GRIFFIN — Corey Peavy wakes to the sound of something hitting the house. It’s 12:30 a.m. and hail is beating a deafening rat-tat-tat against the windows of the bedroom he shares with his brother, Tyler, in the family’s one-story ranch home. “This ain’t no regular weather,” Corey thinks.
The tornado doesn’t just strike the house, but like some malevolent intruder it forces its way inside.
It grabs hold of the wall behind the two boys’ double beds, ripping it away from the rest of the house. The wall tumbles into the yard, leaving the brothers exposed. As they stumble from their beds, they can feel the wind pulling at them.
Corey, who at 16 is older by one year, yells to his brother, “Go!”
But it’s hard to move. Blackness alternates with blinding bursts of lightning. The air is dense with sheet rock, insulation and boards studded with exposed nails.
They can hear their mother, Stacey, shouting; in the darkness and chaos, they follow the sound. Get to the bathroom, she yells. It’ll be safe there.
Their younger sister, Kylie, is screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” Stacey pushes through the tumult to the girl’s pink bedroom. The outer wall is gone. So is 13-year-old Kylie.
Stacey fights her way across the room, past where Kylie’s bed should be. She sees Kylie’s mattress, lying in the yard. Kylie is still on it.
Stacy jumps down and runs through the sheets of rain to her side. Kylie is alive but woozy from a blow to the head.
Stacey grabs her daughter and pushes, pulls and carries her back into the house.
The two boys, squatting in the bathtub with their heads down, hear the clang of metal striking metal. In the speed-shutter flashes of lightning, they see a wall of the bathroom cracking open. Bathroom tiles fly off the walls, slicing at their skin.
They flee into the hallway, but not before Corey pauses for a moment to look square at the tornado. Just to see it.
The force of the wind has trapped their father, Joe, in the master bedroom. Finally, he is able to force the door open.
He emerges to find the boys crawling toward him under the debris that blocks the hallway. They have to stop from time to time to wipe the dirt out of their eyes.
Joe calls out to them and to Stacey, who helps Kylie toward the master bedroom. At last, all five family members huddle together in the parents’ walk-in closet. There, they take stock, checking each other for injuries as best they can in the darkness.
They’re all scratched up pretty good. Corey stepped on a nail, but his shoe kept it from penetrating his foot too deeply. The flying bathroom tiles cut Tyler’s back. Joe has a big puncture wound on his arm, probably from a piece of glass. Stacey has sprained an ankle. Kylie’s head and neck are swollen from where the piece of lumber hit her.
After a few minutes, no one is really sure how long, the sound of the wind dies away. The Peavy family emerges.
They search the house and yard for their their dogs, including the bulldog, Dixie, who just had three pups. Every dog survived except Charlie the chihuahua.
The scene is dreamlike. The tornado pulled out the drawers from the TV cabinet but left the TV standing. A curio cabinet, filled with fragile eagle-themed clocks and collectibles — Joe’s passion — is intact.
The storm carried away the garage but left the minivan standing there. The van’s doors are punched in; they won’t open. The windows of the car Joe drives in his role as a sheriff’s deputy are all blown out.
They look down Sidney Drive: their neighbors’ homes are similarly damaged, but perhaps not quite so badly.
It’s eerily quiet, except for one small sound. Among the Christmas decorations the tornado has flung across the yard is one that plays music. It starts playing. Standing beside the ruins of their home in the odd peace after the storm that almost killed them, the Peavy family listens to Christmas carols.
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