The professor and I found Brigid about fifty miles west of Table Rock, and only because we had to go back to collect our forgotten samples. I was weary, having not slept well the night before, and the professor had been too distracted by the coming storm to remember the jars of rainwater. Brigid’s van had stopped close to where we’d left our jars out, and she’d picked them up, possibly thinking that we wouldn’t have gone back for them and wanting to return the university’s equipment before she was left stranded herself. Dr Maynard had checked out a long list of university equipment for this trip. Brigid had presumably noticed the little prints on the bottom of the jars that designated them the university’s property and had decided to pick them up. Or more likely, she had read the records and memorised who took what equipment and where they were headed, so she knew exactly who had left the jars behind.
Brigid had been going in the same direction as us, but one of the tires on her van had blown out as she drove over a sharp rock, and somehow she’d forgotten to bring a spare. She had an uncharacteristically wild look about her, her ponytail all in disarray and the top two buttons of her shirt undone as well as her cuffs. Even in storm country, Brigid tended to appear tidy, if not necessarily polished or sophisticated, with her hair brushed back and tied up and her shirts ironed but not pressed or even particularly fashionable. She had the look and build of someone who had never seen a gym, only heard of them in tales told by other nerds around a strictly figurative campfire. I didn’t hate Brigid; she was just someone you had to trick yourself into liking. Good on paper, frumpy on first sight.
As the professor and I collected our rain samples from her van, she climbed into our RV and inspected it, presumably for cleanliness, before perching on one of the fold-out stools attached to the right interior wall. We would have to take her back to the university, but we couldn’t go out of our way to do so. We’d have to take her with us on our storm-gathering trip, which would consist of several steps, the first of which involved continuing to head in the direction of the thunder and wind, travelling away from the university. I felt a headache coming on at the thought that she would be there; so far the trip had been almost fun, taking notes and exchanging opinions with an expert in the field of storm science. But with Brigid along for the rest of the trip, we would be bogged down in details about irrelevant data points or pointless differences in semantics. What people like Brigid didn’t realise was that not everything could be quantified and objective; some things required an artist’s hand and a personal touch, even in fields of meteorological study. This was why people like Brigid did not get chosen to go on special assignments like this one.
The air outside felt quite normal now, apart from maybe a slight heaviness, but both the professor and I could sense a storm on the horizon. The badlands were heaving with them; we simply had to drive out far enough to encounter one. The hard part was going to be capturing it, funnelling it, and bottling it for study.
Most people have this notion that simply running up to a tornado with a jar is enough to capture its essence, but the reality is a lot more complex. For example, many don’t know that thunder and lightning, apart from being common (if fleeting) sources of power in and of themselves, help concentrate a tornado’s essence into something tangible, something useful. The same with thrashing waves in a cyclone. They have the energy of disaster, the energy of death. This is why sirens in mythology are said to be more powerful after a nearby storm causes a shipwreck; the drowned bodies of sailors act as both carriers and amplifiers of the storm’s energy.
I thought we would get a good storm within a couple days. It can be difficult to tell for sure, because telling is part of the art, and because our equipment consisted of a brick of a laptop with a weather app installed on it. Nonetheless, I reckoned we would get some thunder and lightning and maybe a couple gallons of storm water to study.
I said as much to Dr Maynard, and he agreed. Brigid only said, “If we even make it to the heart of the storm,” which I found suspicious until I recalled that her own attempt to travel into the wilderness had resulted in a dead tire. Nevertheless, I resolved to keep an eye on Brigid, with her unkempt look and shifty eyes.
There was a break in the conversation for a while as we studied the readings on the monitor. Brigid took this opportunity to ask if she might be allowed the use of our desk for her work, even though I had been in the middle of an essay when we found her and I still had all of my work splayed out on the desk.
Dr Maynard considered it for a moment and then said, “Well, I suppose that’s up to Hestia.”
I had to oblige her; by leaving it up to me, the professor had put me in the awkward position of having no good reason to say no.
Brigid got her laptop out of her backpack and began to type away at some document. She didn’t bother to move the papers I’d left on the desk or the jars I’d been using as paperweights (I was in the middle of editing “Carried on the Breeze: the Northern Winds in the Use of Small Incantations” and the sheets of paper were in disarray because I kept going back and forth on my paragraph about what constituted small vs. substantial acts of weather wielding). Finally we got to a particularly rocky patch of dirt road and the jars started to rattle.
“Um, sorry, is it okay if I move these into a drawer?” Brigid said, gesturing to the jars and the papers. I was in the middle of pretending to read a book so I could peer over the top of the pages at what Brigid was doing, so I acted surprised when she addressed me and then, with some reluctance, told her to go ahead.
“The drawer on the top right is mine. Top left is Maynard’s and the other two are for bits of equipment,” I said.
“Thanks. I’ll just finish this paragraph and then put those away.”
“I can do it if you want. They’re my papers.”
“Oh, no worries. I’m happy to.”
Brigid typed for a few more minutes before opening the drawer on the left. She peered inside, and then reached for a jar and a pile of paper.
“I said the top right is mine.”
Brigid startled, then closed the top left drawer and put my papers away in the other one.
#
When we stopped for the night, we were six hundred miles deep into the savannah and it was almost eight p.m.; time to make dinner. We had few fresh ingredients, so we had to make do with ready meals. Only now we would also have the supplies that Brigid had brought with her, such as spices, lemons, and yet more ready meals. The lemons, apparently, were to introduce acid that would break up the salty flavour in the sodium-heavy meal packs.
While it was just the two of us, Maynard had been heating the food, because the microwave belonged to him and it was old-fashioned, with dials on it that I didn’t know how to operate. Brigid asked if there was anything she could do to help as she was already bringing out some lemons to cut up.
“Oh, don’t bother with those,” said Dr Maynard. “I’ve found they don’t much help, unless you squeeze the whole lemon in, and at that point, all you’ve got is one very sour Bolognese.”
Brigid was unperturbed. “I’ll take that into consideration, but I’m considering this my own little experiment. Hestia, did you want some lemon in yours as well? I’ve found that it really does help. Also, how do you–” Brigid motioned to the microwave, with its arcane series of dials, arranged according to the most efficient way to punish anyone who dared try and use them.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve got it. You and Hestia just sit down, maybe go over your exam notes. I’m quite happy to heat up a few meals for dinner. It’s not a problem at all.”
“It’s just that I’ve got a really particular way I like my food, and I’d rather not impose that on you. Could you please show me how the microwave works?”
For some reason, it had never occurred to me to just ask how the thing worked. A small wave of shame lapped at my feet, and I felt like a child, needing my meals provided for me by an adult. It irked me that Brigid had come to this solution with such ease.
“Oh, don’t be silly. Just sit down and tell me what you want. A slice of lemon, is it?”
Brigid sat down. Ah, good. Vindication.
She corrected the professor: “Actually, half of the lemon, if you don’t mind. And I like the food to be really, really hot. Overheated, even, if possible. Got to denature any bacteria in there. Who knows how well they pack the food, and all.”
As Dr Maynard stood there, squeezing the lemon in, Brigid asked him about our research, what was our hypothesis, what were our methods. The professor spoke over the whirring of the vile microwave.
“Well, everybody knows that storm essence, tornado essence, the essence of any kind of extreme weather, can be harnessed to use as fuel, redirectable energy, or even direct electricity. But nobody quite knows why. You and Hestia and the others are studying the way it all works, safe methods of harnessing essences, but I wanted to learn more about the why of it all.”
Brigid watched him closely, taking all the words in. Really, he hadn’t said anything ground-breaking (we had yet to interpret any of the data we had collected, and we hadn’t yet gotten any decent tornado samples to study, so we hadn’t had the chance to discover anything ground-breaking yet), but she hung on every word. Kiss-ass.
#
I woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in my stomach, a cough, and watery eyes. I looked about the darkened interior, weighing whether or not it would be worth it to get up for some water, when I noticed that Brigid, who had been in the sleeping bag across from me, was no longer there. I got up slowly, careful to not move in a way that would upset my stomach any more, and walked down the length of the RV in search of her. I heard something click by the passenger side at the front of the van, and as I drew the curtain open, I saw Brigid fiddling around with a torch that was turned off.
“What are you doing?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Just wanted to catch up on some reading. Sorry if I woke you.”
“You didn’t.”
I stood there staring at her for a while longer, thinking she might offer up some more explanations to fill the awkward silence. This was a technique I read about in a rather colourful sociologist’s field guide once. She didn’t budge, just held my gaze unblinking. Maybe she had read about the technique as well.
Just as I grabbed the curtain, ready to turn back and pull it closed behind me, she spoke.
“Wait.”
I stopped.
“How are you feeling?” She looked up at me, her eyes huge behind her glasses.
“Tired. And a bit sick.”
She studied me a bit longer, as if I were a particularly dense text.
“I’m going to have some tea. Did you want any? I could even put lemon in it, if you want.”
We drank the tea in the driver’s and passenger’s seats so we wouldn’t disturb the professor. We drank it in silence. When I was done with my cup, Brigid asked me,
“Do you feel any better?”
And I told her I did, a little. My stomach still hurt, though, and I still felt the dizziness that came with a heightened temperature.
“Good,” she said, and soon I found my eyelids getting heavy again, my body going limp in the driver’s seat of the RV.
#
I awoke to the sound of papers shuffling and the tiny crunch of a hamster nibbling on a carrot; or, no, something dryer, maybe a biscuit. Wiping my eyes and stretching my neck out from the position it had been in for what felt like a couple of days, I turned my head and peered behind the curtain. Brigid sat on the floor surrounded by papers, with a plain cracker in her mouth that she very tentatively crunched. She glanced up briefly as I climbed out of the seat and toppled over the gearbox that acted as a barrier between the car and the rest of the RV, catching myself just before my face met the carpeted floor.
“Alright?” she said.
“Not to sound like a parrot, but really, what are you doing?”
“I still couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d make myself useful and organise some of the essays you’ve got lying around. You seem really interested in the looping studies conducted by Vermer and Hughes.”
“Oh, those aren’t mine. I’m more interested in the effects of seasonal storms.”
“Yeah, the northern wind papers. I saw those. I just thought you might have been pursuing more than one avenue of research at a time.” This last comment Brigid made quietly, under her breath, as if she was confirming some hypothesis she had about me to herself. The gall of her.
“Well, I actually prefer to focus on one thing at a time. I find diluting your focus between multiple projects is the best way to ensure that none of them are up to snuff.”
“Mm-hmm.” She wasn’t even looking at me.
“Anyway, I’m sure that Maynard has things organised exactly how he likes, and I don’t think he would appreciate you reshuffling all of our papers.”
“Hmm.” Brigid stopped at one of the papers and looked at the pile around her, appearing to consider something that I suspected was not my request for her to back off. “Okay,” she said.
#
The professor woke up soon after to a fold-out desk that was half reorganised and half in its original disarray. Brigid said nothing to explain herself or the situation in general, but despite my suspicions of her, telling on her seemed so juvenile and beneath me that I didn’t even consider it. Besides, I didn’t want to alert her to the fact that I had my eye on her any more than I already had. It was a slow-moving day, and by about noon, the professor reached into one of his drawers for his favourite pen, only to find it buried under some of the essays he’d laid down at the bottom of the stack.
“Oh, I must be going senile,” he said. “I could have sworn these were at the bottom of the drawer.” He looked up at me, then at Brigid, for explanation. It wasn’t my fault, so I said nothing, and Brigid affixed her gaze to the pot of tea she was brewing, pretending she couldn’t sense his eyes on her.
“Does anyone want tea?” she asked. Neither I nor the professor responded. She shrugged and poured herself some hot water. Then she cut up a lemon to squeeze into it.
Dr Maynard approached me a few minutes later in the back of the van, when Brigid had volunteered to start up the engine for today’s drive. His face was folded in the shape of concern.
“This is going to be a strange question, and I hate to doubt any of my students, but for your own safety as well as mine, it’s important that you answer truthfully. Did you notice Brigid take anything from the drawer when she was fiddling around with it?”
I couldn’t be sure whether or not she had taken something, but I was glad to see that the professor found her behaviour as suspicious as I did.
“I don’t know. Is there something missing?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I thought you might have been paying closer attention. She has been acting a bit odd, though, hasn’t she?”
“Definitely.” I struggled to keep a straight face. Some part of me felt a childish glee at hearing Brigid get called out, and I didn’t fight very hard to tamp this feeling down.
“I wonder if maybe she’s just not feeling all right. She did go through quite the ordeal with her van breaking down. Maybe it would do her good if we could find a way to get her back to campus.” Outside, the horizon had been getting darker and more foreboding with every mile we travelled. We were far away from any major towns or outposts now, and even if I wanted her gone, I wasn’t sure how to get her to town without calling down another vehicle to pick her up. It would just slow us down, and we couldn’t afford to stop long enough for anyone else to get here, or we might miss the big storm.
“Maybe,” I said, eyeing the silhouette of the driver’s seat where Brigid sat.
#
We made the inevitable drive to Zephyr’s Hope, the last outpost between us and true wilderness. We needed to fuel up and buy some ready meals for the next day, when we would finally be arriving in the very heart of storm country and begin our hunt for the tornado in earnest.
When we pulled up to the side of the dusty building, there were only two other vehicles in the car park. One was a rectangular blue two-seater that I didn’t know enough about cars to recognise or name but that looked like it had been restored from another time. The other was a pickup truck with the hood up and a mechanic in front of it, pulling bits apart and putting them back like a careless surgeon at an open heart.
The professor handed Brigid a fifty-dollar note and asked her to fill up the tank as much as the money would allow, and she hesitated, but she took the money and then stepped out of the van to fuel up. I made for the sliding door at the side of the van, hoping to grab a snack at the shop, when a wave of nausea and headache overtook me again.
“Not now, Hestia,” the professor said, seemingly in agreement with my body. “Now’s our only chance.”
Before I could think to ask what he was talking about, he was already in the driver’s seat and putting the car in gear. He looked into the rear-view mirror and hit the gas pedal. It all happened so quickly that for a moment I almost forgot about Brigid. As we sped away, I turned to see her through the haze of dust on the window, holding a dripping pump. A trail of splotches on the ground marked where the van had jolted forward with the fuel tank left open. I wasn’t Brigid’s biggest fan, but seeing her left in the dust like that made me feel a twinge of regret, even over the pangs of nausea and pain that overcame me.
“Why did we do that?” I asked. I barely registered the responsibility I took on in that “we.” Dr Maynard did not respond, but instead kept glancing up at the mirror. When Zephyr’s Hope disappeared over the horizon, he trained his eyes on the road ahead, not looking back anymore.
We only stopped when hours had passed and it was gone midnight. The professor had considered the possibility of sleeping in shifts so that we could cover more ground that way, but then quickly decided against it. He had insisted the tornado would soon be upon us, or rather we would come upon it. Tomorrow it would happen. Still, something in his manner had changed ever since we abandoned Brigid. Dinner was short and hasty, and afterwards I felt somehow even worse.
When the professor retired to his pull-out bed, I could hear him behind the thin privacy screen turning from side to side for what felt like hours. I myself had trouble sleeping, and when I did fall asleep, I woke up shortly after with a nosebleed and the urge to vomit.
In the morning, we took off again, both of us bleary-eyed and yawning. I got ready to drive while the professor sat in the passenger seat and consulted his maps. As I adjusted the side-view mirror, I thought I saw a flash of blue on the horizon behind us, out of place against the increasingly grey sky and outcrop of muddy rocks in the grass. I turned around in my seat to make sure, but the landscape behind me was still. My brain felt like soup in my skull.
The professor had me drive us further west for the next few hours. Even though I was unwell, I could tell he needed the break, too. He seemed to be mulling something over whenever I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye. Perhaps we were both wondering the same thing: what was Brigid doing now, abandoned at the station?
We had to stop and switch seats when I got another nosebleed. By this time, I had seen several more flashes of blue light coming from the mirrors in the periphery of my vision and felt like I desperately needed to lie down, but the professor handed me the maps and told me to watch out for any change in elevation in our surroundings; we wanted to be on flat land for the storm. Then he hit the gas pedal.
The worse the weather got, the worse I felt. I thought at one point I might pass out, and felt my head dipping toward the dashboard, but Maynard reached out and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Keep your head back,” he said. “It’ll be easier that way.”
I did, and found that I did not feel any better, but was comforted by the idea that if another nosebleed came on or if I started to throw up, it would all glide down my throat instead. I could barely lift my arms up to see the map anymore. It didn’t seem to matter, as Maynard had not asked for any input from me in the two hours I’d been pretending to be able to read the maps.
“Not long now,” the professor said. Despite his lack of sleep, his focus was sharp on the dirt road in front of us.
When we finally caught up to the edge of the inclement weather, I had nearly fallen asleep a dozen times and was still fighting it even then. Whatever I had seen in the mirrors, it appeared the professor had started seeing it too, swearing under his breath and accelerating every time he seemed to catch something in the rear-view. He stopped speaking to me — had blanked my existence out entirely, it seemed — and was exclusively concentrated on the skies above us.
Before we were upon it, the tornado came into view. Here the professor laughed giddily and turned to me for the first time in hours.
“We’re here.”
We pulled over maybe a kilometre away from the gyre, which itself was about a hundred metres in diameter. As soon as we stopped the RV, it gave a pitiful whirr before it died down. I wasn’t sure we had enough fuel in the tank for it to start up and go again. That, or some other car component had fizzled out on us. We would need to get closer on foot. I just about had the strength to stand up, but I wasn’t sure how I would make it any closer. For his part, Maynard seemed to have forgotten his sleepless night. He had a frantic look in his eyes, and he set about collecting the equipment we would need, not asking for my input anymore but giving me orders to fetch this and that. He grabbed a jar, then set it down to reach for a bigger jar. He opened a false compartment in the desk, one whose existence I had been heretofore unaware of, and pulled out what looked like a gun holster. The one thing he was forgetting was the conduit, the item that would act as a receiver to the tornado’s energy and filter the storm’s energy into the jars, ready to be bottled and studied. I managed to slur out a question regarding the conduit.
“The what? Oh. Don’t worry about that,” the professor responded. He still wouldn’t look at me. He grabbed a few more things, attached his holster to his waist, and set off, motioning for me to follow.
As we headed into the storm, the horn of a car went off behind us, muffled but just barely audible over the raging winds. Even in my state, I expended the energy to attempt to turn and find the source of the noise, but the professor urged me along. I gave in. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other and not vomiting or bleeding on either of them.
Within two footsteps, I had forgotten about the car horn. Forgotten, until I saw the same flash of blue I’d been catching in the mirrors speed by and screech to a halt between us and the tornado. It was the old car I’d seen in Zephyr’s Hope, and behind the wheel, hair a mess and eyes wild, was Brigid.
As she stepped out, I could see the professor reach for the holster by his hip. An understanding seemed to pass between the two of them, one that I was apparently peripheral to. He released his gun from the holster and pointed it.
It took me far too long to realise he was not pointing it at Brigid, but at me.
“You piece of absolute shit,” said Brigid. I watched her features contort from anger and determination into something resembling shock as the gun shot resounded in my left ear.
In that moment, as he fired the gun and the bullet tore into my side, I understood, confused as I was, that it was going to be either me or him, and only one of us was in any kind of fighting shape. My entire left side went numb as the impact shocked through me. I could see Brigid’s mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear anything. The wind raged around us as if feeding off the violence. As I struggled to stay upright and eventually toppled over following an embarrassing series of stumbles, the slightest hint of comprehension began to dawn on me. I had begun to grasp, intuitively, what he was doing, why he had not cared to bring a conduit, and there seemed only one way to respond.
I reached with my right hand over to my left side, found the place where the bullet had lodged itself, and began to dig at the flesh. My vision went entirely white as I jammed my fingers in the wound. I willed the storm closer now, and I felt the winds picking up around me as they fed on my dying body. The wind gathered me up and carried me, as I continued to tear at my left side, streaming my blood into the weather, mixing it with the rain. It almost didn’t even hurt at this point. I was past pain. My vision returned, and I had climbed about fifty metres into the air. I felt the wind as a gentle force, caressing my open wound, sustaining my body in the air, even as I saw it shatter the windows of Brigid’s borrowed car. I heard another gun shot, then another, but felt no impact as the wind carried me up higher.
I was drunk off the flow of air; I felt like part of the tornado itself, felt myself melting into it. I let it take however much of my blood it needed. I ignored Brigid, who scrambled to get in the car and shelter from me, and I focused my efforts on disarming the professor, who was still trying to shoot me in the air. The tornado and I eased around the shape of the car below and found an elegant solution to our problem. The shattered pieces of glass on the ground flew and began to dance around the professor’s feet, working their way up before finally and fatally slicing at his neck. He didn’t even notice the shards until they were lodged in his windpipe, and he toppled backwards, firing off another gun shot into nothing as he fell. I found it within me to wonder why the storm had listened to me the way it had; I suspected it had something to do with the blood it consumed belonging to me and not the professor. I made a mental note to investigate this further, if I happened to survive.
When the storm finally moved on, it felt like hours had passed. In reality, it had probably only been a few minutes, if that. Brigid watched from the seat of the car as the wind let me down softly on the ground. She got out of the car and ran to my side. Her face appeared above me, all sweaty and out of breath.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, shaping out the words as clearly as I could through the jolt of pain that met me as the tornado hurtled away from us and the rain died down. Brigid ripped off the sleeve of her button-up shirt and pressed it down on my wound. I was bleeding pretty heavily, but the pressure helped staunch it somewhat.
“Don’t ask me stupid questions,” she said.
“If I die, I want you to continue my research on the northern wind.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” said Brigid. “Your research is garbled at best. Picking up where you left off would be like da Vinci finishing a drawing started by a sickly five-year-old.” She squeezed my hand with her free hand. We stayed like that until I felt well enough to stand up, however shakily, maintaining pressure on my wound myself. We stole some emergency supplies from the now-broken-down RV and prepared for a long journey back to Zephyr’s Hope. Brigid sat me down in the blue car she had borrowed. Before she buckled her own seat belt, she handed me a lemon from the back seat.
“Eat this,” she said. “For the poison.”
I sucked on the lemon as we sped away from the RV. I was in shock and half-dead but the car had no windows anymore, so the whole way back, I had the bracing wind at my side.
Ana Kosic 