A degraded honeymoon

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A long time later, after her whole life had been turned upside down, Catherine Mason would remember having perceived the harbinger in the storm. She would realize that her trepidation, and her bizarre fascination with the then unexplainable feelings that gripped her, had derived from a sixth sense, warning her that she had more to fear that day than the elements, that she faced a danger much greater than the mere wrath of God as personified in the fury that poured from the sky.

It was not the kind of storm one was accustomed to seeing in that part of California. Though not by any means a real tornado, the balmy green-clouded stillness that had immediately preceded it would have sent old-timers in West Texas or Kansas scurrying to the shelter of their cellars. The clouds took on that unreal looking greenish glow; the light left the sky as swiftly as if there'd been a sudden near-total eclipse; a vacuum-like stillness seemed to descend over the rolling, vineyard-planted bills. It was almost summer and it was not cold. It was neither cold nor hot. Yet it looked cold, cold in a way she'd never seen it look before, and riding beside her young husband in the front seat of their second-hand Chevy the sensuous nineteen year-old blonde shivered involuntarily, folding her bare arms protectively oven the flimsily-shielded swells of her high standing young breasts. She gazed apprehensively through the windshield at the surrealistic painting created by the low-hanging clouds, then slid suddenly across the seat toward her husband, pressing her slender, bared thigh hard against the gear-stick in order to get as close to him as the bucket seats allowed.

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