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The storm Kate and Javi had once been so excited for ended up roaring down a path straight for a small town—one that hadn't so much as received a siren until two minutes before the twister would hit. Caroline hitched a ride with Javi and Kate, staring blankly out the window as Javi took them in through the destruction and chaos.
The ruins of a small town in the wake of a tornado was not something Caroline was unfamiliar to. Walking down what must have, once upon a time, been Main Street, gazing helplessly at the crushed homes and collapsed buildings, Caroline was struck with a memory of her own hometown looking similar after a twister of their own. It had taken Dumas five and a half years to rebuild the town to what it had been before the EF-5 had struck it, and Dumas was a much bigger city than this tiny little town Caroline found herself in.
The phials sitting in the back of Javi's truck with the PlanetCorp logos stamped on them called out to Caroline, but what would she do with them? How could she take any data from this place in good conscience?
What good would taking a soil sample do for a town that had nothing left to give?
Off to the left, a few yards ahead, Caroline watched a nice-looking white car pull in next to the Storm Par vans. That'd be Marshall Riggs, Caroline knew—here to collect the numbers his men had collected for him.
Riggs stepped out of his car dressed in a nice pair of jeans and a starch-white button-up shirt, nice cowboy hat glinting in the sun. He looked out of place in the midst of all the destruction—out of place and rich.
Tyler's words from earlier that morning came to the front of Caroline's mind. Did she know who she was working alongside? Storm Par, she'd always figured, was just another one of those high-tech storm chasing companies that collected data to track tornadoes and keep tabs on advancing alerts, or something. But she had never asked before. And right then, Riggs didn't look much like he cared any about the destruction he was facing—just the Manila file folders Javi and Scott were offering him.
A bitter taste took over Caroline's mouth, but there wasn't anything she could do just then—nothing she wanted to do in the name of Storm Par, anyway. She left behind the thought of her data samples and veered off to her right to help an older man searching for his cat in the wreckage of his home.
A police SUV inched down the middle of the road, rolling its sirens and announcing a curfew for the town in the same of everyone's safety. Caroline looked over her shoulder toward the sound, but suddenly she was back in Dumas in 2009—no longer outside the ruins of this kind old man's home, but her own: The Sullivan family's plot of land grounded by what had once been a plain one-story house with three bedrooms.
It was gone, of course. After the storm—a storm the radios had been calling an EF-5—had passed, leaving behind fragments of homes and hundreds of dead bodies, Caroline and her daddy emerged from deep within their cellar, blinking in the sun that Caroline had been so sure would never return after the night.
