Early Warning

 

The day began with a gentle breeze.  The wind seemed mostly calm, out of the East and held no sign of danger to anything or anyone.  By 11 AM the front windows of the Quickie Mart had blown in, the roofs off of several houses along Elm street were gone and power outages were widespread across the county.

While the Mayor was trying desperately to contact the Governor in order to secure the National Guard, local police were attempting to control intersections, as there were no working traffic signals.  The wind now exceeded 80 miles per hour and showed no signs of slowing.

The fire department had already dispatched all of their firetrucks and rescue vehicles and now only Lipton Barns remained at the switchboard.  He had nobody left to send out on a call.  As 911 calls came in, all he could do was take notes, writing down the type of emergency, who called it in, the location and the time of the call.

By 6:20 PM even the communication lines were gone.  Except for the howling of the wind, everything in the fire station was dead quiet.  Lipton had never felt anything so eerie.  He was wishing someone would make their way back into the station, but so far no one had.  He knew he was in a key spot and lives depended on him, but at this moment, there were no procedures to follow, no higher-ups barking commands, there was only him, and now he was just as scared as everyone else.   

Today Lipton would be tested.  He simply had no idea how much.

 

For the past two hours, the phone lines had been silent, and the television in the breakroom was absent of life.  Lipton felt helpless.  He knew there were perhaps a hundred people out there that needed help but who couldn’t call in.  From the window of the side door he could see the glow of fires off in the distance.   He also was feeling very hungry but hesitated to open the refrigerator door, as the power had been out for so long.  Whatever cold was still in there he didn’t want to get out.

Finally consumed with fear and guilt over his inability to help anyone, he walked over to the breakroom sofa and plopped himself down.  I will sit here; I will relax and try to think of what I can do.

He was just a baby step into dreamland when he heard a voice in his left ear.  It was a calm voice, almost soothing.  It didn’t startle him awake but was strong enough for him to hear every word very clearly.

As he listened to the voice, he knew it was longitude and latitude numbers he was being given.  He had a mental image in his mind of a large clock face, but instead of the second-hand making tick sounds as it moved, it sounded like breaths being drawn in and exhaled.  He awoke sweating and with a heightened sense of urgency.

Quickly he scrambled to the large wall map showing the county.  He ran his finger across the top to the longitude mark and then down until he reached the latitude.  For whatever reason, he was having difficulty focusing.  He tried hard to remember what was there.  He even yelled out, “What is it?  What’s here? I can’t think.”

He tried to calm himself down.  He took a step back from the map and tried again to get his thoughts together.

As he stood there he could hear himself breathing quite heavily.  In fact, it made him think of the second hand making its way around the face of the clock, each breath was a tick, each breath landed on a second mark.

It was then he knew.  The location was the fire station.  He dove to the floor and rolled under the breakroom table just as the tornado ripped through.