A classical, high-intensity microburst dropped out of the thunderstorm cell above them and killed the bus.
Worden and MaryLiz had met only yesterday, at the start of this five-day bus junket to visit remote little towns and scenery in the southwestern desert. For her it was relaxation after six weeks of hard work – she was British, this was the end of her annual buying trip to the USA. Despite missing her husband and two teenagers back home, she was taking this extra time because she had never seen a real desert. For Worden, it was just a chance to get away from the office and back to countryside he enjoyed, without having to think or drive. Sitting together by accident at the first breakfast, they found one another to be extraordinarily compatible souls. For Worden, MaryLiz had all the necessary attributes – witty, well read, intelligent and personable. It didn't hurt at all that she was also quite pretty – short blond hair, no makeup, clear skin. Plus slim, slightly busty, and at 35 near enough his own age – fifty something – to be genuinely interesting. Touch oriented, too – and comfortable with it: enroute into lunch that first day she had taken his arm without it being offered. She in turn found him engaging – surprisingly well educated and traveled – and well-mannered – for a Yank. A pleasant surprise, a bonus.
The tour stopped on day one at several minor remote towns and some fine landscape. They took dinner together, went their separate ways to their assigned rooms. In the early-morning pre-breakfast cool they met for a run – to her pleasant surprise, she found him as attractive physically as she did mentally. Their running styles and speed were compatible. Two miles out of town, they encountered a large rattlesnake mid-asphalt, using yesterday's residual heat to warm itself against the morning chill. She had never seen such a beast – he caught it, a skill learned in high-school field biology class, showed it to her in up-close detail, then they trotted out into the desert a quarter mile to release it far from traffic. After breakfast they boarded the bus together, she took the outside seat at a huge picture-window, he sat beside her on the aisle.
Brassy still skies were the morning's weather offering – Worden had grown up in Tornado Alley, northeastern Kansas, and opined that there was a hellacious thunderstorm brewing. She doubted it – there wasn't a cloud to be seen, she observed. By midafternoon, she had conceded the point. The bus was belting down the road on a course gently converging with the razor-sharp edge of a huge and clearly violent weather front – dominated by the biggest anvil-shaped thunderhead cloud Worden had ever seen. It towered hugely over them, over the entire landscape. He guessed it topped out over sixty thousand feet. Within and beneath it, lightning flared continuously, air-to-air, air to ground. Over the bus's road noise they could hear the increasing rumble of nearly continuous thunder.
It was a Great Mother of a storm, he told her. MaryLiz was fascinated, Worden was privately concerned but not yet worried. The road curved left around a smallish butte and suddenly they were aimed straight under the anvil, directly towards the most intense lightning. It was still miles away, but the road vanished disquietingly beneath the storm, disappearing into the sheets of rain as if behind a stage curtain – there was no gradual transition from "in-view" to "disappeared" – the change was like a knife-edge. MaryLiz quickly discovered that massive lightning displays at five miles are an abstraction, an art form – but as the distance decreases, things get much more personal and much more real.
The wind hit the bus head-on like a wall of mush. Worden was astonished – extensive experience with storms on the Great Plains, and at sea as well, let him guess the wind-speed at over a hundred knots. And no rise-time, either – it arrived as a step-function, blasting with it the accumulated junk of desert and mankind alike as bouncing, wind-powered shrapnel. And the wind's note was rising steadily. The bus groaned, slowed, the driver downshifted repeatedly. The wind increased steadily – it was insanely strong. Passengers were getting scared now - MaryLiz, wide-eyed, clung to his arm, looking back and forth between his face and the suddenly berserk outer world. The driver had them nearly down to compound low gear – lucky the wind was from dead ahead. Even so, even at their magnificent new top speed of about ten miles per hour, the bus shivered and shook from the blast. Worden was now worried- he stood, trotted to the front, suggested to the driver that they stop in the shelter of one of the overpasses they could see ahead, just short of the squall-line. They were substantial structures, low concrete-and-steel arcs thrown over the interstate, carrying four- or six-lane "farm roads". Old Federal pork projects. The driver readily agreed – it was about a mile to the nearest one, he would stop under it. Worden returned to his seat, explained his concerns – storms like this were loaded with tornados and violent, variable winds. Under a bridge lay a much higher level of safety.
The bridge was only a hundred yards ahead when it disappeared into the wall of rain as the bottom edge of the anvil-cloud covered them, making instant dusk interrupted by blue-white flashes every other second. Far above, in the anvil-top, a mile-wide bolus of dense, very cold air plummeted downwards. It hit to the bus's left, half a mile away, going over 200 miles per hour. When it hit the desert, it splattered sideways like a fire-hose stream against a brick wall. No longer a downdraft, but a radially-outwards burst of high-velocity air – sure killer for any low-altitude aircraft that caught it as a tail-wind – an instant, utterly irrecoverable dead stall into the ground.
Worden saw it coming – sort of. Something changed in the blurry view outside, he had time to yell "Holy shit, hang on!" The twenty ton bus heeled to starboard as quickly as a yacht in a squall. The suspension made peculiar groaning noises as the weight came off the left, fully onto the right wheels. Slamming thuds signaled the suspension fetching up against the stops – no more extension. The microburst got its fingers beneath the frame and heaved. For a moment they were poised on the right wheels, passengers tumbling and screaming. Then the tires blew and the bus yielded to this strange concatenation of forces, slowly rolled to lie down in the ditch on its side, almost with a sigh. It took no time at all for the bus to scrub off its ten mph's worth of momentum, plowing ahead like a beaching whale. As the bus settled, its frame twisted mightily.
Worden was an experienced sailor, had followed the slow roll with his feet, was standing on the aisle-arm of the seat on the other side, holding a terrified MaryLiz in her seat. The twisting frame popped the big window loose – it was designed as an emergency exit, and it was determined to do its duty. The wind caught its edge, lifted and separated. Like a silicon sail blown from its boltrope, the window blinked out of existence as if down a black hole – to be replaced by a truly Noachian flood of ice-cold rain. Rain and a howling maelstrom of wind invaded the bus, stirring and floating all the loose detritus of forty tourists suddenly upended. It looked like the inside of a jetliner during explosive decompression. The wind's shriek was incredible, as was the downpour - in five seconds Worden and MaryLiz were as wet as if they'd just been through a fundamentalist baptism, her single-layer linen dress plastered to her body like paint.
