The probe had become entangled in the limbs of the tree and was hanging twenty feet or so above us. I did a quick survey of my body and could feel no breaks or puncture wounds, but I felt like one large bruise. My muscles were still slightly traumatized and I couldn't move yet. The EMU made moving even more difficult. My PLSS was buried no telling how deep in the sand.
"Tabitha, are you okay? Tabitha?" I yelled. I was able to move my arm enough to open my sun visor, then I twisted and lifted the helmet free. Hot moist and very thick air rushed into my face and nearly choked me. It felt great to be home.
"Anson, I'm okay, but I think I bruised or broke some ribs. I can't really move. I need help getting up."
"Me too. I'm kind of stuck in the sand."
Then the trees above us bent nearly over to the ground and swayed back upright several times. The wind had picked up so strong that several of the smaller pines in my peripheral vision snapped in half. One of the tops of the trees was airborne and collided with the probe in the trees above Tabitha and me. The collision was just enough to jar the probe loose. The wind whipped the trees around and the probe began a gravity-assisted plunge toward us. I screamed like a little girl, but the adrenaline rush from my fight or flight reflexes gave me the strength to roll over and bear-crawl out from under the crashing six-ton spacecraft. I hoped that Tabitha could move. Although I didn't count on it since the spacesuits weigh about three hundred pounds each in one gee of gravity.
The probe crashed only inches behind me. I was able to stand to my feet with the strength from the adrenaline. I lost the PLSS, HUT, SSA, and helmet as quickly as possible. As quickly as possible was several minutes. I began removing my LCVG gloves and footies and a serious gust of wind caught me and threw me over the probe. My suit partially inflated from the hellacious wind but remained weighed down where I removed it. I grabbed at a tree as I flew by it and stabilized my fall.
"This wind makes no sense at all," I said to myself. I thought possibly it might be some sort of wind vortices anomaly due to the warp bubble appearing then disappearing in the atmosphere. Whatever it was, the air was chaotic as hell now. The wind pushed me over again and I landed about two meters from Tabitha who hadn't moved when the probe fell. An ECC support tube was across her left leg. Fortunately she was lying in sand and the tube merely forced her deeper into the soft ground. I dug her out and dragged her from beneath the tube.
"How are you?" I asked.
"I'm okay. What is happening?"
The bottom fell from the sky as torrential rainfall pounded us. The winds grew even stronger. The air was getting colder.
"I ain't sure, Tabitha. Let's get you out of the suit and try to figure out where the hell we are." Pine trees don't grow in the desert, and it was way too humid for New Mexico. As we were getting Tabitha down to her LCVGs the weather turned for the worse. It began hailing golfball-to-baseball size chunks of ice. Tabitha and I crawled under one of the ECCs for protection. Then lightning struck a tree about ten feet away from us. The tree burst about five feet from the ground and fell over. It landed on one of the other ECCs with a loud crash and pieces of the device were scattered about. We huddled together under the protection of ECC two.
I could hear even stronger winds and the lightning increased. The hail continued to pummel the ECC. Tabitha pointed out several treetops flying off into the sky.
"Look! I've seen that before!" she cried.
Tabitha grew up in Austin, Texas. I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. Both places are right smack dab in the middle of tornado alley. We both knew a tornado when we saw it. And holy shit we were seeing one now. A big one!
"How the hell did we happen to land right in the middle of a twister?" she yelled over the clanking of hailstones.
"Let's worry about that later. We've got to get out of the path of that thing," I said and I began looking around. There didn't seem to be any place to go that would offer shelter. A pine tree zipped past us at fifty miles per hour.
"That way!" Tabitha pointed in a direction that appeared to be orthogonal or at a ninety-degree angle to the direction of the tornado's path. The hope was to not be in front of the tornado when it passed by. The tornado was maybe a quarter mile away from us and was cruising at probably forty miles per hour. No way we could outrun it. Maybe we had time to get out of its way. We started running. Fast! Tabitha clutched her side as she ran.
Lightning struck to my right about ten meters away.
"Shit! That was close!" I said.
"Shut up and run!" Tabitha was holding her left side. She had said she thought her ribs were cracked. It had to hurt but worry or talking about it couldn't help the pain and staying here in front of that tornado was not an option either of us liked.
We ran hard through an endless pine thicket just ahead of the sound of breaking trees and limbs. I soon realized that this was no natural thicket. The trees were all about the same age and they were all growing in lines. We were in a timber company's pine grove—and fortunate for our bare feet that there was a nice sandy path between each row of pines.
I looked over my shoulder and noticed that the large tornado had spun off three smaller ones that were in a merry-go-round circling it. The large central storm had to be a four on the Fujita scale at least. Maybe even an F-five.
We came to a small creek that cut through the pine grove. We were running too fast to stop easily so Tabitha and I jumped and landed right in the middle of it. Fortunately the creek bed was sandy or we could've twisted or broken feet and ankles. The creek wasn't more than knee deep in water, but the banks were five or six feet high.
"Let's dig in right here," I yelled. The wind was still so loud we could barely hear one another.
"Good. I can't run much more." She gasped holding her side.
We crawled up as close to the bank of the creek as we could and grabbed onto anything we could hold. The lightning was getting closer and the sound of the storm was getting louder. I thought of rising up and looking over the embankment, but then a tree trunk whooshed by inches above the ground. It would have taken my head off. I hunkered down and stayed put. Those tornadoes were only a quarter of a mile or so away and I never once heard the sounds of a damn freight train. All I could hear was an intense wind and the sound of trees breaking. There was thunder, but no freight train.
The storm turned away from the crash site and away from us. As the tornado sounds got further and further away I decided to brave a peek over the edge of the creek bank. I could see the tornadoes ripping through the trees in the distance.
"I think we're out of the woods for now." I stood and offered Tabitha a hand. I looked around and remembered that we were actually in the woods and laughed at the pun.
"What a day." She grabbed and kissed me hard. "That's for marrying me." She kissed me again. "That's for getting us back to Earth alive." She kissed me once more and said, "That, is just for the hell of it."
I gazed into her eyes and commented on how beautiful she looked.
"Phew! You're blind." She shrugged.
I started to respond to her when the world suddenly started spinning. I tried to keep focused on Tabitha's face, but I couldn't. Everything spun around and around as if I was on a merry-go-round moving at fifty miles per hour. Then I lost my balance and fell sideways into the creek. I struggled to keep my head above the water level, but I had no connection to what up or down was. My sense of direction had completely vanished. Tabitha pulled my head above the water and grunted from the painful effort.
"Anson, what's wrong?"
I was able to make it onto all fours with my face slightly above the water. Then I vomited violently. Tabitha didn't move. She made sure my head stayed above the water. Several dry heaves later the nausea subsided somewhat and I was able to get to my feet with Tabitha's help.