Rick Mofina - Whirlwind

Oh God, it’s real! Those dead children! Their poor parents! Please, please don’t take Caleb from me! Please!

As the camera tightened and panned over each one, Jenna looked for any women with red hair, gasping when the camera found one. Instantly she thought of the spiky-haired stranger who’d complimented her on Caleb and Cassie at the clothing table; her smile and how she’d led them to safety in the center, holding Caleb’s stroller.

A kind woman who tried to help me.

But the dead red-haired woman, whose bruised face filled the screen, appeared larger and older. She couldn’t be the woman who’d helped her.

The camera continued its grisly display, evocative of documentary and news footage Jenna had seen of concentration camp and earthquake victims. In this one, many of the bodies looked as if they’d been broken and awkwardly reassembled. Her eyes blurred with tears. Not long ago, these people were living their lives, shopping, just shopping like me, but now- now…

“Oh, no!”

Jenna saw one dead older woman, her neck and face bloodied, still wearing a Dallas Cowboys ball cap and a T-shirt with the words: Verna’s Clothes for Kids.

“That’s the woman I bought my children’s clothes from just before the storm hit.”

“She’s been identified by a relative,” Belle said. “She’s a vendor.”

Jenna was overcome.

As the video played out to the end, the image flowed into Denton’s screen saver: a mountain vista with snowcapped peaks. Jenna stared at it then at the devastation around them, aching for her baby.

I should’ve been holding him. I’m his mother .

Jenna needed Blake, needed his arms around her, to hold her together because she was coming apart. It started with a small cry in a far corner of her mind and grew to a keening as the blood rush hammered in her ears-“Jenna, are you all right?” Bella asked-creating a deafening roar, and the beginning of a colossal scream rose from deep in her stomach when-

Cassie suddenly got up from her chair and stepped away from the table. Her eyes sharpened on heaps of debris in the distance. Clutching her teddy bear with one hand, she raised the other, extending a little finger to point.

“Mommy, I can see Caleb’s stroller!”

Wildhorse Heights, Texas

Kate painstakingly picked her way through the debris to the Saddle Up Center.

It had been more than fifteen minutes since she’d left the news truck and the curt email from Dorothea.

Her criticism still burned.

You should’ve tried to reach us sooner.

How? Cell phones aren’t working here and no one at the bureau was handing out satellite phones.

Can you find anything stronger?

What the hell does that mean? Chuck wanted the facts, the heartbreak and the heroes, and that’s what Kate got. She could only interpret Dorothea’s comments to mean the people in her story were “not suffering enough.”

In her years as a reporter, Kate had encountered hard-case editors and unbalanced fools for editors, but Dorothea was in a class of her own. What is it with that woman, making those brainless comments on her work from her downtown office on the twenty-second floor of Bryan Tower? No doubt she was watching TV-news footage and convinced she was tuned in to reality while Kate was here, on the ground, stepping through it.

Feeling the crunch of debris under her boots, Kate looked at the wasteland around her; the air was filled with cries for help, the chaos of rescues, radios and helicopters; the smells of upturned earth, broken timbers and small fires.

As she got closer to the Saddle Up Center it became clear to Kate that for some unknown reason Dorothea did not like her. But Kate would be damned if she’d let that slow her down. If anything, she thought, tapping her notebook to her leg, taking in the destruction, it made her stronger.

“CALEB!!!”

A child’s voice cut through the clamor, yanking Kate’s attention to the scene ahead: a little girl, no older than five or six, with a woman in her twenties, presumably her mother. An empty, twisted stroller stood near them, the mother savagely tearing away debris, tossing pieces as she and the child repeatedly called out: “CALEB!!!”

Even the little girl was lifting smaller pieces and peering under them. Two aid workers in orange fluorescent vests appeared to be helping on the opposite side of the debris pile. The woman was contending with a large section of plywood by herself when she saw Kate at the end of it.

“Please help me move this!”

The panic in the woman’s eyes telegraphed her agony-she was in the fight of her life.

“Please!”

Once more, Kate was being asked to cross a journalistic line. She was well aware that her job was to observe the news, not take part in it, but her conscience would not allow her to ignore another plea for help. She gripped her side of the wood, heaved and helped toss it aside.

“CALEB!”

The woman got on her knees, her hands and fingers were laced with blood as she tugged at scraps and hunks of metal, glass and wood while combing every opening in the ruins.

“Is Caleb your child?” Kate asked.

“He’s my baby boy.”

The woman pulled at a large chunk of wood causing the entire heap to shift precariously toward her daughter. Kate reached to steady it.

“Stop, miss!” A relief worker shouted at Jenna. “Get back! It’s not safe!”

“My baby could be in there!”

“Yes, we’ve got help coming!”

“Hurry, please hurry!”

As Jenna continued searching the debris without touching it, Kate acted.

“I’m Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead. Would you tell me what happened to you when the storm hit?”

Without taking her eyes from the debris to look at Kate, the woman quickly related her story. She held nothing back. “It’s my fault. I should’ve held him to me. I had him, but I let him go. Oh God, it’s my fault!”

I had him, but I let him go.

The words detonated an emotional charge within Kate.

An image flashed.

A tiny hand slipping away from hers in the icy river…

It’s my fault.

Jenna’s words jolted Kate because they were words she’d lived with. She’d known this anguish in her own life long ago. It was why she’d become a reporter. She was haunted.

“I understand,” she said.

Suddenly Jenna met Kate’s eyes and something between the two women fused. In that intense emotional instant Jenna searched Kate’s face for deception. Finding none, she started nodding with the belief that Kate did understand, just as they were overtaken by the arrival of rescuers.

For the next twenty minutes the team worked in the area, searching and moving wreckage with great care, but found no trace of the baby, or anyone else. They were still searching when two TV-news crews hurried by them. An anxious cameraman was saying that a helicopter ambulance had just crashed nearby.

“I have to go,” Kate told Jenna, quickly exchanging contact info with her. “I promise I’ll follow up with you. Where will you be later?”

“An emergency shelter, where they have phones. I need to reach my husband.”

Jenna sobbed as she stood there watching the search team, while holding her daughter and the bent and twisted stroller, struggling not to lose hope of finding her baby.

A portrait of heartbreak.

With Jenna’s permission, Kate used her phone to take a picture before she rushed off after the TV news crews.

Cutting across the market took time. When Kate’s group arrived they found that the helicopter was upright in the temporary medical landing zone. The chopper showed no obvious signs of damage. Kate spotted Barry Lopez, the Newslead photographer, among a knot of journalists. They’d encircled an EMS official, who someone called Dave Wills and who was facing questions under the glare of lights. Some of the arriving TV crews wanted him to “start over.”