Supercell

by H W Buzz Bernard

  Metalf stared at him, a hard-eyed squint.

  “I can’t go tornado chasing without technology,” Chuck said. “I’ll need a couple of high-end laptops, a GPS navigation system, a whizbang iPhone—”

  Metcalf attempted to interrupt, but Chuck ignored him.

  “—plus subscriptions to meteorological forecast models and real-time weather radar feeds.”

  “Wasn’t in the contract,” Metcalf snapped.

  “Well, fine, Mr. Hollywood. We’ll just tootle aimlessly around the High Plains for two weeks searching for nymphocumulus.”

  “Nympho-what?”

  “Big fucking clouds. That’ll be the best I’ll be able to do flying blind.”

  Stormy, formerly Jack, turned away from the door and sniffed Metcalf’s shoes.

  “So, you want $14,000 just like that?” He looked down at Stormy. “She’s not gonna piss on me, is she?”

  “Only if you don’t come up with the money. Look, I’m not gonna skip town and take up with some Mexican honey in Acapulco on a measly fourteen thousand dollars. It’ll be money well spent, believe me.”

  Metcalf eyed Stormy who stared back.

  “Consider the check in the mail,” Metcalf said.

  Stormy stalked off.

  “I’ll get busy,” Chuck said.

  Metcalf extended his hand. “Nice to know you’ve still got some moxie left,” he said.

  The men shook on the deal.

  “One final thing,” Metcalf said. “Just curious. What changed your mind about the deal? Most people would pee in their pants from excitement if they were offered a chance at a million bucks. Not you. You were kicking and screaming to stay away from it. Then you grabbed at it. I have a feeling it wasn’t my persuasive argument. What was it?”

  Chuck studied the tops of the distant supercells for a while before answering. Then he said, “My son.”

  “Your son? A guy you haven’t seen in eight years?” The words came out as if Metcalf were issuing an indictment.

  Chuck nodded, but didn’t turn to face Metcalf.

  Chapter Three

  SATURDAY, APRIL 13

  SEVENTY-FIVE MILES west-southwest of Norman, the late afternoon had turned evening dark as though the sun were being swallowed by the gaping maw of a bottomless pit. Dirt and grit, riding the stiff inflow wind of a strengthening supercell, filled the air.

  Clarence and Raleigh Jarrell, brothers, monitored the growing thunderstorm from within their GMC Terrain, a mid-sized black SUV sporting a steel grill guard. Parked on a dirt road, the men maintained a safe distance between them and the billowing storm less than a half mile to their northeast.

  “Won’t be long now,” Clarence said to his younger sibling, Raleigh, in the passenger seat.

  Raleigh nodded, but looked away from the storm to the east.

  Clarence followed his gaze. “Yeah, I know,” he said.

  “That son of a bitch,” Raleigh responded, his voice low but sharp.

  Clarence knew who he meant. The old bastard had lived not far from here, in Windsock, a town Clarence described as being “fifty miles from Nowhere and thirty miles south of Despair.” Clarence and Raleigh had lived there, too, as foster children of the old bastard—he could think of the man in no other terms—and his timorous, withdrawn wife.

  The boys had been placed in the home after their mother’s death. Their mom, Rita, had been a rodeo groupie and boozer who’d died of acute alcohol poisoning when Clarence was seven and Raleigh four. Each had a different father, and they knew their dads’ names, rodeo cowboys, only by virtue of their birth certificates.

  The old bastard had been kind to them at first, occasionally giving them “softball” jobs around the down-at-the-heels Sinclair station where he worked, or taking them to Oklahoma City to see a baseball game or Norman for football. But as the boys grew older, he began to make . . . demands.

  Clarence’s stomach churned as he recalled. The old bastard crawling into bed with him at night, his breath reeking of whiskey and cigarettes, his skin stinking of gasoline and motor oil, and demanding Clarence perform acts that even Satan must have found despicable—acts that would leave no physical evidence and could be readily denied by the old bastard, charming and soft-spoken when he was sober.

  Initially, it was only “hand jobs,” but later . . .

  Clarence rolled down the window and spit, as if attempting to purge himself of the vileness and filth he’d been forced to endure. A futile effort. The abomination would always be with him. His stomach heaved again.

  The great irony was that it was during this time, his “time in Hell” as he came to call it, that his passion for storm chasing was born. It began after a tornado leveled most of the buildings in Windsock, but not the old bastard’s, a sign, Clarence divined, that “God didn’t give a damn about me or Raleigh.” His fascination with nature’s violence grew. With Raleigh riding shotgun, he began chasing. Driving mostly pickup trucks “borrowed” from local farmers and ranchers, the boys learned the craft by shadowing more experienced chasers.

  After a couple of years, they struck out on their own. As soon as he was eighteen, Clarence had taken Raleigh and fled their repulsive keeper. They supported themselves with a variety of construction jobs and petty thievery. Clarence took a few “distance learning” classes in meteorology from Mississippi State, and both boys signed up for on-line paramedic courses. The combination of meteorology and paramedic curricula led them to a new and fruitful career. Which was why they now sat watching vivid forks of lightning shoot like electric lizard tongues from the mass of blackness just ahead of them.

  Their gazes fastened on the underbelly of the boiling storm. There, spinning like an immense, inverted whirlpool, hung a classic wall cloud.

  “Look!” Raleigh said. He pointed at the edge of a field where winter wheat was just beginning to green. A slender, spinning column of dirt and debris skipped across the field. In tandem with and above it, a gray-white condensation funnel dipped from the wall cloud. Seconds later, the funnel appeared to drop even lower, joining forces with the debris column and morphing to black.

  “Tornado,” Clarence said. He slipped the GMC into gear. “Here we go.”

  The funnel threaded its way over the field, flinging chunks of soil and stalks of wheat outward like an uncapped food blender. The twister bounced and weaved along a zig-zag track, growing in girth and fierceness. It filled the air with an atavistic roar, perhaps something akin to what a charging T-Rex might have sounded like in a primeval world.

  The SUV jounced along the rutted road, Clarence allowing the strengthening storm to remain a respectable distance ahead. He reached a paved road and turned left, north, still trailing the tornado.

  “Anything in its path?” he asked his brother.

  Raleigh, stocky, muscular and broad-faced, gazed at his laptop computer, examining a digital roadmap overlaid with detailed radar imagery of the storm. He looked up, peering at Clarence through thick glasses. “Yeah, it’s heading northeast right toward a little burg called Honeybee.”

  Clarence slowed the vehicle and studied the whirling monster for several moments. A farm truck coming from the opposite direction blinked its headlights in warning.

  “Stay on this road?” Clarence asked Raleigh.

  “For about four miles, then take a right on Thirteen Hundred.”

  The tornado, now a seething ink-black cauldron, careened across the road in front of them, leaving the pavement strewn in dirt and shattered vegetation. Wounded utility poles, their wires drooping precariously near the surface, leaned over the road at extreme angles. One or two had been snapped in half.

  Clarence slowed the Terrain and eased around the dangling wires, careful not to make contact. The twister, now a mature funnel, churned over a low rocky ridge. Once clear of the road debris,
Clarence sped up, closing the gap between the storm and the SUV.

  He turned east where his brother had indicated and slowed again, once more allowing the tornado, grinding northeastward, to transit the road in front of them. Its path, marked by downed poles, flattened fences, and a scattering of snapped scrub oaks and cottonwoods, appeared to be several hundred yards wide.

  Clarence eased the vehicle to the side of the road and stopped. He rolled down the front windows. Gusts of wind whipped through the interior. The distant thrashing roar of the twister reverberated through the semidarkness.

  Raleigh checked the map and radar overlay. “The town should be about to get hit,” he said.

  Virtually on cue, the eerie wail of warning sirens cut through the air, as if trumpeting the ride of modern-day Valkyries come to claim their dead. The two men waited, their gazes fixed on the obsidian buzz saw barreling toward tiny Honeybee. After several minutes, they saw what they were waiting for: brilliant explosions of blue-white light, electrical transformers falling victim to the twister’s violence.

  “That’s it, bro’,” Clarence said. He and Raleigh bumped fists.

  Clarence reached into the back seat, grabbed a light bar with warning flashers, and handed it to Raleigh. “Hook it up,” he said. “I’ll get the signs.”

  He exited the SUV, lifted the tailgate, and pulled out three magnetic signs. He checked the road behind him to make certain there were no other chasers or emergency vehicles coming. Satisfied none was, he affixed a sign to each of the front doors and one to the tailgate: EMT-Rescue.

  By the time he got back into the vehicle, Raleigh had mounted the light bar on the dash, plugged it into the cigarette lighter and set the flash pattern for the bank of red LEDs.

  “Let’s go,” Clarence said.

  Now, as paramedics and not storm chasers, the brothers continued east on the county road. Raleigh instructed Clarence to make one last turn, north onto Main Street, and they accelerated toward Honeybee.

  They reached the edge of the small town that now lay in the deep dusk of evening, the township’s lights having fallen victim to the storm. Clarence guided the SUV, its emergency lights strobing the gathering darkness, cautiously around fractured branches and fallen trees. Their investment in a heavy-duty grill guard for the GMC seemed well worth it in situations like these. Raleigh moved the beam of a roof-mounted halogen spotlight in a search pattern, looking for the more severe damage that would mark the exact track of the tornado.

  Here and there, people had already stepped from the safety of their homes and stood gazing at the evidence of the twister’s near miss in their once-tranquil neighborhood: splintered trees, missing shingles, dangling power lines.

  A frightened cat darted in front of the Terrain. Clarence braked the vehicle. “Poor thing,” he said.

  Raleigh continued sweeping the spotlight beam along the row of neat homes that lined Main Street.

  “Anything look promising?” Clarence asked.

  “Not yet. Maybe the funnel lifted before it got here.”

  “Don’t think so. Too many power flashes. Someplace got clocked.”

  The brothers entered the business district of Honeybee, which wasn’t much: two or three blocks of shops, restaurants, and a couple of banks.

  “More damage here,” Raleigh said.

  Shards of glass, pieces of aluminum, chunks of masonry, and broken bricks coated the street. The walls of several buildings had collapsed, leaving the structures looking like victims of a bomb blast. A step van, compressed to the height of a flatbed by a heap of fallen bricks, hemorrhaged gas and oil into a curbside gutter. A dozen parked automobiles and pickups, reduced to junkyard status by flying debris and massive chunks of destroyed buildings, gave testament to the tornado’s path.

  EMTs from the town’s fire department surged into a shattered restaurant filled with thick smoke. A fire truck, siren spooling down to a throaty gurgle, pulled up to the scene. Other sirens, more distant, told of additional help racing toward Honeybee.

  The brothers continued along Main Street, Raleigh playing the spotlight back and forth from one side of the street to the other, examining the broken buildings.

  There was just enough ambient light for Clarence to see ahead, but not clearly. “Shine the light down the block there,” he said. He pointed to the right side of the road.

  Raleigh aimed the beam where Clarence suggested, at the corner of the next block where two of four walls of a brick structure had collapsed. Amidst the rubble, a fallen sign rested ankle-deep in the detritus covering the sidewalk. Raleigh ran the beam over the sign: KELLER BROS. JEWELRY, WATCHES, ELECTRONICS.

  “Dontcha just love it?” Clarence said. “Small towns and their—”

  “—catch-all stores,” Raleigh interjected, finishing his brother’s sentence.

  “Let’s take a look. Grab the trauma kit.”

  Clarence pulled the SUV to the curb, leaving the emergency flashers on. The two men exited the vehicle, Raleigh lugging a large red bag stuffed with splints, a BP cuff, Mylar blankets, and a variety of other first aid supplies.

  Blue lights flashing, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol car pulled alongside the Terrain and stopped. A trooper stuck his head out the window.

  “You guys need assistance?” he asked.

  “Nah, we got it, sir,” Clarence answered. “Thought we heard someone calling for help in here.”

  “Okay. Good. We’re spread pretty thin right now. Ya’ll be careful in there.”

  Clarence gave the trooper a thumbs-up as the cruiser pulled away. The yowl of sirens, some sounding closer now, continued to fill the evening. From down the street, where emergency workers had entered the damaged restaurant, shouts and screams added to the growing cacophony.

  Clarence and Raleigh clambered over a pile of bricks and masonry into the destroyed business. It was darker in the interior—former interior—and Clarence played a powerful Maglite beam over the wreckage as Raleigh struggled behind him with the medical bag.

  Dust hung in the air, mingling with the electric smell of ozone and the faint stench of rotten eggs. Sheet lightning from the departing storm painted the sky a pulsating neon purple.

  “Careful, no sparks or anything,” Clarence said. “There’s a gas leak someplace. Not here, but nearby. Let’s work fast.”

  They moved through the rubble, Clarence probing the dimness with the flashlight’s gleam. Broken glass from shattered display cases blanketed the floor, sparkling like morning hoarfrost in the beam’s brightness. Lying among the shards were gold and diamond rings, silver bracelets, expensive wristwatches, and digital cameras.

  “Welcome to Shangri-La,” Clarence said, his words breathy.

  Raleigh set down the trauma kit and withdrew his own flashlight from a pocket in his cargo pants. He swept the beam over the debris, then stopped it abruptly.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Clarence moved his own beam to where Raleigh’s had stopped.

  A pair of legs clad in gray slacks protruded from a stack of broken bricks.

  “Let’s take a look,” Clarence said.

  The brothers worked quickly, removing the debris from the half-buried victim. Their efforts revealed a man, perhaps in his 60s, who, judging by his finely-tailored suit, probably was the proprietor. Blood streamed from a gash on his head. He moaned softly as Clarence examined the wound.

  “Get the bag,” he said to Raleigh. To the man he said, “Can you hear me, sir?”

  The man opened his eyes. “What happened?” he said, his words slurred.

  “Tornado. Are there others in here?”

  “Feel sick,” the man said.

  “Okay, relax. We’ll take care of you. Listen, are there other people in here?”

  The sound of sirens, very loud now, warbled through the destroyed building,
signaling that additional help had arrived in Honeybee.

  “Where am I? What happened?” the man asked.

  “You’re in a business, a store. I assume it’s yours. It was hit by a tornado. Are there others here who might be hurt?”

  “No others,” the man said, then lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Raleigh arrived with the trauma kit.

  “Flush out his wound,” Clarence said. “Get a bandage on it. And a cold pack. He’s probably got a concussion. Keep him still, too, since he might have a neck or back injury.”

  “I know what to do,” Raleigh snapped.

  “I know you do.” Clarence patted his kid brother on his shoulder. “Do your thing. I’ll do mine.”

  Raleigh nodded.

  Clarence pulled a folded canvas bag from the trauma kit and set off through the store, sweeping his light beam through the suspended dust, searching first for intact display cases. Most were indeed smashed, their glass tops shattered, their wooden frames fractured. But several were not.

  One held a treasure trove of high-end wristwatches: a handful of Rolexes, Tag Heuers, and Breitlings, along with a couple of Raymond Weils and half-a-dozen Citizens. Probably not a lot of demand for expensive chronometers in a small town. He picked up a heavy chunk of masonry and hammered it down on the glass. It exploded in a crystalline spray.

  He stared at the watches for several seconds. A Rolex or Breitling would be nice, but too easily missed. He withdrew several Eco-Drive Citizens instead and dropped them into the bag. Then, second thoughts. He reached into the case and grabbed a Rolex Daytona. A nice memento.

  He scanned the already-destroyed cases and the rubble on the floor, being careful to remove only a few retail items here and there: a diamond engagement ring, a bracelet of tricolored gold, and a fistful of cell phones.

  Raleigh called to him: “I’ve got the old fart—”

  “Elderly gentleman,” Clarence corrected.

  “Elderly gentleman stabilized,” Raleigh said, an edge to his words.

  “Good. Almost done here. Pack up.”