Wild As the Wind (First draft)

One

They were dying out.

Dory looked towards the sky with pursed lips as she leaned over her steering wheel. Strands of her hair hung in front of her face where they had been teased and pulled by the wind, and her blue eyes were glaring at the passing clouds.

She was parked at an intersection in the middle of a farmland. B.F.E., smack dab in the heart of Tornado Alley, and the perfect place to go chasing a storm. Modified probes weighed down the bed of her pale orange pick-up, begging to be sucked into heaven, but irritation was nagging at the back of her mind. There wasn't a tornado in sight.

The conditions had been favorable. The sky had opened up for a considerable amount of rain, and after a moment pea sized hail started pelting the ground, but the winds had never stopped warring with each other. They hit the storm cell from both ends, tearing it apart even as it began to build. She could see the breaks in the clouds from where she was sitting, and all that she could think was about two hundred miles south, the storm was exploding with activity.

But instead she was stuck here, in B.F.E., and with no real guarantee that she'd get what she came for.

Cursing, she dialed the first number in her phone. Peaches answered on the first ring.

"Remind me why I'm headed to some po-dunk town in Arkansas," she demanded as she watched the sun begin to spill through the canopy over her head, "when I could be two hundred miles south, getting information from the heart of a storm that's tearing a line across the Southeast."

His laughter came in a low rasp that had her leaning her head back against the seat.

"Because that town," he reminded her, "is about to be heading straight into twister season without a working siren. You're going to head out there and make sure its working right, but you're also going to convince that Mayor to let us set up the W.I.A.D.. Dorth...We've shown the system all that we can with chasing. Now I know that nature's a bitch and there's always something new to factor in..."

Dory let out a sigh as he anticipated her argument before she made it.

"But the funds are starting to run out. After that you can support this project all you want with your own money, but even that will only go so far. People might believe in the cause, and our word might be enough for some, but they need to see it. We need to prove to them that this works."

"In other words, they think we're full of shit."

He laughed again, "Pretty much."

"Why me?" she muttered to herself.

"I'll give you two guesses, but you'll only need one."

She grimaced at the road ahead of her. Hawthorn was just a few miles in the distance. She could see the first set of farm houses and evidence of civilization from where she was, tractors and cattle herders scattered in the fields around her. But in the center of it, in the heart of the city limits was a cluster of close knit people, a community where a neighbors business was everyone's business, and a town that screamed tornado magnetism.

Their storm sirens would need fixing, sure, but there are at least a thousand other storm chasers that she knew of who were capable of servicing the type of old equipment a town like this was sure to have. Even more, she thought, that the state could have out there rather than a scientist whose home was wherever the storm was. Still they had called her, and she didn't know whether or not to be thankful that they did.

She had been damn near ready to slam the phone back onto the receiver when the mayor of the small town spoke her father's name, but Peach was right. Their funds were starting to run low, and until that moment she had been thinking about all the things she could say to convince the man to let her set up her weather system in the heart of his town, so she told the man that she was tied up at the moment, sorting through leftover information from a chase a few days before.