The Breathtaker (16 page)

Charlie glanced at Willa, who was doing sixty. The wind roared in his ears. Scattered hailstones hit the hood of the car, and the tumbleweeds were flying about three feet off the ground. The sides of the road were lined with storm-chasers, all watching the wall cloud put down numerous filaments. These filament funnels made strange, eerily graceful turns around the main funnel, then quickly dissipated. The main funnel muscled its way earthward and touched down again, ripping up dirt, plants and shrubs—basically anything in its path.

“I’d give that an F-1 on the Fujita scale,” Willa said. “Definitely not bad for May eleventh.”

There was a party atmosphere—cars filled with wide-eyed kids, cameras hanging out the windows. They all watched the stiletto shadow as it skipped gracefully across the flattened landscape, changing direction on a whim. The sky had turned so dark that Charlie could see the dash lights inside the car. Very faintly, he felt the concrete beneath their tires beginning to rumble like a slowly approaching train. Moments later, the F-1 lifted up into the rain and disappeared for good.

“That was amazing.”

“Look over there between the breaks in the strato-cu,” Willa said, pointing to their southwest. “You can see the sharp knuckles of that other tower continuing to develop. See how the rain wraps around the wall cloud? And there’s a distinct hail shaft north of the tail. We want to avoid that.”

She hit the gas and they zoomed southward, where an even larger rotating cloud in the shape of a beaver’s tail churned darkly along the horizon.

“These storms are killing people as we speak,” the local meteorologist said anxiously.

They veered down a bumpy two-lane road, where Charlie noticed a pair of headlights dogging them at a distance. He remembered the camera in his hand and turned around to take some pictures. A blue Mazda pickup truck and a vintage Buick Electra converged on the road behind them, along with a burnt-umber Chevy Caprice Classic and another pickup truck.
Casino pink.
Boone Pritchett’s truck. The little prick had lied to him.

“Too many yahoos on the road today,” Willa complained, glancing in her rearview mirror. “Go hang gliding, you idiots! Go bungee jumping and leave the rest of us alone!” She stomped on the gas and they roared toward the second wall cloud, where dust whirls and short-lived condensation tubes bubbled to life beneath it. The top of the tower ballooned well beyond the anvil cirrus, while chunks of clouds under the storm base tore loose and pushed southward. The remaining low-hanging clouds located further east moved rapidly northward. Immense bolts of platinum lightning arced across the sky, then shot straight down the wall cloud toward the earth. Charlie’s adrenaline surged as he watched a violently whirling debris cloud suddenly form on the ground, chewing at the earth like an electric mixer.

The funnel shot up amazingly fast. It was five miles away but plainly visible. It narrowed and tightened, then needled its way into the ground, producing a classic elephant trunk. Debris rose from the flattened fields as it ripped a path through.

“Bingo. We got the tornado of the day,” Willa said, a mix of raw fascination and professional respect in her voice. She hit the brakes, and Charlie shot forward in his seat. “Move, you weather weenies!” she screamed.

A line of cars had developed in front of them as several slowpoke chasers went podunking up the road ahead, gawking at the tornado and paying scant attention to those behind them.

“Maybe he’s afraid of hydroplaning at twenty fucking miles an hour,” Willa said as she blasted her horn.

Two chase cars ahead of them pulled around the rank amateurs, and Willa followed suit. “Sit on this and rotate!” She flashed the slowpokes her middle finger.

Charlie just stared at her.

“What?” she said, mildly agitated, her cheeks a lovely rustic color.

He couldn’t help grinning from ear to ear. “You’re something else.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve been called worse.”

The air grew electric between them. His hair crackled with static. The car made sick chugging sounds as they sped past abandoned pastures where swaths of box elder and cottonwood scruff whirled in the wind, everything illuminated by stunning bursts of near-constant lightning. Khaki-colored leaves, torn off their stems, spun wildly through the air. The circulation intensified as they edged ever closer to the beast.

Charlie gritted his teeth as the tornado rapidly widened, gathering strength. He could see why it was so addictive. All around them, brilliant streaks of lightning slapped out of the clouds, and enormous droplets hit the windshield at an angle. Then it began to hail.

“Hold on to your hat,” Willa said as hail pellets peppered the ground around them, stones of ice banging off the roof and popping off the hood. “When a hailstone the size of an egg hits you on the head, it hurts,” she said. “But don’t worry, one-inch-diameter hail is just below the damage threshold for most metals and windshields. Anything bigger, and we’d be in serious trouble.”

“Thanks for sharing.” He clutched the dog-eared gas station map, trying to stay ahead of the curve. He tore his gaze away from the tornado long enough to search for street signs, but it turned out that the road they were on was misprinted on the map. The Ford’s engine whined and wheezed, the temp gauge rising as they sliced through the hailstorm into a broad shaft of light. On the far side of this light, they could see the cone-shaped tornado very clearly now, dark with pink edges against a charcoal-colored sky. The racket was incredible. The wind bent the grass completely over in the field, and the air was filled with leaf debris.

“Major chaser convergence,” Willa said, glancing in her rearview at the string of cars behind them, hurrying to catch up.

Charlie turned in his seat to snap a few more pictures, his palms oozing sweat. His hair felt as if it’d been whipped by an eggbeater. They took a left onto Eyebright Road, where they had a sweeping panorama of the grasslands splashed with purple and yellow wildflowers. When the sun burst from between the clouds, the dark vortex turned suddenly milky white. The sun briefly struck their faces before disappearing again, and the sound of the wind grew thunderous as they moved parallel to the tornado, now just a few miles away. It took Charlie’s breath away, how close they’d come.

“I can hear its voice clearly,” Willa said. “Hear it talking to us?”

He listened. He heard. Gurgling and cascading. Like water. There was a cold, heavy odor to the air. The tornado cut a swath across the plains, slicing through dead weeds and sagebrush, everything spinning up into the air like a plague of locusts. It was wrapped in a shawl of torrential rains and screaming upper-level winds, and within the northeastern edge of this mesocyclone, great swirls of clouds dove for the ground and then dissipated.

Willa’s hands grew white-knuckled on the wheel as she maintained a constant right angle to the line of movement. “Oh fuck,” she said, suddenly losing control.

The vehicle spun out, skidding across the rain-slick road. Charlie’s arm rose automatically to protect her as she hit the brakes and they both slammed forward in their seats. Through the windshield, he could see the tornado shrinking before his startled eyes. It stretched out like taffy, grew skinny as a rope and then lifted up into the clouds, where it abruptly evaporated.

Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were glazed. “I can’t believe I spun out,” she said.

“Are you kidding? You were amazing.”

She squeezed the steering wheel while lightning rippled across the slowly retreating wall of thunderheads, the spider-egg mammatus clouds glowing silver and gold in the afternoon sun, the storm gradually tapering off into calmness.

“Now what?” he asked, his heart slowly regaining its regular rhythm.

“Now we stop at some grease palace and analyze the data.” She looked at him and smiled in all her awkward beauty.

He edged forward in his seat, thinking he might kiss her again, when all of a sudden a screaming emergency vehicle tore past them in the opposite direction. Without hesitation, Willa shifted gears, and they made a U-turn in the middle of the road.

They dogged the flashing beacon down one lone country lane after another, until somewhere south of town, the emergency vehicle pulled over to the side of a poorly paved road and Charlie shot forward in his seat. Boone’s pickup truck was wrapped around a denuded oak, suction spots in the grass around the base of the tree where the tornado had left its devastating impact.

They rocketed out of the car and jogged toward the scene, where two EMS personnel were already immobilizing Boone on a back board. He lay flat on his back with a dazed look in his eyes. The cowboy hat was gone, and his short black hair was laced with insulation dust. He appeared to be choking on the blood in his mouth. The male EMT performed a quick finger sweep, while the female EMT applied a rigid cervical collar.

“Stabilize the head…”

“No loose teeth… Let’s suction his throat…”

Charlie’s shirt was soaked with sweat. The sky was full of quick-moving, low-level scud clouds. The tornado had left a trench of braided prairie grass in its wake, four-foot-long cordgrass leaves impossibly twisted around broken milkweed stems. Several nearby oak trees had been completely denuded, and the wheat fields held swirl patterns. The wind must’ve lifted the truck up like a toy and slammed it into the massive oak, which clutched the mangled chassis in its sagging limbs. The truck was riddled with bullet-shaped holes from flying debris, and all the windows were busted in.

“Sinus bradycardia at fifty beats per minute…”

“Let’s load and go.”

The wind was making the grass gallop. Above the whistling sound, Charlie could hear something else—a cry, almost human.
Clara, howling with indignation at having been abandoned, the tips of her teeth like glistening barnacles breaking through the pink and healthy gums.

“Daddy?!”

The fields were yanked into sharp focus as he recognized Sophie’s voice.

He spun around, heart hammering dangerously in his chest. His daughter staggered out of a stand of trees, covered in mud and blood, the wheat around her braiding and streaming in the wind. He could taste the tang of his own panic as he tried to swallow. “Sophie?” He ran across the road and swept her up in his arms. He hugged her so tightly she squealed in his ear. “You okay?” He inhaled sharply. “Are you hurt?”

“Is he dead?” she wailed, looking beyond her father’s shoulder, her eyes staring wide with helpless terror.

He thought he was going crazy. His heart kept booming in his ears. What was she doing here? She was cut up pretty badly. He checked her scalp beneath her wet, wind-tossed hair. “Did you hit your head?”

Her eyebrows rose with mild surprise. “Is he dead?” she asked. “Did he die?”

“No.” His blood went cold. “He’s unconscious.”

“Is he going to die, Daddy?”

“Shh. Calm down, sweetie.” He stomped hard on his anger.

“We were in the truck. It got so dark, it was raining really hard. We were getting closer to the tornado,” she said, “when a tree branch flew into us head-on and smashed the windshield. Boone tried to keep the truck upright, but then the tornado got us.” She burst into tears, and he held her in his arms, wanting to shield her forever from the wind, the bogeyman, all bad things. “I was wearing my seat belt,” she said with a shiver. “But Boone wasn’t wearing his. He got thrown from the truck, but I was wearing my seat belt, Daddy… so I was okay. I unhooked it and climbed down.”

“Thank God.”

She struggled to keep her footing. “Is he gonna be okay?”

“Shh.”

“Is he?” She sobbed against his shoulder.

“Did you hit your head? How’s your head? Are you dizzy?” He checked her scalp with a lingering sense of unreality. “Over here!” he yelled at the paramedics, and the female EMT came right over.

“Does it hurt anywhere?” she asked before calmly listening to Sophie’s heart with a stethoscope. “Can you breathe okay?”

“Take her in,” Charlie told the EMT. “We’ll follow.”

“Daddy?”

“We’re right behind you, sweetie.”

9

C
HARLIE FOLLOWED
the EMTs into the emergency room, where Sophie thrashed around on the gurney, hair plastered to her face with sweat. “What’s going on?” she said. “Where’s Boone?”

He caught her hand and held it, while half a dozen doctors and nurses swarmed around them, ordering CAT scans and X rays and blood tests. Then a nurse began to cut away her clothes.

“Daddy?” she cried, overwrought with emotion and shock.

“Quiet, sweetie.” He was sweating bullets now. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“What are they doing?”

“Helping you.”

He didn’t let go of her hand until one of the nurses took over. “I’ve got her now,” she said. “You can go wait outside.”

Back in the corridor, Willa kept pressing on her wind-whipped hair as if she were trying to calm it down. “Charlie? She okay?”

“I think so. I hope so. Christ, I’m shaking.”

She rested her hand lightly on his arm. The waiting room smelled of dead flowers and was virtually identical to the one he’d grown to despise so many years ago—that robin’s-egg blue waiting room outside the ICU. There’d been no burn units back then, and he’d spent weeks recuperating in the ICU before being transferred to the pediatrics ward on the sixth floor.
Waiting room.
Even the name was grim. A place where time crawled, where every chair was unforgiving. Better to pace up and down the halls, dragging your IV caddy around behind you.

“I’ll kill him,” Charlie said now, his pants and shirt stained with his daughter’s blood.

Willa held his eye. “She’ll be all right.”

“This can never happen again.”

“Charlie,” she said, squeezing his hand, “she’s going to be just fine. She was wearing her seat belt. She’s conscious, coherent, moving around.”

“I lost my sister. My mother. Maddie. No way am I losing my daughter to that little prick.” He stared straight ahead in deep shock. After a few minutes, he got up and talked to the receptionist, a steely-eyed brunet who told him that a doctor would be with him momentarily.

Momentarily.
He knew what that meant.

He sat back down on the beaten green couch and stared at the dirty white walls and glazed tiles in earth tones. Willa waited with him in silence while the steady drip of the TV set provided a constant background hum, like rain on the roof. His mouth was bone-dry. He formulated a plan at the water cooler. He would ground her for a month, send her off to private school, lock her in a castle tower and throw away the key. He tried to cool his overheated imagination as he sat back down and pushed the hair off his forehead.
Waiting room.

How many operations had he had altogether? Twenty? Twenty-five? As a young burn patient, he used to curse the nurses who forced him to flex his aching limbs. He cursed the dressings, the antibiotic cream, the daily wound cleansing. Twice a day, one big-boned nurse in particular—a beefy Swede, tough as a drill sergeant—made him do his ROM exercises in a whirlpool that reeked of disinfectant. Not moving his limbs meant fibrosis of the joints. Nurse Natalie, with eyes the color of unripe pears, had made his short life miserable. She’d pushed him harder than he’d ever been pushed before, but now, every day, he silently thanked her.

“Chief Grover?”

A movement at the top of his vision made him look up. A frowning doctor, very young, crossed the room toward them. His ID tag said “Russ Pressler, M.D.”

Charlie got to his feet. “How is she?”

Pressler had small, deep-seated eyes and a buzzed haircut. “You were lucky.” He kept his voice professionally detached. “No broken bones, no concussion. We treated her for minor injuries and gave her a tetanus shot. She’ll be feeling it tomorrow. I’d recommend bed rest and plenty of Tylenol.”

“What about those cuts on her face and arms?”

“Tempered glass is designed to shatter into little cubes upon impact. Those marks on her skin are linear, right-angled and very superficial.”

“So she’ll be okay?”

He nodded curtly. “They’ll heal. We’re waiting on the CAT scan, but she’ll be released once that checks out. She’s with the other patient now. He’s in a coma but stabilized. He’s vented and we’re monitoring his life signs.”

Charlie darkened. “Where are they?”

The doctor walked him toward the ICU, then pointed at the daffodil-yellow curtain in the corner.

Boone Pritchett lay motionless on his motorized bed, an endotracheal tube taped to his mouth. His eyes were slightly open but unseeing. His ventilator worked noisily up and down, adding a sibilant hiss to the air.

Sophie stood next to the bed, dressed in orderly scrubs. Her hair was combed off her face, and she clutched a plastic bag full of her own bloody clothes. “It was leaking cold air through the floorboards,” she said without looking up. “My feet were freezing from the blasts of cold air.”

Charlie stood for a moment, quietly observing her baby-smooth complexion and expressionless face.

“It happened so fast.” She wiped away a tear. “It got dark, and then the rain came. I could feel the whole truck lifting up into the air. I kept my eyes closed…”

“He placed you at great risk,” Charlie told her. “I’ll never forgive him for that.”

She turned around, so frail-looking he wanted to whisk her away from here and never let her out of his sight. “He’s not as bad as you think,” she said.

“Sophie… this guy embodies every shade of shadiness.”

He could detect the panic in her eyes. “He’s smarter than most people give him credit for.… Just because his dad’s a Neanderthal…”

“Sweetie, you can’t see him anymore.”

Her eyes brimmed with angry tears. “That is so bigoted,” she cried. “How can you say such a bigoted thing?”

“Your mother wouldn’t want it. I don’t want it.”

She crossed her arms and rocked back and forth, biting back the tears.

“This can never happen again.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she said in a high, reedy voice, failing to comprehend the significance of what had just happened, how close she’d come to dying.

“You lied to me,” he said. “You said you were going back to class.”

“So?”

Shock waves. Still in shock. Count to ten and take a deep breath. “Excuse me?”

“Revelation, Dad. I’m not perfect.”

He resisted the urge to overreact. “We shouldn’t be talking about this right now. We’ll talk about it later.”

Her head sank lower. “You don’t have any right to tell me who I can or can’t see,” she said, fingering the locket at her throat, those tiny silver links. “It’s a free country.”

“Do you understand what I’m saying at all?”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand!”

His pager beeped, and he snapped it off his belt. It was Mike. “Honey,” he said to her, “I’ve gotta take this.”

“Don’t touch me!” She jerked away. “Go make your stupid phone call.”

He activated his cell phone. “What is it, Mike?”

“There’s been a double homicide, Chief. Last night in Texas. A middle-aged couple, unusual circumstances. A tornado touched down about three hundred yards from the house.”

He felt the news like a feather tickling the back of his neck. “How soon can you get here?” he said.