Supercell

by H W Buzz Bernard

  Chuck nodded his understanding. A ripple of moral ambivalence for what was about to happen swept over him, but quickly dissipated. He had no sympathy for the two criminals, degenerates who had just fed a woman to a python, quite likely had murdered others, and were preparing to open up on his son with a .40-caliber handgun.

  Ty gave Chuck a thumbs-up, stood and sprinted into the open, feinting briefly in the direction of the gunman. The man fired. Ty crumpled and sprawled onto the debris-laden Tarmac. He lay there, grasping his thigh.

  “Shit,” he screamed. “I don’t fucking believe it. The bastard hit me.”

  Chuck gaped, stunned as their ad hoc plan came apart at the seams.

  Chapter Thirty

  SUNDAY, MAY 11

  EARLY EVENING

  THE GUNMAN broke cover and started up the slight incline toward Ty.

  Chuck performed a quick analysis, a flash recap of his thought process. That had to be natural gas bubbling up through the puddle. Why else would that guy have been fanning his nose. A small puff of wind confirmed his hypothesis. He caught a whiff of rotten eggs.

  If at first you don’t succeed . . . Surely the guy with the gun can’t get lucky twice.

  Chuck stood, made no effort to conceal himself, and strode directly toward the gunman and Ty. He spread his arms, palms up, on either side of his body: Hit me if you can.

  The guy raised his gun and fired. Chuck saw the muzzle flash, never heard the shot, only an ear-splitting thunder clap. He tumbled backward as the blast wave from the explosion blew over him.

  He landed on his back and found himself staring upward into a cloud-dappled sky. He raised himself on one elbow and looked down the gentle slope into a roiling cauldron of fire. The black SUV hadn’t exploded, but sat consumed in flames. The gunman lay face down several yards from the blazing vehicle, the back of his shirt on fire.

  Chuck struggled to his feet and ran to Ty.

  “I’m okay,” Ty said, his hand clamped over a bloody pant leg. He flicked his head toward the fireball. “Better check on those guys, but be careful. Watch out for weapons.”

  One of the EMTs who had worked on Gabi darted toward Chuck and Ty. He knelt by Ty, glanced at the burning SUV. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

  “Gas explosion,” Chuck said. “Those guys ripped off a safe from the grill. They were trying to get away, fired a couple of shots at us and hit Ty. But they didn’t know, or forgot, they were standing next to a natural gas leak. Boom!”

  “They?” the EMT asked, opening his trauma bag. “There’s only one body down there.”

  Chuck, who’d been squatting next to the EMT, stood and surveyed the scene. The gunman hadn’t moved. His partner had vanished. Chuck had a pretty good idea why. Not even a firefighter in a Nomex suit could have survived the gas-fed inferno that now roared less than a hundred yards from him.

  Out of compassion, not rational thought, he scrambled toward the prone man whose shirt had been completely consumed by flames. The victim lay motionless, arms spread on the ground, one hand still gripping a pistol. Chuck kicked it away and bent to grab the man’s wrists. The heat from the fireball licked at his face, on the verge of searing it. The man’s naked back, a blistered mix of crimson and charcoal, forced Chuck to avert his gaze.

  The man moaned, loud and long, as Chuck dragged him away from the inferno. Then words: “Raleigh,” he said. “My brother. My brother.” He lapsed into whimpering.

  Chuck continued to tug the injured man. “I didn’t see anybody else,” he said. “But I’ll look. Gotta get you away from the fire.” Chuck knew that the man’s brother likely hadn’t survived the blast and ensuing blaze.

  “Raleigh,” the man sobbed.

  “Okay, okay, take it easy now,” Chuck said, feeling almost sorry for a human being who moments ago had fired shots at him and Ty, sicced a reptile on Gabi, and in all likelihood had murdered several people. But the operative word was “almost.” In truth, Chuck couldn’t make the transition from hatred to agape love in the blink of an eye merely because flesh was peeling off a man’s body.

  DRIFTING SMOKE, from both the fires in town and the burning SUV, turned the setting sun into a dull orange, a glowing orb tarnished by death and destruction. The keening sirens of emergency vehicles filled the growing dusk.

  An EMT stood next to Chuck in the wasteland that had once served as the parking lot of the Gust Front Grill. The red flashing lights of an EMT truck stabbed through the haze, adding to the eeriness of the fading light.

  “We’ll transport the lady and the burn victim to Bartlesville,” the medical technician said. “There’s a small hospital in Pawhuska, but it’s already full, so Bartlesville is our next best option. It’s about 25 miles east. The burned man will probably end up in Tulsa or Ok City.”

  “And eventually in prison, I hope,” Chuck added.

  “I understand he’s a criminal, but he’s in no shape to pull any shenanigans at the moment. There’ll be law enforcement officials waiting for us in Bartlesville.”

  Chuck nodded. “And the other injured folks?”

  “They’re less seriously hurt. The gentleman with the gunshot wound—your son, I’m told—will be fine.” The EMT patted Chuck on his shoulder, a “don’t worry” gesture. “Another ambulance will be along shortly to transport him and the other gentleman to Bartlesville, too.”

  “How’s the other guy?”

  “The one by the generator? Concussion and broken shoulder, but he’ll be okay.”

  “And the body?” The charred remains of what presumably was the bad guy’s brother had been discovered a few feet from the blackened and still smoldering frame of the SUV.

  “We’ll have to get a coroner out here first. They’ll arrange for transport to a morgue.”

  “What about the snake bite victims? I mean I know the thing wasn’t poisonous, but—”

  “Massive doses of antibiotics. For the puppy, too. She’ll need to see a vet.” The medic glanced toward his vehicle. “Well, look, we gotta get rollin’. Good luck.” He extended his hand to Chuck.

  “Thanks for all you did,” Chuck said, shaking the medic’s hand. “Thanks for patching up my face, too.” He tapped a large bandage taped to his cheek. “You guys are the greatest.”

  “I tell you what, sir, it’s not often we get gunshot victim, a burn victim, a concussion victim, and the victim of a snake attack all in one call.” A thin smile, not quite a grin, crept across his face.

  Chuck patted him on the back. “Go,” he said. “I suspect this is a day you’ll never forget.”

  “Not a chance,” the EMT answered, and clambered into the truck. The vehicle pulled away, the driver steering carefully through the debris field.

  The strobing lights disappeared into the haze. Chuck stood and watched, noting the irony of the event. Gabi and the object of her pursuit, both badly injured, being carted off to a hospital together. A tactical draw, but a strategic victory for Gabi. Chuck closed his eyes and uttered a brief, silent prayer for her.

  Sam, his stovepipe hat accordioned to half its former height and missing the decorative feather, joined Chuck. Together they walked toward the generator where Boomie and Ty awaited transportation to Bartlesville.

  “How’s your hip?” Chuck asked.

  “Hurts like hell,” Sam answered. “Next time I’ll use a German shepherd as a guard.”

  “Your safe—you think it survived the fire?”

  “Probably.” He stifled a laugh.

  Chuck stopped walking. “What’s funny? Something about the safe?”

  “The robbers would have been really pissed if they’d been able to break into it.”

  “You mean there was no money in it?”

  Sam shook his head. “Not much. Only enough to meet a couple of months’ payroll.”

 
“So the story about your fortune was just a folk tale?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Come on, Sam. We’ve been friends for a long time. No more secrets, not after today. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Sam paused and massaged his hip, then continued. “The only thing those guys would have found in that safe—besides a few thousand bucks—was matted straw and chicken bones.”

  “What . . . ?” Chuck couldn’t formulate a question.

  “Monty used to hang out in there. He generally had free run of the office area, crawled around in the attic mostly. But he liked to curl up in the safe once in a while. Mainly after a chicken dinner. I usually kept the door open for him, but I shut it before I left this morning.”

  “So there never was much money in there?”

  “Oh, there was a lot of money in there. Once. A few million, in fact. But I got a wild hair up my ass when the stock market tanked in 2008, took all the cash and bought securities—everything and anything that looked like a bargain.”

  “Smart Indian.” Chuck clapped Sam on the shoulder. “Rich Indian now.”

  “Just upholding the Osage legend.”

  In the middle distance, Metcalf’s team picked its way through the wreckage that layered the parking lot, searching for the Panavision, or more precisely, its SSR, the solid state recorder harboring the images of the twin tornadoes. Million-dollar images.

  “Hey,” Boomie said as Chuck and Sam approached. A greeting, not a shout. He still sat with his back against the generator.

  “Feeling better?” Chuck asked.

  “A bit. The medics gave me a shot of something. Just waiting for our ride to the hospital now.”

  “Any luck on the SSR?”

  “Not yet. Still looking.”

  Next to Boomie, Stormy, her paw bandaged by one of the EMTs who seemed to have had a way with animals, lay with her head resting on Ty’s lap. Ty had dozed off.

  “You were gonna tell me about double tornadoes,” Boomie said. “How the hell does something like that happen?”

  Chuck looked out at the people combing the debris for the SSR. He wondered if he shouldn’t be out there with them. After all, it was his payday they were searching for.

  Boomie evidently sensed his ambivalence. “Just a short answer,” he said, “then you can help the searchers. I’d like to know what the hell almost killed me.”

  “Short answer then. First, a primer on supercells. A supercell is a thunderstorm that contains a mesocyclone, a deep rotating updraft that can spawn tornadoes. Mesocyclones can persist for hours. Tornadoes themselves are more transient—forming, maturing, dissipating, then repeating the cycle, often in just a matter of minutes.”

  Boomie shifted his position slightly, but held his gaze on Chuck. “Okay, if I’ve got this straight, a tornado forms within a mesocyclone, which forms within a thunderstorm. Kind of like a circulation within a circulation within a thunderstorm.”

  “Yes,” Chuck said. “And sometimes you’ll get a mesocyclone that spins out a new tornado even before the old one has completely croaked. So occasionally you might see a thin, rope-like twister, a dying one, right beside a more robust tornado that’s just beginning to blossom.”

  “I think I see where you’re going with this,” Boomie said. “I’ll bet you’re going to tell me that on very rare occasions a new twister will form and mature even before the old one gets a stake driven through its heart.”

  Chuck nodded. “So what you can end up with is what we saw: two full-blown tornadoes side-by-side. And you’re right, it’s extremely rare. Not only that, when it does occur, you can probably put a stopwatch on its longevity. Like I said, the last twin monsters photographed were almost 50 years ago . . . until today.”

  “And the evidence got blown away,” Boomie said, his words laced in exasperation. “Get out there and help them find that damned recorder.”

  Chuck didn’t need any further exhortations to join the search. He, accompanied by Sam, strode through the litter toward Metcalf, who seemed to be coordinating the effort.

  “Anything?” Chuck asked when he reached Metcalf.

  “Chuckie,” he said, “what kind of a dumbass question is that? Has one goddamned thing turned out right on this expedition? I mean think about it. Our vehicles are beat to shit, one virtually DOA in Tulsa thanks to a buffalo stampede—how often has that happened on a tornado chase? A million-dollar Panavision got turned into scrap metal. A second one is MIA. One of my cinematographers almost got swept into the Land of Oz. Your lady friend, who turns out to be a Fed—” he rolled his eyes “—just about became a full-course meal for a snake. And, oh yeah, you created a crispy critter in a gas explosion. Your kid got shot. And your puppy and Injun bud got chomped on by a Python named Monty. Jesus, that’s hilarious. And ridiculous. And absurd. A comic tragedy. No. We haven’t found the frigging camera. Or the recorder.” He waved the two men off. Dismissive.

  As Chuck and Sam walked away, Metcalf muttered in a stage whisper, “Please, God, take me now.”

  Ziggy motioned for Chuck and Sam to move to the periphery of the search group, toward the southern end of the parking lot.

  “Should have brought a flashlight,” Chuck said.

  Sam agreed. “It’ll be dark in 15 or 20 minutes.”

  After 25 minutes, Metcalf called off the search. “We really don’t have a clue where that thing might have ended up, do we?” he said. “It could be in Kansas, right? Or Arkansas?”

  Sam gestured at the wreckage surrounding them. “Or you could have walked by it a dozen times this afternoon without spotting it in all this shit. We’ll hit it another lick tomorrow. Start early in the morning when the sun angle is low. Great contrast for tracking.”

  “Okay, Tonto,” Metcalf said. “I’ll let you lead the hunt tomorrow. This is your land. Just steer us clear of buffalo herds and snakes. Heap big wampum if you find the SSR.” He raised his voice and addressed the assemblage. “Everybody back here at sunup tomorrow. Red Ryder and Little Beaver here are going to lead us to the Happy Hunting Ground for digital movie cameras.”

  Sam’s jaw tightened. Chuck laid a hand on his shoulder and whispered into his ear. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “He’s an equal opportunity offender.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  The group dispersed. Ty and Boomie had been picked up, leaving Stormy to fend for herself. Now she limped behind Chuck and Sam as they headed to Sam’s truck.

  “I’ve got a friend in Pawhuska,” Sam said. “We can stay there tonight.”

  They rode in silence, Chuck allowing his thoughts to drift toward despair as he stared out the side window into the darkness. He had to be realistic. The odds against recovering the SSR were prohibitive. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility the thing really had been swept into another state.

  Yes, he had to be realistic. In all likelihood he was about to end up back where he’d started, subsisting in a cheesy apartment in Norman. Only this time without even a minimum-wage job. It seemed the weather gods had once again conspired against him. He issued an audible sigh, his breath fogging the window.

  “Sometimes it’s a long road home,” Sam said.

  “I don’t have a home.”

  “That’s why the road is sometimes long.”

  Sam flicked his headlights on high beam, illuminating the deserted highway.

  “You seem to be the eternal optimist, Sam.”

  “No, it’s just that I’ve been there before, after I got back from ’Nam. It took me a long time to find myself. To find the road. To find home. Sometimes I still get lost. You’ll be fine.”

  “Everything hinges on finding the footage Boomie shot.”

  “It doesn’t, actually. But I know you don’t believe that now. Anyhow, I think we might find it.”

  “Yea
h?”

  “I might have a dream.”

  Chuck stared at him. “A dream?” Sam’s face, tinted in the glow of the dashboard lights, appeared almost abstractionist.

  Sam glanced over at Chuck. “Indian stuff. Ask me in the morning.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  MONDAY, MAY 12

  CHUCK AND SAM stood at the edge of the Gust Front’s parking lot, watching the sun lift into an azure sky, a firmament free of clouds, free of threat. An antithesis to the previous day. Chuck turned up the collar on his wool jacket to ward off a chill galloping over the plains on a gusty northwest wind. The gusts bore the lingering stench of destruction, an odor of charred structural remains.

  Stormy sat next to the two men, seemingly reluctant to take off on one of her usual early- morning galavants. Perhaps she’d been traumatized by the snake attack, or maybe she was just confused by the acres of debris.

  “I had a dream last night,” Sam said.

  “And?” Chuck said.

  “I was back in ’Nam.”

  Chuck waited for Sam to continue.

  “Waiting for a Dustoff to land in a stand of elephant grass to ferry the wounded to a field hospital. The Gooks were shooting at the chopper. We returned fire. Drove the Slopes off. But it was too late, the Medevac had left, called to another mission. The Gooks came back, started dropping mortar rounds into our position. Bad situation. Under attack. Lots of wounded. No help.”

  Sam paused, raised a hand to shield his eyes from the rising sun.

  “A mortar round exploded right in front of me. Almost blinded me. I thought we were goners.”

  “Sam,” Chuck said, “this was a dream or something that actually happened to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Chuck reached down and petted Stormy and waited for Sam to continue, wondering what all of this might have to do with Indian lore and finding the SSR.

  “In ’Nam, a flight of gunships escorted the Dustoff back to the LZ and bailed our asses out. In my dream, an Indian pony burst out of the tall grass and galloped through our position. It cut a swath through the grass that we were able to follow to safety . . . into an old Michelin rubber plantation. To a stand of trees where we were able to defend ourselves.”