Mad River

one was suspected. Virgil called his father: “What’s happening there?”
    “It’s something else,” his father shouted into the phone. “It’s a hurricane out there, and a light show. No damage, though. We’ll be out of it in twenty minutes. There’s supposedly a tornado down south of us.”
    “Call me if you have a problem. I’m in Bigham.”
    “Bigham? Virgil, this baby is coming right at you.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL GOT OFF the phone and went and looked out the window. He couldn’t see much, but the window was rattling in its frame from the wind; then the rain came, a violent, pounding downpour that would last less than an hour, but might dump two or three inches of rain.
    Virgil looked at his watch: six o’clock. He’d meet the O’Learys in an hour, but if there was a tornado out there . . .
    •   •   •
    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