The Tornado Chasers

by Ross Montgomery

  Silence. Pete looked down.

  ‘They left me with my nan,’ he muttered. ‘Both of them. When I was a baby. They couldn’t look after me, they said. I’ve never even seen them, except in photographs.’ He picked at a piece of thread sticking out from his pocket. ‘I’m not a murderer.’

  No one said anything for a while. Pete stood, his gaze fixed down, his fingertips skimming the surface of the water. Orlaith shook her head.

  ‘Pete,’ she said. ‘I never knew.’

  He shrugged. ‘You never asked.’

  We glanced at each other. None of us felt very brave any more.

  ‘Sorry, Pete,’ I said.

  Everyone muttered a guilty apology. Pete looked up at us. His lip was trembling.

  ‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ he said. ‘I heard the van coming and I thought, if they saw the bikes …’ His voice broke, just slightly. ‘And I’m really sorry about your dad, Orlaith, I never …’

  Orlaith reached out and touched his shoulder.

  ‘It’s fine, Pete,’ said Orlaith. ‘It’s all fine.’

  We climbed up the sides of the ditch and stood in the road, assessing the situation. The bikes lay in a tangled heap in the stream. Ceri’s camera jutted out the water, dangling by its strap from the tripod. It was a miracle the County officers hadn’t seen them.

  ‘How did they get here so fast?’ said Ceri. ‘I mean, I thought the Detention Centre was miles away – and this is the only road out of town, isn’t it? How could they …’

  She trailed off. Nothing made much sense any longer. The storm was gone. Our whole plan had unravelled in front of us. Orlaith sighed, and pulled off her cape.

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s it then.’

  We fell silent.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, my stomach turning tombstone-cold. ‘My parents are going to kill me.’

  ‘We’re going to prison,’ Pete whispered.

  ‘I’ll never see a tornado,’ said Callum.

  Orlaith squeezed the ditchwater from her cape. ‘And I’m never getting into the Valley Academy as long as I live.’

  The wind ran through the trees again, scattering the roadside with dead branches. We started at them glumly.

  ‘On the plus side,’ said Ceri. ‘I suppose it can’t get any worse, can it?’

  We turned to look at her. She was stood beside the fallen tree trunk, twiddling her cape in her fingers absent-mindedly.

  ‘I mean … why not just keep going? Finish what we started? Leave the valley, chase the tornado …’

  Orlaith frowned. ‘Because between us we’ve already broken about a hundred Storm Laws.’

  ‘A hundred and seven,’ Ceri corrected. ‘So let’s face it – we’re going to get locked up whether we go back now or whether they catch us in a few days. By then, a couple of extra months in County won’t make any difference. But coming back to the village as heroes – as Tornado Chasers – well, that’s got to be worth something, right?’

  We looked at each other. Maybe some blood had pooled in my brain after the car hit me, but Ceri was beginning to make sense. She put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Think about it – Would Owen’s grandparents have given up at the first hurdle?’ she asked. ‘No! They’d have kept going. And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t join the Tornado Chasers to be cautious and safe and sensible. I joined so I could see this.’

  She held out her hands. The trees around us had bent double in the roaring wind, their leaves stripped and trembling. The moon and sun both hung above us in the morning light, casting impossible shadows across a forest streaked in whites and blues. It looked like the end of the world. Ceri shook her head.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ she said. ‘And you know why? Because we spend all our time stuck indoors, that’s why! Home, school, home, school … that’s it! And even then, all we ever get told is how we’re not being safe enough. I’m flipping sick of it. Aren’t you?’

  No one said anything. Without another word, Ceri stuck out one of her braces and drew her leg across the tarmac, carving a line between her and us. She stood defiantly on the other side.

  ‘You lot go home if you want to,’ said Ceri. She drew her cape about her with a flourish. ‘I’m going to chase a tornado.’

  I made to speak, but before I could say anything Callum had already shoved me aside and marched across the line.

  ‘Yeah, obviously!’ he said. ‘That’s exactly what I was about to say, Ceri. We should definitely just keep going. Glad you agree with me.’

  He stood beside Ceri. Orlaith shook her head and made to say something, but trailed off. Pete had stepped forwards. We watched in silence as he slowly crossed the line on the tarmac and stood beside the others. Callum grinned, and slapped him on the back.

  ‘Great!’ he said. ‘That makes three against two. What about you, Owen? Are you with us?’

  I looked at my three friends standing on the other side of the divide. I thought about what my cell in County would look like.

  And then I thought about my new bedroom waiting for me back home.

  With a sigh, I dropped my broken helmet to the ground. It clattered across the tarmac and rolled into the ditch.

  ‘Well, I’m a Tornado Chaser,’ I said. ‘Obviously.’

  The others cheered, and patted me on the back. We turned to Orlaith. She stood alone on the road behind us, her eyes pained behind the mask of mud and hair, wringing the cape in her hands. I suddenly noticed how chewed and bitten her nails were.

  ‘Guys,’ she said. ‘Don’t you get it? The tornado’s gone. The bikes are underwater. Ceri’s camera is probably broken. There’s a tree blocking the only road out of town.’ She shook her head. ‘You … you can’t do it.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Well, of course we can’t do it, Orlaith. Look at us.’

  I nodded encouragingly at the others. We tried to look as pathetic and bedraggled as possible, which was not very hard. Pete had frogspawn in his hair.

  ‘We’d never have got this far without you,’ I said pleadingly. ‘If you leave … we don’t stand a chance.’

  Orlaith looked us over, her eyes calculating it all. Her fingernails twisted and worked at the cape.

  ‘Please, Orlaith.’

  She let out a very long, and very deep, sigh. Then with a flourish she lifted up the cape and slung it across her back.

  ‘Fine,’ she grumbled. ‘Have it your way.’

  She marched over the line. Everyone cheered and leapt on top of her, shaking her and ruffling her hair. Orlaith allowed herself a smile for a moment, and then quickly pushed us away.

  ‘Alright, alright! That’s enough,’ she said. ‘Let’s get going. They’re going to work out we’re not in Barrow any moment.’

  She pointed to Pete and Callum.

  ‘You two get the bikes out the river. Ceri, check over your camera equipment and make sure it all works. And then … well, then still have to get over this flipping tree trunk, don’t we?’

  She turned to me with a sigh.

  ‘You don’t know anything about climbing trees, do you Owen?’

  I smiled.

  15

  The Valleys

  We stood on highest point of the hills surrounding Barrow. It had taken all morning to get over the tree and up the hill, pushing the bikes by hand when the road was too steep. The village was barely a speck behind us now. Not that we were looking at it.

  The valleys stretched out before us. They rolled on great waves into the horizon, dipping and swelling further than the eye could see. Small villages and towns lay pocketed between the hills, the air above them rippling with chimney smoke and flocks of slow-moving birds. The countryside in-between was spread and shaped by hills and mountains, forests and fields, rivers and eddies and clusters of coloured rock.

  ‘Told you it’d be good,’ said Ceri.

  She was right. It was beautiful. It was probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  ‘I’ve neve
r seen so many stormtraps,’ I muttered.

  The blinking metal boxes stretched out in both directions beside us, running like a long great chain fence all along the hills. But they didn’t just surround Barrow: they ran across the entirety of the valleys, splitting into different pathways and flickering on the top of even the furthest mountains. They seemed almost to form a shape of their own on the landscape.

  ‘The stormtraps surround the valleys like a fence,’ Orlaith explained. ‘So the tornadoes can’t escape. Most of the villages just have one in the middle, though. See?’

  She pointed a few of them out. In every village we could just make out a single blinking light in the centre, stuck to the top of the highest building.

  ‘What about that one?’ said Ceri, pointing behind us. ‘Over there. That doesn’t look like a village.’

  We turned round and shielded our eyes. In the centre of the valley directly next to Barrow lay a single grey building, surrounded by high walls. It stood alone in a valley filled with rubbish. A single stormtrap blinked on the roof.

  ‘I didn’t know there was a valley next to Barrow,’ I said, confused. ‘It – it looks like …’

  ‘The County Detention Centre,’ said Orlaith quietly.

  A chill suddenly fell on our group.

  ‘That’s where it is?’ said Callum. ‘Right next to the village?’

  Ceri shuddered. ‘Probably so they can catch you quickly if you try to escape.’

  We looked nervously at the building. It had all the features of a breeze block. It looked very dark inside. I imagined what it would be like to spend my summer there.

  ‘Well – come on then!’ said Callum boldly, breaking the silence. ‘No point standing here like a bunch of losers. Let’s go get this tornado!’

  He pointed to the horizon. High above the hills in the far distance, the sky was stained by a colossal bank of grey clouds. They hovered in the air like a fairytale castle, casting a great shadow onto the slopes below. There was no doubting what it was.

  ‘It looks, er … pretty far away,’ I said.

  Orlaith sighed. ‘Well, it’s had all morning to get ahead of us, hasn’t it? We’ll never catch up with it now. If we want another chance to get near it, we’re going to need a new strategy.’

  I blinked. ‘Like what?’

  Orlaith’s eyes flickered slightly.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Owen,’ she snapped. ‘I didn’t have time to make an ideas machine last night. Just the bikes. And the stormtrap. Oh, and the capes.’ She crossed her arms huffily. ‘So maybe someone else should come up with the ideas for once.’

  We glanced at each other. Orlaith needed careful handling.

  ‘What about the stormtrap?’ I asked. ‘Could that help us?’

  Orlaith groaned. ‘Who knows? I mean, it’s got some kind of screen on it, but I just can’t work out what it’s supposed to be showing …’

  She plucked it from the sidecar and held it up. The screen was filled with a series of dots, laid out across a grid. At the bottom, a single light flashed on and off.

  ‘Looks like a bear,’ I muttered.

  ‘Yeah!’ said Ceri. ‘Or an old bugtrap filled with flies.’

  ‘Or a pile of sick,’ said Callum.

  Orlaith ran her fingers around the dots in a swirling pattern. ‘I’ve looked and looked at it, but I just can’t work out what it’s supposed to be …’

  I frowned, and traced the shape with my eyes. It almost reminded me of something …

  And then it struck me, as if a light had been switched on in my head. I grabbed the stormtrap from Orlaith’s hands and held it up in front of me.

  ‘Hey!’ she cried.

  I looked between the swirling dots and the valleys, the dipping hills and the lights on the screen, a smile slowly breaking out across my face.

  ‘That’s it!’ I said. ‘That’s it!’

  The others looked at me, nonplussed. I pointed back to the stormtrap excitedly.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ I said. ‘The screen – it’s a map of the valleys! All these dots are stormtraps!’

  Ceri glanced at me suspiciously. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Barrow’s the only village that’s surrounded by stormtraps, right?’ I ran my finger around the ring of dots in the bottom left corner of the screen. ‘That would make it this circle here. The dot in the middle must be the one on the clock tower.’ I pointed to another dot outside the ring. ‘And this one would be the County Detention Centre.’

  Orlaith gasped. ‘He’s right! Owen – you brilliant, brilliant man!’

  She ran forwards. I thought she was going to hug me, but she just grabbed the stormtrap out of my hands and turned away. She took a marker pen out of her pocket, pulling off the lid with her teeth. Callum looked at her incredulously.

  ‘You, er … always keep a marker pen in your pocket?’ he said.

  Orlaith ignored him. She set to work doodling across the screen, glancing up across the valleys every few seconds.

  ‘Uh huh … so if we’re here, that would make that one Skirting … uh huh … which would make all those the factories in the East … and all this up here would be the North … There!’

  She popped back the lid on the pen and held up the stormtrap. The screen was now covered in pen lines.

  ‘And that’s not even the best bit,’ she said, her voice betraying a flicker of excitement. She pointed at the bottom of the screen. ‘See that little flashing light just there?’

  We looked at the blinking light on the screen, and nodded.

  ‘Look at where the tornado is.’

  We turned to the shadow of clouds in the distance, hidden by the hills. They slowly moved across the countryside, further and further out of view.

  ‘It’s moving East, right?’ said Orlaith. ‘Now, look at what the flashing light does.’

  We stared at the screen in silence. Orlaith held her thumb to the light. A minute passed. Then, it happened. The light beside her thumb turned off, and the next one along started blinking instead. Orlaith looked up in triumph.

  ‘It shows which stormtrap the tornado is closest to!’ she cried. ‘Which means … we can work out where it’s going to go!’

  We stared at her blankly.

  ‘How?’ asked Ceri.

  Orlaith moaned with frustration and tugged at her hair. I finally understood why it stuck out so much.

  ‘Don’t any of you know how stormtraps work?’

  Our silence spoke volumes. Orlaith muttered something under her breath about doing everything herself, and held up the stormtrap.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Stormtraps push tornadoes away. OK? But they don’t just push them anywhere – they all work together. That’s why they’re in a big chain around the whole valley.’

  She pointed to the enormous system of stormtraps that wrapped and crisscrossed the valleys around us.

  ‘When a stormtrap senses a tornado is near, it pushes it along to the next one in the chain. Which pushes it along to the next one, then the next one and the next, until the tornado gets pushed all the way to the North.’

  She pointed to the horizon, where a range of white mountains dominated the landscape.

  ‘There are no villages or anything there,’ she said. ‘Just hills and caves. Nothing the tornado can damage.’ She struck the stormtrap triumphantly. ‘So all we have to do is work out the path the tornado’s going to take, and cut it off before it gets there!’

  She started scribbling on the display again. The pen raced across the screen, drawing lines, dots, scribbles, everything at lightning pace. She held up the display.

  ‘We’ll head right there – the hills below Skirting.’ She grinned. ‘By the time the tornado’s been all around the valleys and is heading back West, we’ll be ready and waiting for it.’

  We glanced at each other in excitement, our hearts racing. The plan was back on track – we could do this.

  ‘So – how long have we got to get there?’ I said.<
br />
  Orlaith’s eyes flicked around the screen. ‘Two days, I reckon. Which means … well, it means we’re going to have to find somewhere to sleep rough for tonight.’

  Her words had an immediate effect on the group. We glanced at each other nervously.

  ‘Sleep rough?’ Ceri repeated. ‘Outside? But … if we’re outside at night, then aren’t there going to be …’

  ‘Bears?’ said Callum nervously.

  We fell silent. In all the excitement and planning, we’d completely forgotten that our adventure would involve us cycling right across bear country. Callum turned to me, pretending to appear casual.

  ‘You, er … did remember that repellent, didn’t you?’

  I reached into my pockets and held out the two small cans I’d taken from my bedroom.

  ‘It’s all I had,’ I whimpered.

  Callum’s face fell. ‘Two cans? That’s all?’

  There was an awkward pause. I glanced at Orlaith.

  ‘We should be fine if we find shelter …’ I said. ‘Right, Orlaith?’

  Orlaith nodded quickly. ‘Yeah – probably. Let’s just get moving before it gets dark.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Pete, climbing onto his bike. ‘We’ve only got a few hours before curfew starts, anyway.’

  Orlaith stopped suddenly. She turned to him, and smiled.

  ‘Pete,’ she said. ‘No, we don’t. There is no curfew. Not out here.’

  He looked at Orlaith for a moment. Then, a smile slowly flickered at the corner of his lips.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said.

  A gust of wind suddenly belted through the grass, scattering pollen in a cloud around us. We gazed at the countryside ahead. It spread out for miles. There were patches of forest, sheep fields, rivers, mountains jutting out the earth and ringed with wisps of cloud. The whole world lay before us. And it was ours.

  ‘No curfews,’ said Orlaith. ‘No Home-Time Partners. No Storm Laws.’

  ‘We can do anything we want,’ I said quietly. ‘Go anywhere.’

  Ceri grinned. ‘So where do you want to go?’

  Callum barrelled forwards, his eyes wide with excitement.