Their grip on the increasingly sodden road is deteriorating, and a seventy-mile-per-hour headwind out of the northeast further slows their progress. Given the amount of ground they have covered, Carl is still maintaining a quick pace despite the conditions, at least forty to fifty miles per hour.
Their eyes strain to the south, searching.
“Now I see it,” Carl says, “well, maybe I don’t.”
“It’s like it’s just a bunch of rain here,” Tim ventures.
Then, for the first time, he must begin to understand. There is no way of knowing exactly what Tim sees in the south, but the timbre of his voice shifts. It isn’t panic so much as a dawning comprehension: The tornado isn’t gone; it’s just enormous.
“In fact, uh, keep going. This is a very bad spot.”
With that, Carl’s DSLR camera goes silent, having reached the capacity of its five-gigabyte storage disk.
The camera pointing out the rear window of storm chaser Dan Robinson’s Toyota Yaris picks up where the audio recording leaves off.
From the moment the Cobalt crosses Highway 81, it is losing ground. The tornado sprints across the fields, its inflow battering the sedan. While Robinson pulls away from the gathering shadow, the darkness fastens itself to Tim, Carl, and Paul. The Chevy’s headlights dim and flare with the passing of intervening rain curtains, winking from view behind the gentle heave and fall of the prairie. Within a minute, beneath the lowering vault of tungsten-colored cloud, the headlights dwindle to a single, small point of light.
The Cobalt is now experiencing headwinds upward of 110 miles per hour. Its four cylinders are not equal to the task of hauling three grown men and three steel probes over a muddy road. They can manage no more than twenty to thirty miles per hour.
As the distance between Robinson’s camera and the storm grows, a dark wall fills the left edge of the frame. The vault lifts and the subvortex that has haunted the Cobalt’s trail since Reformatory Road now reveals itself. You’d have to catch it between the distortions of sheeting water on the rear window, but it’s there: a tower, black as shale and rising vertical from the earth, its base lapped by turbulent vortices.
Tim’s car is now well within the primary tornadic circulation. The more powerful subvortex closes in. The headlights glimmer once more at about 6:22 p.m.
In all these years, Tim has learned to see the tics and patterns of the vortex. His probes aren’t all that have entered the unknown, glimpsing places no one alive had ever seen before. Tim has as well. And at these moments of extremity, it has always been his talent to see when the door is closing. He has always been able to find the seam, and to slip through to safety.
But this time, it is too late.
This is the tornado he can’t outrun.
The dark wall closes over the road, and the headlights are extinguished.
From the fleeing Yaris, this is the last living image of Tim Samaras, his son Paul, and Carl Young.
They have a little more than a minute left before the real killer—the subvortex—engulfs them. What they say to one another—whether there is time to say anything at all, or whether they even see it coming—remains a mystery.
But we do know what happens inside the storm, where no camera, no eye, can penetrate. Josh Wurman’s DOWs are still scanning. At around the time the tornado’s subvortex crosses US 81 and strikes the Weather Channel SUV, it becomes dislocated from its near-concentric loop around the core and is sent drifting outward. It begins to orbit the main tornado, describing a series of broad loops whose apexes manifest as tight curlicues, like the shapes a child might create with a Spirograph. Depending on its position, the velocity of the subvortex fluctuates drastically. Along the broad arc of the orbit, its speed increases exponentially as it races past the main circulation. But at each apex, the subvortex enters a tight curl that renders it nearly stationary, its high-speed winds scouring a single small area for seconds on end.
When the vortex reaches its first apex, Tim, Carl, and Paul are still within view behind Robinson. They have 130 seconds left. The subvortex arcs counterclockwise across the storm like the hand of some exquisite clockwork. Then it hooks rapidly across the southern rim of the tornado and slingshots to the northeast. More than 200 yards in width, it screams over the fields at up to eighty miles per hour. It sweeps toward zero hour as though it has been counting down.
With the storm moving over them from out of the south, the east is the last direction to which Tim would look for death to come. But shortly before 6:24 p.m., the subvortex appears before them seemingly out of nowhere, as it curls into its second apex. The tip of the apex brings a 200-mile-per-hour killing wind down upon their location on Reuter Road, near a shallow, cottonwood-lined creek. For the next twenty seconds, with the car now inside, the subvortex remains nearly stationary. Its core lofts the Cobalt and carries it south into a field, then east, and northeast over Reuter. The car hurtles, plunges, and tumbles for some 656 yards, before coming to rest in a canola patch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HOW FAR FROM DAYLIGHT
DAN ROBINSON KNOWS nothing of the headlights behind him, or of their disappearance. There is only the way ahead, the darkness to the south, and the race forward that will deliver him to daylight or the beast in his rearview. The rain falls not in a single, continuous sheet, but in battering waves, and the Yaris shudders as each successive series breaks over the frame with the force of a tide. In these moments, he sees nothing beyond the windshield, not even the hood of his own vehicle. He drives on in blind faith, praying the road is
