Race the Sky

by Michael Galloway

  “That’s the day of the picnic.”

  “What picnic?”

  “The church picnic.”

  John put a hand to his forehead. “Tell me you’re not going to that too.”

  “If I was a good girl, I’d stay as far away as possible. But I know my Mom’s going to go. She wouldn’t miss it for the world. Either I drive her or she’ll find a ride.” There was an undercurrent of resentment in her voice as if she contemplated sabotaging the event.

  John changed the screen to look at another atmospheric model. He studied the storm motion chart and then looked at a map of forecast dew points for the region. Both maps excited and unnerved him at the same time. “Can they reschedule?”

  “I doubt it. It’s going to be an outdoor event in Stanton Park. It’s going to be open to the public.”

  “They should have plenty to drink,” Captain said without looking up from his laptop screen.

  John shot Captain a nasty glance.

  “Why? What do you mean?” Madeline said.

  Captain attempted to recompose himself. “Temperatures are going to be in the upper eighties. High humidity. I hope they have lots of Kool-Aid.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ll have that. They always have lots of that in the church kitchen. And lemonade. They keep it around for the kids.”

  John nodded but tried his best to focus on the laptop screen in front of him.

  “What?” Madeline said. She gave him a suspicious look.

  “I agree. For the kids,” John said.

  “For the kids,” Captain echoed.

  “Purple, I hope.”

  “Purple is the best,” Captain agreed. “But black cherry’s a close second. Hey do you think they’ll have a dunk tank?”

  “I don’t think so,” Madeline said. “Maybe they should change the date.” She pulled out her cell phone to compose a text message, but suddenly stopped. “What is it with the electronics around me lately? Everything’s been going wonky.” She tossed her phone onto the table and its screen went dark. “Can I use your laptop a minute?”

  “Sure thing,” John said as he handed her his machine.

  He watched as she hurriedly composed an e-mail to the church and sent it. A minute later another message appeared in her inbox.

  “Oh, come on. Now it says my mail is undeliverable. Something about…the mailbox being full,” she said as she handed the machine back to John. “I give up.”

  “That’s it? But what about your Mom?” John said. He really did not want to cut into their chasing time by taking a detour through Wick. The atmospheric setup was too promising to pass up and he would have a hard time forgiving himself the rest of the summer if he missed the opportunity. He glanced at Madeline and the melancholic look in her eyes said it all. Something else was on her mind.

  “Maybe Janet was right. Maybe I’m not supposed to fight anymore,” she said with downcast eyes.

  The three sat silent for a minute while John and Captain continued to go over the available atmospheric models for the next three days. Certain computer models had difficulty with different types of weather systems and this one looked to be no different. Each model spit out a different radar reflectivity prediction for the weekend, but they all agreed that whatever materialized, it would be violent.

  John reached over and picked up one of his rockets off of the coffee table. Cradling it in his hands, he removed the plastic nose cone, disconnected the cherry-red plastic parachute, and set it aside. Last year he used a parachute in every rocket but he had only been able to recover a handful of them with considerable effort. Now he figured since his launch accuracy was increasing, he could afford to go without the parachutes since the rockets often got torn apart by the updraft or the winds in the wall cloud. He stared inside the clear plastic section of the casing and pictured all the sensors he could fit inside.

  “I’ve been thinking about upgrading these,” he said in an effort to lighten their mood. He then pulled out a box of E9-6 rocket engines and held one up for Madeline to see. “I’m hoping the bigger engines will get our sensors right into the updraft.”

  “Punch the core, John, punch the core,” Captain said with a serious look. “Just don’t use any duct tape on it whatever you do. I’m getting tired of fending off the clowns that call you Duct Tape Guy.”

  John let out a loud sigh. He reached down and slid open the wooden door on the lower portion of the coffee table. He withdrew two boxes of Ferganut sensors and set them onto the tabletop. “I think we should double our efforts to get data this time. This could be a once-in-summer system.”

  “Double the rockets?” Captain said.

  “Double the rockets. Double the sensors. They don’t call me Data Guy for nothing.”

  Madeline looked over at the clear plastic boxes full of black sensor pellets and then looked out the window. The sun shone brightly and a warm summer breeze rustled through the nearby trees but gave no indication that change was on the wind.

  “Think we’ll have time for more launches?” Captain said as he motioned toward the rocket.

  “If we plan it right.” John reached over and opened the cover of one of the boxes. He pulled out a sensor pellet and rolled it around between his fingertips. “Someday it would be nice to meet the guy that invented these.”

  “If you could find him,” Captain said.

  “Oh, he’s around. I hear he lives in Nebraska.”

  Madeline looked at the sensor, then turned away and scoffed.

  “What?” John said. He set the sensor back into the box. “I just meant for the fun of it. Do you know him or something?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” she said as she stood up and walked into the kitchen. She came back with a glass of water but then walked up to the window to stare outside.

  “Okay then,” John said trying to make light of the situation. “Double the rockets. Double the sensors. And Madeline packs us a picnic lunch. You’re coming with, right?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. John set his road atlas in his lap and pointed to it with a pen. “Should we camp out in Omaha?”

  “Sioux City,” Captain said without looking up.

  “No.”

  “Cyclogenesis. Watch it happen.”

  “Where’d you see that?”

  “It’s in one of the discussions online.”

  “How about South Sioux City?”

  Captain shook his head. “How about north?”

  John brought up his sensor graphing software on his laptop screen. He paged through the data from the Ingot storm. “What I can’t figure out is why these graphs keep flattening out.”

  Captain leaned over. “What do you mean?”

  “Look. Almost every sensor flatlines at a certain velocity. It’s like we’ve reached the limit of the sensors.”

  “It’s because you have,” Madeline said as she walked back toward the couch and sat down next to John. She took another drink of water but stared straight ahead. “They’re limited out of the box because the readings get unstable above a certain threshold. It’s not in the specs, but you can reprogram each sensor to have unlimited range.”

  John gave her a bewildered look. “How do you know so much?”

  She continued to avoid his eyes. “I read about it somewhere.”

  Her cell phone rang. With a look of confusion she picked it up and meandered back into the kitchen to answer the call.

  “Oh sure. Now the phone works,” she said. “Hello?”

  A minute of silence went by as Madeline listened. She put her hand to her mouth. “Okay. Okay. Thanks for letting me know.” She wiped her eye with her sleeve.

  John looked up and noticed she had a tear rolling down her cheek. “Who was it?”

  “Janet’s sister.” She looked up from her cell phone but barely held it together. “Janet’s gone.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was early Saturday afternoon when John realized the atmospheric dynamics he looked at on his screen and in the sky
had no analog. What concerned him more was that the computer models struggled to develop convection in certain areas even though one glance at the sky told him that conditions could not have been better for storms clouds to boil up.

  As John neared Sioux City, Iowa, on Interstate 29, he could not help but feel that there were eerie parallels developing with previous violent tornado outbreaks. Months ago he watched several hours of footage again from the 2013 El Reno tornado in Oklahoma that killed three storm chasers. Although he had seen a few documentaries and read a few articles on the subject, the visuals of multiple vortices and the track of the tornado itself was something that had burned itself into his mind from the first day he saw them. With the El Reno storm the path of the tornado was curved and not linear, and near the end the tornado made a loop. Add that to the changing speed of the storm and it was a wonder more people were not killed.

  Today, like that day, felt wrong on so many levels. Every few minutes he began to doubt this particular chase and he knew Captain was on the same wavelength. He did not like that feeling and sought to push it under every chance he could get. It was a struggle not unique to him because, as he had been told once by a not-so-empathetic neighbor, he and other chasers just had to be crazy to try and follow something that could kill him at any given moment. Of course, who was that guy to talk, John thought. That guy trimmed trees for a living and fell out of them a couple of times a year.

  The heat was intense now as was the humidity. Yet it was the strong winds on the ground and aloft concerned him the most. The shear just a few thousand feet up in the atmosphere was increasing by the hour. Despite his initial misgivings about the situation, a palpable sense of excitement and dread was in the air—if only in their truck.

  To the west, a broken band of towering cumulus clouds rocketed upward, driven along by an approaching front and the intense agitation of the mid-level jet that funneled an incredible amount of moisture into the region overnight. What made the cumulus towers intriguing was the rate at which they climbed coupled with the distance between the individual storms. In other words, this had the makings of a multi-tornado outbreak.

  “Does anybody get the feeling this is going to be a long day?” John asked no one in particular.

  “I packed extra camera batteries if that’s what you’re getting at,” Captain said from the front seat.

  By mutual agreement Madeline sat in the backseat during this chase. She kept staring out the side window and then back at her watch. “How long do you think it will be?” She said suddenly while not making eye contact with John. There was a sense of impatience in her voice as if she was late for something.

  “The picnic is today, isn’t it?” John said hoping she had forgotten about it. Only after he thought about how he said those words did he realize that he must have sounded annoyed.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I thought you were taking your Mom.”

  “I was until we had a fight last night. I keep trying to call her but she’s not picking up her phone.”

  “They bumped us up to a high risk, John,” Captain said while flipping between screens on his laptop. He turned and showed John the latest update from the Storm Prediction Center.

  “Marvelous.”

  “Isn’t that a bad thing?” Madeline said after a moment. This time she gave John an irritated stare.

  “It makes sense given how the numbers are off the charts. Which makes this the best place to camp out. At least according to Captain here.”

  Madeline did not respond.

  “Hey, sometimes these days are a bust, too,” John added after a pause. He looked back at her in the rearview mirror but she did not seem interested. He was unsure whether her mood was a product of the fight with her mother or because Captain reclaimed his position in the front seat for this chase.

  “What do you think is going to happen at that picnic anyway?” He said to her after a minute.

  Again, she did not respond.

  “Maybe you should go to it, then.”

  “How would I get there? I’d hate to interrupt your plans for videotaping homes getting demolished.”

  “I don’t get it. Originally you wanted to go with today. You knew there was going to be a lot of driving, right?”

  When she remained silent, he gave Captain a frustrated look. “You talk about videotaping things. You chase false teachers around while they tear up congregations. I could always lend you a camera and you can record the carnage. People falling all over the aisles. Bodies lying everywhere.”

  “That’s not funny. You don’t need to be nasty about it. And what about you? You’re chasing a stupid column of spinning air around. Is it all just about photos and money?”

  “For me it is,” Captain said without hesitation. “I’m shameless about it,” he said with a wink.

  John gave him a sharp glance.

  “What is it for you, John?” Madeline continued. “Are you still trying to figure out what happened to Rebekah? By chasing storms? What do you think you’ll find if you drive into one? Or are you still mad at God? When are you going to live in the moment instead of everyone chasing after you?”

  “Should I tell her about the delivery or would this be a bad time?” Captain said to John without looking up from his laptop screen.

  “No. This is a bad time,” John said. He felt his hands become tacky on the steering wheel.

  “Delivery? What are you talking about?” Madeline said.

  John took a deep breath and exhaled. He knew this conversation was not going to end well. “He delivered a package.”

  “What? To who?”

  “Some of the churchgoers.”

  “It was for the picnic,” Captain said. “Honest.”

  Madeline narrowed her eyes at Captain. “What was in the package?”

  “It was a case of gold glitter. Edible gold glitter stars to be exact.”

  “Maybe I should go,” Madeline snapped.

  “Maybe,” Captain said quietly.

  “Don’t do this, Madeline,” John said as he looked at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Stop the truck,” she said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Stop the truck. I want to get out. Now.” She unbuckled her seat belt and put a hand on the door handle.

  John rolled his eyes and took the next highway exit. At the top of the exit he turned right and pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. He did not want to put the truck into park. Before he could turn around and say a word, Madeline had one foot out the door. “Where are you going?” He said.

  “You know where.”

  “Look, I’ll drive. I’m sorry. Captain’s sorry.” He turned to face Captain and at the same time jabbed him in the side with his elbow. “You’re sorry, right?”

  Captain chuckled. “It was a joke. Ow. Stop that. Okay, I’m sorry. Come back.”

  By this time Madeline was already out the door and had walked several yards along the shoulder of the road. She did not respond but instead increased her walking pace.

  John leaned out of his window and yelled out to her. “It’s a long walk back to Wick.” He turned back toward Captain. “How far is it?”

  “About seventy miles.”

  John felt a lump in his throat and called back to her. “It’s a hundred miles. How are you going to get there?”

  She continued her trek across the highway bridge and stuck out her thumb as if to hitchhike. John looked back at Captain and shrugged. Captain pointed out the fact that one of the towering cumulus clouds had sprouted an anvil. It was the rain-free portion of that storm’s base that drew John’s attention. In that moment, he knew what was going to be their first target of the day.

  Captain looked into the backseat. “Looks like she left something behind. A picnic basket, maybe?” He reached into the backseat and opened the wooden cover. “Hey, check this out. She really did pack us a lunch. Ham and Swiss on rye. She even sprang for real Dijon mustard.”

  John focused on the drive a
head. His appetite was gone.

  “Want one?” Captain said as he held out a sandwich and unwrapped one for John and another one for himself.

  John held up his hand and wished he could have taken the last ten minutes of conversation back.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was not long before Madeline was picked up from the side of the road on her trek toward Wick. John fought the urge to follow the car that picked her up, although he did write down the license plate number from the vehicle. Distracted, he drove off down the highway to a few miles west of Sioux City.

  “Why did you have to bring that up?” John said to Captain.

  “I couldn’t help it. It’s not like you two weren’t fighting already.”

  “Yeah, but I want to make this work today. Now we might have to chase her down.”

  “She’ll be fine. But if we get good data today this could be a game changer for everyone’s future. Think about the grant money.”

  “We’ve made it this far without it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you testing me again? Don’t test me. I’ve been the one filling out all the paperwork.”

  “Who’s testing you? You’re testing me right now.”

  As John zeroed in on the first promising storm, a second cell just to the northeast of that one vied for his attention. “Left or right?” John said without lifting his hands off the steering wheel.

  “Left,” Captain said as he stared up at the sky and then back at his laptop screen. “There’s a broken line from west of Pierre down to south of Omaha. There’s a thunderstorm warning now in front of us on the cell west of Sioux City. Tornado warning for eastern Bon Homme County. Everything is drifting northeast at twenty.”

  John leaned over to look at the highway map on Captain’s screen and mapped out the shortest route to where the storm would be in the next fifteen minutes. Although his thoughts alternated between Madeline and the stirrings in the sky, he also calculated the best possible launch point for the first round of rockets carrying Ferganut sensors. Minutes after turning south down a narrow paved county road he pulled over to the shoulder.