There was.
With the weatherman focusing on the hook at the southern trailing edge of the supercell, he watched it as it skimmed a few miles south of Bigham and continued to the northeast.
A tornado’s hard to track; an exact track usually can’t be done until the next day, when the tornado guys look down at the track from the air. But looking at the weather radar, the small oval area of the supposed tornado appeared to run right over the town of Victoria Plains, which was eight miles south of Bigham.
Virgil watched the radar, listened to the rain, heard an ambulance scream by, and then another, and then a couple of cop cars. The weatherman had no specific information, so Virgil called the Bare County sheriff’s office, identified himself, and asked the dispatcher if there was a problem.
“There is,” she said. “VP took a direct hit, and it’s a big storm. They’re saying the whole town is torn apart.”
“I’ve got lights, siren, and a 4Runner. You think I should get up there?”
“You probably should,” she said. “We’re calling everybody for help. There’s some farms got hit, too, but we don’t have any direct reports yet. Throw everything out of the truck except the first aid kit. You might be needed to transport people back to the hospital.”
Virgil was on his way in five minutes; he’d taken thirty seconds to pull on the Musto pants and jacket, and another two minutes to haul his gear out of the truck and up to the hotel room.
He couldn’t see it, but the sun was low in the sky, and it should have still been broad daylight. As it was, it looked like three o’clock on a cloudy winter day, not quite dark, but not quite light, either; the rain was coming so hard that in places, the water ran over the curbs of the street and down the sidewalks. The truck shuddered with the impact. There were trees down in City Park, and a power company truck headed fast to somewhere-no lights on the north side of town-and then Virgil cleared the town and headed south, following the nav system through the pounding rain.
Victoria Plains-VP-was an ordinary farm town of a thousand people or so, implement dealers and grain silos on the outskirts, with a compact little business district, now half emptied by the two big-box stores in Bigham. There were rows of small prairie houses spreading in uneven blocks out from the central district, with an orange- brick elementary school just off Main Street.
Quite ordinary an hour earlier; now it looked as though a giant had stepped on it.
Virgil passed an ambulance coming out of town, running with lights and siren. A few minutes later, another went by.
The first houses Virgil saw were half-wrecked, and he realized, looking out in the dimming light, that all around them were foundations from houses that simply were no longer there. A man was running down the street through the rain, waving his arms. When Virgil stopped, the man looked at Virgil and said, “You’re not an ambulance.”
“You need one?”
“Yeah-if you can get. . You gotta go around. .”
“Get in,” Virgil said.
The man wasn’t wearing rain gear; he was wearing an athletic jacket and jeans and running shoes, and sputtering with the rain he’d absorbed. He said, “Go that way,” and Virgil went that way. The man said, “There’s a house down. They think a kid is still inside. I don’t know, he’s probably dead.”
Virgil didn’t have anything to say to that, and the man said, “We saw it coming. Thank God, we saw it coming. I think most people made it down the basement.”
They traveled in a jigsaw route along back streets and down an alley, ran over electric wires a couple of times, dodged downed trees, and then the man pointed at a crowd of people working around what must have been an old Victorian house. The man got out in the rain and said, “Let’s go,” and he darted off toward the downed house.
Virgil zipped up the rain jacket and got out, pulled the hood up against the rain, and ran over to the house. A line of men were prying away pieces of siding and structural lumber and beams, and throwing them aside. When Virgil asked what they were doing, the man ahead of him said, “We can hear the kid. Four-year-old.”
They threw lumber for ten minutes, then a big fat man suddenly disappeared into the hole they were making, and a couple of people yelled, “Take it easy, Bill, take it easy. .”
Another man near the hole said, “He’s got him. He’s got him. He’s alive.”
A minute later, the fat man popped out of the hole, holding a kid like a rag doll. Then he bundled the kid in his arms and said, “Where’s the ambulance? Where’s the fuckin’ ambulance.”
Virgil yelled, “We’ll take my truck. We’ll take my truck.”
The men carried the kid down to Virgil’s truck and laid him in the back, and another man crawled inside with him, and the fat man yelled, “Down to Ericksons, everybody who can make it. Down to Ericksons.”
Virgil turned the truck, hit the lights and siren, and took off.
VP was eight miles south of Bigham and the Bigham Medical Center, which Virgil knew well. He made it in seven minutes, the truck rocking in the wind and the rain, while the man in back shouted, “You gotta hurry, you gotta hurry.”
At the medical center, two people ran out into the rain with a gurney and lifted the kid aboard. One of the two was Frank O’Leary, the youngest of the boys. He apparently didn’t recognize Virgil, wrapped in the Musto suit, and the two of them pushed the boy off into the emergency room.
The guy who rode with Virgil shouted, “We gotta go back.”
Virgil made three trips, the two ambulances seven or eight more. On his last trip, Virgil took a woman who might have had a broken hip, in the back, while an elderly man, who’d ripped his hand on a nail, rode in the passenger seat.
VP was still a mess, and people still roamed the town looking for dead, injured, and missing, but mutual-aid cops and ambulances were flooding in, and a disaster headquarters was operating, and Virgil wouldn’t be needed again.
The old man told Virgil he’d gotten hurt dragging broken lumber off a downed house, where they were looking for another old man who lived alone. They hadn’t found him. The old man with the ripped hand said, “That sonofabitch is trying to get out of our golf game,” and then he started to cry.
The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had come, and the wind was gone; Virgil could see stars down toward the horizon.
When they got to town, Frank O’Leary came out with the gurney to get the woman with the hip, and Virgil realized that the woman helping him was his sister, Mary. Virgil led the old man inside, attracted the attention of a nurse, who looked at the old man’s hand and took him away.
Before she went, she said, “There’s coffee and cookies just down the hall.”
Virgil went that way, and got a cup of coffee, and because there were plenty of cookies, took six. Then he went back in the hallway, toward the entrance, then stopped to watch the emergency reception area.
There were several gurneys and beds with people on them, and he saw Jack O’Leary, the med student, taking notes from a woman who lay propped up on a wheeled bed. He was nodding as he took notes, and then he stood up, said something to her, patted her on the arm, and moved on to another bed.
A moment later, John O’Leary came out of the back part of the ER, what must’ve been an operating room. He was wearing an operating gown with a spot of blood on the belly of it. He stepped over to Jack and asked him something, and Jack pointed to one of the beds, and John O’Leary went over to look at the patient.
Another of the O’Leary boys showed up, dressed like his father; what he’d been doing, Virgil had no idea, but he was wearing an operating gown and booties.
Wu, the doc who’d treated Virgil, came out of the back and called something to John O’Leary, who turned and went after him.
Virgil watched it all for another five minutes, and then when they were all occupied, slipped out the door.
