The Stormchasers: A Novel (17 page)

Karena shivers despite the heat and rubs her sticky arms. Now that she’s more alert she sees lightning flare on the horizon, hears the corresponding static on somebody’s radio, then the
wah-wah-wah
of the emergency broadcast signal. Karena’s blood freezes at the sound. Still the traffic flows past, the truck emitting the signal moving through the light. Karena can’t believe these people are just going about their business as if it’s a regular day.

Dan calls from the parked Whale, “Let’s go, people!” Dennis and Fern, who are smoking out on the sidewalk, quickly snuff their cigarettes and jog over.

“You ready, Laredo?” Kevin asks.

“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess,” Karena says, climbing into the Jeep.

“Then buckle up,” says Kevin. “Seriously. This is the real deal.”

They wind through the steep, stepladdered streets of Pierre, careful to stay behind the Whale despite the heavy traffic. Karena has the sense of reaching a new elevation, climbing ever higher. She opens the glove compartment and wipes her face with a wet-nap, ties her hair back, readies her recorder and camera. She is not terrified this time, not with Kevin, but she does have that preternatural feeling of alertness, her skin crawling, her eyes ticking from side to side as if to store up information. As they leave the city Karena’s hair stirs on her arms and tries to stand up, and she wonders if it’s adrenaline, or if she’s reacting to a drop in barometric pressure as animals are said to do before a bad storm, or if the air, which tastes metallic, is electrified.

They proceed through the suburbs, and Karena looks at the little houses on their neat lawns beneath the now-hissing trees and hopes they will be there later. Amazingly, a woman is out mowing her grass. She waves at the Whirlwind vehicles and shouts something. Karena shakes her head. Then Pierre is behind them, and they are in the grasslands as abruptly as if the capital had never existed. These plains feel different to Karena from the ones outside Kadoka, more desolate, wilder, and again she has the sense of climbing, that they are driving along the roof of the world. Her ears pop. The sky is closer. It’s darker too, shading to black on the horizon. The storm looms before them, the grasses bending toward it, and Karena thinks of Dennis saying,
Something about the storms that day. . . . they seemed angry.

It is almost familiar by now: Karena’s awe at the storm, her wonder and dread; her tiny helplessness in the face of it, the Whirlwind vehicles like ants approaching a carousel. They start to see chasers parked in the turnarounds, setting up tripods and video cameras. Karena waves. The chasers wave back. None of them is Charles. She also notices something new—and her stomach drops—law enforcement. Sheriffs’ prowlers and statie SUVs parked on the shoulder, flashers lit, pointing toward the storm. They must expect it to be bad.

“How big is it now?” she asks, leaning over to see the laptop, which Kevin has facing him, and she hears her younger self saying,
How close is that?
and Charles replying cheerfully,
Oh, not so far . . . I’d say about five miles.

Kevin glances at the laptop. “Don’t know,” he says briefly. “No signal. I wish to God we had Threat Net in here,” he mutters, more to himself than to Karena, and she looks at the Whale with its signal-boosting antenna.

Kevin unhooks the ham handset. “KB1 SLM calling KE5 UIY,” he says.

“This is UIY,” says Dennis. His voice is smooth and crisp, all jocularity gone.

“I have no signal, UIY,” says Kevin. “What is Threat Net showing? Do we have a Wheel of Fortune on this storm?”

“Stand by,” says Dennis. Then he says, “SLM, we have three. One shear marker of a hundred twenty knots. Threat Net’s showing upward of five-inch hail.”

“Copy that,” says Kevin. “Is there a hook echo? Has the storm been warned?”

“Affirmative, SLM. There is a classic hook echo, and this storm is tornado warned.”

“Copy, UIY. Thank you. What’s our ETA?”

“We’re looking to intercept in about fifteen,” says Dennis. “Dan thinks this storm might be a right-mover, so we’re keeping an eye on our south option. Better to turn tail and face some RFD than try to punch the core of this thing. We’ll keep you posted. Stand by.”

“KB1 SLM, standing by,” says Kevin and replaces the handset.

Karena has been scribbling notes on her steno as a backup to her recorder, and now she runs over them. Some of what she’s heard she knows, for instance that a hook echo is a tornadic signature on radar, the little curl showing where the tornado will form beneath the storm. Other facts she’s less clear on.

“Five-inch hail, is that softball size?” she asks.

“A little bigger than softballs,” says Kevin.

“And a right-mover, what does that mean?”

“It’s when a storm takes a sudden dive east,” says Kevin distractedly. He is leaning forward, hugging the wheel, to peer through the windshield. “When that happens the storm usually encounters warmer air, and it turns into a superbeast.”

“Oh,” says Karena. “Okay.”

She writes this information down, then closes her steno pad and sits back. The road has curved slightly and the wind is rushing into the storm from their eight o’clock now, buffeting the Jeep and making the overhead wires shriek like a teakettle coming to boil. The base rounds into view as they approach. This is always a surprise to Karena, how something so huge can have structure as opposed to just encompassing the whole sky. This storm’s base, however, is nearly touching the ground. Karena tries to swallow. Her throat clicks.

“Kevin,” she says, pointing, “is that a wall cloud? At our eleven o’clock?”

“If it is,” Kevin says slowly, “it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen. It must be three miles across, but . . . yup, I think it is. Good eye, Laredo.”

He unhooks the handset and is transmitting this information to the Whale when they pass a Volvo station wagon parked on the shoulder. It is just like Karena’s at home except it is bright canary-yellow, vibratingly aglow against the storm-blackened sky. A man is standing next to it, beneath a sign that says OWEEO, 10 MI. He is wearing shorts and sandals and a T-shirt, and his clothes and hair ripple in the wind. His dark blond hair. His skin darker beneath it. He has a beard, and as the Whirlwind convoy passes he waves cheerfully, his grin a startling white in his tanned face.

“Kevin,” Karena cries. She grabs his arm, making him drop the handset. “It’s Charles! That’s Charles back there! Stop the car, go back!”

The Jeep swerves, and Kevin swears. He guides it back onto the road, then bends to grope for the handset, which bobs on the end of its curly cord near his feet.

“Excuse me,” he says, “but do not ever ever ever do that again. It’s dangerous under any circumstances but especially right now, and you must never interrupt a ham radio operator when he’s transmitting, okay?”

“Okay,” says Karena, “but we just passed Charles, Kevin, that was him, I’m sure of it. We have to stop and go back!”

“SLM, what’s going on?” says Dennis. “Is there a problem?”

“No, sorry, UIY, we just had a moment here,” Kevin says.

“Did you copy my last transmission?”

“Negative. Say again, please.”

“Dan thinks a funnel is developing at our eleven thirty,” says Dennis. “Stand by.”

“Copy,” says Kevin.

“Please,” Karena says. “Please, Kevin.” She doesn’t dare touch him again, but she implores him with her eyes. She holds her hand up level with the dash to show him how it’s shaking. “Just for a second,” she says. “Just let me say hello and find out where he’s going, then we can catch up with them.”

Kevin glances at her, his expression flat and tight. Then he swivels to look at the wall cloud, from which a black nub is protruding.

“Please,” says Karena. “It’s been twenty years!”

“Fuck,” Kevin says.

Without slowing significantly, he wheels the Jeep around. The tires squeal and smoke and there is the smell of burnt rubber. Then they’re speeding back toward Pierre, in the direction they’ve come.

“Oh, thank you,” says Karena, “thank you so much—”

“I could lose my job for this,” says Kevin. “Not to mention compromising everyone’s safety. You never leave the tour! Never ever ever! So a little silence will be much appreciated.”

“Okay,” Karena says humbly.

“One minute, Karena,” says Kevin. “That’s it. If we get back there and don’t see him . . .”

Karena leans forward in her seat as if to urge the Jeep on faster. The sky is a light gray ahead, black in her wing mirror. The Jeep rocks on its frame. The grasses bend toward them on the diagonal, nearly flattened.

“SLM, where are you?” says Dennis. “We’ve lost visual. If you’re behind us we can’t see you. Keep up, please.”

“UIY, we’ll catch up with you,” says Kevin, his face grim.

“What’s the problem, SLM?”

“We’ll catch you, UIY,” says Kevin again.

“This is not good, SLM,” says Dennis. “We’ve got a massive right-mover here with tornado on the ground. Repeat, cone tornado on the ground. We need you to catch up immediately—”

“Copy that, UIY,” says Kevin and sets the transmitter down.

“Okay, Karena,” he says, casting quick glances in his rearview and side mirrors, then looking back at the road. “Where the fuck is he?”

Because they have reached the OWEEO, 10 MI sign and the shoulder is empty. The road is empty. There is no sign of the yellow wagon. There is nobody there.

“Oh no,” Karena moans. “Oh my God.”

She whips around to look in every direction.

“But he was right there,” she insists. “He was!”

She shakes her head. “Maybe he dropped back a little,” she says, “toward Pierre. Maybe if we just keep going a tiny bit in this direction—”

“Maybe nothing!” Kevin says. “Maybe he’s not there at all!”

He smacks the dash and Karena flinches.

“God DAMN it!” he says.

“I did see him, Kevin,” Karena says. “I swear.”

“That is NOT the point,” Kevin roars. “The point is that even if he was there, he’s not there now, and meanwhile we’ve lost the van and we are MILES behind them and there’s at least one tornado on the ground between us and them—God DAMN!” He brings the Jeep to a stop.

“Hang on,” he says and cranks the wheel back around.

“I’m sorry, Kevin,” Karena says. “What can I do? Can I do anything to help?”

Kevin is accelerating out of a hasty three-point turn, but suddenly he slows, then brakes.

“Ho-ly Christ,” he says.

“What IS that?” Karena asks and puts a hand over her mouth.

For the highway ahead of them has disappeared into the storm. It is not a tornado, at least not like any tornado Karena has ever seen. It is more that the storm has simply come down onto the ground. The road now runs straight into a churning brown-black mass, a mile-high wall that has swallowed the prairie in front of them.

“What is it?” Karena whispers. “Is it . . . a dust storm maybe?” She is thinking of the famous Dust Bowl photograph of a black cloud like a tidal wave bearing down on a tiny farmhouse.

Kevin is still staring at the giant brown-black wall, but at the sound of Karena’s voice he comes back to himself.

“No,” he says. “Holy fuck, no. That’s no dust storm. That’s a wedge. It’s the biggest fucking wedge tornado I’ve ever seen. It must be two miles wide—”

He scrabbles for the transmitter.

“KB1 SLM calling KE5 UIY,” he says. “UIY, do you copy?”

The radio doesn’t respond. Kevin fumbles for the volume knob and screws it all the way up. His fingers are shaking.

“This is KB1 SLM. UIY, come back, please.”

. . .

“KB1 SLM for UIY. UIY, do you read me?”

. . .

“UIY, this is SLM. Copy?”

. . .

Kevin looks at Karena, who stares back at him. Kevin shakes his head.

“We’ve lost the van,” he says hoarsely.

T
hey pull off the road, hazards flashing, to let the wedge pass. Kevin calls the local National Weather Service office on his cell to report what they’re seeing, their position, and what course the storm seems to be on. Straight east now, a right-mover as Dan predicted, tracking toward Oweeo. When he hangs up they sit on the shoulder, their faces flashing yellow, every so often saying, “Oh my God,” but otherwise not conversing. They just wait. Karena has always heard tornado survivors say the sound of the tornado is like a train, and she thinks it is something like that but not entirely accurate. People must say this because a train is a noise that can be felt with one’s feet, in the stomach, as it rumbles closer. This giant wedge is vibrating the Jeep, shaking dirt down into the drainage ditch, but the sound it is making is much lower, almost below human auditory range. It is as though the earth itself is growling.

When the rippling black-brown wall exits stage right, when they start to see a strip of light beneath the storm’s base and Kevin determines the worst of the danger has passed, he puts the Jeep in drive and they head back north toward Oweeo. Several times he pulls over to let emergency vehicles pass, fire engines and ambulances and the sheriffs’ prowlers and SUVs they saw earlier. Karena is sitting with her behind a few inches off her seat, craning in every direction for the yellow Volvo. Kevin never stops working the radio.

“KE5 UIY, this is KB1 SLM, copy?” he says, over and over. “KB1 SLM calling UIY, come in please.”

About three miles outside Oweeo rain is falling, gently, and something else: pink material wafting out of the sky.

“What is that?” Karena whispers. Her throat is hoarse. “It looks like cotton candy.”

“It’s asbestos,” says Kevin. “Insulation.”

Karena glances at him, his strained face, then goes back to scanning the scoured landscape for her brother’s car.

“UIY, this is SLM,” she hears Kevin saying. “Come in, please.”