Nothing made sense

Rock watched live video of an enormous tornado as it raced by Mount Pinnacle on the westernmost edge of Little Rock. He was in the radio station newsroom he had worked in nearly forty years earlier but was the only of his newspaper coworkers to have seen it. The tornado looked to Rock as if it were traveling east at close to fifty miles an hour, meaning it would reach downtown in less than ten minutes.
Rock tried to warn others in the sports department, but no one seemed interested. Nothing made sense to him except to walk down to the station's basement.

Roommates

There were too many people here. Rock was enrolled for classes at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, and he had been eager to find an inexpensive place to live before a man who ran a print shop near the campus invited him to move into his apartment.

Rock was aware the man had other roommates, but he didn't know how many until he awoke on a couch in the den, early his first morning there to see a crowd of overweight, college-aged women pass by him between their bedrooms and the apartment's only bathroom.

"Good morning, everyone," he said.

Several of the women smiled and returned Rock's well wishes. Others passed by without pause. Neither response surprised him, but he knew there were too many people in this apartment. He would have to find someplace else to stay.

English words

Things were underway in Rock's house that foretold for him a future in which English words would no longer mean what they had from the previous days of his life. He wasn't sure how to react. All he knew was that he needed something to eat and that his cat Joe seemed confused.
Rock was hopeful, but this wasn't a good circumstance.

Rock's pro shop

A handful of old golf historians worked for years to turn Rock's house into a golf museum, a structure that would celebrate the early days of the game in the United States. They tried to make it look like a nineteenth-century clubhouse but had apparently fallen short with the pro shop. All of the clubs in it were relatively modern. Only one—a putter—dated back more than fifteen years.
Rock gradually began to understand that his job had been to acquire the clubs. Obviously, he had made no effort in that regard. He realized he was in big trouble and that the men would arrive soon. All he knew to do was to let his restless, nearly panicked cat Joe go outside.

Anxious for his demise

It wasn't until he reached the door that Rock realized he had two tins of Altoids mints in his hand. He saw a woman at the register staring at him, and he became immediately self-conscious of his apparent attempt at theft. He responded by returning the containers to a candy counter that he thought seemed out of place at a night club such as this one.
Rock was in Nashville, Arkansas, at the club on Sunset Boulevard, three blocks away from his maternal grandmother's house. After he put the candy back, he saw that the woman continued to glare in his direction. He was worried and hoped he could walk to his car and drive away without incident, but when he reached his ten-year-old Chevrolet Impala, it was turned upside down in the parking lot. The trunk had popped open and the doors were buckled out.
It took him a moment to realize there was no way he could drive to his grandmother's house and that the car was a loss, but he knew her house was a short walk away. He walked down Sunset, but his relief was short-lived. People, perhaps creatures, were all around him, anxious for his demise.

Deliberate obfuscation

Rock hadn't seen this sort of crowd at Oaklawn Park since the late 1980s, and thirty or more reporters were there for the Arkansas Derby, packed into a new, ultra-modern press box. The weather was horrid. Rain fell in torrents and cut through fog so thick it was difficult to distinguish one horse from another in the post parade.

Once the race was underway, Rock and everyone else in the press box had trouble seeing through row after row of computer monitors. Midway through the race, no one had yet determined the order of the field. It seemed as if this obfuscation was deliberate.

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.

Rock's cousin

Rock's cousin Jill called just after daybreak. He answered in his front bedroom bed and could immediately tell she was at an Aikman family gathering. Jill put her brothers Bill and Crutch and her daughter Rebecca on the phone.

"Jill, are you in Longview or Beaumont?" Rock said.

"No, dummy. I'm right here."

She sat on a corner edge of Rock's bed, the one by the window that overlooks the front porch.

"Did you climb in through one of the windows?"

"No. I just unlocked your front door."

Rock remembered Jill's skill as a locksmith.

"I thought you were somewhere in Texas," he said.

"Rock, you didn't know? I'm the mayor of San Diego. Everyone's out there. You should come join us."

French fries

A cute, short-haired, twenty-five-year-old brunette woman sat at a desk connected across from Rock's at the paper. As she ate her lunch, Rock was struck by the appearance of a bag of French fries before her. Each fry had a light sheen of grease and was pitted by tiny indentations that bespoke of its crispiness. Rock could not resist.
"I hate to have to ask, but I have no choice," he said. "Could I try one of those French fries?"
The woman paused for a second, but then said, "Sure. Have one."
Rock did, and he found the fry among the best things he had ever tasted.