Whirlwind (3 page)

4

Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

K
ate took the elevator down to the building’s parking garage.

She hurried to her car, a 2007 Chevy Cobalt that started with a rattle, reminding her that she had to get it to the shop one of these days. She reset her mileage counter then keyed the flea market address into the GPS on her dash.

Newslead’s bureau was in Bryan Tower. The flea market was about twelve miles southeast.

She switched on her hands-free speakerphone and wheeled out of the garage. Her wipers swept at the rain as Chuck’s orders echoed in her head.

“Get us the facts, the heartbreak and the heroes.”

Kate got onto the expressway with her stomach tightening, as it always did whenever she’d rushed off to a breaking story. No matter how many tragedies or disasters she’d covered, Kate never got used to it.

No reporter did.

You never knew what you were heading into. But it was up to you to pull a story out of the chaos, to make sense of whatever was unfolding and to do it as a clock ticked down on you. And if that wasn’t enough pressure, Kate knew that she and her two competitors would be judged by their performance on this story.

The prize was a full-time job.

She adjusted her grip on the wheel as she worked through traffic.

I’ll do whatever it takes,
she vowed to her daughter’s snapshot on the visor as the radio news broadcasted tornado updates, confirming: “A large number of fatalities,” shifting Kate’s thoughts to the victims and their families. She did not want to land a story, or a job, at the expense of someone else’s pain.

I didn’t mean it that way. Forgive me
.

She glanced at the few sparkles Grace had shed from her homemade card onto the passenger seat when she’d taken her to her friend Courtney’s birthday party, a few days before she’d left for Texas.

It was nearly two weeks ago but it seemed like a year.

In her rearview mirror Kate saw Dallas’s skyline, the Bank of America Plaza, the Renaissance and Comerica towers and the Fountain Place prism, all blurring in her rain-streaked rear window.

Would Dallas be her new home?

As the wet road rushed under her car, she considered her life and where she was headed with it. She was a twenty-nine-year-old single mother with a six-year-old daughter. From the beginning, Kate and Grace had been on their own. Grace’s father had never been in the picture. Kate had been a loner most of her life. Her mother and father died in a hotel fire when she was seven years old. After the tragedy, Kate and her little sister, Vanessa, lived with relatives then bounced through foster homes. Two years after her parents’ deaths, she lost Vanessa in a car accident.

Kate’s radio beeped.

“We have confirmation that powerful tornadoes have touched down in Lancaster and Wildhorse Heights. We have reports of fatalities and widespread devastation. This could be one of the worst storms ever....”

Kate took a deep breath and concentrated on her driving when her phone rang with a call from Chuck Laneer.

“Where are you now?”

“A little over halfway.”

“Do you see any pockets of damage?”

“No, nothing but black clouds and rain where I am.”

“We need to move on this.”

Kate passed a line of slower vehicles. As neighborhood after neighborhood rolled by she checked her GPS constantly. She was somewhere at the southern point of Kleberg when the squeak of wipers on the windshield signaled that the rain was letting up.

The sky was clearing.

The area was flat, nearly treeless, but it appeared undisturbed. She saw an aging roller-skating rink, an auto auction yard, an ice-cream stand—but no indication of damage.

None.

Fearing she’d missed a turnoff, she consulted her GPS again. Where was the flea market? It should be here.

Her phone rang. Chuck again.

“Kate, where are you...what’ve you got?”

“Nothing so far.”

“You should be—”

“Chuck, you’re breaking up!”

“—we’re hearing that the Saddle Up Center in the market got—”

When the call died, she tried calling Chuck back, but she’d lost the connection.

Traffic ahead was slowing into a stream of brake lights as troopers and sheriff’s deputies were merging two lanes of southbound traffic into one to keep a clear path for emergency vehicles. Kate got into the single slow lane, which soon crawled to a stop.

In the expressway’s grassy median she saw a large upside-down neon sign for Sanchez Restaurant—Fajita Special Today; she saw a partial splintered wooden structure that may have been a roof, then a crumpled van on its side. Cars had pulled over to aid the van’s passengers. Two solid lanes of traffic flowed in the opposite direction. Kate had to do a double take on several pickup trucks. They were loaded with bleeding people being tended to by others.

Oh, my God...

Then her rearview mirror flashed with wig-wagging emergency lights as she heard the siren of an ambulance, no, three ambulances, coming fast behind her in the emergency lane, followed by an SUV painted with the colorful logo of a radio news station.

Kate’s traffic line was inching along. She had to get to the scene.

She bit her bottom lip and made a decision.

When the radio news truck passed, she wheeled her car into the emergency lane and followed it. She traveled for about a quarter mile before reaching a roadblock at a U-turn. Several marked police cars were parked there. Officers were turning traffic around to the lanes moving northbound.

Sheriff’s deputies waived the ambulances and news truck through southbound, but a big trooper in a raincoat stepped in front of Kate’s car, pointed at her, commanding her to stop. Then he leaned into her window.

“You can’t go any farther, miss. This lane is for emergency vehicles only. We need you to go through the U-turn and head back.”

“I know, but I’m with the press and you just let that radio news guy through.”

As the trooper hesitated Kate noticed officers at the patrol cars nearby contending with six or seven anguished people. They were demanding to be allowed through the roadblock.
“My father and mother are there...but we can’t reach them on their phone...please let us by—”

Kate’s trooper glanced at the group, then, as he returned his gaze to her, she said, “I have a job to do, too.”

“Who are you with? Do you have some ID?”

“Newslead.” Kate fumbled for her plastic photo ID and chain, showing it to him. “Our stories go across the country and around the world.”

He studied her ID long enough for her to notice he had blue eyes and rainwater webbing down his jawline.

“All right.” He nodded. “I’ll let you through, but when you get to the next point, park to the side. We need the lanes clear for emergency crews.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve seen a lot in my time, but nothing like what happened down there. Brace yourself.”

5

Wildhorse Heights, Texas

T
ense from the trooper’s warning, Kate drove beyond the roadblock.

Her knuckles whitened on the wheel as she navigated around the chunks of plastic, metal and garbage scattered over the two empty southbound lanes. About a hundred yards in, the freeway dipped with a gentle slope, giving her a sweeping view of what used to be the Old Southern Glory Flea Market.

“Oh my God!”

For as far as she could see, the landscape was a graveyard of crushed cars and trucks, punctuated with the ghostly pronglike remnants of trees jutting from a sea of debris.

Small fires flickered amid the destruction.

It looks like a gate to hell
.

Ahead, Kate saw the long line of ambulances, fire trucks, police cars and emergency crew vehicles, their lights flashing. She parked between a fire truck and a TV news van. The rain had stopped. She was dressed in fitted jeans and a belted top, but her flat leather shoes wouldn’t do. Metal, wood and glass covered the ground. She got a pair of old hiking boots and woolen socks she kept in the trunk, put them on quickly and tied the laces tight. She pulled on her rain jacket, grabbed her phone and tried to call Chuck. Nothing happened. She tried texting. It didn’t work. No service. The cell towers must be down.
Damn
. She tested her phone’s camera. It worked. She tested the keyboard, created a file called Storm-1. Okay, she could still write and take pictures.

She gathered her spare phone battery, notebook and pens, slipped the chain with her press ID over her neck and recalled Chuck’s orders.

Get us the facts, the heartbreak and the heroes.

Her pulse quickened as she rushed into the chaos. Rounding a heap of splintered lumber and smashed Sheetrock, she stopped in her tracks at the scene before her.

With a funereal air, two firefighters were placing a yellow tarp over the bodies of four dead people: two adult men and two adult women, side by side on the ground, in a neat row. Nearly stripped of their clothes, their battered bodies were blood soaked. One of the women was missing a foot. One of the men had a shard of glass sticking out of his stomach. Not far off, she saw another yellow tarp on the ground with three more pairs of feet extending from it. Two of the pairs belonged to children.

Kate steadied herself on a picnic table until she found her composure.

She offered a silent prayer for the dead, then thought of her daughter in Ohio, wishing she could be with her now. After blinking back her tears, Kate opened her notebook, made notes and moved on.

I have to do this
.

Everywhere, people staggered in wide-eyed shock, shouting names of loved ones at the debris.

Kate came upon an overturned car with a metal signpost rammed through the windshield. The car had a large white X sprayed on it. Two women sat on the ground next to it draped in a tattered blanket. They were on the road but much of the asphalt near them had been peeled away.

She lowered herself and sat with them.

“Hi, I’m Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead. May I talk to you?”

The women were in their twenties, their faces were scraped and their eyes were tearful. One of them gave a little nod.

“Can you tell me where you were when the storm hit and what happened?” Kate asked.

The first woman had short blond hair. She looked at the horizon as if the tragedy were replaying there and trembled as she spoke.

“My sister and I were stuck in the traffic, trying to get out, when we saw it coming—the hail, everything going black. Things started hitting the car.”

“Lawn chairs, tables, steel poles,” the second woman added.

“I thought we were going to die,” the blonde woman said. “We heard this roaring, like ten freight trains. The ground shook and this pressure came, this huge pressure, like something trying to crush us. Our windows shattered. We could hear the metal of our car literally crumpling.”

“We just hugged each other and prayed,” the second woman said.

The blonde woman said: “Then the car rocked back and forth and the tornado picked it up. We spun and flew for about fifteen seconds then it dropped us and the air bags popped. We were upside down... I screamed for my sister. But we were alive, thank God. People pulled us out. Our legs and shoulders hurt but we’re all right...but other folks—” The woman stared at the sky like she no longer trusted it. “Others weren’t so lucky.”

Kate steeled herself, offered words of empathy, moved on and talked to more survivors. All the while her deadline was ticking down. She needed to find the Saddle Up Center, get official comment from the scene, write up what she had and find a way to get her story to the bureau.

Everywhere people were calling for help.

Rescuers worked to pull people out of the rubble. They used their hands, pipes, pieces of wood, whatever they could as emergency radios blared. The air smelled of churned earth, fresh-cut lumber and desperation.

Helicopters thumped far off overhead, paramedics moved out the injured on gurneys, others used doors or sheets of plywood as makeshift stretchers while volunteers held IV bags.

Kate saw several firefighters huddled at a table, talking on radios, poring over rolled-out maps. She identified herself and asked for a status report from the most senior member of the group, Station 9 Captain Vern Hamby.

“We don’t have a lot to report right now.”

“Can you give me what you know, please, Captain?”

His weary face creased with experience and concern when he yielded and gave Kate an on-the-record summary.

“We’ve got a significant number of casualties. The dead could be in the hundreds, or higher.”

Kate wrote as he spoke.

“We’ve been told it was an EF5 tornado. That’s the strongest on the scale, with winds in the 260 to 300 miles per hour range. On a day like today, there might be upward of three thousand visitors to the market. The grounds offer little shelter.”

Kate absorbed the information.

“Our priority is to rescue people in the rubble,” the captain said. “We’ve got spot fires from ruptured gas lines, blown transformers. It’s treacherous. We’ve got apparatus coming in from all over the region. We’re setting up triage units, shelters, missing-persons centers and morgues, some on-site. See the flags? Others will be near schools and community halls. We’ve got reports that a number of tornadoes touched down in the Metroplex, across Texas and in other states.”

Hamby’s radio burst with cross talk. He had to go. Kate walked with him, posing her last questions.

“The Xs on the vehicles?” She nodded to a van with X3 sprayed on the side. “It means you looked at them, right?”

“An X means no one inside, an X with a number, tells you how many confirmed dead inside and that you should move on to help those you can help.”

Kate cast a sad glance at the van. A hand was protruding from a door frame.

“Which way to the Saddle Up Center?” she asked.

“The Saddle Up?” Hamby shook his head slowly. “A lot of casualties there.” He spoke into his radio’s shoulder microphone. After a static-filled response, the captain stopped and pointed Kate’s attention to a distant landmark. “See that car that looks like it’s standing on its rear bumper against that pole down there, like a rocket ready to launch?”

Kate nodded.

“It’s way down there.”

Making her way to the center took time.

Kate stepped slowly through the remains of a destroyed building, taking care because pink insulation hid the jagged sections of the broken wooden walls. Midway, a hand seized her ankle.

“Help me!”

Kate had almost stepped on a woman entangled in the ruins. Dirt and glass fragments were embedded in the woman’s face. Kate got her free and into a sitting position. The woman was holding a cloth to the blood oozing from her leg.

“Let me have a look.” Kate lifted the blood-drenched rag.

The woman’s lower left calf had a twelve-inch gash to the bone. The woman was losing blood. Kate’s first aid was rusty, but she knew they had to clean that wound and get pressure on it to stem the bleeding. She pressed the woman’s hand back on the cloth.

“Hold it down firm.”

Kate looked around, called for paramedics, for firefighters, but none were near. Nothing that looked clean, no fabric, nothing was at hand. Kate removed her shirt’s belt, then cut the bottom of her shirt against a broken window and tore long strips from it. She used her shirt to treat the wound then wrapped the clean strips around it and used her belt for pressure.

“Please don’t leave me,” the woman said.

Kate took her hand and sat with her while calling for help.

“I was in the office,” the woman said. “Everything outside went black. The whole office twisted off the ground, the windows exploded, the walls started wobbling like rubber. I was hurled around like a doll in a blender. The desk, the chair, smashed into me. Broken glass flew like bullets. I was going to die.” Tears were streaming down the woman’s face. “Bless you for helping me.”

Kate consoled her until paramedics arrived.

As Kate continued to the Saddle Up Center she spotted a satellite truck for WFGG-TV News, reminding her that she needed to get a story to Chuck at the bureau.

I need to file now, before I get to the center
.

She sat near two crushed cars with Xs, paged through her notes and began writing on her cell phone. She had the story structured in her head and her fingers moved fast. The screen smeared with blood as she typed, finishing at the five-hundred word mark.

There’s no cell service. How will I get this to the bureau?

The answer was in the distance.

She hurried to the WFGG-TV satellite truck with its dish extended on the pole above. Satellite phones didn’t need cell phone networks, they worked anywhere. No one was around. She pounded on the doors. A man in his mid-twenties with a stubbled face opened a side door. Jaw clenched, he stared at Kate.

“What is it?”

“I’m Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead.”

“Yeah, so? I’m busy.”

“What’s your name?”

“Fitch, but I’m busy.”

She saw the array of small monitors, computers and equipment.

“You guys have a satellite phone, right, Fitch?”

“We’ve got satellite everything.”

“There’s no cell service. I need your help now. I need you to take a file off my phone and send it to my desk over your sat system.”

“Sorry, I’m busy.”

“Fitch, please, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

He looked at her, considered the deal.

“Thirty.”

“Come on, where’s the professional camaraderie?”

“Thirty.”

“Okay, thirty. Deal.”

“Let me see your phone.”

Kate gave it to him. He examined the ports.

“I should have a transfer cable for that. What is it you need to move?”

Kate took the phone, showed him her file named “Storm-1”.

“Just text?” He turned to his workstation, rummaged through a box of wires and adapters, fished out a cable, connected one end to Kate’s phone, the other to a laptop.

“Yes, no images.”

He typed a few commands, and seconds later Kate’s story appeared on his laptop.

“Where’s it going?” he asked. “You can email it.”

Kate gave him the newsroom email address for filing stories.

“Type ‘Urgent from Kate Page’ in the subject line.”

Fitch angled the laptop to Kate.

“You go ahead, write what you need. Keep it short.”

She stepped inside, set her things down and typed:

No phone service at the flea market. WFGG let me use their satellite. Will file more soon, Kate Page.

After sending her story, Kate typed another email to her friend Heather in Ohio.

“Hey, what’s that?”

“Just letting my daughter know I’m okay.”

Kate was fast, hit Send then went through her wallet. All she could find were twenties. She checked her pockets. No cash there. She passed Fitch forty dollars.

“I need the change, buddy.”

He slid his hand into his jeans and pulled out a five.

“That’s the best I can do. Sorry.”

“Whatever. Thanks for helping me, Fitch.”

“Otherwise you would’ve hurt me. I sensed that about you.”

“Ha-ha.”

Kate collected her things then took several steps from the truck.

“Hold on!” Fitch called. “You’ve got a reply here. Take a look.”

Kate returned and read the email.

Kate: You should’ve tried to reach us sooner. Can you find anything stronger? Your story has no reference to the Saddle Up Center, which you were told to focus on. Benny Lopez, one of our photogs, is on scene, you should find him fast. AP has already filed.—DP.

“What a hard-ass,” Fitch said. “AP has satellite phones.”

Kate’s face flushed at Dorothea’s remarks.

“Want to respond?” Fitch asked.

“No.”

Kate slammed the door like a gunshot when she rushed out of the truck.