What Stands in a Storm (18 page)

About three miles southwest of Beverly Heights, children were still playing on the grass when the tornado blasted with bomblike fury through the government projects at Rosedale. Filled with shingles and scrap metal, the meat grinder shredded half of the fifty brick buildings that were home to many families. The sky rained cinder blocks and babies.

It swept through Charleston Square, a two-story apartment complex built around an inner courtyard with a pool and a dozen trees. On the second floor, a sorority girl sat on her bathroom floor, studying for a test. As the walls around her vanished, she was thrown like a rag doll through the air, her spine shattering upon impact.

In a 1950s cottage in the Downs, a mother rushed her daughter into a bedroom closet, setting two pairs of shoes inside.

“Come on, sweetie! Time to do tornado turtle.”

As the walls began to buckle, Meredith Cummings lay over her little girl and searched her heart for the right thing to whisper, for words that would not haunt her daughter if they were her last.

Under the ancient oaks of historic Glendale Gardens, a white-haired woman sat in a chair in her closet, clutching a ninety-four-year-old christening gown, the one she had worn as a baby. Her neighbors grabbed their wedding album and held each other in the bathtub. Down the street, a woman clung to her big, white dog.

In a college house on Twenty-Fifth Street, a 220-pound Alabama football player gathered his brown-eyed girlfriend in his arms as they crouched in a closet with friends.

“Carson, I'm scared,” Ashley Harrison told her boyfriend, Carson Tinker.

“We're going to be okay, Ashley,” Carson said. “It's going to be okay.”

In the hallway of 31 Beverly Heights, Loryn sobbed into the phone.

“I'm scared, Mama! I'm scared!”

“It's okay, baby,” her mother said gently. “It's gonna be okay.”

Loryn had Skyped with her mother that morning and, without makeup hiding her freckles, looked younger than twenty-one. Ashley imagined her firstborn child in the hall, a frightened little girl. She wished she had packed up the little kids and driven to Tuscaloosa. She wished they were all together. But thank goodness Loryn was not alone.

On the phone, Ashley heard a boy in the background.

“It's okay,” the boy said. “It's gonna be okay.”

Ashley did not know whose voice this was, but in it she could hear a boy who cared about her daughter. She also heard a slight catch, the sound of a young man trying not to sound afraid.

A mile and a half from Beverly Heights, the funnel was now a mile wide. The black vortex spun across paper-white sky, trailing tendrils of smaller funnels. It was so vast that, from a distance, it appeared to move in slow motion. But it was moving roughly a mile a minute, scouring its way through beautiful neighborhoods shaded by ancient trees.

The tall pines that gave Forest Lake its name began to writhe and twist. Trunks as big around as a man is wide snapped like pencils. Roofs began to peel away, and drywall ripped like wet paper. Windows shattered and broken glass flew in all directions. The wind whipped the little pond into a froth, and the earth itself trembled.

Inside a church, six students jammed themselves in a cinder-block closet. As the noise of ten freight trains hammered their ears, one young man began to pray. “Dear Lord . . .” was all he had time to say before the splinters of his sanctuary fell upon his bowed head, his plea engulfed by the roar.

In a little house off Fifteenth Street, three friends grabbed their dogs and hid under a mattress. Nearby, a group of students huddled in the crawl space under the building. In Cedar Crest, a college boy ran and hid in a closet. His three best friends did not follow. A metal sculpture shaped like a billowing quilt took flight and flew a mile.

A father herded his wife and two girls into the walk-in cooler of Full Moon Bar-B-Que, crowding in with a dozen employees. He tightened his arms around his girls as the walls of the restaurant buckled. A gymnast on the UA team was caught outside and pressed herself into the nearest doorway, trying to shield herself.

In the hallway, side by side with Loryn and Will, Danielle was so afraid that she felt sick. In times of trouble, she leaned on her faith. Her Joan of Arc medal dangled from a silver chain around her neck. On the back of the medal, three words were stamped:

Pray for us.

Will kept telling the girls it was going to be okay, whether or not he believed it. Raised to be a gentleman, he had come to this house to look after the girls. He thought of his mother, fixing dinner at home in Priceville. It looked as if the power might be out for a while, and he knew she would worry. He sent her a quick text to let her know he was okay.

Less than a mile south, at Fire Station 2, the rescuers stood outside on the apron, eyeing the sky. Their colleagues at Station 7, three miles away, were already taking shelter. Located on Paul W Bryant Drive a mile from Bryant-Denny Stadium and the grassy Quad, Station 2 was bigger, with nine men on duty. They had readied their chain saws and paramedic kits and were waiting, antsy, for trouble to arrive. Through the doors of the station, propped open in the wind, they could hear James Spann blaring in the station lounge, where a few of their colleagues sat watching.

“Hey! There's a tornado down!” one of them yelled through the open doors to the men outside. “Y'all come in here and look—it's on TV!”

“TV,
hell
!” said someone in the engine room. “There it is!”

They watched it cut diagonally through the middle of the city. Some filmed it with their camera phones, transfixed by its awesome magnitude. Each minute brought it one mile closer, and in the time it took to draw a breath, it seemed to swell impossibly. Lieutenant Marty McElroy looked up from his camera, saw the blue flash of transformers exploding, and realized it was only four blocks away.

Oh, crap—It's coming right at us!

“Hey, man,” McElroy yelled to no one in particular. “This thing's fixin' to get us!”

The firemen had made a pact to ride this thing out together in a place where the storm would take all or none. It had started as a joke—all for one and one for all—but in the end, they stuck to the plan. Pulling on helmets and turnout gear, they climbed into the heaviest
vehicle of the fleet—Truck 32, the ladder truck—which they hoped was strong enough to survive a station collapse and heavy enough not to fly. The cab built for six was a tight squeeze for nine, and the men sat shoulder to shoulder in awkward silence.

Within seconds, the station began shaking, the doors of the engine bay rattling like an AK-47. Marty McElroy, an ex-marine who had been to war, was not afraid to die. What scared him was not dying but leaving behind a wife and two preteen daughters.
Am I gonna see my girls again? Do they know I love them? Who's gonna take care of them after I'm gone?

“Hey, guys . . .”

It was Derek Riddle, the guy they always counted on to break the tension with a joke. Things were getting real, and they could use a good laugh to shake them out of this spell. The men waited for the punch line.

“Man, I love y'all,” Riddle said gravely. “If something happens . . . you know I love you. And it's been good.”

Silence.

“Shut up, Riddle,” someone said.

They laughed.

And then they felt their ears pop.

Across the street from the station, at Druid City Hospital, the hospital disaster coordinator, Andrew Lee, was sitting in his office, on the phone with his wife. She and the kids were safe at the beach, but she was worried about him.

“I have to go,” Lee told her. “It's right outside our window!”

He threw himself on the floor of the hallway and held on to the doorframe. Down the hall, in the emergency room, doctors and nurses presided over a battalion of stretchers and beds crammed into the innermost hallways. In one room a three-year-old girl who could not be moved lay immobilized on a ventilator. Two nurses, Sharon Oakley and Sharon Allen, threw their bodies upon her as the funnel appeared
through the window. The double doors of the ER banged open as the wind funneled in, snatching pictures from the walls, sending patient charts flying. Everyone held their breath as they felt the cold fingers of wind wrap around them.