What Stands in a Storm (19 page)

Half a mile north of the hospital, in Beverly Heights, the whipping trees swayed like reeds in a pond thrashed by the wakes of passing boats. In the dim hallway, Danielle, Loryn, and Will burrowed deeper under the blankets. The silence was broken now by flying objects pecking at the windows, branches crackling and popping like fireworks in the whistling rush of wind. Ancient trunks groaned in protest; naked boughs whipped violently, plucked bare by the inhalation. The atmosphere accelerated around them, singing the terrible truths of fate.

Surrounded by pillows, blankets, and friends, Loryn held the phone to her ear. Her pretty hazel eyes were red from crying. Her mother's voice rose with panic.

“Oh my God, baby, it's coming right toward you!” Ashley said.

“Get your head down! Get your pillows over your head—it's coming toward you!”

“I'm scared, Mama! I'm scared!”

“It's okay, baby. It's going to be okay. Just get your head down.”

Every time Ashley Mims said it, she heard the boy say it, too.

“It's okay,” Will said, Loryn's hand in his. “It's gonna be okay.”

Ashley heard her daughter's voice once more, muffled by a pillow.

“Mama, I'm scared!”

Click.

The line went dead. Ashley's heart convulsed with terror.

At that moment, in the heart of the crucible, Danielle's phone lit up with one last message:

People who have lived through a tornado say it sounds just like a train, a low and visceral rumbling that is felt as much as heard, a piercing roar that shakes walls and faith, the percussion of a billion things colliding.

When the winds died down in Tuscaloosa, the roar gave way to an awful, lonely silence. A mile-wide swath of emptiness stretched out to the horizon. The trees had vanished. The landmarks were erased. In their place was too much sky.

Everywhere in its path, people crawled out of the rubble and called for one another, shouting through the terrible silence.

The students who hid in the church believed that their prayers had been heard; their hiding place was the only fragment of building still standing. The mother who shielded her little girl peeked out of the closet and saw sky through the roof. The boy who ran into a closet in Cedar Crest crawled out and found his best friend dead in a tree; his other two friends, twenty-three-year-old art student Morgan Sigler and her boyfriend Blake Peek, would die of their wounds at the hospital. The family inside Full Moon Bar-B-Que was alive but trapped in the walk-in cooler. The student chasers who had driven directly through the storm's path realized they had cheated death; they turned the car around and drove up to the ravaged government projects of Rosedale, where a woman stumbled through the wreckage, screaming.

Somewhere under a mountain of rubble, a phone began to ring.

5:19 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Engine 7, Rescue 27, be advised, apartment 41 Bravo Rosedale Court, 41 Bravo Rosedale Court. We have a child cut and bleeding from the head severely.

Adam Watley was already on the way to Rosedale when the first call scratched over the radio. His gut had been speaking all day, and he was anxious to get to work. Like most paramedics, he was better at responding than waiting around for a crisis. He had watched this thing barrel into town from his second home, Station No. 7, the southernmost outpost of Fire & Rescue. Now, dressed in full turnout gear, he rode to the scene in the cab of Engine 7, facing backward. Out the window on his left, he could still see the funnel in the distance. It had barely missed his brothers at Station 2, near campus, and was now tearing through Alberta City. Headed northeast toward Birmingham, it was showing no signs of weakening.

Watley, twenty-seven, was part of a well-trained squad. Among the six men on duty at Station 7 was a driver with thirty years of experience and four paramedics, including an ex-marine who had served as a flight nurse during his tour of Iraq. This team had been together for only a few months, but they were as tight as a platoon. They joked that C shift was where they put the misfits who did not belong on A or B shift, and they answered to station names. Hailing
from Chilton County, the peach capital of Alabama, Watley was known as Peaches.

In his seven years as a paramedic, Watley had seen a lot of things. Even though he had a two-year-old son who hugged his knees when he walked in the door, the prospect of responding to an injured child did not faze him. It was his job. And though he had watched the twister come through, he still expected, for some reason, to be attending to a minor head wound. Maybe some kid had bumped his head on an outdoor AC unit while running around outside, staring up at the sky.

Through his window, facing north, things looked relatively normal. As they neared the scene, the fireman on his right drew in a sharp breath.

“Rosedale's gone.”

The truck rolled into the place where Rosedale used to be. What they saw looked less like a neighborhood and more like a landscape bombed into oblivion. His first thought was
Look at all those refrigerators
. They were the only recognizable objects, rising like tombstones from the rubble. The single-story brick buildings, once lined up in neat rows, were now scattered into mounds of boards and bricks. There were no buildings. No street signs. No landmarks. No trees. Gone, all those beautiful trees.

The big white fire truck became a lighthouse in this sea of devastation. People flocked to it, wading across swells of brokenness. They were bleeding, dazed, and covered with mud. Some were screaming. Others silent. The six men scanned the gathering crowd, more people than six men could possibly treat.

The captain grabbed his radio and called in the on-scene report.

Rosedale is completely demolished. We've got a lot of walking injured. We've got a lot of people that we are fixin' to try to find. We're gonna need any help you can give us.

Across the torn landscape, a man staggered up, guarding his arm, which was bleeding badly. Watley moved to help him. Then he caught the eye of Nathan Moore, the ex-marine. Moore nodded subtly at Watley and cut his eyes away from the man.

“Hey—he's walking wounded,” Moore said quietly. “Let's go.”

Something clicked just then in Watley's mind. Today would not go by the book. No training, no textbook, no experience in his seven years as a full-time EMT could have fully prepared him for a moment like this.

About a hundred yards away, Moore spotted a woman coming toward them, hugging something to her chest. Moore waved her toward Watley.

What's going on?
Watley thought.
What is this?

As the woman drew closer, he saw in her arms a limp and lifeless bundle, tiny arms swinging hopelessly each time she took a step. The mother, in shock, placed her baby in his arms. A baby girl.

Watley looked at the baby and saw no hope. She was not breathing, and she had no pulse. Time slowed as his mind raced through the flow chart of triage. Somewhere in the rubble lay victims who still had a shot at living, but only if help came quickly. His training had taught him the cold math of triage: treat viable patients first. This poor child was not a viable patient. She had almost no chance of living, no matter what he did.

But how can you tell a mother that?

Watley did what he would want another medic to do if the child in his arms were his. He would try his best to bring her back, try until there was no sliver of doubt that nothing more could be done. He lay the baby gently on the back of the stretcher in Rescue 27, a lifesaving truck a little bigger than an ambulance.

As soon as he had laid her down, a man emerged from the crowd and presented a second lifeless baby. She looked younger than two years old. The man was not her father. He did not know her name.

“This come through my window,” he said.

“What?” Watley said. “What do you mean?”

And then he understood.

Nothing good can come of this
, he thought.
This snowball is headed to hell.

Time slowed into freeze-frame.

The rescuers looked up from the infants and found themselves crushed by a gathering crowd. The firemen felt hands on them, heard desperate pleas for help. Triage had no meaning in moments like this. They had to help these babies before the world could be made right.

Doc, a fireman paramedic, climbed into the driver's seat of Rescue 27. The mother climbed up front. Watley bent over the infants, quickly checking their vitals, grabbing IVs, and preparing for intubation. He decided to start CPR on the drive across town to the hospital, which should take about seven minutes. Today it would take them forty-five.

As they began to leave, there was a banging on the truck. The back doors opened and Watley squinted into the daylight, his eyes adjusting to the silhouette of a man. His chest and abdomen were gashed and he was losing a lot of blood. In his arms was another tiny nightmare.

Watley moved instinctively to stop the bleeding, but the man swatted him away. The baby in his arms was not moving.

“Are you gonna help my baby?” he said. “Or do I just need to walk to the hospital?”

Watley placed the baby on the stretcher with the others. One, two, three little infants lined up in a row, like dolls, silent and still. The father climbed in and stood in the back of the rescue truck, holding on to the ceiling and bleeding. Watley closed the doors and got to work. As the truck pulled out of Rosedale, he caught a glimpse through the rear windows of the captain holding his radio.

The captain watched a third of his man power leave in Rescue 27. The rest of his men were scattered on the scene, searching and digging.
There were four of them left to attend to hundreds, everyone needing help at once. They could feel the crowd simmering, the agitation pushing toward panic. The captain's senses prickled.

One man leaned in aggressively, yelling.

The captain punched him, feeling the crunch of cartilage under his knuckles.

“I got to have some help!” the captain yelled.

Like a spell had been broken, the chemistry of the moment changed.

“What do you need?” the man said soberly. “You have to tell me. Tell me what to do.”

“Get as many men as you can and go help these guys,” the captain said.

He grabbed his radio and called again for backup.

Rosedale Command to dispatch. We've got several critically injured patients. We're gonna need several ambulances, as many as you can send down here. Also we're gonna need the gas company. We've got an open gas leak.

Four miles north, in Alberta City, the firemen of Station 4 emerged from the ruins of their station and stood scanning the landscape, searching for a landmark, a familiar sign of the place they had lived all their lives. All they could see in every direction was an ocean of debris, undulating in petrified waves. They inhaled the heady mix of gas and pine riding a choppy wind. All around them people emerged from crevices, moving in incessant, aimless circles of dreamlike disbelief.

The rescuers took a minute to process the gravity of what had just happened. Then they called in the on-scene report.

Dispatch, Station 4 was hit directly by the tornado. There's no buildings left in Alberta City. Our church is damaged. Our station is damaged. All members here are okay.

Copy, Station 4. Do you need medical assistance?

I don't but there's people screaming everywhere around here . . . We need to get absolutely as much help as we can get.

Their eyes were still adjusting to the new reality, like eyes adjusting to light. Minutes ago they had been four men praying under a mattress in a windowless bathroom. Heavy objects had drummed upon the station walls, first from the east, and then, after the calm, from the west.