Free What Stands in a Storm by Kim Cross Page B

hypnotic, haunting beauty that made it hard to look away.
    â€œThis is the time to go to a safe place!” Spann said. “A small room, hall closet, bathroom . . . lowest floor, near the center, away from windows.”
    With live footage, there was no need to put the radar screen on TV, but all across the country weather buffs were admiring the textbook signature: a bright red dot at the center of a tie-dyed spiral. That dot was the debris ball, the vortex of the tornado, where the beam of the antenna was bouncing off shredded bits of trees and earth and buildings. The shape grew on the screen, thickening as it headed at fifty miles per hour straight toward downtown Cullman.
    â€œThis could be a half mile wide,” Spann said. “This thing is probably going to stay on the ground for a long time.”
    On the screen, specks of debris were lofted into the air. From a distance, it appeared to rotate in slow motion. But inside that funnel, winds were ripping and shoving and tearing around at 175 miles per hour.
    â€œThat’s pieces of buildings in downtown Cullman flying apart,” Jason Simpson said as he watched the EF4 tornado penetrate the heart of a town filled with people he knew.
    The funnel plowed straight through the business district, ripping the roof off the courthouse and lofting it thousands of feet into the sky. It knocked down the Busy Bee and flattened Christ Lutheran Church, just a few blocks from Sacred Heart, where the priest who would marry Michelle and Clay ran outside the church and gaped. It peeled the redbrick facade off A Little Bit of Everything, a curio shop, revealing the wall underneath where a painted ad for Fuller Bros. Ford Motor Cars had been covered up for so long that most locals never knew it existed. It bent the NOAA Weather Radio Transmitter Tower like a twist tie.
    On the SkyCam, the antenna tower from Channel 52 was a faint line that quivered and vanished, snuffed out by the dark finger. Just as it grew into a wedge about a mile wide, the image froze on the screen.
    â€œWe just lost power,” the weatherman said.

    About that time, Ashley Mims called her daughter from Walgreens to tell her about the bronze cowboy boots she had bought her at the mall.
    â€œMama, did you see what happened in Cullman?” Loryn interrupted. “I’m getting scared.”
    â€œYeah, baby, I saw it,” Ashley said. “Me and the little kids are coming there.”
    â€œNo, Mama, you can’t!” Loryn said. She was crying now. “You can’t get on the road now. It’s too late!”
    â€œWell, you get in that basement,” Ashley said, her voice calm and reassuring. “You get those pillows and blankets, and you start studying down there.”
    The house didn’t have a basement, but Loryn knew what her mother meant. She started gathering books and blankets to move to the windowless hallway beneath the stairs. The safest place in the house. It was nearing 3:00 p.m. and her mind was not on her Spanish exam.
    â€œHave they canceled classes yet?” Ashley said.
    â€œNot yet.”
    At 2:54 p.m., above a rural stretch of Newton County, Mississippi, a new supercell was born.

CHAPTER 9
BIRTH OF A WEATHERMAN
    1962—GREENVILLE, ALABAMA
    Little James Spann stared out the window of his classroom, watching the clouds go by. He was six years old, and the white billowing shapes parading across the skies of Greenville, Alabama, were considerably more interesting than whatever was being taught in first grade.
    At the head of the class was his first-grade teacher, the fearsome Mrs. Porterfield, who looked to be least a hundred years old and had the disposition of a water moccasin. Edna Porterfield was feared and reviled by misbehaving schoolboys. She was known to yank them out of the classroom and into the hall, where she would wear the cotton out of their britches with a wooden paddle. Mrs. Porterfield was strong for an old lady,