Chapter 29
After feeding Arachnodesiac and company, I stop by Roland's to bring him his meds before I go shopping for supplies for our short film. Felix's birthday is tonight, so I also need to buy him something useful that his parents would approve of, which is impossible.
I knock on the front door and Roland's housekeeper invites me inside. His room door is slightly ajar, so I let myself in. He doesn't look at me even when his door squeaks open.
“Hi,” I say flatly.
Roland is at his desk typing. He's got two monitors on his desk. One displays a website, and the other is a Word document. I put the bag of medicine on his bed.
“Look, I'm sorry about what happened,” I tell him. “Everything that has happened.”
He ignores me, but the important thing is he heard it. He rolls into his bathroom and shuts the door behind him.
From the corner of my eye, something familiar hits me. The pictures from the website. Scenes that are familiar to me and make my blood freeze.
A scoured field of mud, puddles, and empty gray concrete foundations sprayed brown with dirt, surrounded by untouched fields of green. It looks like a blood-spattered axe-murder scene.
An eighteen-wheeler crumpled into a little ball in a ditch. The mud-blasted chassis of a pickup truck coiled around a downed telephone pole like a candy cane.
I lean in closer. Some of the pictures I hadn't seen before, but they bring back memories, thoughts, and smells I had forgotten. I look at the Word document. It's an essay for his Environmental Sciences class.
When I was little, my favorite thing to do was watch the sky light up during thunderstorms while I went to sleep.
I had an unexplainable affinity for the sky and what happens in it.
It wasn't until six years, on Christmas morning, when I was opening my presents in front of the tree, that I knew I wanted to pursue this interest as a career.
My parents were watching the local news. The night before, an extremely powerful tornado destroyed the town of Vernendal and killed sixty-five people. It moved southwest, bucking the trend that tornadoes usually move northeast.
My chest burns. I start to get dizzy.
It was an EF5 on the Fujita scale. That measures tornado damage from EF0, meaning minimal damage like missing roof shingles, to EF5, which is like ground zero at Hiroshima.
Chances of surviving an EF5 at maximum strength aboveground are almost nonexistent.
The people of Vernendal didn't have a chance.
(Please make it go away)
There's this acronym called CAPE (convective available potential energy), which measures atmospheric instability. For example, 4,000 joules per kilogram is considered extremely unstable. The CAPE that day in Texas was 8,000. And a cold front was just the spark it needed.
(That's when it's coming right at you)
Over a mile wide, the twister reduced the town to a war zone with some of the most extreme damage ever documented.
It tossed a mangled tractor into a water tower and left a wide dent.
It sucked up asphalt roads and topsoil. It granulated debris, livestock, and people, who couldn't build storm cellars in this kind of area.
It nubbed mesquite trees down to little stubs.
In the Shadow Oaks subdivision, it left nothing but mud and concrete slabs, with some slabs broken or even pulled out of the ground.
Blades of grass were impaled into the concrete like nails.
In neighboring towns, mud and insulation rained down from the sky.
Inexplicably, an antique china cabinet was found without a scratch two football fields away from its house.
(You're my little champ)
A witness who saw the tornado said that it looked like malevolent spirits dancing with each other the moment it condensed from a group of skinny rope tornadoes into one giant wedge.
In ancient stories, they call that phenomenon the “Dance of Death.” When you see the Dance of Death, death is coming your way.
(It's like they're dancing)
Nobody has any video or photos of it. There is only testimony from people who saw it.
It happened so fast at night. The few who survived lived with catastrophic injuries.
An almost pulverized boy was found alive in a tree, unclothed and covered in his own blood.
There wasn't a warning since budget cuts reduced the number of working meteorologists.
Even storm spotters were at home for Christmas with their families.
When I saw the footage of the devastation and the survivors crying on live television, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life preventing something like this from happening again.
I can't stop a tornado, but I could chase them, just like Glen Powell in Twisters, and give people enough warning to save their lives when other methods of warning have failed them.
I dreamed of braving the dangers of a tornadic storm in my truck and feeding the news stations updates on what the storm was doing so they could keep citizens informed.
I dreamed of the thrill of seeing something so big and terrifying up close.
Now that I'm in a wheelchair, that dream is dead.
I wobble to his bed and sit for a moment. “Uh…” My stomach is twisting itself into a pretzel. “I'm sorry, I need to go home,” I say breathlessly to the bathroom door. I run as fast as I can out of his room, then his house, and back to the van.
I unlock my phone and load Tetris, but the loading screen freezes. Tears start to well in my eyes.
I dreamed of the thrill of seeing something so big and terrifying up close.
You idiot.
I throw the phone into the floorboard and bury my face into the wheel, clenching my fists around it as I gasp in between sobs.
Christmas Eve, Six Years Ago
The sun was blazing, the sky as clear and blue as a summer day. Real Frosty the Snowman in Hawaii vibes, except if Frosty had melted and waterlogged the air with his big ass. It was that humid.
My best friend Tramel and I were out catching tadpoles in the lake behind a grassy stretch of mesquite trees.
He loved to raise them and release them back into the lake when they became froglets.
His big glasses fell into the water while he pulled the net out.
I snagged them before they could float away.
The lake felt crisp and cool, and I was tempted to dive in.
Our shirts and shorts were soaked in sweat anyway.
I was drying my hands with my shirt when Tramel got a text from his mom telling him he had to go home.
“Can't we hang out a little longer? My aunt is coming over and I don't want to be there,” I said. As was Christmas tradition, Dinah would drive over from Oyster Pit with my uncle Mason and my grandmother on my mom's side.
“I have to go now. Anyway, see you here tomorrow for gift swap.” Tramel and I always met each other on Christmas Day to exchange any gifts we didn't like that the other might want.
“Are you in trouble?” I asked.
Tramel shook his head. “My mom says the air feels haunted.”
“You mean like A Christmas Carol with the ghosts and stuff?” I shouted after him, but he was already running off with his jug of tadpoles.
I ambled through the trees back to my part of the subdivision.
All the houses were decked out in Christmas decorations.
My two-story brick home was always the winner of the Christmas Spirit contest thanks to my dad's over-the-top yard setup.
My mom was out front kneeling on the ground with panic in her eyes.
“Your aunt was wearing her elf shoes while driving and crashed into Dad's lawn gnome. Please don't tell him,” she said when she saw me. “And Uncle Mason isn't going to be here today. He's spending Christmas somewhere else. Do not mention him once, you understand me?”
She looked at me with desperate eyes. I knew immediately she was begging to avoid conflict with her sister. I nodded. Thankfully, Dinah had narrowly avoided crashing into my dad's sleigh decorations with Santa and his reindeer.
As soon as I entered the living room, Dinah was there in her favorite elf costume, jingling a bell mounted on a stick. As soon as she saw me, her hands were all over my face.
“Chubby cheeks, chubby cheeks! Ew, you're dripping with sweat,” she said, casting me aside to smear her sweat-drenched hands on the sofa.
“Hi, Aunt Dinah.”
She shook the bell at me. “Don't call me aunt anymore. It makes me sound like an old maid from a Dickens novel.”
I got a kiss from Grandma, who was waiting behind Dinah, and sat on the couch. My grandfather on my dad's side, who had Alzheimer's, was sleeping in his chair in the corner.
“This heat is unbelievable. So much for winter wonderlands,” Mom said glumly as she closed the front door behind her.
“I'll take this over a winter wonderland in Minnesota any day,” Dad said. “Wade, help your mom get the dinner plates out of her china cabinet.”
We always ate Christmas dinner around three o'clock, which is more like a late lunch. Dinner was quiet. Dinah stared at her food like she was under a trance, and every time Mom asked her how the food was, she'd snap out of it and start eating.
“I don't know about y'all, but I'm ready to open some presents,” Dad said next to our chaotically decorated tree as he spruced up the red tissue paper in one gift bag.
We always did presents after Christmas Eve dinner.
On Christmas mornings we had to rush through a big breakfast, going to mass to indulge my very religious grandmother, and then a final goodbye before she had to hurry back to Oyster Pit to play the piano for the annual church pageant.
Then all hell broke loose when Dinah opened her gifts.