What Stands in a Storm (20 page)

It was like a space shuttle was launching directly above.

And then, silence.

They shoved open the door of the bathroom, blinking in bewilderment at the things they could now see. From the bathroom, they could see into the station's back bedroom. Through its sheared walls, they stared up the broken street. The things they should not be able to see stood out in arresting contrast to an impossible expanse of blue. That water tower, a mile or two up the road in the town of Holt, should be hidden by a wall of green. But the trees that had blocked it were somewhere else. All those trees, gone. It was dizzying, this feeling of too much sky, like diving one hundred feet underwater and looking up for the first time into the weight of all that blue.

Many of the houses and apartments, missing entire walls, presented the absurd impression of dollhouses, exposing the incongruously undisturbed contents of the private rooms inside. Beyond the ragged edges of shorn drywall, throw pillows rested on couches. Photo frames sat unmoved upon dressers. Dioramas of disrupted lives, the rooms' naked exposure testified to the fragile impermanence of the structures the residents had trusted to hide and protect them. Concrete and steel had crumbled like illusions.

Station 4 had been built in the 1950s as a bombproof shelter but was now gutted by flying debris. It had done its job and protected its men, but it would have to be torn down. The fire truck inside the engine bay was too damaged to drive. Even if the truck had been operable,
they could not have gotten it anywhere through the telephone poles and live wires that lay strewn across the roads.

The firemen gathered armfuls of tools and medical supplies and marched out into the wasteland, not knowing what they would encounter. Right outside the station they found a grandmother and her tiny grandchild, dead, thrown hundreds of feet from their home. They covered the bodies with a sheet and a prayer and noted their location.

They heard a dog scratching under toppled walls, and they dug to free an elderly couple buried in their bathroom. Someone summoned them to the back of a pickup truck, where a woman lay struggling to breathe with a collapsed lung. A man volunteered to drive his truck on four flat tires to get her to the hospital. He made the trip again and again.

In Druid City Hospital, patients had opened their eyes to a blizzard of papers fluttering to the ground. The walls were still standing. They were still alive. As the power flickered and the generators kicked on, the room audibly exhaled.

The disaster coordinator, Andrew Lee, began running through the hospital, past caravans of gurneys and flocks of stunned nurses hunkered down in the halls. He met an ER physician doing the same, his white coat flapping like a cape. They ran downstairs, by the cafeteria, past three dogs with tucked tails, cowering on the tile. They burst out the south entrance, looking around wildly, expecting to find destruction.

They saw . . . nothing. The hospital appeared untouched. The only trace of the storm was a scattering of branches on the pavement. The men ran back up to the ER, which faces north, and came out the double doors. They felt sunshine on their faces. One tree limb dangled from a power line, beneath a sky showing patches of blue.

“It looks like we really missed it,” the surgeon said.

What they could not see from their side of their building was the wake of destruction a few blocks from the hospital, the scar across the landscape that looked as if it stretched forever. This moment of misinformed hope would soon pass, but for fifteen minutes, the ER remained disturbingly quiet. No calls. No ambulances hauling in victims. The doctors and nurses readied their supplies and braced themselves for an onslaught of the wounded. Where were the patients?

Then the first call came in from an ambulance en route to the hospital. It was Adam Watley, aboard Rescue 27. He asked to speak with a doctor.

“I have three infants in full cardiac arrest,” Watley said.

“Three infants?” said the doctor.

“All under the age of eighteen months. Full arrest. We are headed your way.”

“What else do you have?”

“I don't know.”

Engine 2, Engine 4, respond to 85 Cedar Crest. Eighty-five Cedar Crest. We have subjects trapped in a house.

Inside Station 2, on Bryant Drive, the firemen climbed out of Engine 32 and could see the destruction from their doorstep. The tornado had passed within a half mile of the station, and Tuscaloosa's ground zero—Fifteenth Street and McFarland Boulevard—was less than a mile from where they now stood.

“Hey, guys, it's bad,” said Lieutenant Marty McElroy. “Time to get to work.”

Reeling with adrenaline, they climbed back into the ladder truck and drove two blocks south before they realized that was as far as the roads would allow. So they set out on foot dressed in full turnout gear, carrying axes, chain saws, and Halligan tools. There was no room left in their arms for medical kits, but treating the wounded was, at this
point, a secondary concern. Their first priority was freeing the entrapments, the victims buried and pinned beneath the crushing weight of collapsed buildings, their precious time ticking away like the clock on an activated bomb. If the firefighters did not dig these people out quickly, the mission of rescue would very soon give way to the haunting duty of recovery.

The neighborhood of student homes and small cottages two blocks east of the hospital, Cedar Crest, was crawling with people who had impossibly survived a direct hit to the shelled-out houses from which they now emerged. Some of the homes were flattened, and others had been stripped of their outer rooms, leaving only a ragged core. A few, on the outskirts, were battered yet standing. From one of the latter, an elderly lady walked out on her ragged porch and began calling out to the firemen.

“What's wrong, ma'am?” McElroy said. “Is everyone okay?”

“Yes, I'm fine,” she said. “I need you to do something.”

“What do you need?”

“I need you to put some plastic on my car. The tornado blew my windows out and I don't want the seats to get wet.”

“Ma'am,” McElroy said, with all the patience he could muster, “we'll be more than happy to do that but right now we have other people to check on. If we got a chance we'll come back.”

“When are you going to be back?”

“Just as soon as we can.”

As McElroy moved through the hardest-hit streets of Cedar Crest, it was hard to tell where one house ended and the next began. In his thirteen years of riding these streets on calls, he had memorized the details of every neighborhood, the shutters of this house, the colors of that one, but now they had all vanished. He looked around, trying to place himself on a map that had been ripped to pieces.

He followed the sound of someone yelling for help and saw the body of a young white male, college age, draped in the branches of a toppled tree. He guessed that the boy had died instantly. Gently, McElroy took down this boy and laid him on the street. This was someone's
son, someone's brother, someone's best friend, someone's lover. It was UA student Scott Atterton covered up with a sheet.

“I got two more behind the house,” a medic said.

A group of fraternity brothers came up to the firemen.

“What can we do to help?”

The firemen decided they could use a few more strong arms and took the young men with them as they swept the neighborhood, heaving toppled walls, lifting boards, and digging through mountains of drywall, chasing the muffled voices.

McElroy felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and met familiar eyes. It was an off-duty Northport fireman, a friend he had known all his life.

“Hey,” the fireman said. “What can I do to help?”

“Hey, man,” McElroy said. “Come with me.”

A few blocks away, a college student woke up beside a chain-link fence outside his apartment. His ears were bleeding, and though the world sounded muffled, he could hear the shrill cry of a baby. Randy Robbins turned toward the cry and saw his neighbor and her baby, alive but battered. The baby's ears were gushing blood.

The image unleashed fragments of memory. The moments leading up to this rushed into focus, like fish surfacing in muddy water.

He remembered the wind knocking his backpack from his shoulder as he walked to his car from class. The sizzle and ding of a microwave pizza. The flurry of texts from his sisters, warning him of the coming storm. He had brushed them off as hysteria.

Robbins recalled closing the windows of his apartment as the trees bent like stems of grass. He remembered the searing pain in his eardrums. A scramble into the closet. The sound of drywall ripping. The rattle and yank of the doorknob in his hands, his tug-of-war with the wind. Being launched, along with the closet door. Sucked into the teeth of the storm.

He remembered being flung around on the ground by a lashing, whipping wind. The sound of hysterical screaming; the disturbing realization that the screams he heard were his own. He remembered raising his head in the lull and seeing a woman lying on her baby. Then the sprint, and the flash of pain in his foot as he threw his body upon them. The sting of flying objects stabbing his back. The belief, in that terrible moment of fury, that they were the last three people alive in this world rapidly dissolving around them.

Lying on his back, concussed and in shock, Robbins felt no pain. But when he slowly stood, he looked down at his body and saw bare skin shredded and bleeding. The tornado had ripped off his jeans and his shirt, had stolen his watch and his glasses. A three-inch shard of wood pierced the tender arch of one foot, and blood was pooling beneath it. A Bic pen was impaled in the flesh of his side. He wrapped his fingers around the pen and winced as he yanked it out.

Through his tender ears, every sound was muted, but he could hear a phone bleating nearby. Glancing around, he stared in disbelief at the phone ringing in his right hand. How had he not lost it?

“Randy?!” his sister said, breathless. “Randy?!”

“Kiki!” he said, a little too loud. “My apartment—it's gone! The baby is bleeding! I lost my glasses! My foot is bleeding bad! There are people stuck! I have to go!”

After crawling under his crushed pickup truck, which had landed in his living room, Robbins limped toward help on the arm of a friend. The only clothes that had not been ripped off were his boxers and the small, silver cross he wore on a simple chain. His foot, still impaled and bleeding, was wrapped in a neighbor's shirt. The man, whose name he did not know, had taken it off his own back. His good foot was tucked in a too-small loafer someone gave him to protect it from debris on the ground. He loaned out his phone, his only possession, to people who had lost theirs.

Robbins and his friend fell into step with an army of walking wounded. In the streets of Tuscaloosa, people shuffled and limped
and carried one another to shelter, to the hospital, to a clean spot to sit. They merged with the ranks of instantly homeless, wandering the streets with glassy eyes and trash bags filled with scavenged things, wondering where to go.