The Stormchasers: A Novel Read online

  Eventually Karena retreats to the median, disheartened and sweaty, and sits in the shade beneath the giant red-and-white coffee can billboard. She fans herself with her steno pad. Are the chasers closing rank, or have they really not seen her brother? Charles, the lone wolf. Maybe he’s really not here. Maybe he’s in another state altogether. But Dan said the only real chance for severe weather today is right where they are. Karena slits her eyes and inspects the crowd. Come on, Charles, she thinks. Show yourself. I know you’re here somewhere.

  “Hiya,” says Fern, the British girl. She ambles over, tapping a pack of cigarettes against her wrist. “D’you want company?”

  “Please,” says Karena. She might as well make a friend and get some material for her story.

  “How you doing back there on your own?” asks Fern.

  Karena smiles. “Fine,” she says. “Though I do miss out a little on getting to know you guys. But I like driving.”

  “I’d go mad,” says Fern. “You Yanks drive like nutters. No offense. Don’t you get sleepy?”

  “Sometimes,” Karena admits.

  “D’you smoke?” Fern says, offering her pack.

  “Not anymore,” Karena says.

  “Shame,” comments Fern, lighting a Marlboro. “That’d keep you awake. You could try sunflower seeds, though. That’s how Dennis manages, since he can’t smoke in the van.”

  She considerately exhales off to the side, the smoke forming a twisting parabola in the sunlight. You could die, you know, Karena wants to tell her. You’re not immune. Cancer doesn’t happen just to somebody else. She wants to tell Fern about her mom Siri, how at the end, after they took one of Siri’s lungs and put her through chemo and radiation and steroids, there was nothing recognizable left of Siri except her voice. But Karena kept smoking three years after her mom died, stopping only when she began getting migraines from it. The habit is that hard to break. So she says nothing, and the two of them sit quietly for a minute like old farmers, Karena watching the chasers, Fern the sky.

  “Nice Cu,” Fern says.

  “Sure is,” says Karena absently. Then, “Wait, what’s Cu?”

  Fern laughs. “I keep forgetting you’re a virgin,” she says. She points with her cigarette to the white puffy clouds cruising over the truck stop.

  “Cu,” she says. “Short for cumulus, cumulus congestus. We’ve got a bit of a Cu field, actually, and they’re agitated. See how they’re blowing themselves up? Means we could get some action soon.”

  Karena laughs and takes out her little recorder.

  “Agitated Cu,” she says into it. “Cu field. That’s great, Fern. The guides should give you a cut.”

  Fern looks aghast, as if Karena has committed some blasphemy.

  “I’m shite compared to them,” she says. “They’re bloody geniuses.”

  “How many times have you been on tour, anyway? Do you mind if I record this for my piece?”

  “No, that’s all right,” says Fern. “Six.”

  “Six!” says Karena.

  Fern blows smoke into the sky. “Whirlwind’s brilliant,” she says.

  “Apparently,” says Karena. “How’d you hear about them? How’d you decide to do this in the first place?”

  “I saw a documentary on Discovery Channel about chasing,” says Fern, “and I knew I had to come. I’ve always been obsessed with tornadoes. I’ve loved them ever since I was a little girl.”

  “That’s interesting,” says Karena. “How come? It’s not as though England has a lot of severe weather.”

  “Well, that’s the point,” says Fern. “English weather’s shite. The most you ever get’s some pathetic little thunderstorm, and everyone goes mad. It’s bollocks. So I knew I had to come to the States. And that first tour changed my life.”

  “Interesting,” Karena repeats, a little more alert now. There’s a story here. “How so?”

  Fern stubs her cigarette out on the sole of her boot, her grape-colored hair swinging forward.

  “Fell in love, didn’t I,” she says.

  “With the storms?” Karena asks.

  “With a man,” says Fern. “The best, smartest, sexiest man in the world—bloody bastard.”

  Karena makes a sympathetic face. “Ah,” she says. “Should have known.”

  She waits while Fern lights another cigarette. Karena was right: This is turning out to be a much richer story than the one she had planned, as so often happens when the people get involved.

  “So who is the sexy bastard?” she asks. “If you don’t mind talking about it.”

  But before Fern can answer, somebody from the lot shouts:

  “There it goes!”

  Fern looks up and grins. She nudges Karena with an elbow.

  “Look,” she says, pointing.

  Karena does. Her mouth opens, just a little. One of the big Cu has exploded like a Jiffy Pop container, and it is still growing, punching up and outward so fast that Karena can actually see it happening as if in fast-forward film. Its top is blinding white against the blue sky, and hard and knuckly, but its underside is dark gray, and as it expands its shadow eclipses the truck stop.

  “Right,” says Fern, “showtime.”

  She stamps out her cigarette, bends to pocket the extinguished stubs, then jogs toward the White Whale. Halfway there she turns.

  “See you out there,” she calls.

  “Let’s go, people,” shouts Dan Mitchell.

  The parking lot is a madhouse. The chasers are jumping into their vehicles and speeding toward the exit, which results in a nasty bottleneck. Horns blare, and some of the vehicles start plowing across the median rather than wait. One of them, a bizarre hybrid of tank and armadillo, gets mired in the grass, blocking the rest. Karena watches in awe.

  “Hey, Laredo,” yells Kevin, and it takes Karena a second to realize he’s shouting at her, referring to her by the model of her Jeep. Of course: She hasn’t introduced herself to him yet, so although she has been listening to him all day, he doesn’t know her name.

  “Saddle up, Laredo,” he shouts and cranks his arm. “We’ve gotta move!” and then Karena is running too, sprinting like everyone else toward the vans.

  9

  They turn right out of the Sapp Bros and drive through Ogallala to pick up 61 North, Karena talking to herself in her Laredo. Come on, she tells herself. You can do this. It is not like last time. These guys are not Charles. They’re professionals. They have radar. But Karena is shaking all over, so badly she can hardly hold on to the wheel. She can’t help it. Every instinct in her screams to drive back to the Sapp Bros, where there is, if not a basement, at least a bathroom she can hide in, a windowless room in a cage of pipes. Instead she keeps following these total strangers into life-threatening danger.

  She has snapped into hyper-alert mode again, her eyes ticking rapidly right and left in case some detail might be necessary later for survival. The warehouses and steakhouses of Ogallala. The bungalows on its outskirts. The Platte River again. The land becoming hilly as they head north, long, gentle swells beneath the grasses. A beautiful blue-green lake. A picnic table and pine trees like a 1950s postcard. The light is intense and jaundiced, choked off by the storm, as if Karena is wearing yellow-tinted sunglasses.

  She starts thinking about what she could tell them: Her check engine light came on. She had a sudden attack of E. coli from her fast-food burger the night before. She got an emergency call from home. But then Karena would have to call her editor and confess she’s aborting the assignment. Tell Tim Tarrant, the Whirlwind owner, the same thing— after she assured him she could handle this. She imagines the tourists saying, What happened to that reporter? and Fern saying, She did mention she was getting sleepy back there. Dan would say nothing and probably be relieved. But what really bothers Karena, for some reason, is the you-all-right? look that guide Kevin gave her during orientation. She doesn’t want to repay that small kindness by disappearing.

  And there’s Charles. She has come out here t
o find Charles. Karena straightens her arms, bracing them against the wheel, and keeps driving.

  After a while, Karena starts to relax, hypnotized by following the van along the swooping highway—and here is a curious thing: The sun is out again, shining strong between the agitated Cu Fern pointed out, which sail like galleons over the Jeep. In the rearview the storm that exploded over the Sapp Bros is barely visible, looking like a scoop of melting vanilla ice cream. Karena hasn’t seen any other chasers since leaving Ogallala, either. “What the hell?” Karena says. Why are the Whirlwind guys going in the wrong direction? There’s a white line above the hills ahead, bulging upward in the middle like a contact lens, but that’s not a storm. That’s a front.

  Suddenly her cell phone starts burring and moving itself around on the passenger’s seat, startling Karena—she’s forgotten about it. She grabs it. “Hello!” she says. “Karena Jorge.”

  “. . . scanner,” one of the guides says. She thinks it’s Kevin. The phone beeps three times and goes dead.

  “Damn it,” Karena says and shakes it, as if this will help. The phone buzzes in her hand.

  “. . . scanner, Laredo,” Kevin says faintly. “146.520.”

  “Oh!” says Karena as the phone dies again. She waves to the van, annoyed with herself. How could she have forgotten to put on the scanner? 146.520, she repeats, 146.520. This is the channel the scanner has to be on for her to hear them. She steers with her elbows while she programs the frequency in.

  “. . . with us, Laredo?” says Kevin on the scanner. “Flash your high beams twice if you can hear.”

  Karena does.

  “Okay, copy. You doing okay back there?”

  Flash. Flash.

  “Copy that. Good. Just wanted to let you know there’s a Wheel of Fortune on our storm now. We’re looking to intercept in about twenty minutes.”

  “Wheel of Fortune,” Karena repeats, bemused. She flicks her high beams rapidly, a blizzard of brights, and holds up her hand questioningly.

  “Oh, sorry, Laredo,” Kevin says. “A Wheel of Fortune’s a little spinny thing, spinning icon, that pops up on our Threat Net when a storm starts to rotate. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  Karena flashes twice to show she has understood, and in response all the tourists stick their arms out the windows, then wave them up and down in unison so it looks as though the van is flying. Karena laughs and turns on her recorder. “Wheel of Fortune,” she says. “Threat Net.” Is this how Charles talks now too? Probably. Karena remembers him saying things like punch the core and in the bear’s cage. He always did love the lingo.

  Then she thinks, Wait, did Kevin say our storm?

  She leans forward again and shakes her head. “Where?” she says. “I just don’t see—” And then the van comes up out of the valley they’ve been traveling in and a moment behind it, Karena’s Jeep, and she realizes that what she thought was a front is a storm, after all. It’s just so big she didn’t recognize it as such. She never would have imagined a storm could be this huge, a mothership filling the sky, taking up the whole horizon. It hangs there, the telltale anvil shape Karena recognizes from Stormtrack, the bottom flat and the top also, sheared off by upper-level winds. Any tornado, even as tall as a skyscraper, will look like a toothpick coming from that thing.

  “Oh my God,” Karena says.

  Her scanner crackles. “Okay, Laredo,” says Kevin, “in about two miles we should be coming to a farm road, and we’re going to take it.”

  “Okay,” says Karena. “Okay.”

  “Laredo? Copy?”

  She has forgotten to flash her brights. She does, twice. Her hands are shaking again.

  The tour continues toward the storm, the light fading as they drive under the anvil. The temperature drops. The prairie dims. They are in the shadowland beneath the base now, a place Karena remembers. The wind rushes toward the storm, and Karena can smell rain as well as see it, an opaque gray stem drifting from the storm’s base. Lightning flickers within it. But there is no thunder.

  “Here’s our road, Laredo,” Kevin says.

  Karena flicks her brights and starts to cry as she follows them. They are driving closer to the storm. They are going into it. She knows this is the point, but she can’t stop. She swipes her nose with her hand and tells herself Charles is probably parked right over there, taking pictures.

  “Wall cloud, two o’clock,” says Kevin, and Karena recognizes the lowering shelf from which the tornado might come. She makes a terrified noise and leans forward to look up. The base, a dirty brown, presses down on the Jeep, bulging with huge, hanging, breast-shaped lumps. Karena remembers these too, and she knows now they are called mammatus, and they indicate severe turbulence overhead. The light has been squeezed to a murky yellow stripe on the horizon.

  “Okay,” she tells herself, “you’re okay, you can do this. All you have to do is follow the Whale,” and she concentrates on this with all her might, not losing that boxy white van, because if she does, she’s dead. Then Karena notices clouds the size of a house being sucked into the wall cloud and disappearing. Getting vacuumed up. Immediately to her right more clouds are rising off the prairie like smoke going up a chimney, that fast. And there’s a little point coming from the wall cloud now too, trying to lengthen into a funnel.

  “This is not safe,” Karena says. “They are all fucking crazy. This is not safe at all!”

  She takes her foot off the gas and falls way behind the van as it trundles toward the wall cloud, then wheels her Jeep around and speeds back in the opposite direction.

  “Laredo?” Kevin is saying. “Laredo, we’ve lost visual. We can’t see you, Laredo. Catch up, please.”

  Karena turns the scanner off and barrels along the dirt road toward the highway as fast as she can. Only something has happened, either the storm turned or she did somehow, because now the rain shaft is in front of her. The core. That’s what Charles called it, anyway. We’ve got to punch the core, K! No way out but through!

  But Karena also remembers all too well what happens in the core. And on the other side.

  She looks behind her and sees the dark brown storm base rotating over the empty road. No sign of the van. She can’t go back that way. What if they turned off somewhere? But she can’t go forward, because the core—

  Then it is too late because it sweeps over her, the rain immediately blotting out visibility, and the Jeep begins to rock. The wheels on Karena’s side lift off the road, set back down, lift again. Karena grips the wheel, gasping. “Think,” she says. “Think!” She knows the tornado will be on the other side of the core, in what her brother called the bear’s cage. But what if she has edged into the bear’s cage and this is the tornado, here, now? Hidden by the rain? She can’t stay here. She’ll get picked up and thrown.

  She is struggling to put the Jeep in drive when someone pounds on her window. Kevin, his hand cupped over his brow so he can see in, his dark hair stuck to his forehead.

  “Stop,” he yells. “Put it in park!”

  Karena does.

  Kevin yanks open her door.

  “Get out and go around,” he shouts.

  “What?” yells Karena.

  “Or just slide over! Let me drive!”

  “Okay!” Karena shouts.

  She jumps out and is instantly soaked through her clothes. She runs around the back of the Jeep trailing one hand on it so she won’t get lost. The rain is that blinding.

  She climbs into the passenger’s seat and slams the door. Kevin throws the Jeep into drive and accelerates. Every so often the Jeep tries to lift up again as the wind punches it broadside. Karena sees small branches scudding across the road. Then they are out on the other side and there is blue sky up ahead, the sun shining beyond the anvil.

  The birds are singing in the fields. Karena remembers this now. The birds, how they sing after. How it is oddly peaceful. Her own breathing sounds very loud and harsh in her ears. She is sitting plastered against her seat, gripping the cushion.<
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  “Where’s,” she says, and has to clear her throat. “Where’s the van?”

  “At our six,” says Kevin and tips his head toward the backseat. Karena turns and sure enough, now that they’re not in the core she can see the White Whale’s longhorn skull and grille in the rear window. They had to come back for her. She hasn’t felt so ashamed in years.

  “I am so sorry,” she says.

  Kevin cuts his eyes sideways at her.

  “What happened back there?” he says. “You all right?”

  “Yes,” Karena says. “Just totally mortified. I feel like such a girl.”

  Kevin shrugs. “People panic sometimes,” he says. “It happens.”

  He runs his hand down his face and shakes it, wicking droplets off his fingers.

  “Bruh,” he says. “Rain. I hate rain.”

  “But—you’re a stormchaser,” Karena ventures.

  “Stormchasers hate to get wet, Laredo,” Kevin says. “If you’re in the precip, you’re in the wrong place.”

  “Oh,” says Karena, chastened.

  Kevin keeps driving. He smells good, Karena thinks, like damp cotton and cologne, something safe and nostalgic sold at a drugstore. After a minute Karena has it: Old Spice. His brown hair is extremely short and cut in that style with the little flip in the front, and as it dries it lifts into porcupine quills above his round face.

  “I’m Karena, by the way,” Karena says. “I mean, I know you know that, but I don’t think we ever got introduced.”

  Kevin looks startled. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m Kevin Wiebke.”