Eye of the Storm
Authors: Kate Messner
For my aunt, Maureen Lahue,
and for all librarians
fighting the good fight
for books and knowledge
There are no words to describe this sound.
In the old days, they said tornadoes sounded like freight trains. I've seen video archives of survivors being interviewed, all out of breath. They describe an approaching rumble and then a roar. Wind pouring out of the sky. Buildings shaking. And finally, the train rumbling off, fading away as the storm lumbers on.
But that was then.
There are no words for the sound of what is happening now.
A thick, dark shadow is snaking down from the cloud that followed us from the airport. It's wider and stronger than anything those people in the video archives had ever seen. Bigger than anything they could have imagined.
It is headed straight for us.
“No worries, Jaden,” Dad says, but both our DataSlates are wailing with high-pitched storm alerts. His eyes dart to the rearview mirror as he pulls the HV into a safety lot.
I've heard about these huge roadside shelters, but we don't have them at home in Vermont. The one time Mom and I got caught
out with a storm coming, we just knocked on somebody's door. It goes without saying in New England: on storm days, you let anybody who needs help into your safe room.
But in this part of Oklahoma, there are fewer houses now, hardly any doors to knock on. This huge concrete structure is the first building we've seen for miles. It's almost full, but Dad maneuvers into one of the last spaces. “We'll be fine here.”
“Good timing, I guess.” My voice shakes, even though I try to pretend it's no big deal; Mom warned me the storms would be more frequent here, but I never thought I'd see one before we even got to Dad's house.
“That good timing's no accident.” Dad leans back in his seat and picks up his DataSlate. The glow of the screen lights his face an eerie blue, even as the sky outside grows darker. “When StormSafe got the government contract to build these lots, we put one every fifteen miles on major roads so you'd never be more than a few minutes from safety.”
“That's how much warning you get when a storm's coming?”
“Give or take.”
They're like the Revolutionary Warâera taverns I learned about in my online history course, spaced fifteen miles apart because that's how far a traveler could ride in a day. Here we are, 275 years later, driving hydrogen vehicles instead of horses, and we're back to needing shelter every fifteen miles.
Lightning flashes outside. I tug my backpack from the floor into my lap and run the strap between my fingers, over and over, so I can concentrate on that instead of the pounding in my chest. I can't
freak out. Not on my first day with Dad in four years. He lives for storms like this.
A plastic chair tumbles, legs over arms over legs, past the entrance we came in.
“This is turning into a good one.” Dad cranks the volume on his DataSlate so we can hear the regional news feed over the screaming wind. If they mention the storm, we'll know it's big. Normally, they send out the DataSlate alerts that replaced the old tornado sirens and leave it at that. Mom said when she was growing up, her town got on national news once when a tornado wiped out half a mobile home park.
National
news!
Now the news feeds only report the biggest of the big, the true monsters. It sounds like this could be one of them.
“The National Storm Center confirms a tornado warning for all of eastern Logan County,” the voice on the DataSlate says. “NSC meteorologists say the system that developed this afternoon has spawned three separate tornadoesâthe latest, a possible NF-6. Residents are advised to get to safe rooms immediately.”
“NF-6?” I swallow hard. We have our share of storms back homeâwho doesn't?âbut the worst I've seen was the NF-4 that ripped the roof off Mom's environmental science lab at the University of Vermont.
“Could be.” Dad leans to see past me, out the shelter door. The tornado doesn't even have its funnel shape anymore; the thick, jerking rope has swelled into a churning blur of brown-black wind.
“It's rain-wrapped!” Dad shouts over the roaring. “Tough to see how big it's grown. But at least it's not a Niner!” That's weather-geek
slang for an NF-9, the second highest rating on the new scale they developed a decade ago when it became clear the storms had outgrown the old Enhanced Fujita Scale that went from one to five. When I was a baby, EF-5 was the worst a tornado could be. The New Fujita Scale goes up to ten, though nobody's ever seen a ten touch down. What would they call it? A Tenner?
The lights flicker, and I grip the door handle.
“Relax, Jaden.” Dad punches me lightly on the arm, and it sets something off inside me. All the swallowed-up storm jitters rise in my throat, and I want to scream. Instead, I swallow that, too, and my eyes fill with tears.
I've been on the ground all of two hours, and I'm not used to it here. None of it feels like home.
Not the desolate brown flatness of the land.
Not the stark concrete gray of the shelters.
And not the storms. Especially not storms like this.
Dad should know that.
Maybe he'd understand how I feel, understand
me
, if he hadn't spent the past four years in Russia, doing weather experiments that weren't allowed in the United States. Maybe he'd ask how I'm doing now thatâ
“Jaden, look!” He holds up his DataSlate and turns the radar screen my way. “This hook echo is incredible!”
He points to the blob on the screen. It's churning, growing, hungry enough to swallow half of Oklahoma. A curled-up green extension sticks out one side of the storm, like a witch's finger calling us in.
I know what he wants me to say. He wants me to
ooh
and
ahh
and talk about the rotation like we used to when I was little and I'd sit on his lap, and he'd laugh because I knew how to read a satellite map before I was five. He wants me to be WeatherGirl, the nickname he gave me before he left, before he and Mom split up, before the storms got this bad, before everything. He wants me to say how awesome it is, how fantastic and powerful. How amazing.
But it's not. It is terrifying and loud, pounding the concrete shelter we're hiding in with uprooted hackberry shrubs and tree trunks and God knows what else. I grab the door and hold on.
“Relax, Jaden. This is no big deal around here. You're safe. I designed this shelter model myself. StormSafe tested these things under conditions that were far moreâ”
He's trying to comfort me, but he is screaming,
screaming
over the storm he says is no big deal. So I scream back.
“Dad,
stop
!” I put my head down on the dashboard and press my hands into my eyes, but I still can't escape from the sound. Forget the passing freight train. This is like being
inside
the engine of the train, inside the throat of some ancient Greek monster that's roared down out of the sky. It's throwing recycling bins and branches, torn-off roof tiles so frantic and flapping they look like huge tortured birds, all flying past the entrance to the lot. I scream again, “Just stop! Stop!” And I don't know if I'm screaming at Dad or the storm or both. But neither responds.
Finally, I sit up and open my eyes. Dad is ignoring the weather outside, staring at me. He closes the radar imageâthe storm looks even bigger in the glimpse I catch before it's sucked into a folder on
his screenâand pulls up his StormSafe corporate log-in page. He turns the slate away from me as if I'd be able to see or remember his stupid password in the middle of this and pokes at the onscreen keys. “Relax,” he says. “It's weakening now.”
I squeeze my eyes closed against the pounding, against the attack from the wind and debris, and I don't answer him. But as if by magic, the roar of that monster-from-the-sky fades back into something more like an old-fashioned freight train and then dissolves altogether.
I don't open my eyes.
I sit, listening to the train rumble off. I squeeze my eyes shut tighter and think.
This was not a storm. It was a monster.
This is not home.
And this is not the same father I used to have, the one who tucked me into bed, singing songs about the wind.
That father took me out for ice cream on a summer night four years ago. He ordered rainbow sprinkles on his cone, right along with me, and he told me why he had to go on another trip. Why he wasn't coming home anytime soon. Why he needed to open a new StormSafe headquarters in a country that would allow him to do his research. And he left.
This father who has come back to me . . . I open one eye a crack. His fingers fly over the DataSlate. His eyes focus on the scrolling columns of numbers, laser-intense. Fierce.
He feels like someone I don't even know.
No matter how bad things get in Logan County, no matter how the clouds swirl, how the radar screens light up, I'll be safe in Placid Meadows.
Perfectly, one hundred percent safe.
That's what Dad promised Mom, how he convinced her to send me here, to the heart of the storm belt, for the summer. And his new, self-sufficient StormSafe community does sound impressive. Safety. Higher water and kilowatt allowances, thanks to Placid Meadows' private solar and wind energy reserves. Eye on Tomorrow Science Camp, the state-of-the-art program Dad's corporation runs for “the best and brightest young minds” in the world. Dad said it went without saying that I was one of them and sent me admissions papers, but I still wanted to take the official entrance exam. When I answered the last question on my DataSlate and pressed the SUBMIT button, the score that appeared on the screen put me in the top five percent of applicants. I couldn't argue that I didn't belong there.
Plus Mom had her own research project waiting in the shadow
of an active Costa Rican volcano. Not to be outdone by my father's adoration of storms, Mom's had her own love affair . . . with frogs. While Dad's been studying the effects of global warming on storm formation, she's been researching its impact on wildlife in sensitive ecosystems, particularly rain forest amphibians like the poison dart frog. Mom's wanted to take this trip for years but had nobody I could stay with until now.
“This must be WeatherGirl!” As we pull up to the Placid Meadows gate, a beanpole of a man leans down into the HV window.
Dad nods in my direction. “This is indeed my daughter Jaden, the infamous WeatherGirl.” My stomach's still tangled from the storm, but I smile; nobody's called me that in four years, and even though I'm a total science geek, I'm surprised Dad still thinks about me that way. Surprised, and I guess a little pleased.
“Hi, Jaden. I'm Lou.” He points to the shiny silver name tag on his navy blue uniform. There's a StormSafe emblem above his name. Does everybody here work for Dad? “Any update on the expansion, Dr. Meggs?”