What Stands in a Storm (24 page)

“I got word Will wasn't at his apartment,” Darrell said. “He went to Danielle's.”

“I don't know where that is. Do you have an address?”

“Thirty-one Beverly Heights.”

Rand hung up the phone and pulled up the map on Google.

Gosh, that's a lot closer than I thought.

He texted Chase Martin, a mutual friend who had played football with them at Priceville High.

“Swing by here,” Chase said. “I'll ride with you.”

Nearly every street was blocked. They made their way down McFarland toward Fifteenth, staring in awe at the wake of this massive force, noticing puzzling details. A whole wall had been rent from the gas station at the corner of Fifteenth and McFarland, but there sat an undisturbed shelf of food, every bag of chips in place. How could that even be possible?

Like many others, Will's friends found a way to circumnavigate the city, passing busted stoplights, dangling wires, cops and fire trucks driving every which way. Near the church, the trees blocked their path, so they parked in a ditch and walked in.

Police stopped them at the entrance to the neighborhood. They were not letting anyone in. Rand began to pace and worry and wonder. Fear of the unknown roiled in his gut. Rand and Chase leaned against the truck, thinking of ways to get to the house. Out of nowhere, a stranger wielding a giant chain saw ambled up to them.

“I overheard you talking to the police,” the man said. “Carry this chain saw and tell them you're going back there with the tree service to clear the roads.”

The stranger nodded at the logo on Rand's shirt:
ACE TREE SERVICE
. His buddy's company. It was either dumb luck or providence that he had happened to pull that one on today.

“Thanks, man,” Rand said, accepting the offer. It had never occurred to him that angels carried chain saws.

Rand and Chase walked into the neighborhood unquestioned. As they hunted for 31 Beverly Heights, they grew more and more disoriented, looking for points of reference that no longer existed. There were no street signs, and in some places it appeared there were no streets.

They spotted a track hoe pulling debris off a house.

“I'm trying to find 31 Beverly Heights,” he told the operator. “I've got a good friend there. I'm trying to find him.”

“I don't know,” the man on the track hoe said. “There's a possibility there are three people in this house.”

“Okay,” Rand said. “I'm going to look around.”

He walked up to the end of the driveway and noticed, hidden by the branches of a fallen tree, a mailbox without a number. He swung open the metal door and looked inside. The sticker said: 31.

His insides sank.

No. It can't be. This house is destroyed. Maybe it's not really them. Maybe there's a chance. His truck's not here.

Just as that glimmer of hope crossed his mind, the man from the track hoe walked up.

“Hey, man, I found your buddy's truck,” he said. “It's parked over on the side of the road.”

He had walked right by it, hidden by fallen trees. His phone rang and a knife twisted in his gut. It was Darrell. His best friend's father. Who did not know. Who could still hope, for a few more precious minutes, that his son was still alive.

If I answer this phone,
what am I supposed to say?

He let it ring.

Michelle, distraught, called her father to see whether anyone had heard from Danielle. He had not. He had warned the girls to take shelter as he watched the two nasty-looking supercells spiral across the radar around 4:07—one headed for Starkville, the other for Tuscaloosa. Now he consoled his youngest daughter with the reasonable likelihood that Danielle was not able to get in touch because cell towers across the state were blown down.

Michelle dialed her sister's number again. At first the tinny song of Danielle's ringback tone—“Don't Stop Believin',” a favorite '80s song by Journey—sounded almost hopeful. But eventually her calls went straight to voice mail. Without Internet access, she felt starved for information, so she called her uncle in Florida.

“I can't see anything—we don't have power. Mom and Dad don't have power. Danielle's not answering. Can you look?”

“I'm sure she's fine,” he said, trying to calm her. “She was in a safe place.”

Michelle then called Cheryl Singleton, a cousin of theirs in Shalimar, Florida. Cheryl posted a message on Danielle's Facebook wall, hoping that a friend would see it and give them some details.

After work, Clay arrived at Michelle's apartment to check on her.

“Let's just get on the road,” she begged Clay. “Let's go find her.”

As a meteorology student, Clay knew that this was not a good idea.

“If she was hit, we don't need to be in the way,” Clay said. “There are all sorts of people out there to help them, and we don't need to be in their way.”

They agreed to drive to Tuscaloosa at first light. They downloaded
a photo from Facebook and created a missing-person flyer. Next to her photo, Clay carefully wrote Danielle's name, height, age, and eye color with a marker. They would tack them up on telephone poles if that's what it took to find her.

Michelle did not want to be alone, so Clay took her to his apartment. His power was out, too, and the candlelight flickered upon the faces of people who would not normally be at Clay's place. Michelle struggled with the cognitive dissonance of staying here, doing nothing, in this warm, safe place, while her sister was somewhere out there alone in the dark.

They were standing in the kitchen when Clay's phone rang. It was Michelle's father. The kitchen grew silent as everyone cleared out, giving them space.

“Hey, Mr. Downs. Have you heard anything?”

“I just got a call from Kelli's mother,” Ed Downs said. He paused a long time. He was calm, but Clay heard his future father-in-law cracking. “They just started digging through the rubble.”

Michelle read Clay's face and came apart. He hung up and repeated what her father had just said. They sat on the kitchen floor for a long time. Michelle imagined the worst. She felt the ground truth, the ice water pooling in her stomach once again. Clay held her. He searched for words that didn't feel hollow, something that could bring her comfort that didn't feel like a lie.

“No matter what, she's going to be okay,” Clay said. “If she's here or if she's gone—she'll be okay.”

Dusk dropped like a curtain on Beverly Heights. The moon had not yet risen, and through the black-velvet darkness, lights that once had been hidden by trees now winked from distant hills. Chain saws growled and generators roared, yet underneath the surface noise prevailed an empty silence. Without the enclosure of trees, the world seemed wide and lonely.

Kelli Rumanek had been calling her roommates' phones, hoping the ringing would help the rescuers find them. Now she sat in the street, numb with shock, watching firemen swarm over the house, their yellow bunkers glowing like bees against the abstract canvas of devastation. Eric was glued to her side and her mother was on the phone.

Rob Rumanek, her older brother, had joined them at the house, which had once been his house, the backdrop of his college years. Rob stepped back and surveyed the car bumpers protruding from beneath felled trees, hidden by sprays of branches. That was when he noticed a third vehicle, a beige truck no one recognized. Dianne Rumanek realized with horror that a third person, unknown, lay under her house. She had been bracing herself to call two sets of parents and deliver the worst news of their lives. She had no idea who this third person could be. She fought another wave of vicarious nausea on behalf of this new set of faceless parents, who would soon have to grasp the unthinkable.

The rescuers' headlamps bobbed through the dark as they canvassed the house, guiding the driver of the track hoe that rolled over the debris on tanklike treads. On the end of a giant mechanical arm, a clawlike bucket gingerly plucked off layers of walls and roof. The digging was slow and laborious. Phantom shadows danced in the headlights of parked vehicles casting their brights upon the house. As one of the walls was lifted, Rob Rumanek glimpsed something that his sister should not see.

“Mom, they're dead,” he whispered fiercely. “You need to get Kelli out of here. She doesn't need to see this.”

Dianne saw it and agreed.

“I can't leave!” Kelli protested. “I can't leave!”

“I'm a nurse, and I'm stronger than you,” Rob told her. “I can help them. I'm not leaving until they come out.”

Kelli's boyfriend and her mother guided her out by the pale light of their phones. Rob, an outline of black on black, stood under the moonless sky.

In the dark, peeking out of the rubble, was a single, shoeless foot.

7:00 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—ACROSS ALABAMA

The storm was far from over. It was twilight now, and the chasers had abandoned the roads. Chasing at night was dangerous and pointless, and filming it was impossible; even if they were able to catch a tornado, they would not be able to see it until it was perilously close. Across the state, rescuers looked over their shoulders for the next one. Damage reports were fragmented, contaminated with the rumors and misinformation that infect communications during the first twenty-four hours of a crisis.

“The reports are very troubling,” Spann said on TV. “The bottom line is, we don't know how many people have died,” he said. “We don't know how many people have been injured at this phase. It takes the first light of day the next day to see the severity of this whole thing.”

Even as Tuscaloosa tried to save itself, the atmosphere above Dixie Alley continued to convulse. Impossibly, the Tuscaloosa tornado had strengthened as it left the town, bringing down a steel train trestle spanning Hurricane Creek, ripping thirty-four-ton steel trusses from their concrete anchors and flinging them up the hill. It had flattened tens of thousands of trees and charged through a coal yard, where it derailed twenty-nine of thirty-one coal hoppers poised on the railway. People saw a thirty-five-ton coal car lofted and heaved nearly four hundred feet. The Tuscaloosa storm widened as it crossed I-65
and approached Birmingham's financial district, where workers had watched through the glass of the high-rise towers as it approached. It had grown to a mile and a half wide.

The monster tornado missed downtown Birmingham by less than four miles. But as it passed through the northwestern outskirts of the city, it left whole communities mirroring the scenes from Tuscaloosa. These communities—Pleasant Grove, Concord, McDonald Chapel—had already witnessed the terror of previous storms: an F4 that killed twenty-five people in 1956; an F5 that killed twenty-two in 1977; and another F5 that killed thirty-two in 1988. This EF4 would bring them to their knees all over again.

But a few miles northeast of the city, eighty miles from where it began, the Tuscaloosa tornado mysteriously faded out. The town of Center Point was spared. This single tornado killed sixty-five and injured more than fifteen hundred. The villain of the outbreak, the tornado upon which the national media would focus it overshadowed all the rest. But it was just one of sixty-two tornadoes that would pummel the state on this record day. It was not the largest tornado of the day. It was not the most violent. Nor was it the most deadly. But it had hit the largest population center affected by this outbreak, and for that, it would be the one that took root in collective memory. But many people—even those in storm-struck areas—would somehow lose sight of that tornado's context within a greater outbreak. Before the night was done, eighteen more would follow. Including four more its size, or bigger.