Chase Me If You Can(58)
No one says a word. Wes plants himself next to me, arms crossed and radiating tension. Tracy watches the sky with her hands shoved in her pockets, while Matt paces a short circuit, constantly looking down at the radar app on his phone.
“Funnel.” Matt is the first to spot it, one finger pointing upward. His voice is flat, all the usual excitement stripped out by the gravity of what’s about to happen.
“Don’t do it, you bastard,” I mutter under my breath as it wobbles above the town. My stomach knots with dread. “Don’t you dare do it.”
Wind howls past us, strong enough to send me stumbling. Wes tugs me into his side, his body warm, his scent familiar, and presses a kiss to my temple. Whatever low words of comfort he murmurs are lost on the wind.
We watch in horror as the funnel lowers. Our pleas and curses are entirely ineffective. I’m already dialing the emergency number to call it in when an explosion of dirt transforms the swirling vortex from funnel to tornado. Sirens start to wail less than a minute after I hang up. There’s nothing we can do but watch as a stovepipe forms, the column of whirling air quickly turning a blackish brown as it sucks up dirt and debris.
The steel grain silos perched at the edge of town break apart like wet paper as they’re sucked into the murk of the storm, quickly followed by a flash of blue-green light and a loud boom as the first transformer blows. The noise turns deafening. The high-pitched train whistle of the tornado, the roar of the wind, thunder, and more exploding transformers tear the evening apart one after the other like apocalyptic dominoes.
When you see a disaster on TV, there’s a boundary to it; it can’t exist beyond the confines of your screen. On the ground, there’s no escaping it. I’ve never been to a war zone, but I have to think it’s not unlike the aftermath of a tornado ripping through a town. It’s a level of destruction almost too big for the mind to handle.
Seconds are all it takes. One minute, we’re staring at a row of neat houses. The next, trees are ripped out at their roots, roofs are missing, windows are blown out, walls are shredded like tissue, and cars are tossed upside down like toys.
The tornado is still visible, the debris field widening as it roars through the town. With tornado warnings posted fifteen minutes before it touched down, I can only hope residents took it seriously and everyone is safe in a storm shelter.
“Let’s go.” My voice is hoarse as I turn back toward the car. “We shouldn’t drive too far into town in case there’s a gas leak. Wes grabbed some extra water earlier. There’s probably wires down, and they might be live, so we need to—”
“Sloane.” Wes grabs hold of my shoulders in a gentle but firm touch. “We’ve all done this before.” He leans his forehead against mine for a few precious seconds, takes a long breath, and then opens my door for me. The sirens continue to wail behind us. “I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”
I nod, squeeze his hand one more time, and steel myself for what’s coming. It doesn’t escape me that Wes never says it will be okay. We both know that while it might be true for us, for the people who live here, it’s not.
It only takes a few minutes to reach the edge of the destruction. Uprooted trees tangle in downed power lines. Shingles lay scattered across the road like confetti. Glass crunches under my boots when I get out of the car, the scent of freshly split wood heavy in the air.
We move quickly, emptying our camera bags and leaving our gear tucked under the seats. It’s replaced by first aid supplies and bottles of water. I hand Wes the small axe I keep in my emergency kit, stuff another bottle of water in my bag for good measure, and then take a long, slow breath.
His hand grazes my lower back in a comforting touch. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s help who we can.”
After making sure Tracy and Matt have plenty of water bottles to hand out too, Wes and I head in one direction while they take another. We’ll cover more ground in separate pairs.
The first couple of houses aren’t damaged too badly, families emerging unscathed from their storm shelters. But as we move deeper into town, the damage quickly grows worse. I peer into cars parked on the side of the road with their windows smashed out, relieved when I find them empty.
I try very hard not to think about the image of Wes’s car in a similar state and how badly that could have ended. Our eyes catch when I reach out to squeeze his hand. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one thinking about that moment right now by the way his throat bobs before he looks pointedly away.
We start knocking on what’s left of front doors, ears straining for cries for help in the near-deafening silence that falls once the tornado sirens abruptly cut out. No one answers, but at the muffled bark of a dog, Wes glances back at me before shoving his shoulder into the door we just knocked on. Hard.
“Anyone inside?” he shouts, ducking under the branch that’s sticking through one of the front windows. “Call out if you need help!”
The house groans when he pushes his way inside. “Careful!” I hiss, reaching for the back of his T-shirt and grabbing a fistful of fabric. “You don’t need to get trapped in there too.”
This time, the barking is accompanied by the faint sound of a man’s voice, too quiet to make out words. Wes hesitates, takes another step into the house, and waits to see if anything else shifts. “I’ll be okay,” he says over his shoulder, but that doesn’t stop him from pointing toward the debris-littered yard. “Wait out here while I see what we’re dealing with.”