§ § § -- March 17, 1996
Sunday morning dawned very rainy and dim; the clouds were so heavy and dark that the street lights remained on, and most lightning flashes could easily be seen. At the moment the only ones visible were over the mountaintops, as if there were a pause between storm fronts in the system. The group, now numbering nine altogether, ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, most chatting with rising excitement about the events to come. Only Leslie and Denise, who were sitting at the same table, ate quietly, both watching the weather and listening to the anticipatory conversations of the chasers.
Finally Denise asked Leslie point-blank, "Did you know that Wayne's never seen a tornado?"
Leslie nodded, clearly surprising Denise. "Yup. Father knew, and he revealed it to me, in a sort of roundabout way. But I understand his group has no idea." She peered curiously at Denise. "Do you mean you're planning to tell them?"
Denise shrugged and let her guilty gaze stray out the window again. "I was seriously considering it. I might still do it, if I can't talk these crazy people out of this incredible folly. I suppose I shouldn't even bother trying, because I saw Wayne's chase van in the parking lot this morning when I got up. Mr. Roarke sure covers all the bases." She blew out a breath and idly poked holes in her pancake with her fork, then looked up at Leslie again. "There really is gonna be a tornado, isn't there?"
"That's Wayne's fantasy," Leslie said, answering without really answering, in just the manner Roarke did. She hadn't spent all these years being his ward, daughter and assistant without learning a few of her father's tricks.
Denise propped her chin on her hand and stared morosely at the wall over Leslie's shoulder. "Yeah, more's the pity."
At that moment Wayne got out of his chair and clapped his hands once, drawing everyone's attention. "Okay, people, here's the plan. The hotel kitchen has very kindly agreed to provide us with a picnic lunch to take along, so we don't get hungry out in the field. We'll eat around noontime or so, and in the meantime we're all going to keep an eye on the clouds. We all know what to look for, I presume. Let's recap." He sounded to Leslie like a schoolteacher conducting a class. "The first sign of a tornado is—?"
"A wall cloud," said Hannelore Niemeyer solemnly. "It will probably be rotating."
"Right," said Wayne with approval. "There'll be a rain-free area to one side and probably rain on the other, and there's likely to be hail…" He continued in enthusiastic lecture mode while Denise sat and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, at which she stared with a profoundly bored look about her. Leslie snickered softly.
"Does he lecture like that a lot?" she asked, just above a whisper.
"All the time," Denise muttered. "He actually does have a teaching degree, but he claims teaching bores him out of his skull. He's so certain he knows what he's doing, I'm afraid that he'll get really cocky, and the skull in question will be all that's left of him."
"Well," Leslie mused, eyeing the chasers, "let's see what they're all saying at the end of the day." She smiled at Denise and ate the last couple bites of her omelet.
Wayne wound up his recap then and addressed everyone as a whole. "Okay, then, let's get our stuff and check out, since after we finish chasing for the day, we'll be on our way back to Fantasy Island." He grinned. "And by then, we'll all have seen a tornado, if Mr. Roarke's word can be trusted!"
The group headed upstairs and retrieved their luggage, then checked out. By the time the process was complete, the next wave of storms had moved in and it was pouring rain outside, so everyone paused in the lobby to don raincoats. They then followed Wayne out to his chase van in the parking lot. There was very little in the way of actual equipment inside: there was a small secondhand radar scope mounted on the dashboard and connected with a tiny rotating dish on the roof, and a twenty-year-old CB radio was mounted to the van's interior ceiling just to the left of the rearview mirror. A handheld video camera lay in the driver's seat. Leslie, who had expected a goodly amount of sophisticated weather-forecasting and analysis paraphernalia, gave Wayne a dubious look before she noticed that Denise had seen it.
"This is all he can afford," Denise murmured for Leslie's ears only. "He swears it's enough for him."
"I sure hope so," Leslie mumbled before climbing inside the van and choosing a seat. Wayne had a few words with his tour group before the rest got in and settled down one by one; Denise took the front passenger seat and picked up the camera, and Wayne hopped into the driver's side and started the engine. The tour members, with the exception of Simon Lightwood-Wynton who looked profoundly bored, set up a teasing cheer as they pulled out of the hotel parking lot and gained the road out of town. Wayne grinned at them in the mirror and gave them all a thumbs-up.
Everyone watched the passing countryside with interest as they rolled along. A short distance outside town, they passed the last of a few scattered small farmhouses and found themselves alone in the open fields. Isolated trees stood bleak sentinel against the storms; now and then some cattle could be seen huddling under some of the taller ones. Wayne pointed this out. "That's an excellent way to get hit by lightning," he told the group. "If you ever get caught outside in a thunderstorm, whatever you do, don't stand under a lone tree. Lightning always goes for the shortest path to the ground, and it'll pick the tallest thing around. If you're beside that tallest thing, you'll get fried."
"That would make an interesting sight," observed Simon. It was hard to tell whether he sounded sarcastic or serious, and Leslie chose to pretend he hadn't spoken. She had begun to wonder if even a tornado could subdue the man's cocky arrogance.
Through the morning they paused twice to watch likely-looking storms, but neither tempest produced a twister and they moved on, traveling ever farther into the interior and away from Cedar Heights. Shortly before noon, there was enough of a break between storm fronts to let some watery sunshine through, and Wayne stopped the van near an orange grove and suggested they have their picnic lunch there. This was greeted with enthusiasm and they spread out a waterproof tarp near the van, setting out food and gathering around to enjoy sandwiches, potato salad, pickles, baked beans and lemonade, with oatmeal-raisin cookies for dessert.
During the meal, Joachim Albarran chose for some reason to sit beside Leslie. She welcomed the chance to talk with someone, since Denise had grown increasingly moody as the day progressed. "So how did you happen to join a tornado-chase tour?" she asked the studious-looking teacher from Spain.
Joachim smiled. "A misguided case of curiosity," he confessed with self-deprecating humor. "It began last summer when there was a rogue tornado near my hometown. It frightened the wits out of everyone, and I found myself considering the widespread ignorance of these storms in my country. I felt someone should try to lessen that ignorance, so I elected myself, and began to learn all I could. I decided that I would set aside a month of each school year to study weather in the science classes that I teach, and to spend a full two weeks of that month focusing on tornadoes. Then I learned of Señor Blanchard's chase tours and signed up for one of them, thinking that practical experience could lend some authenticity to what I was trying to teach my students."
"That makes sense," Leslie agreed, nodding. "What does your family think of this?"
"They don't know about it," said Joachim. "I am divorced with two children who live primarily with their mother. At any rate, I found this quite intriguing, and more than a little surprising, because March is somewhat early in the season for tornado-chasing. Perhaps Señor Blanchard meant to come to Fantasy Island all along."
"That could be," Leslie agreed neutrally. She met his gaze and smiled. "You might consider it a bonus trip."
Joachim laughed loudly enough to turn heads and evoke smiles on most faces. "I didn't think of it quite that way. One thing of which I am very certain is that this has been a true adventure, and worth what I paid for the privilege of participating in it."
Leslie grinned. "Glad to hear it. I just hope it all turns out the way you want it—you and Mr. Blanchard, and the rest of the people on this chase tour."
They were nearly finished when the sun disappeared and thunder began to mutter in the distance once more. The women packed up the picnic items while the men folded the tarp and put it away, and the entire group piled back into the van and got onto the road. This time Simon, who'd been in the back all morning, chose a seat just behind Wayne and Denise, and asked to look at the video camera. Denise handed it over without comment, settling back in her seat with a sullen look about her. Wayne drove at sixty miles per hour till the rain started again, then slowed to half that, reaching up and turning on the CB.
"Good Lord, man," Simon blurted out, half laughing. "Do you think anyone has one of those things anymore? How truly 70s!"
"It's a very handy tool," Wayne said, "and you'd be surprised how many people still have them. It may not be the trendy fad it used to be, but CB radios are useful, especially to amateur tornado spotters and less well-heeled chasers such as me." He twisted the channel knob in a rapid series of staccato clicks till he found the one he wanted, then adjusted the volume and resettled himself in the driver's seat. "There ought to be some weather watchers out there today, so if they have anything to say, we'll hear it."
"Turn on the headlights, Wayne," Denise said. "It's getting dark."
Leslie and the others in the back overheard and peered out the windows; the clouds had thickened and blackened to the point that the few street lights this far from civilization had come on. At wide intervals they passed under a pool of blue-white or pinkish-orange light; otherwise, the only light came either from the dashboard or the increasingly frequent bursts of lightning as the storm intensified. Once or twice they passed a lonely farmhouse set way back from the road; but for those, the chase group might as well have been alone in the world. Leslie's stomach began to twitter with nerves.
Wayne made a last-second decision and turned off the main road onto a paved, but very rutted, secondary lane with a deep drainage ditch running alongside it at their right. "What the hell—" Simon began.
"Shut up," Denise flared, twisting in her seat to expend some of her ugly mood on him. "If you plan on leading the tour, then you can make the decisions, but if not, then keep your lip buttoned." She turned away without waiting for his response and slouched low in her seat, glowering at the sodden landscape through the windshield.
They broke out rather suddenly from a curtain of heavy rain into a quiet area; Leslie, in the back beside Joachim, looked behind them and realized they'd emerged from the latest in the procession of squall lines. The cloud just behind them looked like a shelf with a rolled edge. This new area was a little lighter, so that it was easier to see what was overhead.
Wayne pulled over and stopped the van, bringing her attention back around to the front. "Okay, folks, let's take stock," he said, and everyone got out, stretching their muscles as they stepped onto the wet pavement. Thunder rumbled from somewhere not too far away, and a steady, humid wind bent the long grass of the open countryside.
"This is it!" shouted Wayne, and they all flocked around to the front of the van to see what he was talking about. They were facing almost due west; to the southwest was the unmistakable tower of a supercell thunderstorm, soaring so high into the heavens that their necks cricked from looking up. Trailing behind the storm at its greatest height was a bright white expanse of cloud that Wayne informed them was called an anvil, due to its shape as seen from a distance. Looking northwest, they could see a heavy, smoky curtain of rain; this vanished about halfway back, leaving a dry area. At the meeting point between these two sections of the cloud base was a low-hanging bulge that looked, to Leslie, roughly like the bottom edge of a hollow cylinder. A long thin tail preceded it, vanishing behind the rain curtain. Beside Leslie, Joachim Albarran murmured an awed curse in Spanish.
"It's a wall cloud," he said, catching her puzzled, anxious look. "This may be the payoff Señor Blanchard has been waiting for."
Leslie's stomach went light, as if someone had filled it with helium. "Oh…"
Wayne had been dictating into a small hand-held portable tape recorder, describing the supercell storm in meticulous detail. Now he turned around and said distractedly, "I need the camera going—gotta catch this in case a funnel forms."
"I'll do it," Simon offered, surprising the others, and lifted the video camera, turning it on and training it on the storm. Just as he did so, a sudden strong rush of cold air hit them, nearly knocking them off their feet with its unexpected intensity. It seemed to be some kind of cosmic signal; in the middle of the rain curtain, a huge bolt of lightning cracked out of the cloud and set off an explosion of thunder that they felt in the ground beneath their feet. In that moment Leslie fully understood her father's extreme aversion to her being with this group, and stood there seriously questioning her own sanity.
"That's the gust front!" shouted Wayne, his excitement escalating madly now. His eyes gleamed with anticipation. "Watch for the clear slot, people!"
"That wall cloud is rotating," yelled Enzo DiSandro enthusiastically. "Do you see it?"
"There's the clear slot," Hannelore Niemeyer screamed.
Confused, Leslie peered around at the group, and once again Joachim took pity on her. Pointing to the left of the slowly revolving wall cloud, he indicated an area of clear sky on the horizon. "That's called the clear slot," he explained, speaking close to her ear so that she could hear him over the wind. "It's another sign." Another enormous lightning bolt sparked from the storm and drowned out anything else he might have said in the resulting thunder. Leslie, unable to stand any more, slammed her hands over her ears and cursed her own idiocy for insisting on being part of this. How on earth had she ever thought this would cure her storm phobia?
The thunder died away and Leslie dared look up; something caught her attention and she noticed a streak of white amidst the dark-gray rain curtain. It took her a moment to realize it was hail. Not only that, the whole storm was moving, slowly but surely, toward the north, crossing the landscape from left to right as seen from their vantage point. Keep going that way, she implored silently. We'll just stay right here and spectate.
Then both Joachim and Sangeeta, standing nearby, grabbed her arms and pointed. She followed their gazes and found herself staring helplessly at what was all too obviously a tornado in the making. The wall cloud had extended a short, thick feeler; as they stood there watching it, with Simon providing technicolor commentary in his own inimitable way, it stretched toward the ground, already stirring up a small dust cloud. A moment later it had connected with the earth and was now an official, full-blown tornado.
"TOUCHDOWN!" Wayne shouted exuberantly into his tape recorder. "We have a tornado, folks! Appears to be shaped roughly like the trunk of an elephant with a slight backward-S curve in it…" His dictating was lost in the gradually-increasing roar of the storm as it plowed ponderously along the land, throwing up a large, dirty dust cloud at its base. The wind whistled around them, occasionally buffeting them; now and then a bolt of lightning streaked out of the clouds and touched off thunder, whose noise was now partially dulled by the steady racket from the tornado. It was a wall of sound, and Leslie was sure she would be deaf for a week after this.
The tornado had nearly reached the point where the road vanished into the distance when it seemed to pause, as if wondering where it wanted to go next. Simon stood training the camera on it, making remarks that couldn't be heard over the storm; Wayne was still narrating into the tape recorder. The others were pointing out one feature or another to each other, commenting enthusiastically on what they were seeing; only Denise and Joachim wore somber expressions, the latter studying the storm closely, the former glaring at it as though daring it to come closer. Leslie hovered near the open door of the van, warily watching the storm, ready to duck under shelter at any moment.
Wayne turned around and started hollering at his tour group; Leslie couldn't hear him from where she stood, but it looked as if he'd gone back into lecture mode again. She just didn't see how anyone could be so calm in the face of what they were witnessing; she herself wanted nothing more than to run for the hills. When the thought blossomed in her mind, she reached for Joachim's sleeve and plucked at it. "Shouldn't we get out of here?" she shouted at him.
Joachim frowned. "It's bad to try to outrun a tornado in a vehicle," he told her, and might have said more, except for a shrill scream from Denise that easily pierced the bass roar of the tornado.
"It's heading straight at us!" she screeched, pointing.