What Stands in a Storm (21 page)

As Robbins rode to the hospital in the back of a stranger's truck, he felt blackness bleeding into the edges of consciousness. He asked for a pen. On his forearm, he inked his name and his mother's number, so that if he lost consciousness before reaching the hospital, the nurses would know whom to call.

At the hospital, victims came in waves.

The first came on foot and in the backs of pickups. They were rolled in on office chairs, carried in the arms of strong men or on ripped-off doors that served as makeshift stretchers. Throngs shuffled up like zombies. Some were screaming hysterically. Others appeared almost catatonic. They were broken and bleeding, hurt and mourning, experiencing every degree imaginable on the spectrum of human nightmare.

They were assigned to a premade chart with a name that could not be mistaken for real. Unknown Amsterdam. November November. Raja Ed Downtime (that was Randy Robbins). These preposterous names differentiated the 450 fake charts that the hospital staff had created ahead of time. In the golden hour after trauma, every minute makes a difference. By accelerating the intake process for hundreds of patients, the fake charts would save lives.

By the time the first ambulance arrived, the emergency room staff was already attending to fifty or sixty critical patients who had come on foot or in the backs of pickup trucks. That first ambulance was Rescue 27, from which Adam Watley had phoned as his driver navigated the many blocked streets on the way from Rosedale. The disaster coordinator, Andrew Lee, who was receiving patients in front of the ambulance bay, stepped up to Rescue 27's back double doors, painted in
a high-visibility red-and-yellow chevron. He opened the doors to an image that would haunt him all his life.

Three dead babies.

On a normal day, the ER would have hemorrhaged resources to save the life of just one child.

Three kids
, Lee thought,
you give everything.

Today that was not possible, because it could have happened only at the great expense of dozens, maybe hundreds of viable patients, parents and children and siblings and lovers whose lives mattered no less, who could still be saved before their golden window closed forever. A female doctor bent over the babies, listening for a pulse. She heard nothing and wept.

At home, Lee had two kids of his own, both under the age of two. Inside him, the RN wrestled with the father. The nurse was trained to make calculated decisions through the unfeeling logic of triage. The father was steeped in emotion, driven by love. Lee knew, as any parent knows, that the death of a child will change someone's world forever. But if he harbored any wavering doubts about what to do for these three dead babies, Watley yanked him quickly back to their unrelenting reality.

“There are hundreds of people lying in the streets,” Watley said. “We don't know if they're dead or alive. It's like that all over Tuscaloosa—it's gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Lee said.

“I could see the hospital from Rosedale.”

Lee rolled the babies into a dark, quiet room and covered them with a sheet. Two-year-old Zy'Queria McShan; Christian McNeil, fifteen months; and Ta' Christianna Dixon, eleven months old, were gone.

Someone said there was another storm coming.

5:30 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—STARKVILLE, MISSISSIPPI

Michelle sat on her bed in her dark apartment, fighting waves of panic and fear that broke over her heart in sets. She kept checking her phone, but Danielle had not responded. That was not like her. Michelle kept calling, but the phone rang and rang as she prayed for her sister to answer. The sound of Danielle's voice on the recorded message had, until now, felt comforting.

Michelle had not spoken with her parents yet. Ed and Terri Downs were taking cover in Priceville from the rash of tornadoes pounding north Alabama. The Tuscaloosa storm was raging north toward Birmingham, one of four violent tornadoes on the ground at this moment in the state. An EF3 was passing over Haleyville, with a trajectory that put Priceville in its path about fifty miles away. Ed and Terri Downs had lost power and had fled to a house with a basement. They did not know Tuscaloosa was hit.

In the lonely quiet, Michelle felt a cold heaviness pooling in the pit of her stomach, like ice water drunk too fast. Hope and fear dueled fiercely in her head.

Why hasn't she called?

The phone lines must be down.

What if her house was hit?

Everyone is checking in at once. The lines are overloaded.

What if she's lying somewhere in the street, unconscious?

Maybe she dropped her phone.

What if she's trapped under a house?

Her phone battery might be dead.

What if she's being rushed to the hospital?

She's probably busy helping someone else.

What if she's gone?

After twenty minutes of radio silence, sitting without power in a dark apartment, she could not drown the worry. An emotional storm raged on in her head, a deafening chorus of what-ifs, until she could not bear to wait any longer. She fired off another text to her sister.

Alone in the dark with her thoughts, she waited.

Danielle and Loryn's roommate, Kelli Rumanek, was still at Gorgas Library, where she had weathered the storm with her boyfriend, Eric Arthur, and a group of students hunkered by the checkout desk. In the dark, a student with a smartphone had read updates aloud as the storm blew by the hospital. That was just a couple of blocks from the house. The comforting weight of her boyfriend's arm on her shoulders felt like an anchor holding Kelli down. In the dim window light she and Eric exchanged worried glances. Danielle and Loryn were at the house, hiding under the stairs. Kelli knew this because she and Danielle had been texting each other all day.

Now neither roommate was answering.

Danielle's parents were still dodging their own storms in northern Alabama. Ed and Terri Downs were two of the six hundred thousand Alabamians without power. Around three hundred electrical towers had been blown down, and the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant, not far
from their home in Priceville, had experienced an emergency shutdown.

Ed and Terri Downs had taken refuge at Ed's parents' house, which also had no power. They did not have smartphones, and without them had no way to follow the storms online. Cut off from communication, they were dodging bullets in the dark.

They still did not know about Tuscaloosa.

Loryn's mother knew immediately that her daughter was dead. The second the phone went silent, Ashley Mims was seized by a stabbing loss, a visceral emptiness, as if a yawning black hole had opened up in her chest and swallowed the light in her world. It was as if, somewhere in the core of her being, a part of her was gone.

Still clutching her phone, Ashley walked out her front door, stepped off the porch and into the yard. In her mind's eye, she could see Loryn's face painted in clouds, white on white. Raising her arms to the sky, she felt a scream welling up inside.

“Oh, God—
no!
” she screamed at the sky.
“Don't take her!”

She sank to her knees in the grass.

5:40 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—ACROSS ALABAMA

The Tuscaloosa EF4 was still thundering on the ground, tracking toward Alabama's biggest city. Now in sight of the live cameras mounted atop tall buildings in downtown Birmingham, it had grown into a wedge tornado that dwarfed the monster that had swallowed Tuscaloosa.

It was one of four.

Three other violent, long-track tornadoes were ripping through different parts of the state. The storm's fury was building to a crescendo. The radar was blooming with supercells and showing no signs of slowing down. Alabama was under siege by a fast-moving holocaust that lashed the state without mercy or discrimination.

The Hackleburg EF5 had narrowly missed Huntsville, a major metropolitan bastion of aeronautics and engineering—the home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. It would kill thirteen people before it was done, and injure at least fifty others. The Cordova EF4 was petering out on Sand Mountain, fifty miles south of Huntsville, but the supercell would reorganize to bear a new EF5 that would kill thirty-five in northeast Alabama. An EF3 was on the ground in Haleyville, a town of four thousand in northwest Alabama, home of Guthrie's Fried Chicken and the first 911 emergency phone system in the country. A fourth long-track tornado, an EF3, had flattened Sawyerville and Eoline, two rural towns southeast of Tuscaloosa.

The meteorologist Jason Simpson looked closely at this last one. His eyes traced the storm's trajectory, and he saw that it was on track to hit the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, and just beyond it, his home. His wife, Lacey, had canceled her ultrasound appointment because of the weather, and was waiting out the storm there with their dogs. Their home, on the western side of a hill, did not have a basement.

Lacey Simpson saw the text and did not take any time to question it. She had weathered many storms before, almost always alone while her husband worked. Usually, when she heard a warning, her husband told her not to be alarmed. She grabbed their dogs and ran to the home of a neighbor with a basement. They had to get underground.