“This thing is moving relatively slowly,” Bettes says, addressing his crew as much as the live viewing audience. “What we may end up doing, guys—because we could be putting ourselves in a dangerous position here—we may actually quickly try to get into our cars and get south of here. That’d be the safest place to do that. I think we have to go now in order to stay ahead of this and not get run over by it.”
At 6:16, the men pile into a satellite truck and two GMC Yukon XL SUVs. Bettes rides in the front passenger seat of the second GMC in the convoy, and Austin Anderson, a field producer from Texas, jumps behind the wheel. They pull onto US 81 and dash south, trying to cut ahead of the eastbound tornado. Without realizing it, by 6:19 they have penetrated its weak northern flank. Bettes was wrong; Tim, Carl, and Paul aren’t the only chasers who have misjudged both its speed and its size. The blinding rain is the first sign the convoy is in trouble. The light through the windows fades and the sky darkens.
Cameraman Brad Reynolds rolls the window down and trains his lens just ahead and to his right. The trees lining the road lean north; limbs flagellate in the current. Then the line of trees ends and they get a clear view.
The tornado is just off the road, almost directly to the right and coming for them. In one second the subvortex is an opaque stovepipe. In the next, it breaks down and disperses into two, then three, and as many as four suction vortices, like geysers of pure vertical motion.
“Oh, shit,” Bettes mutters. “Oh, shit.”
We gotta get out of here, Anderson thinks. We’ve got to get past them before they hit us.
The road in front of them vanishes. “Hold on, brothers,” Bettes shouts. “Hold on.”
Reynolds rolls his window up, and the camera sees little through the tint but the red smear of passing brake lights.
“Everybody, duck. Go-go-go-go. Just keep it going if you can. Everybody, duck down.”
Reynolds’s window shatters.
There is the rushing sound of wind, a wall of white noise, and Anderson experiences a peculiar floating sensation.
Then, the SUV comes down hard and his memory goes dark.
When he comes to, Anderson’s head is bouncing against the earth through the broken window each time the SUV rolls onto his side of the cab. Reynolds’s camera picks up a confusion of tumbling and the grunts elicited by the impact of bodies against hard interior paneling. Then the camera is ejected from the car. The image is blurred, but the SUV can be seen rolling over and over, receding from view.
When the GMC finally comes to rest, on its tires, the wind surges through the cab and Anderson spits the gravel and soil from his mouth. Bettes shouts out to his team. He and Reynolds climb out and try to pry open Anderson’s door, but it won’t budge. They extract him instead through the other side. Anderson stands up and feels sharp swells of pain in his ribs with every breath. Though the adrenaline partially inures him to the extent of his injuries, he’s cracked his sternum, crushed several vertebrosternal ribs, and fractured a vertebra in his neck.
The men look at the SUV. It has been dismantled—its luridly decaled windows shattered, side-impact air bags protuberant, the roof over the front seat nearly flush with the hood. They had been traveling south down US 81 and now find themselves in a field east of the northbound side. The SUV traveled across the broad median, then across two more highway lanes—a distance of some 200 yards. Others begin to emerge from overturned cars and trucks nearby. Two men, a volunteer school bus driver and an oil-field hand, had been hit roughly a mile to the southwest, a minute before the subvortex overtook the Weather Channel SUV. The bus driver, Billy O’Neal, is already dead. Dustin Heath Bridges, the oil-field worker, soon succumbs to his injuries.
Anderson can see the trailing edge of the tornado some 150 yards out. It’s more than two miles wide now and heading northeast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE LAST RIDE
CARL RACES ACROSS the four lanes of US 81 and plows into the hanging traces of grit that billow behind the Toyota Yaris in front. The trees thin and the red-bed plains slope gently before them. Carl’s outlook brightens. The rain is easing and the road ahead appears dry.
It has cleared up enough that if they glance out Tim’s window just after 6:20 p.m., they will sight the thin annulus and sod corona of a satellite vortex, no more than 250 yards distant.
After only eight seconds, though, it is ingested by what can only be described as an encroaching wall. Confusion begins to grip the men in the Cobalt. They have been flying down country roads at nearly fifty miles per hour, and they can’t seem to gain an inch. Tim suspects the tornado is racing at forty miles per hour at least.
If Tim consults the latest radar scan from the nearest stationary Doppler, updated a minute before, he will note that it places the tornado core signature two miles to his southwest. But at this proximity he is likely chasing by sight alone. And this is just as well, because the radar is misleading. Much has changed in the last sixty seconds.
The tornado is steadily swallowing the distance. Just as the Cobalt passed US 81, the twister jagged to the northeast, even more severely than when they’d skirted the circulation just minutes ago. It isn’t only that it’s turning toward them, now; the tornado is expanding. It’s growing toward them. They’re not, as they’d thought, comfortably ahead; they’re on the knife’s edge.
Some thirty seconds later, the rain begins to
