Page 26 of Wild Texas Wind
Yeah, but did they, though? “Are we even going to see it with all this rain?”
“That’s one of the dangers,” she said, glancing at her phone, presumably at the radar.
When he looked over, all he could see was red on her screen, so he had no idea what she thought to learn from it. And the two-way radios she and her sister had been using were useless in this downpour. Hell, Javi could barely even see the van behind them, only the headlights reflecting off the rain.
“I think we need to get out of this,” Javi said as the first hailstone was joined by others.
Esperanza’s shoulders tightened further, until they were nearly up to her ears, but then she nodded. “Yeah, this is too dangerous, and we can’t see anything, anyway.”
Javi looked for the next road leading north, which he presumed would be away from the worst of the storm, and hoped Angelica’s van was following him. He did not want to be responsible for her group getting caught in severe weather because she didn’t see him.
A hailstone cracked the corner of the windshield, and another hit right below the windshield wiper well, and stayed there.
“Holy crap, that’s a big hailstone!” Esperanza exclaimed, and started to lower the window to try to reach it.
“Wait until we’re out of the weather,” Javi said, using the driver side controls to raise the window. “No sense in getting all beat up trying to grab it.”
She nodded and sat back, her eyes nearly as big as the hailstone. But he drove them out of the storm, then pulled the SUV over to the side of the road to look back at it, and to catch his breath. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel a bit before he hopped out onto the wet asphalt and tried to stretch the tension out of his shoulders. He wanted to brace his hands on his knees and bend over, but he didn’t want Esperanza to think he was weak.
“You okay?” she asked, coming around the side of the SUV, her camera around her neck and braced with one hand.
“Let me ask you,” he said, trying not to sound as breathless as he felt. “Would you have kept going? If you were driving?”
She drew a breath through her nose and turned to look at the retreating storm. “Probably. But you’re right, it would have been pointless. If there’s a tornado in there, we wouldn’t be able to see it, and that would be the most dangerous thing of all.”
“So what do we do now?” Mr. Laughton asked. He had retrieved the hailstone from the wiper well and tossed it in the air a few times, catching it in his palm before he missed and it shattered on the pavement.
Esperanza looked at the shards of ice for a moment before she wiped her curls out of her eyes and turned back the way they had come. “We go back and go around.”
“Go around the storm?” Javi clarified, wondering where the other van was.
“Yes. I think if we come at it from another angle, we’ll be able to see a tornado.”
Not for the first time, Javi thought the risk was ridiculous, but he had agreed to come along, and he felt better knowing he was here to make decisions and talk her down from more foolish choices. What would she have done out here on her own?
“All right. Let’s load up.” He motioned for everyone to get back in the car.
“Are we doing okay on gas?” Esperanza asked after the Laughtons got back in the van.
“We can make it to the next town, but we’re going to have to stop there.”
She motioned to her sister’s van, which was heading toward them now. “Let me see what their situation is. We have a container locked on the back of the van, so we might be able to bum some off of them. Then we don’t have to stop until after the storm has passed.”
He didn’t like that idea at all. But he’d agreed to come along, and that was the way they did things, so he would go along.
* * *
The group wason the road in a matter of minutes, heading back toward the retreating storm. Well. They had to go west first, then south again, and Javi wasn’t sure they’d be able to catch up to it like Esperanza seemed to think they could. But at least they were out of the heavy rain and had reestablished communications with Angelica.
From the distance, the clouds appeared black, and low. Or maybe that was the rain shafts he was seeing.
“See that?” Esperanza’s voice shook with excitement. “That’s a wall cloud. That is where you’re going to see the tornado.” She looked toward Javi. “Can we go a little faster?”
He grunted, then applied pressure to the accelerator. His own adrenaline was pumping. He had lived here all his life and never had seen a tornado, so yeah, he was kind of getting into the spirit of things.
“We’re watching for rotation,” she said, twisting in her seat to address the Laughtons.
“That cloud itself is going to rotate?” Mr. Laughton’s voice was shaky. “That’s going to be huge.”
