into the church in the first place. The fact was he didn't know himself, but for whatever reason, he could not resist.
It was midafternoon and Rock drove north on U.S. 71 toward Fayetteville, Arkansas. As he drove through one of the many small towns along the way, his attention was drawn to an old, enormous church. It reminded him of the European cathedrals he toured as a child.
Rock's next memory was of a walk through a wide hallway in the church. He reached its end and turned left into another to see a pileup of crushed cars, pickups, and SUVs. Several were burning. It was clear the wreck had occurred within the last minute. Rock could see airbags deployed and bodies crushed inside each of the half-dozen vehicles. He called 911.
"I don't know what town I'm in, but it's about twenty miles south of Fayetteville," Rock said. "There are a lot of dead people here."
The Democrat-Gazette sports department was in what Rock assumed was once a classroom in the church. He joked about the tragedy he had just witnessed, but no one laughed. It was easy to see that his former boss Jeff Krupshaw disapproved.