What Stands in a Storm (26 page)

At 8:12 p.m., the fifty-sixth tornado of the day, an EF4, tore up the beautiful lake houses of Lake Martin, taking seven more people from this world and injuring thirty more. After forty-four miles, it came to an end at 9:09 p.m. This is how the superstorm ended in Alabama. But it continued its rampage northeast.

7:44 P.M., APRIL 27, 2011—FD STATION 1, TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Alberta Command, we just had a report that in Beverly Heights, we're trying to get a better location, that there are two 1089s at that location. Can you advise me how you want to handle that? Or do we want to send the PD unit?

Rescue 23 to Alberta Command. Hey, we're right here close to Beverly Heights. We're gonna swing in there and check it out. I've got seven men with me.

A volunteer with a chain saw, Joe Chastine marched into Beverly Heights beside the six men of Rescue 23. To him, these firemen looked as if they belonged on some calendar. He did not look like them, but he had worked as a paramedic thirty years ago, and now he swung hammers, building houses with tools they might need at a time like this. He had found his way to Battalion 4, asking if they could use a good man with a chain saw and a truck full of hardware. And of course that was just what they needed. Much of the equipment they needed to dig for survivors was out riding around on other trucks, or buried under the ruins of the Emergency Management Agency. The battalion chief shook Chastine's hand and sent him along with Rescue 23 on a call to Beverly Heights.

Chastine was not sure whether it was instinct or providence that
had led him that morning to buy a chain saw he could not afford. The five-thousand-dollar insurance check he had in his pocket was meant to fix his roof, which had been damaged by the April 15 tornado. He expected his wife to give him grief about buying a thousand-dollar chain saw. And rightfully so. But if it could help save a life, it was worth the money and the grief.

Chastine now lugged his chain saw into a neighborhood choked with fallen trees. Some of the trunks were so big around that the thirty-six-inch saw could not clear them in one swipe. In the distance, another volunteer with a backhoe was clearing the roads, making a path for the rescuers. The man was Loryn's grandfather.

7:50 P.M.—WETUMPKA, ALABAMA

Ashley Mims's house flooded with family and friends from church, who swept in like a tidal surge of love—cooking, cleaning, and fussing over the children. Ashley and her husband hurriedly packed their overnight bags for a trip to Tuscaloosa. They were eager to leave, but the weather had made its way east by now and they would have to drive west, straight into its teeth.

On TV, James Spann called out the name of their town.

Wetumpka was under a tornado warning when they pulled out of the driveway. Ashley stared out of the passenger window, past raindrops that danced along the glass and glittered in the headlights of passing cars. On Highway 82,
MONTGOMERY FIRE & RESCUE
trucks zoomed past them at an urgent clip, headed west toward Tuscaloosa.

Go get my baby
, Ashley thought.
Go get Loryn.

Down the road from Ashley's house, in the neighboring town of Eclectic, four died. A twenty-three-year-old mother of two was thrown a hundred feet from where her home had been. Her five-year-old niece was tossed across the road. In the same trailer park the sixty-seven-year-old
woman who drove the school bus for Elmore County held her grown daughter in their trailer. Their bodies, still clutching each other in death, were found fifty yards away.

8:04 P.M.—BEVERLY HEIGHTS, TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

We're at the house in Beverly Heights. We got one fatality and two unaccounted for. It's totally collapsed. If we can get the TRT rescue over here to Beverly Heights, we're gonna need the camera off of that truck.

It was night now, and the moon had not yet risen, so the Technical Rescue Team could see only what the pale ellipses of their headlamps could illuminate. Jagged edges protruded from dark shadows, and the surroundings were cast in black and white, as if color itself had been sucked away.

The men made out the silhouette of a massive root ball. The ancient oak attached to it had been dropped on the two-story house like a sledgehammer. The walls had fallen in, and the two-story home pancaked under the impact. Under thick layers of shingles, beams, and drywall, the lonely foot protruded. There was only one way to get to it, and that was to go in from the top down.

They dug down through the layers, cutting and prying, descending like cavers through sedimentary layers of roof, wall, and floor. A responder crawled into the excavated cavity, where he could hear the muffled sound of a mobile phone. It was not an ordinary ring but a country song. He did not listen to country music much, but the radio stations in Tuscaloosa mixed in a little pop-country, and he recognized it. As the tragic refrain played over and over in the dark, he knew without wondering that the caller on the other end of the line was somebody's mother.

I'd be doing the very same thing
, he thought.

Steve Stewart had a daughter at the university, the same age as the girl he was digging for. This moment stuck in his heart like a splinter that would never dislodge itself, one of the sharpest details among many blurry memories of that day.

It could have been her
.
That parent could have been me
.

On the other end of the line was Ashley Mims. When other people called, Loryn's phone played Beyoncé. But when her mama called, it played a bittersweet ballad by Miranda Lambert.

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it

This brokenness inside me might start healin' . . .

Out here it's like I'm someone else

I thought that maybe I could find myself

If I could just come in I swear I'll leave

Won't take nothin' but a memory

From the house

That built me

A woman's voice sang wistfully into the dark.

The rescuer heard the voice, and it guided him.

Will's family pulled into Tuscaloosa just as the fuel light went on in the Tahoe. They had seen no lights from the interstate since Bessemer, and now in the middle of McFarland Boulevard the blue lights of a police car stabbed through the dark. Darrell braked and rolled down the window. The officer tried to turn him back.

“We're going,” Darrell said in a voice that no reasonable man could contest. “We're trying to find our child.”

The cop waved him through.

They crept along McFarland, able to see only what their headlights illuminated in front of them. The farther they went, the more
littered the street was with dirt and branches and what looked like torn bits of paper. They drove in silence. Words felt superfluous. They were all feeling the same thing.

At Druid City Hospital, they entered a vortex of fragmented information. They asked whether they had registered William Chance Stevens, but nurses with shell-shocked eyes explained that the incoming flood of patients had been assigned charts with fake names to expedite their intake. The staff had prepared 450 of them in advance, as part of their disaster plan. They ran out of charts in two hours.

Just blocks away, at 31 Beverly Heights, Will's friends waited. How long had they been there? Four hours, maybe. They had lost all sense of time. In the place of time was the ebb and flow of emotions: devastating cycles of grief and numbness. Now the reality of it was setting in as they watched the rescuers peeling back walls.

A great mechanical arm was combing away the debris, layer by layer. Phantoms danced in the shadows.

“We need everyone who is not a state employee to back away.”

In a circle of spotlight, the final layers of wall and floor were slowly lifted. The rescuers heaved a toppled refrigerator and found what they had been searching for.

The three bodies were huddled together in a tangle of blankets and pillows. Will had thrown himself upon the girls, shielding them, as the house came crashing down. They had done everything right. But when the giant oak sliced through the house, not a single wall stood. They did not have a chance.

The rescuers gently pried them apart.

From the road, Rand and Chase watched a tall and lanky boy being carried over the ruins in a sheet, held at the edges like a hammock. They laid the body gently on a driveway a discreet distance from the road. A police investigator looked up, walked over to Rand and Chase, and sat down.

“Gentlemen,” homicide investigator Terry Carroll said softly. “I understand you're friends with the deceased.”

Rand swallowed and looked at the ground.
Wow.
He said deceased.

“We cannot one hundred percent identify these bodies. They don't have IDs.”

Rand looked up. The investigator met his eyes with a square and heavy look.

“I want to ask you a serious question,” he said. “Would you be willing to ID these bodies?”

Rand looked at Chase. Chase looked at Rand.

“Yeah,” Rand said slowly. “I just want answers.”

The investigator held out his digital camera.

It did not look at all like Will. But Rand saw the Priceville
P
on the front of his T-shirt and knew then his best friend was gone. It was the darkest moment of his life.

“Yeah, that's William Chance Stevens,” Rand said. “Birthday December twenty-third, 1988. That's my buddy.”

Rand sat in the street and put his head in his hands, crying as if he had not cried in years, squalling like a baby. Around him, the chain saws, the generators droned on, oblivious to his loss.

“Is this real, Chase? Is that really Will?”

“Yeah,” Chase said. “That's Will.”

Once he dried up, Rand spent a long while thinking. How was he going to tell Darrell? How do you call your best friend's dad and tell him his son is dead? There are no right words for times like this. Rand paced for twenty minutes in front of the house, mustering the courage. Finally, he dialed Darrell's number.

“Hey, Darrell,” he said hoarsely. “Where are you?”

“Drivin.' ”

“I think I found Will. He didn't make it.”

“How do you know?” Darrell's voice was clipped.

How do you answer that?
Rand took in a shaky breath.

“I saw him.”

“Do you know it's him?” He was trying to hold it together in front of his wife and daughter. “A hundred percent?”

“Yes, Darrell. I know it's him. I identified him for the police officer,” Rand said. “I will not leave this spot until you get here.”