Chapter Text
There’s a cardboard cutout of a field sparrow that hangs from the rearview of her weather van, wings outspread and bedraggled, water dripping from the ends of the feathers. Rare sun has faded the photo, washing out into watercolor. The edges are cracking and the tape’s starting to peel up on one side, but Meryl doesn’t take it down.
The birds know first. That’s one of the signs.
Her radio’s turned all the way down so that the loudest sound is tires on gravel, the crunch of the debris that litters the blacktop. A transformer snaps and crackles at the end of the road; the utility pole is an older model, wooden, like many in Amish country, and snapped in half, shedding sparks into the bare dirt below.
She drives slow, leading the pack of cars and emergency responders behind her. Over the klaxon, Meryl’s radio bursts to staticky life, the codes coming through clearly as the police scanner crackles from the dashboard, eerie twin to the spitting transformer.
“Damn, you think they know about that?” Roberto asks, gruff in a way she reads right through. “Should we call it in?”
Milly speaks up from her orange tail truck. “It’ll only get worse the closer in that we get. The responders can handle it.”
“We can’t fix it,” Meryl agrees, speaking into her handheld. It’s familiar in her palm, wrapped in leather smoothed by her thumb over many nail bitten rides. She holds the receiver close to her mouth. “We’ll only get electrocuted if we try to help. Besides, the dirt is too wet to burn. Leave it.”
The makeshift caravan crawls past the crackling pole. She’s in the back of her beloved weather van, seated at the bank of blipping monitors. The multiple screens show a complex assortment of colored lines across the map of the county around them. Some of the lines intersect, but most scrawl across the landscape in straight patterns, formations she often sees in her sleep.
“How do we look?” Roberto asks, his voice tight. He sounds tired. It’s been a long day on the road to reach a destination where the wind’s already died down to nothing.
Meryl answers, “We’re late. The storm passed through three hours ago.”
Out the windshield she can spot nothing but damage as far as the drenched horizon stretches. With one last heavy sigh at her bank of computers and tech, she clambers into the passenger seat for a better analogue view.
Roberto’s gray face stares straight ahead at the road, maneuvering around the larger clumps of shattered trees. She’s reading the landscape, cataloging how the pieces lie, points of line the destruction follows, which way the corn lies flattened.
All the corn for the last ten miles points the same direction, downed as if rolled by barrels. A flutter runs through her at the sight. “Estimate?”
“Hard to say,” Roberto (he’s driving?) reads the printouts with an expert eye in the rearview. “No touchdowns recorded— only straight line winds.”
That decides it, though she’s guessed already. Sirens go off for anything over 70 mph, rotation or not.
Meryl hits her radio on. “Guys,” she announces. “It’s a derecho.”
“Hell yeah,” Milly replies, gruff and joyous. “Roberto, you lose! Pay up,” she laughs over the radio, crackly like the gravel under their tires. “I win this time, Smoke-face.”
Even Meryl laughs at the look on her driver’s face at the teasing words.
“You two are vicious,” Roberto complains, eyes on the road, on tree limbs and fence posts and the blind hands of wires slumped over the hedges.
“Guys, guys, wait,” Meryl says sharply and the artificial crackles quiet down over the speaker system. “What did I say about bets?”
“Don’t tempt fate?” Milly guesses. “Sorry, Shortie.”
Roberto passes a street sign, one of the few things left upright. Jenora Rock, 3 miles. She speaks into her radio again, eyes on the bloated sky. “We’re getting close. Ready the drones.”
“Okay.” The words echo from the two different vehicles. The last okay comes from Roberto, huffing away in the driver’s seat.
She studies the corn with a keen eye, scrolling through increasingly out of date radar readouts. Local news is the only reliable source for primary accounts, but the power grid hasn’t quite recovered yet. She knows there will be little help from the national guard; it’s been years since national networks or the military cared about the storms or the people they hit, the people they leave behind.
Roberto asks, “How widespread was the stormline?”
“Forty miles,” She hedges, calculating on the fly. “And it tracked for nearly 150.”
It’s not the worst trajectory, all in all. “Mostly corn?” he asks, and swerves gently around a tree trunk that lies broken on the road. There’s few trees in this part of the state, all young, springy, many eerily the same height. The ones that have survived the storms this long, or been replanted during one recovery project or another, are stripped naked and plucked bare. The ones still upright are ugly and thin; either spring will revitalize them, or the next storm will tear them down. More light poles still stand, their lines strewn haphazardly about. This county’s old enough, low income enough, that the telephone lines are all strung along with the power, not carried underground like in the emptying cities. It’s a miracle there’s no fire yet; the mud too wet to burn, the corn too green to smolder.
“Corn and Amish,” Meryl says as Roberto snorts. “Jenora Rock is the only city in the path.”
“Thank the lord Iowa is so godforsaking empty,” Meryl continues, her radio muted, a curious relief beginning to mix with the odder disappointment.
“Pity about the corn,” Roberto sighs. Its all she can see: corn, and the sky, still settling. “That’s a family’s whole life. An entire season lost.”
She shrugs. “The crop is insured,” she says. “It’s the people I’m worried about.”
They reach the town at a snail’s pace. As far as storm damage goes, she’s seen worse. A lot worse. A few corrugated tin roofs are gone, peeled back like the lids of sardines to expose the interior of the buildings. The smaller downtown is lined by old Victorians, colored like gemstones, but only the most devout or the most idiotic trust glass these days. The reinforced shutters held, even if branded wrap is visible through missing siding, the holes like gaps in teeth. Plucked trees, crooked fences, and downed power lines aside, it’s not that bad. Meryl’s seen the landscape swept clean down to the bare dirt, pressed flat as if by the hand of God himself. Jenora Rock’s still standing stubborn and forlorn as the people who still live here, like nothing so severe as sustained 75 mph straight line winds tore through just hours ago. The rescue effort’s well underway, with firetrucks flashing silent lights at the intersection outside the courthouse as linemen struggle to get the lights back on.
Nothing’s burning; the air is blessedly smoke-free. The sirens have been shut off and the activity in the square is a balm. Its when the storm ends and all is quiet after that she knows it was the kind of bad she’s searching for.
Roberto parks the van outside City Hall. Her two-van caravan rolls to a stop behind them and Roberto stands and stretches, creaky as an old tree. The late afternoon light shines muggy through the carbonized windows. It’s overcast, the sky a dreary gray above the flat line of the horizon. It’s humid, but not enticingly so. The pressure’s stabilized as the barometer levels out.
Meryl knows to look to the sky first, checking the formations above for dangerous patterns, but these clouds are thin and flat, heavy-bottomed with more rain. It’s a sluggish, tired sky, and that makes it safe.
A cop greets her by name, forgoing her first name in favor of her work moniker. “Storm Strife,” he greets her after taking a long look at her heavily modified van. “I’d ask what brings the CAD crew here, but I have a feeling I could guess.”
He kicks aside a leafy length of snapped off branch with his foot; its white birch, popular in the Midwest for its bendiness, its survivability in high wind, even before the storms shifted into something personal. The Sheriff is a heavyset man with graying stubble. His eyes shine as tiredly as the badge at his chest as he points to the courthouse with no small amount of windbitten, hardscrabble pride. “Welcome to Jenora Rock. She’s seen worse than this. We’ll recover fine.”
It’s bravado that she can respect. It takes a certain type of gumption to stay in the path of the storms, when so many have left.
Meryl takes a practiced scope of the town. “Even with as minor as the Derecho was, we’ll need to catalogue the damage and track how the winds reacted to the landscape here. Do you mind if we use this intersection as a base point for our drones?”
The linemen have the area already blocked off from what few cars clutter the dirty roads. Jenora Rock is far enough out that the people on the road are locals, taking stock. There’re no disaster tourists, at least, not yet. The overhead traffic lights are dead as doornails. It’s the perfect spot.
“Sure,” the officer answers. “It’ll be a while before we get the lights working anyhow. Plus, I’ve always wanted to watch CAD in action, sad as that sounds.”
“I understand,” Meryl says. Its always been a paradox: the relief, the regret. The fascination never enough to cover the terror, and vice versa, the risk and reward tough to make reconcile even on a sunny day.
But if anyone understands why storm chasers throw themselves into the paths of Twisters like CAD does, it’s the Sheriff of a town full of people who have refused to leave year after year.
Milly interrupts them, coming around the front of her armored pickup after loudly slamming the door. Meryl sees the cop do a double-take at the sight of her. Milly’s big; big and tall and muscular with it, with legs like a super model and shoulders like a linebacker. There’s an old cartoon that used to play when she was a girl in Philadelphia, a place full of bridges and rust, deteriorating in a different way than the Midwest. In the cartoon, a cowboy lassoes and wrestles a tornado.
It was in good taste, then. It probably wouldn’t air now. Regardless, if anyone looks like they could go hand to hand with a storm bank, it’s Milly. She walks like she knows it, too. There’s even an excited bounce in her step as she surveys the town square.
“Meryl,” Milly says, loud as everything she does. “Drone’s ready for flight. Gotta launch em’ ‘fore the engines cool.”
The thick, unapologetic accent takes the Sheriff by suprise almost as much as her size, but Meryl’s long used to it. “Check with Roberto first,” Meryl yells back. “If the tech’s good, launch them.”
“Alrighty, Miss,” Milly yells back, thumbs through the straps of her overalls. She’s excited as she disappears back around the edge of her heavy van. The words Central Alley Division are dull, printed down the side paneling in a way that makes the stylized twister look like it’s chasing the letters rather than the other way around. Originally, the idea was for the logo to shine in sun, but they don’t get much of that, here. The paint isn’t pristine. It’s been battered to hell and back. Pockmarks score the color down to the gray steel underneath, scarred from past hailstones and razor scratches from airborne debris
It’s a stormchaser’s dream. She wouldn’t trade it for anything.
She bangs on the side of the van until Roberto sticks his graying head out the side window at her, scowling. She’s interrupted his own study of the readouts. “What?”
“Get ready to launch,” she orders, and the cop whistles at her side as Roberto’s scowl vanishes. The Sheriff eagerly follows her as she starts her round up, her radio clipped at her belt.
She checks the second truck, Milly’s riotous orange monstrosity. The truck bed’s folded open to the sky above, steel doors pulled back to reveal the tech crammed inside. Milly fiddles with a drone in her arms; Roberto appears and goes to work straightening the blades of a second drone. Their low hum fills the air.
“CAD 2, report,” Meryl says, and Milly answers her.
“Drones are warmed up and ready,” Milly replies, spitting hair out her mouth as she speaks. There’s no wind here, not anymore, but the buzzing drone in her arms makes its own breeze, the feel of it on her face a little like the grace of air conditioner, a little like the thrill of danger.
Roberto speaks up from where he’s wrestling with a drone and losing. “All but this one,” he says, shaking the thing. “It’s got a locked up propeller.”
“Give it to Milly,” Meryl says as the other stormchaser pulls out a flathead screwdriver with a vengeance. Roberto surrenders the drone and Milly doesn’t sway with the weight of it. The flying contraption is a modern marvel, a grid-like square with a downwards facing bubble camera below four propeller arms that whirr like helicopter blades. The three-foot-long device is entirely a cool gray except for the crimson trim around the camera lens. This drone is number 34, the number printed in scarlet on it’s top.
Meryl mentally subtracts one drone from her swarm as a tired Roberto appears at her side. His glasses are askew and he’s leaning heavily on the cane he still insists he doesn’t need, it’s butt planted firmly in the dirt. “Shortie? We’re ready.”
“Weather?” She double checks. Her drones are good fliers but they’re no match for strong winds or storm formations. They’re meant for stable air only, and its been maybe 20 minutes since she’s laid eyes on her screens. That’s plenty of time for the bottom to drop out.
“Calm now that the derecho is passed,” Roberto assures her. “We can launch.”
Milly and Roberto look at her expectantly. Milly’s still struggling with the busted drone, her tongue between her teeth, scowling as she jabs the screwdriver at the left rear propeller capsule.
“Leave it, Milly,” Meryl says gently. They’re losing time. “You can work on it later. Stations, people!” she claps her hands, herding her team into position at the side of CAD Two. Roberto throws open the back of CAD One’s rear doors to climb back inside.
CAD 2’s passenger door opens. Milly stumbles out and hands her the printouts for the local terrain. Meryl scans them quickly and likes what she sees. This part of Iowa is as flat as it comes, not the gently rolling hills of lake country, not the north chewed up by glaciers eons ago.
Roberto hands her the drone launch pad with all its little buttons, configurations she’d designed in the graduate program she’d abandoned to follow radar from one tormented side of the alley to the next.
“Ready, Strife?”
“Come on, Meryl,” Milly cheers. “Launch them!”
She grins back at her team and hits the big red button on her launch pad. Even after a year of running the drones, the sight of their liftoff still fills her with awe.
With a dull roar of propeller blades, the swarm rises in an orderly fashion from the bed of CAD 2. There’s 40 drones, 39 with Milly’s troublesome one grounded. Meryl wrote the program they follow, organizing themselves into groups, analyzing the landscape data uploaded into their processors. They peel off the main pack in lines, zippy and nimble for something so sizable.
It’s a wonderous sight. A marvel. Another thing she sees in her dreams.
The cameras guide them, locking in on pinned landmarks and GPS coordinates to figure out their location, and join the grid pattern that begins sweeping across the town. The drones will fly over everything, cataloging the direction of the damage, calculating wind flow, and analyzing the terrain along an XY axis. Later, once the data’s in, she can piece together the pattern in the mess of lines the drones provide.
And it is pattern recognition, well studied, informed by years of field experience and years spent bend over a keyboard, not an exercise in instinct and keen-eyed intuition. As much as Milly insists on her precognition, she’s just good at her job.
It’s amazing to watch the drones work. They’re independent little things, stubborn almost. They sweep by overhead before heading out into the suburbs and fields. It’ll take hours for them to scan everything, but their batteries have a five-hour lifespan before they go down. It’ll take less time than that to sweep an area this small and relatively undamaged. The storm system they’d been chasing was a long line of red on the Doppler, a bow echo that transformed into a derecho before falling apart after a long track of destruction. So far, the only reported casualties have been the corn crop: a billion dollar loss in this part of the state. It’s economically devastating and there’s really nothing to do for it but rake up the flattened corn and grind the stalks into silage. That’s all its good for now.
The cop whistles at the sight of the streaming drones. “That’s some science fiction,” he says. “You really think those drones’ll help solve the storm problem?”
Calling it a storm problem is a misnomer, but one she thinks the locals cling too. It makes it easier, to imply that a potential fix exists. But severe storms have only strengthened over the last five years. Whole areas have been abandoned as high-risk for tornadoes, strong ones, the kind that don’t leave life behind them. This derecho is a blessing compared to what that bow echo might have sprung. Jenora Rock is lucky.
“There’s a theory I’m working on,” Meryl admits. “Everything we learn gets us closer to helping prevent loss of life and economic destruction.”
The Sherriff takes a second to wave at a passing car, the windows down, snapping pictures of the drones overhead. There’s a kid in the backseat, face lit up with awe as he looks at the sky.
Meryl says, “we can’t stop the storms, but if we can swing them away from populated areas, or at least predict where they’ll strike, we can save lives.”
The cop nods, his face grave. This is the Midwest, smack in the middle of the Central Tornado Alley. Everyone knows someone lost within the last seven years of storms. There’s even a name for those killed by tornadoes, the act getting its own verb—the Twisted.
“How long will your scans take?” the officer asks, gazing upward, like so many others.
“Few hours,” Roberto grunts, his nose buried in the datapad in his hands. “Maybe less.”
Meryl peeks eagerly over his shoulder at the data that’s coming in. Right now, its thin black lines across the barest hint of a map of Jenora Rock. Even as she watches, the map solidifies, holes patching themselves as the drones scan them in. It’ll be a 3D image soon, perfect enough that not a detail gets left out.
Milly gives a sharp yell from the bed of her pickup and comes out running, hefting the drone up. It takes off out her outstretched arms as she throws the thing into the sky.
“Fixed it. Old bird had a busted rotator wire.” She’s grinning as the drone smoothly climbs to altitude.
“Thanks, Milly,” Meryl says gratefully, and the engineer zeroes in on her, coming closer.
“Hey, Meryl,” she asks, gnawing on her lip. “About that bet, you know what the terms were?”
There’s something sly in her eyes that instantly has Meryl on full alert. She resists the urge to cover her ears like a child. “Do I need to know?”
“Need, want, what’s the real difference between those two things?” Milly shrugs. “If I were you, I’d keep a close eye on that whiskey bottle you keep under your front seat.”
“Roberto wouldn’t dare,” Meryl threatens, digging in her heels. “He wouldn’t dare.” Roberto may be older, but this is Meryl’s outfit. She’s the boss here.
Milly shrugs. “Take it up with him,” she offers. “He set the terms, not me.”
“Smoke-face!” she calls out, loudly rounding on the older man. He walks over with only the slightest of limps, a leftover from a childhood encounter with a tornado that put the stormchasing bug into him.
“Meryl,” Roberto greets as he catches the murderous look on her face. “Something wrong, girl?”
She digs her fingers into her temples, massaging the skin there. “I’m locking CAD 1,” she states. “I’ll keep all the keys on me for the time being. No one’s getting in my van without my say so.”
Roberto doesn’t do her the service of looking surprised. Instead, he’s overwrought. “She told you the terms?”
“If you touch that bottle,” she threatens. Overhead, a drone flies by in a buzz of chopper blades.
“I won’t,” Roberto reassures her. They both know it’s a lie, but it’s the good kind of lie: the kind that’ll be funny later, once she’s done being mad about it.
Behind them, Milly laughs like a rooster crowing.
…
The CAD crew races along the empty highway, overhead lights flashing. The road is straight as an arrow, wide enough for horse buggies, and pointing into the mouth of furious hell.
The system they’re chasing started in the west and is racing eastward across the plains, crushing everything underfoot. There’s already reports pouring in about multiple tornadoes on the ground, and hail the size of softballs. The line of thunderheads Roberto’s driving at is a solid bar of red of the Doppler. They’ll meet it in the middle, where a thankfully desolate stretch of land will be the test point for a theory Meryl’s been working on for the past five years.
It’s a beautiful setup. She couldn’t have planned this better if she tried— a long stretch of storms a hundred miles long, hitting no major populated areas, nothing but angry horizon on all sides.
They’re getting closer. They’ve been driving westward for an hour, speeding at the storm system where it’s red is the thickest, it’s winds the most volatile and erratic. But there’s a predictability in the recklessness that forms these supercells, a routine she’s learned to watch unfold and guess at where the twister will touchdown.
She’s very rarely wrong.
Milly confirms her guess over the radio, speaking urgently as the sky before her darkens to a steely black. The wall of the thunderhead looms like a giant, it’s leading edge a solid mass of roiling gray. She’s got her eyes glued to the screens, watching the storm unfold into something monstrous over the radar.
“Meryl!” Milly yells into the mic, her voice crackling with interference, static in the air from the barometer dropping, a warning she feels ghost over the back of her neck, her arms. “This is going to be a big one. You’re sure about this?”
“Incoming!” Roberto yells, and Meryl’s windshield takes a battering as hailstones begin to crash down. The reinforced acrylic holds without cracking as she engages the shields that’ll protect the driver’s and passenger side windows. The metal plates slide down as the light from her equipment intensifies in the new darkness. The only visible window is the windshield, but the cameras around the sides of the van let her see everything clearly, recording everything that’s happening.
The storm’s in her blood, the ever-present lightning flashing alongside her heartbeat. Her pulse races like the wind around them, breath coming in quick little pants. The AC’s throwing freezing air at them and she shivers as Roberto steers straight at the black line of the sky like space itself is mad and about to drop down to the ground and thrash it for existing.
The sky underneath the cloud shelf is muzzy with driving rain and hail, but no fingers stretch downwards yet. This storm is an angry thing but there’s no danger yet, not for their reinforced and armored vehicles. Even Milly’s pickup could take the sized hailstones with ease.
“Straight at it,” she calls into her radio. “Hold steady. We’re doing this.”
It’s too much of a perfect opportunity to miss. This storm system is a godsend, a fully-formed supercell that rages and twists above them. The winds lash at the van, howling past the sharp pings of the ice against the roof. There’s no other cars on the road; everyone else cleared out as soon as the storm threat alert went out. There’s no sirens out here, not this far into the flat nothingness of the state, but these days, everyone keeps an eye on the sky and an ear for the weather alerts.
“We’re going in!” she yells, and the rain hits them like a blow as Roberto passes into the storm itself. The rain is all around them. It’s all she can hear. The headlights cut through the wet murk, and Roberto keeps them on the road. It’s a nasty storm but it’s nothing unmanageable. The road is paved instead of gravel or dirt rutted with wagon wheels and horse shit. Their tires are designed for traction here. CAD 1 will handle it.
“Milly?” He questions, his voice a sharp bark of sound.
“Radar’s clear,” she replies. She’s their eyes in the sky now that visibility is so poor, CAD 2’s instruments peeling back the area around them until the landscape’s clear as a sunny day.
He slows, keeping with the worst of the downpour now that they’ve caught up to the leading, volatile edge. What she wouldn’t give to launch her swarm inside this system, but the conditions are poor for flying and the hail would tear the drones to shreds. They have to do this old-school: drive within the storm, record everything from the road and their vans, and pour over the data later.
She studies the radar, has Roberto stop the van, and turns the caravan around to avoid driving through the thickest part. They stay with the leading edge, enduring the beating of the hail like it’s nothing. As loud and furious as this supercell sounds, she doesn’t feel like it’ll pop off a tornado. The sky looks wrong for it, too uniform gray, the rain edge too messy. There’s no feeling of impending disaster, of humid warmth on the back of her head, wind currents like large animal breathing. The field sparrow jitters from the rearview mirror, bouncing.
“This is fine,” Milly radios back. She can hear the grin in her voice. Not many people think driving willingly into a storm system is good fun, but there’s a fever in them, a hunger that only stormchasers get, that bug that sets them apart and drives them into ongoing natural disasters. It’s an itch that can’t get scratched, in any of them.
Meryl scowls, and they slow further as the rain beats at them. This storm will not produce a tornado, not unless a lot of things intensify quickly. Tornados require a delicate but ham fisted roster of conditions to manifest, and this isn’t it. The sky’s not even green. It’s another dud storm, another heartbreak.
“Meryl?” Milly radios in, her voice rushed from the CAD 2 behind them. “Confirmed tornado on the ground, tracking eastward south of here! Just came through the police scanner!”
She doesn’t double check the equipment as Roberto floors the gas, ripping forward. “Get me to it,” she tells him over the sound of the rain. “Milly, send me the location if you can. Keep me updated.”
“Roger,” Roberto replies, stomping the gas harder. He’s the only true Midwesterner among them, as much as he insists that north Texas doesn’t count. But he’d grown up in the flatlands, has a feel for the way roads are laid out, the neat squares so different from the unplanned urban sprawl she’d grown up in. She trusts him to not lead her astray, not even in blinding rain and driving hail. He’s kept her out of the ditch enough times she half-thinks his eyes see better in the rain than on a clear day.
“Woohoo!” Milly yells, loud and exuberant. Her voice crackles over the radio, like thunder. “We’ve got our shot in hell today!”
“Everyone, move!” Meryl orders, eyes on the cameras. Their windshield wipers are useless against the downpour. They begin the race again.
The next supercell is southwards, and they race at an angle to intercept it, leaving the original storm behind. Supercells used to track in bands like ripples on a pond, each new line petering out in strength.
Not anymore.
She sees it on radar now, the barest hint of rotation. Other instruments start pinging confirmations. Roberto hears from the drivers seat and swears.
“Milly?” she calls, and CAD 2 answers.
“I have a tornado on radar,” she says. “The image is nice and clear. Atmospheric debris is confirmed.”
“’Bout time,” Meryl says eagerly and her heart is racing. Her knuckles are white across the dials as CAD 1 hums true below her, the tires eating the miles between them.
Her teammate carries them true. Each sideroad and farm track gets them closer and closer. Her team’s been doing this for years. A lot of what they do doesn’t need words anymore; their teamwork is so precise.
When she catches a glimpse through the driving rain of the stormline across the horizon, she knows this is the one. The cloudbank is a dark, furious black, dropped low in the sky. Its leading edge is seething and wind-churned, ragged edges whipped into a frenzy. The divide between sky and land starts to clear; Roberto’s instinctively gotten them to the clear side of it, the calm between the rainbands, the calm before the storm.
No rain muzzies the sky this time even as early hail reaches them. The most notable difference about this stormcell is the fat finger of cloud that drags itself across the earth. This twister is no lean, meandering whisp. Some tornados are beautiful, elegant, long twirls that dance nimbly against the sky, eerie and ethereal all at once.
This tornado isn’t like that idealized picture. Few are, these days. This tornado is a squat black beast that tracks in a straight line, a sharp V of debris thrown skyward around it. It doesn’t narrow down to a point, like a kids drawing would depict; the base must be at least half a mile across, and the kicked up debris makes it all the deadlier at touchdown.
In the past, a superburst this size would have thrown a neat F1— some lanky, loopy thing the gray of a freshly hatched swan. Maybe some roofs would get damaged. Maybe a few powerlines got downed and lawn furniture tossed about.
But there are no weak storms now. There are no more F1s inside the Central Alley. The days of such easy twisters are over, and this tornado has been tracking for nearly 75 minutes, leaving a mile-wide stretch of destruction behind it.
Soon, the goal will be to stop these twisters in their tracks. Her years-long theory is in the workshop. But that’s years and dozens of failed trials away. Now, all she can do is steer herself into the path of the storm and pray.
“Roberto, do you trust me?” she yells at him. The radio crackles with interference at her side, Milly’s protest drowned out by the thunder. The roar of the wind grows louder, an exhale like a drawn-out moan rattling through the van.
It’s the sound people get wrong, in the movies. You can’t easily reproduce the wound on the world that is a twister chewing up the land underfoot. You hear freight train comparisons a lot, and she used to like those, the sense of something weighty bearing down on you.
But nothing compares. Tornados don’t sound like anything else. They’re singular, and they sing and scream and weep and rage all at once.
It’s a sound that’s in her bones: a tornado’s breath. She can’t ever forget it. Nothing else comes close.
This, she has nightmares about.
When the lightning flashes in thunderous, illuminating stripes of bright white, the sky glows green above her. “Roberto?” They’re losing road, Milly yelling at her in a tinny buzz that’s almost lost in the noise.
“Go for it,” he yells back, and he floors the gas pedal to pull ahead of the twister, running parallel to it, still at a safe distance, waiting for a crossroad to meet it on.
She doesn’t need a safe distance. She needs to be closer.
The radio’s in her hand. She hopes Milly can hear now that the rain’s not beating an erratic drill against the steel shutters on the windows. “CAD 2, pull back. I repeat, CAD 2, pull back.”
Smaller twisters can be unpredictable. They can swing around without warning, backtrack and twist sideways. Large ones like this get rooted in their tracks. They get comfortable, settle in. It makes them more powerful but more predictable, and she’s reading this storm like an open book.
The whip crack of a downed powerline lashes at them, the winds screaming like banshees. She’s not afraid of the CAD rolling. All CAD vans are weighted at the bottom to prevent the air from getting underneath and flipping them. It’s not foolproof, but it works fine for the peripherals she helps Roberto maneuver CAD 1 through.
“How close can we get?” she asks Roberto, still yelling to be heard over the sound of the hail, of the thunder, the spitting rain.
“Not much closer,” he says, and he’s leaning forward, ignoring the equipment behind him, eyes fixed out the windshield. She can see the clouds reflected in his eyes. “You’re sure about this?”
“We won’t get another one this perfect,” she answers, and the dust from under the tires as he floors it down the hardpack road is lost to the sky, more dust to fuel the dark clouds.
“Are you sure?” he repeats, his face lined with stress. He’s not like her. When he looks at the raging sky around them, the fear settles into him. It’s mixed with awe and respect and understanding, but the fear is still strong. It’s the one bad habit she’s never tried to nag him out of. It won’t let itself be ignored and his hands shake.
“Get me into position,” she orders, and then leaves him to the task. The van never swerves. Even with shaking hands, few people will ever be able to outdrive Roberto and none of them could do it in weather like this.
In the back of the van, Meryl pulls out a long black case. It’s fingerprint and PIN protected. Inside is what looks like a modified shoulder fired RPG that she loads with precise movements, snapping the parts together as the van bounces along.
The roar outside grows louder and it could never be mistaken as a train engine’s squeal. It’s too eerie and distant, but the sound’s deceptive. She knows it can’t be as close as it feels. Regardless, it rattles down her throat and lights her nerves on fire. She straps on a motorcycle helmet and arm guards like skaters wear, shoulder pads like a linebacker. It’s full-body armor.
She shoulders the rocket as the van screeches to a sudden halt as Roberto’s nerves fail. They’re as close as he dares. He must hit the button that opens the back doors because she sees the seals disengage, the light turning green.
She charges out smoothly and hell itself pours in behind her.
The hail is a hit from every direction, but she doesn’t feel it. Adrenaline surges through her, masking the pain. It feels like just more pressure from the system, and smells sharp, like ozone, like humidity, like every threat she’s catalogued and labeled over the years. Rain splatters across the visor but nothing can disguise her target. It’s as large as the sky itself, black and angry.
She wishes she were closer, but this will have to do. She breathes in the damp air, hair whipping around even inside her helmet as the wind forces itself into every smallest passageway.
She lifts the rocket. The missile it fires is a targeted probe packed with instruments and cameras and equipment to study the tornado from the inside. All she has to do is aim at a half-mile-wide target that’s bearing down on her position along a gravel path between two cornfields.
She can’t miss.
She fires the rocket. It’s as point-blank as she can get it. The tornado’s debris field is 3/4ths of a mile away and closing quickly but she waits and watches the shot streak at the cyclone. It’s closer than any lucky person will ever be to such a funnel, but that’s not how she earned her nickname. The rocket’s hard to track by eye when it gets close, then it vanishes into the debris. She can only hope it hits true.
She climbs back inside the van, wrestles with the wind for the doors, and Roberto speeds away when he hears the hiss of the seals engage. Behind them, the tornado crosses over where they were with a roar. Once it’s done, the fields will be bare dirt as far as the eye can see. Her blood sings with the storm outside.
When she sees the data begin to pour in, her lungs release. It’s a victory. Milly’s cheering is the first thing she hears once the roar fades.
It’s only later she hears the death toll. There’s always a death toll, even with the few and far between storm shelters in cities. Weather, natural disasters, used to be one of the great equalizers. Storms didn’t care who you were, how much money you had. There’s no bargaining with a twister. But the discrepancy has become clear, over the years, especially as the wealthy fled. Most places are still stuck with basements that were built a hundred years ago and outdated siren systems, and there’s power outs at hospitals and powerlines down across roads. It’s been nearly a decade and the rescue effort is still slow to get off the ground.
In Amish country, they don’t even have cell phone alerts to warn them. People say the animals can tell, that by watching them, you know when to retreat underground. If anyone would know to follow the signs, it’s the countryfolk the weathermen left behind.
The rocket CAD 1 launched into the funnel struck home and is recovered without issue. The data it holds is part of the reason why the newer sirens are up to twenty minutes early now.
20 precious minutes to get to safety. 9 dead is tragic, but 5 years ago it would have been 100.
Meryl Strife watches the news from a diner booth, her team at her side. This should be a celebration. They’ve done it, the critical step forward, the step closer.
It’s not enough. It’s never enough. She picks at the slice of pie on a plate before her, pushing it around with her fork. Milly’s just holding her coffee, Roberto grinding his teeth.
Her radio crackles to life at her hip and her hand flies to answer it. Coordinates crackle through.
Another storm. There’s always another storm.
Roberto handles the tip as Milly packs up the leftovers. Her team rolls eagerly out before the quarters stop spinning on the diner’s table.
…
A motorcycle chases the horizon’s bleak edge, waylaid by the storms. It’s a sleek model, rare in these parts. On it rides a stranger, and he’s in love, unwisely, with the purr of its engine, the freedom it offers him. There’s a cross around his neck and God’s promise in his heart, and he knows better than to test the wrath of either of those things, precious as they are to him, burdensome as he lets them become.
The sky sings to him too, in a different way. There’s a downdraft in his soul, sucking him closer and closer to the stormline at the edge of the sky.
He’s so caught up in listening to the storm call to him that the van comes out of nowhere, appearing out of the droll mists like a wraith.
His motorcycle goes crunch. Wolfwood thinks he might go crunch as well.
…
Above them, far above them, the clouds twist and writhe as the eye of the supercell stares down at them from the heavens. Everything holds its breath. It seems like the very rain hangs in the air for an instant.
And for the first time, as Meryl battles the light rain to reach the struck figure on the ground, she almost feels like the sky is watching her back.