The rain hammered down as Bathilda pulled out of the hospital car park. With a 16 hour shift behind her, she drives her yellow Beetle out onto the main road imagining a nice hot bath and glass of red. The road in front is hard to see due to the torrential downpour and it forces her to drive more cautiously than she usually would.

This is not the type of shower she had in mind.

Heading away from her place of work, Bathilda stops at the intersection to wait for the lights to change. Looking at herself in her mirror, her hair is affray in a messy ponytail and her bloodshot eyes show her exhaustion. The light changes and she takes the first right, heading towards the freeway. Having worked at St Mary's for the last three years, Bathilda has taken this route thousands of times and even with the poor-weather conditions, she manages to merge into traffic safely.

Switching lane, Bathilda has a good thirty two minutes worth of travel and she out breathes a sigh of relief. After owning a licence for eight years and making the same journey so many times, she still hates merging onto the freeway. With her eyes glued on the road in front of her, Bathilda carefully lights a cigarette before turning on the radio.

The weather report is on, but is hard to here through the static of a bad signal. It's advising against all non-essential travel as visibility is extremely poor and accident reports are piling up left, right and centre.

"No shit," she says, taking a drag. The car behind Bathilda overtakes her with abandon, causing her to panic.

"Asshole!" she shouts, remembering the last patient she had sedated before leaving. A man had been rushed in after a traffic collision with three quarters of his arm hanging off. The same arm had also been run over and both his legs were crushed.

Apparently he was the driver that caused the whole ordeal. The nurses and doctors were baffled as to how he ended up with such injuries. The best one they come up with was that he had been run over, after he had crashed and was thrown through his own windscreen that was.

With her shift over, Bathilda didn't hang around to find out the why. There was no doubt she would hear about it tomorrow. The nurses staff room was the den of gossip after all.

She takes another drag and almost drops her cigarette, as the weather man, John Johnson, shout out the radio. "We've received reports that a Tornado has just started at St Mary's hospital in downtown Fremont. Anyone living in or around the vicinity, buckle down now and anyone heading that way, stop and turn around."

Not wanting to believe her regular weather reporter, she checks the rearview mirror. Barely visible through the freakish weather, Bathilda can just about make out the natural disaster behind her and it is not what the weather man described at all.

Almost five-times the size of the eight-story hospital, the insane force of nature has already torn through half of the building. If that was the worst thing she had seen, then Bathilda would have turned around and went back to throw in a few more hours. God knows they needed her now. She could have found somewhere to close her eyes and get a few hours in before jumping back into the fray.

Sadly though, the cause of the hospitals destruction had decided to take the same freeway that Bathilda took.

The same direction she was heading.

"Shit," she curses as another car goes speeding past, bumping into the side of her beetle.

"What the fuck! Asshole!" she shouts out, knowing full well no one can hear her through the storm. Realising she should be copying said driver's example, Bathilda puts her foot down and increases her speed. She most certainly doesn't want to get caught by the tornado that seems to be closing the gap with ease.

She keeps her foot pressed hard on the accelerator until she hits 190.

It takes all her focus and attention to hold the car steady as Bathilda has never driven that fast before. Even if the conditions were good, she would never exceed the speed limit. With the poor visibility in front and the slippery surface beneath, Bathinda's wipers flap continuously as the free-falling rain beats down on her.

Bathilda leans closer to the wheel trying to improve her view as she enters a trance of sorts. Ignoring the growing noise and focusing solely on the road infront, Bathilda keeps her foot down.

Scared shitless by the roaring winds of death creeping up from behind, Bathilda forgot about the cigarette burning away between her fingers until it burnt her, causing her to lose her concentration. The pain was enough to eject the nurse from the meditative state of survival and at the same time caused her to lose grip on the steering wheel which resulted in the beetle taking a sharp-right at breakneck speed.

Less than a second was all it had taken.

After reaffirming her grip on the steering wheel, Bathilda tries to right the car's direction but sadly the damage has been done. The yellow beetle has begun to spin and is crossing lanes with no control at all. In the driver's seat, Bathilda can do little to help herself and screams as she the car spins furioisly.

Still screaming, still spinning, Bathilda's beetle slowly starts to lose its momentum before it hits the barrier without coming into contact with any of the other fleeing vehicles.

Facing the wrong way as her wipers still push away the heavy rain, Bathilda can now see the terrible magnificence of mother nature. Destroying everything in her path, she's on her way to greet the broken-down wreck of a nurse that is still screaming.

Bathilda turns the key again and again but the engine doesn't start. Lady luck doesn't appear to be on her side.

'Why aren't you running? Or trying to escape?' she thinks to herself.

"Can you really outrun a tornado?" she answers herself with another question.

'Have you ever tried?'

"I've never actually seen a tornado first-hand before, but I doubt it. Look at the fucking size of that thing!" Staring at her approaching monster of death, Bathilda takes another cigarette from her packet. "I suppose I shouldn't be worried about these cancer stick's killing me anymore, should I?"

'If only someone was around to hear that one. That would have had some of the doctors in...stitches.'

Bathilda starts laughing before she coughs due to not inhaling correcting.

'Ha, might be better that there isn't anyone around.'

"Who's side are you on?"

'There are no sides. Only death.'

Her Beetle begins to move, not due to the engine. Instead the forces of nature pull the windscreen from off the car and it flys up into the sky, revealing Bathilda to nature at her worst.

Taking one more anxious pull, as the tornado is now right in front of her, she throws the cigarette away to shield her face from the oncoming torrent of wind and rain.

'Why do I have to die like this?'