Damascus Road (17 page)

My clothes were laid out the night before, so I dressed
quickly. Jeans and boots and black t-shirt. I dropped my knife in my pocket,
then picked out the rest of my gear. I had a SureFire mini-flashlight and GPS
built into my phone. I was certain that there would be a hundred other things
that I would need in the moment, but I had to go with what I had.

I hit the door and headed for the car. My bag went in the
trunk and I got in, turning over the engine and dropping it into first gear. I
cruised quietly around the building, taking solace in the presence of the
Suburban and the pickup truck still parked out front. They were still at the
hotel.

I walked in, wearing my jacket, ready to ride at a moment’s
notice. The team was grazing on the continental breakfast spread. Bud and Duff
had helped themselves to sweet rolls the size of my fist and were bickering
about the biggest tornadoes they had ever seen.

“I’m telling you that tornado was no more than an F3, maybe
an F4,” Bud said.

“Easily an F5, newbie,” Duff said, nonplussed.

I looked past them to Grace and Erik who were sitting
together, but seemed to be in an argument, albeit, fairly civilized. I gave
them room. I had no interest in stirring up trouble so early. Trouble would
come find me as soon as it was good and ready.

“What’s an F5?” I asked, interjecting myself into the
conversation while pouring myself a cup of coffee.

“It’s the Fujita scale,” Bud said. “Used to measure the size
of tornadoes by how much they eat.”

“Eat?” I asked, my cup nearly to my lips. “Like an animal?”

“Sort of, yeah,” Duff said.

“So, how big do they get?” I asked.

The coffee was better than I expected for being in a cheap
hotel in the middle of podunk nowhere. I guess when you don’t focus on foam and
sprinkles in the coffee, it had better just be good.

“Well, an F2 can get up to speeds between 120-150mph,” Duff
said. “That’s bout two football fields across”

“Oh… sure,” I said. “I saw one of those yesterday.”

“Nothing to sneeze at, right?” Bud said.

I grunted my agreement and drank more coffee.

“An F3 is somewhere up to 200 mph winds and can get as big
as 500 yards across,” Bud went on.

It scared me that the dimensions of these things were
getting exponentially larger. I never had a fear of tornados before, but the boys
were helping me on my way to a full-grown phobia.

“An F4 is up to 250 mph give or take and can be up to 900
yards across,” Duff said.

“900 yards?” I sputtered. I shot a look over their shoulders
at Grace and Erik. Grace’s eyes flicked up to me and then away. “That’s half a
mile.”

“You got it buddy,” Duff said.

“Alright, fine,” I said. “Tell me about the F5 then.”

“Up to 300 mph winds and it includes everything in excess of
1100 yards,” Bud said.

I blew out a breath. I had volunteered to stay regardless of
what I might face. I just didn’t realize that I was going to be facing a half
mile funnel cloud that could pick up cars and blow down houses like the Big Bad
Wolf.

“You ever seen one?” I asked. “An F5?”

“Never.”

“Nope, never.”

“Must be pretty rare, huh?” I had found a thread and was
pulling on it.

“Oh, they are,” Duff said.

“Probably never been anything like that in these parts,” I
continued.

Duff and Bud looked at one another, then back at me.

“What?” I asked.

“The last F5 that hit this area was in 1999 in Bridge
Creek,” Bud said.

“Killed 36 people in one night,” Duff said, lowering his
head.

We all looked at each other for a moment, considering that.

“Okay, who’s ready to go find one?” I asked, cracking a
grin. The mood lightened, and the boys laughed as we headed toward the door.

“We ready, Grace?” I said.

Her look was absolutely venomous. I ignored it.

“Are you riding with me, or am I following you?” I asked, my
toned softened a bit.

Her jaw flexed as she stood.

“I’ll ride with you,” she conceded.

She picked up a gear bag by her feet.

“You want a hand with that?” I offered.

“No, just get the door, please.”

It was going to be rough going, and there was no sense in me
being antagonistic. We walked to the car together, and I opened the door for
her. She dropped in with the bag on her lap and pulled the door shut without
saying a word.

I walked around to my side and opened the driver door to
find her pulling out a laptop and plugging it into my cigarette lighter.

“Good morning, Jim.” I looked up.

“Hey, Erik,” I said. “Good morning to you.”

He waved, wary of me. I waved back without being unkind. He
got into the Suburban alone, while Duff and Bud jumped up into the pickup
truck. They pulled into position, waiting for us to take the lead.

I sat down in the car to find that Grace had her command
station set up in the front seat of my vintage Hemicuda. I shook my head in
disbelief without saying a word. She had a Doppler radar map going without any
trouble. On her smartphone, she had her GPS running and attached to the dash
with a suction cup. She pulled a walkie-talkie and headset from her bag and
clipped the unit to her belt before putting the headset in place.

She caught me watching her and gave me a hard look.

“What?” she snarled.

“I’ve never seen you work,” I admitted.

“You still don’t have to stare.”

“Okay, fair enough,” I said. “Where to?”

She studied her map for a moment, then pointed.

“Out of the lot and take a right,” she said.

I did what she asked and pegged the speed at a pretty fair
clip. The trucks were keeping up with a little effort, but I kind of thought
that was the point. I aimed the car down the road and kept my focus there.

“At the next intersection,” she said. “Take a left.”

“OK,” I acknowledged.

We had navigated our way onto a country road lined with
trees. Under different circumstances, I would have asked questions, but this
was Grace’s show, and if it helped for me to keep my mouth shut for the time
being, I was happy not to talk if it wasn’t necessary.

She seemed to notice that I wasn’t bombarding her with
questions, so she shifted a little uncomfortably in the silence.

“We’re tracking a wall cloud not far from here,” Grace said.

“And what does that mean?” I asked.

“There’s a storm out there,” she said. “We would like to
intercept it to see if there’s any potential tornado activity going on.”

“Does it look like that could happen?” I asked.

“It does,” she said. Her voice betrayed her.

“You don’t seem happy about that,” I offered.

“No, no, I’m happy,” she said. “Just surprised.”

“Why surprised?” I asked. I could see the darkness of the
clouds looming ahead. We were getting close.

“Because typically storm chasing isn’t like in the movies,”
she said, more than a little exasperated. “There’s hours worth of research and
timing and search time spent before we come across active tornados. This one
just came up in front of us.”

I raised an eyebrow without saying anything out loud.

“I know, Jim,” she said. “It’s what I wanted, so why
complain now, right?”

“Well, no… I just… yeah, I mean… kind of…” I said.

“This storm is moving really fast,” she cut in. “We have to
catch it. How fast can you get us there?”

I looked over at her and chuckled.

“Buckle up.”

I hit the gas, and the Cuda leapt forward, pressing her back
into the seat. The landscape blurred, while the engine howled low and deep. I
was only beginning to tap into the car’s potential.

“There it is,” she said. “Do you see it?”

She was pointing out the window, and I did my best to follow
her finger. I saw it then. Bigger than the last storm, it looked like death
from the sky. As a boy, I had never been one to imagine shapes in the clouds,
but when I looked up at the storm system, I imagined a hundred howling faces
staring down at me, morphing into shape long enough for me to see and melting
back into winds.

“We’ve got some major cyclonic winds working here,” she said
over the radio.

“Roger that,” came Bud’s voice back to us.

“We’re moving to intercept,” she said.

“Intercept?” I asked. “What are you talking about?
Intercept?”

Grace pulled a video camera from her bag. She snapped open
the small monitor and began filming.

“Get as close to that thing as you can,” she said. “I have
to get a better look at it.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“What are you scared?”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

I gritted my teeth and accelerated, upshifting as I went.
The storm was moving faster than I anticipated. The last tornado that I saw had
formed slowly, almost in a dream, until it finally touched down. This storm was
moving like a walking, talking nightmare. The clouds were black, and lightning
flashed in the sky like the tendrils of some ancient sea beast stretching out
across the heavens in almost a purple light. The thunder crashed, and I felt the
booming sensation of it punch me in the chest.

Just then, a hunter green Land Rover flew past me like I was
standing still. I hadn’t seen him in the rearview mirror because I had been so
focused on the storm. I looked up in time to see his tinted windows, but not
the driver. As quickly as he appeared, he vanished in front of us, hidden by a
sheet of rain.

“Did you see that guy?” I asked.

“Yes, he drove that jeep faster than this old car,” Grace
snapped. “You should try to catch up with him.”

The sarcasm was biting, but not helpful.

“Did you recognize him?” I asked. “Is he one of your fellow
storm chasers?”

“No, didn’t see him. Could you focus please?” Grace huffed.
Then into the radio, “We’ve got a rain-wrapped tornado here boys. I have no
idea where this thing is going to set down.”

I heard a mixed chorus of whoops and curses come back over
the radio.

“What does that mean? You have to tell me these things!” I
said.

The car was being pelted with sheets of rain. They washed
across the fields and swept over the car in one pass, one after another. I
could feel the winds buffeting the car, but I had lost sight of the tornado.
The entire area was blacked out with the storm system. It felt like driving in
the clouds.

“It means that there’s rotating sheets of rain around this
tornado,” she said, looking frantically out the windows. “It means this thing
could be right in front of us and we’d never see it until it’s too late.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“Stay or go, Grace,” I said. “You have to call it. Stay or
go.”

I could hear the wind howling, shaking the car. Trees bent
nearly in half under the force of the winds.

“I don’t like what we’re seeing here, Grace,” Erik said over
the radio. “Or perhaps more importantly, what we’re not seeing.”

“I don’t like this, man…” Duff said.

“Go, Jim,” she said at last. “Go, get us out of here.”

I stomped the gas and lowered my head. The car was
struggling to stay on the road under the harsh weather conditions. I saw a farm
coming up and considered if it would hold any shelter for us. The house, the
barn, the silos, none of them would be safe. I saw the propane tank that sat
just off the side of the road. Then, beyond that, I saw the Land Rover that had
passed me before.

I didn’t have time to put it together until it was too late.
The propane tank exploded in a fireball just after we passed it in the Cuda.
The thin skin of the tank blew apart in a thousand shards of shrapnel.

My eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, in time to see the
fireball bloom and the shrapnel hit the side of the pickup truck. The tires
exploded with a horrific whine, and the wheels dug into the blacktop. The
forward momentum was too much, and I watched helplessly as the Suburban with
Erik Balfour flipped over. It tumbled onto its side with a horrendous crunch.
In the pickup truck, Bud must have reflexively pressed the transmit button on
his walkie-talkie when he saw the crash, because his voice boomed over the
transmitter.

"Look out! Look out! We're gonna--"

He didn’t finish the sentence before their vehicle slammed
into the Suburban, too close to stop.

"What was that?" Grace shouted.

"It was a roadside bomb," I said grimly.
"He’s here. Tom’s here."

I spun the Cuda in a tight 180 and sped back the way we had
come. The Suburban was laying on its roof, the pickup truck piled into the side
of it, pushing it down the road until they finally ground to a stop.

I stopped hard and jumped out, immediately assaulted by the
wind and biting rain, pelting my face. I had to turn my head to take a deep
breath. Grace was by my side as we arrived at the Suburban.

“Check them!” I said, pointing to the pickup truck.

“But Erik…” she started.

“Grace, don’t argue,” I said. “Please!”

She relented and ran to the side of the pickup truck. I took
the opportunity to crouch and look for Erik. As I suspected, he was unconscious
inside the Suburban. The airbag had deployed and hit him at full speed,
knocking him out. His cheeks were abraded from the impact. He hung suspended by
his seatbelt.

I grabbed my knife from my pocket and whipped it open to
expose the blade. The blade sliced through the restraining belt with hardly any
pressure and Erik slid down onto the roof of the vehicle. I reversed the
process and the blade disappeared back into my pocket. I grabbed Erik by his
wrists and pulled him out of the car. His face became clear then and I saw that
the right side of it was awash with blood. The wound was not life threatening from
what I could see. The rain was quickly washing the wound site and I tried to
help it along. The wound was shallow, and he didn’t have any debris of shrapnel
in the wound.