I Survived the Joplin Tornado, 2011

by Lauren Tarshis

  But Dex had a mission.

  To help Dr. Gage.

  Some strength seeped into his aching body. He stood up and shook off his tears.

  If Dex didn’t do something right now, Dr. Gage was going to die.

  Dex remembered the first aid kit that Dr. Gage kept in his glove compartment. He peered into the car’s shattered insides. The computer screens had been sucked away. The air rifle and sound pods were gone, too.

  But the first aid kit was still in the glove compartment.

  Dex grabbed it and hurried back to Dr. Gage.

  Mom had made him take an advanced first-aid class last summer. He’d hated every minute, but now the training came back to him. He unzipped the case, taking a deep breath to calm his hammering heart.

  He followed the steps he’d been taught: put on disposable gloves, use scissors to carefully cut away the muddy fabric that stuck to Dr. Gage’s wounded leg. He didn’t drop the scissors when he saw the gaping gash above Dr. Gage’s knee. He didn’t vomit at the sight of the blood, or at the sickening gleam of white bone through the open wound.

  He thought of Jeremy, imagining that he was right behind him, calmly walking him through the steps.

  He ripped open a package of gauze and pressed down as hard as he could. Blood soaked through, so he took more gauze and pressed harder. He kept pressing to try to stop the bleeding.

  The minutes crawled by. Dex gripped Dr. Gage’s hand tight.

  No, he wouldn’t let Dr. Gage go. He would hold on to him for dear life, the way Dr. Gage had held on to Dex when the tornado tried to suck him away.

  The bleeding slowed and then stopped. Dr. Gage’s skin didn’t look as gray. His breathing seemed a little steadier.

  Dex was putting on a fresh bandage and wrapping it in adhesive tape when he heard the sound of a truck, and slamming doors, and then voices.

  A man and woman came running toward him.

  Relief poured over Dex as he realized it was Jimmy and Sara.

  “We found you!” Sara shouted.

  She and Jimmy started to cry when they saw Dr. Gage lying there, surrounded by bloody gauze.

  They kneeled down next to him, and Dr. Gage’s eyes fluttered open, but then he drifted away again.

  Sara turned to Dex.

  “Dex, you took care of him?”

  Dex nodded.

  He’d done all he could.

  “You did real good,” Jimmy said.

  Dex barely managed a nod as he fought back his tears.

  Within minutes, they had found a door in the wreckage to use as a stretcher. Dex helped them carefully move Dr. Gage onto the door, and they carried him to the pickup truck.

  “I’ll ride in the back with Norm,” Sara said. “Dex, you get up front with Jimmy.”

  Dex shook his head.

  “I’m not going with you,” he said.

  He hated to leave Dr. Gage, but Jimmy and Sara would take good care of him.

  “I need to find my mom and dad. I need to get home.”

  The word home caught in his throat.

  “I don’t live far from here,” he said. His neighborhood was no more than a half mile away.

  “It’s very bad out there, Dex,” Jimmy said quietly. “This is the worst tornado I’ve ever seen. It’s just miles and miles of destruction. Parts of Joplin are completely gone.”

  “Come with us to the hospital,” Sara said. “We’ll help you find your parents after we take care of Norm.”

  Dex was tempted. He didn’t want to be alone.

  But he couldn’t wait. And Jimmy and Sara had no time to argue.

  They hugged Dex as though they were all family.

  Dex watched them drive off.

  And now it was time for Dex to head into the ruins, to discover what was left.

  No matter where Dex looked, in every direction, as far as he could see, Joplin was in ruins. What was once his city — his peaceful, bustling city — had been shattered into millions of pieces.

  He made his way into his neighborhood, where just yesterday he had been riding his bike. The streets were filled with downed wires and splintered telephone poles. The trees that had shaded him on hot summer days were now naked sticks, their leaves and branches carpeting the ground. Cars and trucks were everywhere but parked in driveways. They were crushed in the middle of the street, flipped upside down, wrapped around poles.

  And then there were the houses.

  Some had been swept away completely, so that only cement slabs remained. Others were chopped up, or cut in half, smashed by trees or peeled open. And what had been in people’s kitchens and bedrooms and desk drawers and toy boxes was now scattered everywhere. Someone’s family portrait, smudged with grime, smiled out from under a pile of plaster and jagged glass. A page from a children’s book blew through the air like a dead leaf. A basketball rolled down the street, as though someone had just missed a free throw. Mixed in with the piles of wood and roof shingles were parts of couches, stuffed animals, a smashed oven, a headless Barbie doll, dishes, pots … parts of people’s lives scattered like puzzle pieces. Everything was soaking wet and covered with brown filth.

  Dex rounded the corner onto his street.

  Or was it his street?

  He couldn’t know for sure, because there was nothing left.

  He didn’t see a soul.

  He walked more quickly, gaping in horror at the wreckage of the Tuckers’ house. He whispered a prayer of thanks as he remembered that the Tuckers had left yesterday. Their house was destroyed, but the Tuckers were safe in Arkansas.

  He walked faster and faster, and soon he was running, until he reached the spot where his own house should have been.

  Mom’s car was upside down. Dad’s station wagon was nowhere to be seen.

  And the house.

  The house where Dex had lived his whole life. The house where Dex had learned to walk and talk and tie his shoes and read and write, where he’d put his baby teeth under his pillow and waited for Santa to come down the chimney. The house where he rode around on Jeremy’s shoulders, feeling like the luckiest boy on earth.

  The house that had made him.

  The tornado had smashed it to pieces, and now it was just a mountain of rubble.

  And where were Mom and Dad?

  Where was Zeke?

  They would have taken shelter in the basement. And now they were trapped somewhere under the wreckage.

  Dex climbed up the pile of ruins and dropped to his knees.

  “Mom! Dad! Zeke!”

  He grabbed hunks of wood and plaster that used to be his house and he started throwing them aside. There were bricks from the fireplace and huge shards of glass and broken plates and Dad’s smashed laptop and an old baseball bat.

  His whole body shook with sobs as he tore away at the wreckage, desperate to reach his family. He barely noticed that a huge nail was stabbing into his knee, and that both of his hands were dripping with blood.

  Don’t quit.

  Don’t quit.

  Don’t quit.

  And then something touched his neck — something warm and slobbery.

  Dex spun around.

  He looked up, and there was Zeke standing behind him, balanced on a wooden beam.

  He stared at his dog, his beautiful ugly dog who was soaking wet and covered with dirt and grime, whose tongue was hanging out of his mouth.

  Where had he come from?

  Zeke licked Dex again.

  Dex threw his arms around his dog, burying his face in his filthy fur.

  And then Dex heard voices calling from the street, ragged shouts that rose up over the sirens that wailed all across Joplin.

  “Dex!”

  “Dex!”

  Dex jumped up and practically flew toward the street, with Zeke following right behind him.

  Mom reached him first, and then Dad.

  They all grabbed hold of one another, and Zeke nuzzled in, too.

  They clung together and cried.

 
But they did not cry for what had been lost.

  That would come later.

  Right now, they were crying for what they had found.

  Dex sat up in bed, his heart pounding.

  He’d heard a noise.

  Was it the tornado siren?

  He held his breath.

  No.

  It was just Dad’s phone alarm.

  Zeke was sprawled out next to Dex. He stared up with worried eyes, his ears pressed back.

  “We’re okay,” Dex whispered, kissing Zeke on the head.

  And they were.

  Still, it took a minute for Dex’s heart to stop pounding, for the nauseous swirl to clear from his stomach. Though he was sleeping better, the tornado howled through his dreams. And he always woke up in a sweaty panic, reliving the terror of the storm, the jumbled darkness of those first few days.

  Joplin had been cut off from the world. Many of the roads were closed. Phones were dead and power blacked out. Every hour brought more terrible news. One hundred and fifty-eight were killed in the storm. They died in their homes, in stores, on the roads, in their cars. More than a thousand were wounded. So many families had lost everything they had.

  Dex would never forget those terrifying minutes when he was sure Mom and Dad and Zeke were lost in the rubble. It turned out that Mom and Dad weren’t in the house at all. They’d been driving home from the graduation when the sirens went off. Luckily they’d had enough time to pull the car over and sprint into the basement of a restaurant. Their car had been sucked away; they still hadn’t been able to find it.

  None of them wanted to think about what would have happened if anyone had been in the house when the tornado hit. What if Mom and Dad hadn’t stayed after the graduation to help take pictures? What if Dex hadn’t gone with Dr. Gage that day? What if they had been in the basement when the beams of their house cracked? A crushing mountain of wood and plaster and appliances and furniture had come crashing into the basement, filling every inch.

  Nobody would have survived down there.

  A big mystery was how Zeke made it through. None of them could figure out how he had suddenly just appeared when Dex was searching through the rubble.

  It was Dr. Gage who had the best answer.

  “I told you, your dog has superpowers,” he’d said.

  Dex smiled to himself, thinking of Dr. Gage safe at his house in Tulsa.

  For an agonizing week after the storm, Dex had no idea whether Dr. Gage was alive or dead. Joplin’s main hospital had been practically destroyed, and so Joplin’s wounded were taken to hospitals for miles around. With no phone service, they had no way of tracking him down. Finally the call came from Sara: Dr. Gage was in a hospital in Oklahoma. He was still weak, but getting better every day.

  Now that Dr. Gage was back at home, he and Dex spoke almost every day. They’d made a plan for Dex and Mom and Dad to visit him in Tulsa in a few weeks. Dex already had the present he would bring.

  He’d retrieved it from the wreckage of Dr. Gage’s SUV.

  Dad had gone with him to the parking lot of Peter’s Garage, to see if there was anything in the SUV they could salvage for Dr. Gage.

  They found some maps, and some important papers in the glove compartment. And Dex discovered something else: the small hail freezer wedged under the front seat. Dex yanked it free. The battery-operated motor was still humming. And inside, that huge piece of hail was still frozen solid.

  Dex lifted the glistening ball out of the freezer. At first he wanted to smash it into millions of pieces. That hailstone was part of the storm system that had destroyed his city!

  Yes it was. And that’s why Dex put it back in the little freezer, to save for Dr. Gage.

  Who knew? Maybe there was some secret inside the icy ball, a clue that would help Dr. Gage unravel the mysteries of tornadoes.

  Dex finally got out of bed. He got dressed, squeezing around the boxes and bins stacked everywhere in their tiny apartment.

  Each one was filled up with books and dishes and photos and other treasures they’d managed to salvage from the soggy wreckage of their house. For days they had sifted through the pile, with the help of volunteers from around the country. Thousands had flocked to Joplin to help pick up the pieces.

  And of course people from Joplin were helping one another, too.

  A friend of Dad’s had found this apartment. Mike Sturm brought Dex a whole bag of clothes, some of them brand-new. Dylan and his family had donated a TV, some sheets and blankets, and this cot. Dylan had helped Dex get the bed set up, and of course they made it right, the SEAL way. They’d even smiled at each other, the kind of smiles they used to share back when they’d been best friends. It seemed the tornado had broken down that wall that had risen up between them.

  And now Dex picked up the little box that was resting on the windowsill.

  It had arrived in the mail yesterday, sent from a secret military base in some far-off country.

  It was from Jeremy.

  Dex’s brother had managed to finally get in touch with them, three days after the storm. He spoke to Mom and Dad and then Dex finally had his turn.

  “Jeremy!” he’d cried, fighting back tears.

  At first there was only silence.

  “Jer?”

  Dex was about to hang up, figuring they’d been cut off.

  But then came a choked-up whisper. “Dex …”

  And Dex understood. His brother, his brave warrior brother, was crying.

  That got Dex blubbering, too, but he didn’t care. It was a while before either of them could get a word out.

  But then they talked and talked and talked. And the call ended with the best news of all: that Jeremy’s mission was ending. He would be home for a visit within the month.

  Dex opened the box Jeremy had sent.

  He stared at the sparkling gold trident pin.

  Jeremy’s SEAL pin.

  “You earned this,” Jeremy had written.

  At first Dex couldn’t believe Jeremy was giving it away. That trident was what made Jeremy a SEAL!

  But no. It wasn’t a piece of gold-painted metal that made Jeremy strong and brave.

  It was what was inside him.

  And wasn’t the same true of Joplin?

  What Dex loved about Joplin wasn’t the buildings and the houses.

  It was the faith of the people, their strength. A tornado couldn’t break that.

  Dex and Zeke stood at the window. Zeke’s ears perked up at the buzzing of chainsaws and the booming of dump trucks and back hoes, the sounds of Joplin being put back together. Dex thought about his busy day ahead. The Tuckers were finally coming back to Joplin, and Dex was helping them move into their temporary house. Later on, he and Dylan and Mike were going to volunteer in the shelter organized by their church.

  There was so much to do.

  Dex’s mission had just begun.

  Whenever I go on a school visit, some nice reader asks me if I have a favorite I Survived book. I always give the same answer, and according to my eleven-year-old daughter, Valerie, it’s a bad answer: I have no favorite book in the series.

  I explain that, unlike many book series, each I Survived book takes me on a different journey. Each character is a new creation. By the time I am finished writing a book, my characters seem so real to me that I even dream about them. Not long ago, I had a dream that Oscar from my Chicago Fire book was sitting at my kitchen table eating tacos with our family. (He seemed to like them.)

  So no, I don’t have a favorite I Survived book because I love all of my characters equally, and each story has deep meaning to me.

  But The Joplin Tornado is especially close to my heart because it was people from Joplin who suggested that I write it. And it was their true stories — dozens of them — that guided me. I visited Joplin and got to spend time with the wonderful librarians from Joplin’s elementary schools. I met hundreds of kids and their teachers. Dex and his family are fictional characters, but many of their experience
s were inspired by stories people shared with me.

  Joplin is officially a city, but it feels more like a small town. It sits in the middle of America where three states touch: Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It’s a pretty place, with an interesting history as a nineteenth-century lead mining town. The people are incredibly friendly — buying a tube of toothpaste at the local CVS felt like going to a family picnic. It was easy for me to see why so many people who are born here never leave.

  The tornado that hit Joplin was the deadliest to hit America in fifty years. It was nearly one mile wide at its widest point, a rain-wrapped “multiple vortex” tornado, which means it had more than one funnel. Entire neighborhoods were completely swept away; 158 people were killed, more than 1,100 wounded. Thousands of people lost their homes. Five schools and a major hospital were destroyed, along with hundreds of businesses.

  Four years later, the city has been almost completely rebuilt. Librarian Ashley Tucker, my kind and generous guide during my visit to Joplin, drove me through some of the heavily damaged areas. The most obvious scars from the tornado are some still-empty lots and skeleton trees that stand amid the newly built houses and beautiful schools. Otherwise it was hard to imagine that just three and a half years before my visit, one-third of the city lay in ruins.

  Within people’s minds, though, the memories of that day are still raw. So many lost relatives and neighbors. People described the tornado’s howling roar, the power of its fierce winds, the terror of feeling their homes collapsing around them as they huddled in a basement or bathtub or closet.

  Being in Joplin, I kept thinking about another question I often get from my young readers: Why do I choose to write about disasters and other such dark and frightening events? One boy just wrote to me today, “Mrs. Tarshis, no offense, but why do you write about such DEPRESSING subjects?”

  Here’s my answer, one that my daughter approves of: The I Survived series isn’t really about disasters. It’s about people. Yes, I write long chapters filled with destruction. But in the end, my books are about resilience — the ability most of us have to recover after experiencing something difficult or painful.