The Stormchasers: A Novel (7 page)

“Oh my God,” Karena says.

Her scanner crackles. “Okay, Laredo,” says Kevin, “in about two miles we should be coming to a farm road, and we’re going to take it.”

“Okay,” says Karena. “Okay.”

“Laredo? Copy?”

She has forgotten to flash her brights. She does, twice. Her hands are shaking again.

The tour continues toward the storm, the light fading as they drive under the anvil. The temperature drops. The prairie dims. They are in the shadowland beneath the base now, a place Karena remembers. The wind rushes toward the storm, and Karena can smell rain as well as see it, an opaque gray stem drifting from the storm’s base. Lightning flickers within it. But there is no thunder.

“Here’s our road, Laredo,” Kevin says.

Karena flicks her brights and starts to cry as she follows them. They are driving
closer
to the storm. They are going
into
it. She knows this is the point, but she can’t stop. She swipes her nose with her hand and tells herself Charles is probably parked right over there, taking pictures.

“Wall cloud, two o’clock,” says Kevin, and Karena recognizes the lowering shelf from which the tornado might come. She makes a terrified noise and leans forward to look up. The base, a dirty brown, presses down on the Jeep, bulging with huge, hanging, breast-shaped lumps. Karena remembers these too, and she knows now they are called mammatus, and they indicate severe turbulence overhead. The light has been squeezed to a murky yellow stripe on the horizon.

“Okay,” she tells herself, “you’re okay, you can do this. All you have to do is follow the Whale,” and she concentrates on this with all her might, not losing that boxy white van, because if she does, she’s dead. Then Karena notices clouds the size of a house being sucked into the wall cloud and disappearing. Getting vacuumed up. Immediately to her right more clouds are rising off the prairie like smoke going up a chimney, that fast. And there’s a little point coming from the wall cloud now too, trying to lengthen into a funnel.

“This is not safe,” Karena says. “They are all fucking crazy. This is not safe at all!”

She takes her foot off the gas and falls way behind the van as it trundles toward the wall cloud, then wheels her Jeep around and speeds back in the opposite direction.

“Laredo?” Kevin is saying. “Laredo, we’ve lost visual. We can’t see you, Laredo. Catch up, please.”

Karena turns the scanner off and barrels along the dirt road toward the highway as fast as she can. Only something has happened, either the storm turned or she did somehow, because now the rain shaft is in front of her. The core. That’s what Charles called it, anyway.
We’ve got to punch the core, K! No way out but through!

But Karena also remembers all too well what happens in the core. And on the other side.

She looks behind her and sees the dark brown storm base rotating over the empty road. No sign of the van. She can’t go back that way. What if they turned off somewhere? But she can’t go forward, because the core—

Then it is too late because it sweeps over her, the rain immediately blotting out visibility, and the Jeep begins to rock. The wheels on Karena’s side lift off the road, set back down, lift again. Karena grips the wheel, gasping. “Think,” she says. “Think!” She knows the tornado will be on the other side of the core, in what her brother called the bear’s cage. But what if she has edged into the bear’s cage and this is the tornado, here, now? Hidden by the rain? She can’t stay here. She’ll get picked up and thrown.

She is struggling to put the Jeep in drive when someone pounds on her window. Kevin, his hand cupped over his brow so he can see in, his dark hair stuck to his forehead.

“Stop,” he yells. “Put it in park!”

Karena does.

Kevin yanks open her door.

“Get out and go around,” he shouts.

“What?” yells Karena.

“Or just slide over! Let me drive!”

“Okay!” Karena shouts.

She jumps out and is instantly soaked through her clothes. She runs around the back of the Jeep trailing one hand on it so she won’t get lost. The rain is that blinding.

She climbs into the passenger’s seat and slams the door. Kevin throws the Jeep into drive and accelerates. Every so often the Jeep tries to lift up again as the wind punches it broadside. Karena sees small branches scudding across the road. Then they are out on the other side and there is blue sky up ahead, the sun shining beyond the anvil.

The birds are singing in the fields. Karena remembers this now. The birds, how they sing after. How it is oddly peaceful. Her own breathing sounds very loud and harsh in her ears. She is sitting plastered against her seat, gripping the cushion.

“Where’s,” she says, and has to clear her throat. “Where’s the van?”

“At our six,” says Kevin and tips his head toward the backseat. Karena turns and sure enough, now that they’re not in the core she can see the White Whale’s longhorn skull and grille in the rear window. They had to come back for her. She hasn’t felt so ashamed in years.

“I am so sorry,” she says.

Kevin cuts his eyes sideways at her.

“What happened back there?” he says. “You all right?”

“Yes,” Karena says. “Just totally mortified. I feel like such a
girl
.”

Kevin shrugs. “People panic sometimes,” he says. “It happens.”

He runs his hand down his face and shakes it, wicking droplets off his fingers.

“Bruh,” he says. “Rain. I hate rain.”

“But—you’re a stormchaser,” Karena ventures.

“Stormchasers hate to get wet, Laredo,” Kevin says. “If you’re in the precip, you’re in the wrong place.”

“Oh,” says Karena, chastened.

Kevin keeps driving. He smells good, Karena thinks, like damp cotton and cologne, something safe and nostalgic sold at a drugstore. After a minute Karena has it: Old Spice. His brown hair is extremely short and cut in that style with the little flip in the front, and as it dries it lifts into porcupine quills above his round face.

“I’m Karena, by the way,” Karena says. “I mean, I know you know that, but I don’t think we ever got introduced.”

Kevin looks startled. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m Kevin Wiebke.”

Karena says, “Pleased to meet you,” then laughs, given the circumstances. Kevin snorts.

“Seriously, thank you for helping me,” she says. “I’m really sorry I made you get wet. But you were heroic to get out in the core.”

Kevin gives her a quick glance. “The core?” he says. “What core?”

“All that rain we just drove through? Was that not the core?”

“Actually no,” Kevin says. “It wasn’t. It was just RFD.”

“What’s that?”

“The rear-flank downdraft. Just a little wind.”

“Oh,” says Karena in a small voice.

They drive on.

T
hat night Karena is walking across the rear courtyard of the Pony Express Lodge behind the Sapp Bros, carrying a case of beer. She knows she’s still a little shocky because she had a terrible time choosing the brand. She deliberated for half an hour in the travel plaza’s beer cave, bemused and distracted by the alcoholic lemonade, the wine in a bag, the lime-flavored salt. Finally the clerk had to come assist her and, when they chose Budweiser, help Karena extract her ATM card from her wallet.

At the back of the Pony Express courtyard, almost hidden by the pines separating the hotel’s property from the highway, is a hot tub. The pool next to it is covered as if in deference to the sign that says NO SWIMMING AFTER 10 P.M.! The hot tub is not, and the three guides are sitting in it. Or rather Dan Mitchell and Kevin Wiebke are, while Dennis is perched on the side, still wearing his floppy fishing hat. He’s talking energetically about something as Karena approaches, but Kevin sees her. He tips his chin up, and Dennis turns.

“Greetings,” he says. “You must be Our Lady of Budweiser.”

“I am,” says Karena, setting the case down near the edge of the hot tub and rubbing the insides of her elbows, where the sharp edges of the cardboard box have bitten into her skin. She’s a little apprehensive about bothering them, but she theorizes that any group of men will be happy to see a woman with beer.

“It’s the least I could do after that stunt I pulled today,” she says. “Thanks again for coming back for me. I’m really sorry.”

She looks at Dan Mitchell, trying to pretend he’s not half naked, his beefy chest muscled and streaming with wet blond hair. He shrugs.

“It happens,” he says, as Kevin did earlier.

“What, people routinely freak out on you?” Karena asks.

“I wouldn’t say routinely,” says Dan. “But sometimes. The storms are big, and they mean business. People get scared.”

Dennis cracks a beer and hands it to Karena.

“Have a seat,” he says.

“I don’t want to intrude,” says Karena. She has been planning to go back up to the room she is sharing with Fern and another tourist, Alicia, because the Pony Express is overbooked, and file notes for her story, and call all the area motels to see if Charles is at any of them.

“We insist,” says Dennis, and Dan nods.

“All media in the hot tub,” he says. “It’s mandatory.”

Karena laughs. “Somehow that sounds a little suspect to me, but . . . okay.”

She toes off her new Walmart sneakers, lowers herself to the chlorine-smelling pavement, and eases her feet into the hot water. Dennis hands around beers. Karena sips hers. It’s half warm and maybe the best beer she has ever tasted.

“Thanks,” she says.

“De nada,”
says Dennis, and for a minute nobody says anything. The bubbling of the water seems very loud, and Karena feels supremely conscious of being the only woman in a hot tub with three men, even if two of them are wearing shirts. The jets keep pushing her feet across the pool toward Kevin’s submerged lap.

“So,” she says, “tell me it’s not just the newbies like me. Or the guests. You guys must get scared sometimes, right?”

Dan Mitchell lets out a huff, and Dennis nods.

“Sure,” he says. “If you’re not scared, you should be worried. It means you’re getting too cocky. Although—I wouldn’t say scared, exactly. More like alert and respectful. You have to be willing to learn from the storms. They always teach you something.”

Dan Mitchell stretches his arms across the back of the tub. “Or sometimes they’re just plain scary,” he says.

“That too,” says Dennis. He swigs from his bottle and says, “HAH!”

“It must really take something to scare you guys, though,” says Karena.

She pats her shorts pockets and wishes she had brought her recorder. But maybe these guys wouldn’t talk to her candidly if she had.

“When’s the last time you got yourself into a situation that scared you?” she asks, and holds up her empty hands. “Off the record.”

“May twenty-second of this year,” Dennis says promptly. “Before I joined up with Tour Four. Gove County. Central Kansas. Man, Mother Nature really let her dragons out to play that day.”

He opens another beer. “I was supposed to be chasing with this goober”—he kicks water toward Kevin—“but he hadn’t gotten his act together. Hadn’t even left St. Paul yet. So I was tooling around on my own in the ol’ purple PT Cruiser—”

“The Eggplant,” says Dan.

“Yeah, the Eggplant,” says Dennis. “And the SPC issued a high risk that morning—which actually I don’t like to see because the storms can get messy,” he tells Karena, “the situation can spin out of control real fast. Which is exactly what then happened.”

He swigs his beer.

“So the cells were firing all around me,” he continues.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!
All I had to do was get in position. It was that kind of day, when every cell that went up would be a monster, and they’d all produce. It wasn’t even like you had to decide which one to chase. All you had to do was sit there and wait for them to come along, and when one was done the next would come spinning right up the dryline.”

“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” says Dan.

“Exactly,” says Dennis, pointing at him. “It should have been. But it wasn’t, because I got stupid. So there I was driving along this farm road, watching this cell at my eleven o’clock. It had already been warned, and it was rotating like crazy, and let me tell you, that thing was a beast. Something about the storms that day, it’s not just that they were huge and moving fast. They seemed angry.”

He pauses to take a swallow.

“So I’m watching this meso form right above me—you know what a meso is, Laredo? Sorry, what is your real name, anyway?”

“Karena,” says Karena.

“Very pretty name,” says Dennis. “Norwegian, I’m going to guess. But I’ll stick with Laredo, since I’m used to it now, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” says Karena, smiling. “So what happened?”

“So I’m watching this meso,” Dennis repeats, “this tight little area of rotation the tornado’s going to come from, what we call the area of interest. And the radar’s showing this beautiful tight couplet and my scanner’s going crazy,
wah, wah, wah
, tornado warnings all over the place. And I’m saying to myself, man, that thing’s right on top of me, maybe I’d better drop southeast, when suddenly there’s this
POP
and a light goes on on my dashboard.”

He turns to Karena. “You believe that?” he says.
“POP!”
He laughs. “You know what that was?”

She shakes her head.

“My tire,” says Dennis. “Rear left. Somehow I’d picked up a spike in it. Not a nail, a spike, with a washer on it the size of a quarter. I mean, that thing had
teeth
. So there I was sitting under this tornado-warned storm, and it was cranking, just going nuts, and my freakin’ tire was gone.”

“Wow,” says Karena, frantically taking mental notes. Her pulse is rapid in her throat. “So what’d you do?”

“What do you think I did?” Dennis says. “I jumped out of the car and ran around the back and threw everything out to get the spare, except guess what?”