Whirlwind

by Rick Mofina

  Remy reached for the baby, screamed and shut her eyes, bracing for a collision.

  At the last second Mason swerved, coming within a hairbreadth before averting a crash.

  Remy sighed with relief.

  This was the last straw for Mason. The close call detonated his rage—rage at Remy’s reluctance to get rid of the baby; rage at DOA’s text; rage at everything. Mason roared east on the freeway, his nerves rippling with each car he passed.

  “Slow down!” Remy said.

  He was catatonic with fury, driving hard.

  “Mason, please!”

  He drove without speaking as they exited the freeway into some community racing by them in the southeast.

  “Mason, for God’s sake, what are you doing?”

  He didn’t have a clear destination but rather a burning intention. They came to a deserted field, heaped with broken branches and debris from the storm. He parked the truck, grabbed the baby and got out.

  “Mason!” Remy jumped out after him. “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t take any more of this bullshit, Remy! I’m going to take care of things once and for all!”

  Mason’s jawline pulsed as he marched through the debris with the baby. Remy ran after him, pounding his back and shoulders, tears streaming down her face.

  20

  Balch Springs, Texas

  The morning after her night shift, Kate was in a southeast suburb of Dallas.

  She’d halted her Chevy Cobalt in front of a redbrick bungalow, glanced at the trimmed grass and neat low-standing hedges bordering the sidewalk. Well kept, she thought, flipping through her notes to confirm the address.

  Bolstered by Chuck Laneer’s support the night before, she’d been going full tilt on the baby story since 6:00 a.m. When she woke, she’d texted Jenna Cooper for any news in the search for Caleb.

  Nothing. Praying, Jenna texted back.

  Kate then called Frank Rivera for any developments on the case. Had the baby, any baby, been recovered? What about anyone bearing resemblance to the helpful strangers?

  “Nothing new to report, Kate, sorry,” Rivera said.

  “Hey, Frank, is it possible the baby was taken by this couple?”

  A moment passed.

  “You’re not going to quote me. We’re just talking, right?”

  “Right, just talking.”

  “Okay, well, anything’s possible, but I doubt it’s the case here.”

  “Why?”

  “People try to help people in times of chaos, and the storm has given us many stories like that. I think this one is just a very tragic one, and while I pray for a different outcome, I fear the baby and the Good Samaritans may be found miles from the flea market.”

  “Thanks, Frank.”

  Kate pondered Rivera’s comments then reasoned that her best bet for learning more about what had happened to Caleb, and the strangers, was to get an account from anyone who was there at the time.

  She drove to the flea market.

  Search-and-recovery work was ongoing. Access remained restricted. Kate was permitted to enter and returned to the wreckage of the Saddle Up Center, where she located Captain Vern Hamby and search-and-rescue team leader Steve Pawson. She pressed them for any information on the Cooper case.

  No babies had been recovered so far from the center’s debris, and they’d found no one fitting the descriptions of the strangers, they said.

  “I understand that you have maps,” Kate said, “floor plans that pinpoint where people were situated when the tornado hit, to help identify people.”

  “That’s correct,” Hamby said.

  “Can you help me locate a spot on the floor plan?” Kate unfolded a page of her notebook with a sketch she’d made based on Jenna Cooper telling her how she’d taken shelter with the strangers by four large concrete planters near a wall.

  Hamby and Pawson checked the sketch against the center’s floor plan, which covered a worktable. Pawson touched a dirty, scraped finger to a corner of the plan.

  “That would be here,” he said.

  Kate looked at the plan.

  “Which vendor was closest to that spot when the storm hit?”

  Hamby scratched his chin.

  “Big Rail World. They would’ve had the clearest view of that area.”

  “Who’s the operator for Big Rail?”

  “According to the public directory, Burl Heaton,” Pawson said.

  “Did Burl Heaton survive?”

  Pawson consulted his phone and Hamby opened a three-ring binder.

  “Yes, he did,” Hamby said. “Got banged up a bit, but he’s okay.”

  “Any idea where he is right now—hospital, shelter, home?”

  “I think he went home with his son,” Pawson said.

  Kate confirmed the spelling of Heaton’s name and looked up his address.

  Now she was parked in front of his house in Balch Springs. She closed her notebook. The address was correct. This was the place.

  She gathered her bag, walked up to his door and rang the bell, hoping against hope that Burl Heaton might get her closer to learning what happened to Caleb Cooper.

  A white-haired woman in her sixties opened the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello. I’m Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead. I called earlier.”

  “Oh yes, come in. Burl! She’s here! Don’t worry about your shoes. This way.”

  Thick outdated carpet covered the living room floor. Dark paneling covered the walls, which displayed family photos and a large painting of a freight train in the mountains. The coffee table was covered with paperwork, lists, photos, inventories and forms. Burl Heaton, aged seventy, was a retired brakeman who’d run a model railroad business at the flea market. He was assessing his losses and the toll, he told Kate.

  His face was a net of abrasions. “I lost everything. About fifty thousand in product,” he said. “I got my arms skinned to the bone, got some bruised ribs, but I’m alive. Not like some of my friends. Not like— Sorry...”

  He turned away and cried as his wife comforted him. In the quiet, Kate heard a man’s voice in the kitchen, talking about insurance on the phone.

  Heaton brushed away his tears.

  “In forty-nine years of railroading, I thought I’d seen a lot. I was in two derailments and one collision. But I cannot comprehend what I saw at the market. The building was torn apart, bodies flying like rag dolls, like the door to hell had been kicked open.”

  Kate’s heart twisted as Heaton shook his head slowly until he found his composure and his way back from the horror to his living room.

  “On the phone you said you needed help looking for someone?”

  “Yes. I’m following the story of Jenna Cooper, whose baby was lost in the storm.”

  Heaton glanced to his wife and said, “We heard a little bit about that on the news. She was at the Saddle Up. Terrible, just terrible.”

  Kate cued up the photos she’d taken of Jenna on her phone and showed them to Heaton, to aid his memory.

  “We think she passed by Big Rail to take shelter by the planters near your booth. I’m interested in knowing if you saw what happened there, especially with the two people who were helping her, a man and woman in their twenties.”

  Kate described the mystery pair as Heaton looked at the pictures for several moments.

  “No, she doesn’t look familiar. I don’t recall seeing her or these other people you’re talking about,” he said. “It was so crazy and everything happened so fast. A lot of people just stood there in shock, not believing what was happening. There was no place to go, nothing you could do.”

  “What about Lance?” his wife asked and cocked an ear to the kitchen. “He was there with you.
I think he’s done on the phone. Lance!”

  A slender, unsmiling man in his thirties with bandages on his cheeks stood at the hallway entrance, listening to his mother explain Kate’s request. Without speaking, he took Kate’s phone and looked at the images intensely before shaking his head and passing the phone back to her.

  Disappointed that her avenue of searching had dead-ended, she thanked the Heatons and stood to leave.

  “Hang on.” Lance was busy with his phone. “I got something else. It came this morning. It may help you. Dolores Valdez runs the booth across from Dad’s, called These Boots. Her teenage son Tony sent me a recording he did of the center when the tornado hit. He wants to sell it to the TV people. Here it is. Watch.” Lance passed his phone to Kate.

  She saw shaky video of people crowding inside the center amid the sounds of cracking, creaking and hammering. There, Kate glimpsed Big Rail, the forest of people, a flash of a baby stroller, Jenna’s profile, a fleeting image of Cassie’s head, and two adults with them, barely visible, navigating their way through the pack. The camera’s point of view shifted; some people crouched on the floor, shouting to others to get down. Some cried out as explosion after explosion sounded along with the shredding of metal by unbelievable winds. Debris swirled, a car landed inside, people were pulled into the air and tossed into darkness.

  Then the footage went black.

  Kate caught her breath and willed her heart to calm.

  She asked Lance to replay the video, which ran for nearly five minutes. As she watched the second time, she realized there was no way of telling what had happened to Caleb and the strangers. The video cut away before it offered up any clues.

  “Lance, can you give me Tony’s number? I’ll check with my desk, but Newslead might buy this from him and put it up on its website.”

  21

  Pleasant Grove, Southeast Dallas, Texas

  Pam Carraway had started her day before first light.

  That morning, Pam, a part-time gym teacher, joined her search-and-rescue team in the parking lot of a Baptist church. Their fluorescent jackets glowed yellow, orange and green in the headlights of arriving vehicles.

  You couldn’t tell by looking and talking with her, but Pam was not sure she could make it through another day.

  As the sun rose, members of the volunteer group sipped coffee from commuter mugs and checked radios and phones while they were given their new assignment: the fringes of Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery. Tornadoes had churned through the burial grounds and destroyed surrounding homes and businesses.

  “The debris field is substantial,” Kel Zedler, the search manager, said. “It was searched yesterday by Jay Selinger’s group. We’ve been tasked to take one quadrant of the area and search it again. And, guys, it bears repeating that time is running out for survivors. Lives may depend on us.”

  Some of the K-9 units yipped as the team climbed onto the school bus that would take them to their command post. As they drove in the twilight Pam adjusted to her muscle aches from yesterday’s marathon search.

  She couldn’t shake off the secret overwhelming sense of loss and foreboding dwelling in a far corner of her heart.

  Was it posttraumatic stress?

  Suck it up, Carraway. This is no time to go to pieces.

  Make no mistake, she was dedicated to the work, having started volunteering two years ago after the group had found her seventy-three-year-old father, an Alzheimer’s walk-away.

  They’d saved his life, and she felt the best way to thank them was to be a part of the work they did.

  Pam was already certified in CPR and advanced first aid. She was in excellent condition. The search team trained her on how to use compasses, maps, GPS, grid search practices, various advanced communications, weather, clue and evidence techniques. She’d learned incident management skills and could quote from four different manuals.

  During the time Pam had been with the team, they’d helped search for bodies, missing children and seniors, hikers lost in the wilderness. They’d helped police look for guns or knives tossed after a crime.

  As a searcher, Pam had been involved in helping locate twelve bodies. She had experience with making gruesome discoveries; still, she never got over the shock of seeing cadavers in various stages of decomposition. It never, ever got easier. She died a little each time, thinking of the families of the victims.

  Yesterday her team searched through a section of Irving that had been hit hard. They’d made sixteen finds. Eight were deceased and Pam had found seven of them, including the man buried in rubble holding his dead wife, whose body had been cut in half by a roof beam.

  The group also found eight people who survived. The power of the disaster was overwhelming. Some victims had been found miles from where they were when the storm hit. Some had been in trees, on rooftops, entwined in wrecked cars, enmeshed in debris or they had been torn to pieces.

  Hope for finding survivors was ticking down according to medical estimates of the time a person could survive injury, exposure, without water or food. Gas lines were ruptured everywhere. In addition, there were health-and-safety laws outlining a deadline for debris to be removed before areas became vermin infested. There was a real fear that a victim, still alive, could be bulldozed into a dump truck and taken to a landfill.

  That wasn’t all.

  “You could use a tornado to attempt to get away with murder,” a team member who was a retired detective had told Pam, just as they got off the bus. “Place your victim amid the debris and it would be assumed the cause of death was from the tornado. Unless someone knew otherwise, you might get away with it.”

  The possibility gave Pam a chill, but the truth was she was not sure she could survive finding another body, she thought, as they assembled at the command post. There, they were given their assigned zones and set out to process them.

  Pam’s zone encompassed a section of the cemetery and a neighboring residential street, or what was left of it.

  Police had sealed the area so search-and-rescue efforts could continue. The cemetery was a field of toppled trees and headstones. Huge patches of manicured lawns had been ripped from the earth. Across the street, houses had been flattened or shorn, exposing rooms, wiring and insulation. Topsoil had been hurled onto rooftops and cars overturned.

  Pam searched the area as K-9 teams probed nearby. Clothing, toys, appliances and furniture were scattered everywhere. She found a real-estate for sale sign from Duncanville, which was about fifteen miles west. But so far she’d found no bodies, no survivors.

  She was grateful.

  Jay Selinger’s team was good, she thought. You could always count on them to do a thorough job.

  Nearly two hours passed with Pam continuing her work amid the destruction of cars dropped on houses, more branches and tree limbs, and sections of walls hurled into residential streets. She came upon what must have been a day care. A heap of children’s furniture and toys buried beneath trees was all that was left.

  She saw a doll, dirty and mud covered.

  Pam bent down to grab the leg and froze.

  It was not a doll.

  22

  Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

  After disembarking from his connecting flight through Seattle, Blake Cooper met Garrett Keo, his brother-in-law, at the arrivals gate at DFW International Airport.

  For the first time ever, Garrett, a six-foot-two mechanic and Falcons fan from Atlanta, hugged Blake, in a tender but awkward moment.

  That simple action pushed matters beyond the understated machismo of two blue-collar men who did little more than shake hands at family gatherings and holidays.

  It drove home the depth of the tragedy.

  “It’s a helluva thing, Blake, a helluva thing. Holly sends her love. We’re going to help you and Jen get through
this,” Garrett said after grabbing Blake’s bag and leading him to his rental, a pearl-colored Ford Escape. “You made good time getting back,” he said as they left the airport.

  “The airline bumped me ahead when I told them the reason I needed to get home,” Blake said. “My company covered the ticket, sent in a guy from Tacoma to fill in for me. Everyone’s been good...” Blake’s voice trailed. As they got on the expressway and the city rolled by, Blake thought back to that first awful call with Jen. How he couldn’t believe what she was telling him, thinking she had to be wrong.

  Caleb vanished in the tornado. It made no sense.

  It couldn’t be true, he thought, telling himself as his jet had climbed over the Rockies that really, everything was okay. Jen was just confused by the storm. Caleb was safe somewhere.

  He had to be.

  Yes, Blake had seen news coverage of the tornadoes on the TVs at the Seattle airport. Yes, there was death and destruction in several states. Yes, Dallas was hit hard. Yes, people were suffering, but this couldn’t be happening, not to his family. Really, everything is okay.

  God, please let everything be okay.

  Blake suddenly realized that Garrett had passed the exit for his home.

  “Aren’t we going to go to my house? Hasn’t Jen moved out of the shelter by now?”

  “No. I went out to Lancaster— It’s not good.”

  “What?”

  “Blake, your house is gone. I’m sorry.” Garrett’s voice was soft, filled with compassion.

  Blake’s face paled and he ran his hand over it. Then a sound between a groan and a curse escaped him. “Was—was there anything left?”

  Garrett shook his head solemnly. “Your neighborhood was totally destroyed, nothing left but rubble. The area’s restricted, sealed off while they deal with power lines and gas.”

  Blake said nothing. He blinked at nothing, as if struggling to comprehend something incomprehensible.

  “That’s not all of it, Blake. There’s more about Caleb.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I’m so damned sorry. I should’ve told you at the airport.” Garrett’s voice began to crack a little. “It happened when you were on the plane, I—” The words wouldn’t come.