Chapter Four #2
By the time Matt and Tracy show up and everyone heads back to their cars loaded up with donuts and coffee, the Storm Prediction Center has a wide swath of western Kansas marked with a high probability of strong storms. With the phrase numerous tornadoes with very large/destructive hail included in the discussion notes, just about every chaser in the area will be out.
There’s a trough coming in this afternoon, the atmospheric equivalent of dropping a mass of cold air into a seething cauldron of heat and humidity.
All the ingredients for a nice simmering pot of tornado soup.
When Tracy, Matt, and Wes opt for the core of the storm on the hunt for aqua skies and menacing clouds, I hang back, more in the mood for structure and scale today. If a tornado pops out, I can throw on my telephoto lens and still pick up detail at a distance.
While I miss the tornado—it’s hidden behind rain and I’m too far away—I do get some of the shots I’m after, including a panorama of the whole storm looming high above freshly plowed fields.
The distinct rows of tilled earth provide perfect leading lines, the warm brown of the dirt a great contrast to the whites and grays of the sky.
Wes texts the group chat while I’m piling my gear into the car to reposition.
It’s a selfie uncomfortably close to the tornado, his hair and shirt soaked with rain and a mile-wide grin on his face.
I sigh, type out Try not to end up under a house in Oz, and stuff my phone into my pocket before getting back behind the wheel in search of sunset’s cotton candy colors.
Twenty minutes later, I pop out on the backside of the storm just as the angle of the sun is starting to paint the towering mass pale pink. With any luck, that color will intensify shortly into the brilliant oranges and deep reds I’m hoping for.
What I’m not hoping for is the sight of Wes’s SUV. I’m too far away to be certain, but there aren’t many chasers out here in brand-new vehicles, and there definitely aren’t that many with his towering height.
Sure enough, as I get closer, the guy standing on the edge of the road is definitely Wes. Not in the mood for his gloating, I’m about to blow by and find a spot farther down the road, but the red stains on his exposed forearm look a hell of a lot like blood.
Which is when I notice that his windows, including the rear windshield, are smashed out.
Bits of broken glass crunch under my tires when I pull over just in front of him, the storm at our backs.
I hop out and scowl at the wreckage with my camera in hand out of habit.
Whatever happened, Wes is lucky it didn’t end up much worse.
“She’s going to light up like a damn firework,” he calls while I stand there gaping at the broken glass and blood spattered across his leather seats with my heart in my throat. There are only a few things that could have blown windows out like this. All of them are scary as hell.
Not that Wes gives a damn.
“Have you lost your mind?” I gesture wildly to his car when he glances back at my shout. Blood dribbles down his cheek from a gash uncomfortably close to his eye. “You did a hook punch again, didn’t you? For fuck’s sake, Wes, you need stitches!”
“I’m fine.” He has the audacity to grin. “It was just a little impromptu shower.”
“In glass!”
Wes shrugs and turns back to the storm, leaving me to stare incredulously, camera dangling at my side. I want to rip his camera out of his hands, but I’ve known him too long to bother. This is classic Wild Wes. Anything to get the shot. Consequences and collateral damage be damned.
“Well, fuck it,” I mutter under my breath, moving around him to line up my own composition. We’ve got maybe ten to fifteen minutes to shoot this thing before the sun sinks under the horizon. His injuries will keep that long, and it’s not like his windows are going to get any more broken.
Besides, I can work and give Wes I told you so face at the same time.
We move around each other in silence. Wes makes me nuts, but he’s a talented photographer, and when it comes down to it, it’s not because he has the cash for the best equipment or connections with big brands. When we’re out here shooting, he’s all business.
But when the colors fade and I lower my camera, there’s still blood leaking from the cut on his face. “I really think you need stitches. At minimum, you need to clean that.”
His hand starts to rise. I snatch his wrist and jerk his arm down.
“You’re covered in dirt and who the hell knows what else.
Do not touch an open cut on your face. What’s the matter with you?
You should be on your way to urgent care.
” I glance back over my shoulder at his ruined windows. “And a repair shop.”
Wes stares down at my hand on his wrist with an odd expression. I quickly let go and fight the urge to rub my hand on my leggings.
“It’s Friday night in rural Kansas,” he says dismissively. “Nothing is open for a hundred miles. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“This could have been really bad. You get that, right? You get this is why we were all pissed the other day?”
Wes’s god complex is even worse than I thought. He laughs, as though the very idea that he wouldn’t simply walk away from everything in one piece is ridiculous. “With the steam practically coming out your ears it seems like you’re building up to a good shout. Don’t stop on my account.”
“Goddammit, Wes! Do you have a death wish or something?”
It’s not my finest moment, standing on the side of the road surrounded by nothing but endless stretches of tilled earth, yelling at a bleeding man.
A bleeding man who finds this whole thing so amusing that my lingering trickle of guilt for shooting the sunset and not making him go to a doctor immediately fades away with the storm.
“You worry too much, Sloane. I’ll be fine.” He flashes that trademark Wild Wes grin. “And if I’m not, at least I got the shot, right?”
“That’s insane!”
“I’m not your responsibility.” His attention slides toward the horizon and the empty stretch of road heading west. Far in the distance, the faint red lights of a wind farm throb. “I could use some dinner. You?”
“That’s your plan? Just drive into town and leave your car in the parking lot of a hotel, asking to be stolen? Even without windows that thing is worth plenty.” I jerk my chin toward his SUV. “I have a first aid kit. I can clean your face up at least and then…”
Exhaustion seeps into Wes’s carefully applied mask of good cheer when he turns to face me again. “I am not your responsibility,” he repeats with an edge to the words, as though this whole conversation is trying his patience. “It’s not your job to fix me.”
It sounds an awful lot like I’m not worth fixing. Wes has been a lot of things over the years, but his rare seriousness tells me he’s not nearly as okay as he’s pretending to be.
“We’re three hours from my house, give or take,” I blurt out, mentally cursing myself even as the words keep spilling out of my mouth. “My brother owns a garage. I’ll call him in the morning, and you can sleep on my couch. No one will fuck with your car if it’s in my driveway for the night.”
All traces of Wild Wes are completely absent from the thousand-yard stare he levels at me. “Why?”
The bitten-off, one-word question makes his point for him. Inviting Wes to my home, doing him this kind of favor, it goes beyond the standard duty we all feel to help each other out of a bad situation. It’s definitely outside the realm of our standard frenemies routine.
“I’m not going to force you,” I say wearily with a glance down at the crumbles of safety glass littering the pavement.
Wes’s expression doesn’t so much as flicker.
His inscrutable look leaves me clueless as to whether or not I managed the easy-breezy tone I was aiming for, or if some of the uncomfortably squishy feelings I’m desperately trying to ignore escaped.
But then he nods, sweeping his hand out toward my car. “After you, Nurse Sloane.”
Wes begrudgingly allows me to clean up the various cuts and scrapes caused by the glass. By the time I’m done, I still think he could use a few stitches in the largest cut by his eye, but he waves me off and dry swallows a couple of ibuprofen before he slides off my rear bumper.
“You going to tell me how this even happened?”
He only shrugs. “RFD got me.”
The RFD—rear flank downdraft—is an atmospheric punch from the sky.
Supercells are powered by hot surface-level air slamming into cold air in the upper atmosphere.
Once the storm starts to rotate, cold air gets kicked out on the storm’s backside—sometimes with enough force that it can knock over trees like matchsticks.
I rub my temples, where a headache is starting to form. “We told you something like this could happen.”
“Yep,” Wes says dismissively, opening the map app on his phone. “What’s your address?”
Trying to get him to see how dangerous his decision was to chase this thing the way he did is a losing battle. If he doesn’t care about his own safety, nothing I say is going to change that.
Shoving aside the realization that Wes is going to know where I live now—obviously, I’m the idiot who invited him—I rattle off my address before opening my car door. “You sure you’re okay to do the drive? Windshield will make it?”
There’s a long spider crack across it, but it’s low enough that he should be able to see. And he’s right that there’s nowhere around here where he can get the glass fixed until morning, if that. Camping out on the side of a farmer’s field isn’t going to solve anything.
Wes brushes some loose bits of glass off his seat and leans on the doorframe. “Guess we’re going to find out, aren’t we?”
Gritting my teeth at his blasé attitude, I point at the windshield. “Call me if that gets worse.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you worry far too much?”
“Just you,” I grumble before slamming my door shut.