Room 123
by James Yarbrough
254.722.9056
James_Yarbrough@baylor.edu
Room 123
The sirens woke me up. I had heard the tornado sirens once before, when they ran an
emergency system test. The sun was out and the sky was cloudless. They sound much different
when the wail is struggling to be heard over a torrential rainfall. They sound of truth.
Spotters on the ground noticed the funnel cloud at 3:06 AM. The sirens sounded at 3:09
AM. The RA knocked on my door at 3:13 AM. I left my room on the third floor and arrived in
the first floor hallway at 3:15 AM. The power went out at 3:21 AM. The tornado hit at 3:25 AM.
The winds were howling. I could hear the sound growing, exploding through the hall.
When I lifted my head, I saw huddled forms pressed up against each other in the dark. They had
their hands over their ears. Helpless.
People say a tornado sounds like a freight train, but that is only part of it. A tornado
sounds like a freight train crashing into your ear and barreling through your head before tearing
through the other side. And then there was the piercing shriek: penetrating, violating. The
windows in the building exploded one by one. Sharp staccato gunfire.
I was huddled against the door of room 123. I could feel a strong, cold wind pulling at me
from the crack at the bottom of the door. The walls shook. The door handle above my head
rattled. I thought the tornado would pull the whole building away at any moment. Dust and
plaster clouded the mass in the hallway, shivering with the building.
Then, at 3:29 AM, everything stopped. The air was still full of noise, but the building had
come to rest. I raised my head above the crowd and saw the cowering freshmen covered in the
dust of our dormitory. Large cracks spider-webbed up and down the walls. I leaned my head
back in relief, thankful to be alive. My legs were cramping and I was beginning to feel
claustrophobic, crowded in the hallway, so I reached up and grabbed the door handle above my
head to pull myself up. Instead, I pulled open the door to room 123. Or what was left of it.
The roar of the tornado rushed back through our ears. Cold wind sucked the air out of the
hall, pushing down the heads of those who had tentatively raised them to look around. I saw
nothing of the room in the darkness, but I could feel the nothing, too. The room was gone.
I met Jack Rawlins when I was in eighth grade. We were best friends soon after. I lived at
his house about as much as I lived at my own. We went to high school together. We took classes
together. Our senior year, we applied for college together, and decided upon Huntington State.
The three-hour drive was close enough to go home on weekends if we needed food, money, or
clean clothes, but far enough that our parents weren’t always there. It was complete and total
freedom.
We were roommates, of course, and shared room 312 in Booker Hall. It was just like
junior high and high school, except our parents didn’t tell us when to go to bed and they didn’t
wake us up in the morning.
When the sirens sounded, I was the first one up; I was always the lighter sleeper. I woke
up Jack immediately. We both threw on clothes and shoes. We weren’t about to face a tornado in
our underwear. We ran down the stairs to the first floor hallway together, leaving everything else
in our room. I sat against the door to room 123. He was against the doorframe.
While the tornado was still roaring away from us, everyone in the hall was motionless,
waiting. Then we could only hear the rain, pounding and crushing and flooding. I could feel it
blowing in through the missing door. I shivered and stood, joined slowly by the mass of ghosts
huddled in the hallway, stretching toward the ceiling and shaking off the death and dirt with
which the tornado had painted us. We were the lucky ones. 52 people were already dead. 7 more
would die from tornado-related injuries.
The lightning flashed through the missing door, illuminating the crowded hallway.
Someone down the hall turned on a flashlight. The eyes reflected in the beam of light no longer
betrayed the apathy of sleep, but illustrated instead shock and confusion. Everything was gone.
“We have to make sure everyone’s okay.” The words came out of my mouth before I had
time to think about them. Everyone in the hall was standing up, now. They were all fine. But
Jack knew what I meant, maybe even more than I did. He knew that it would mean going out in
the rain. He knew that it would mean going to Meyer Hall. He knew that I meant, “We have to
make sure Alison is okay.”
Jack nodded his head. “We’ll need that flashlight. And maybe a first aid kit.” I pushed
my way down the hallway, toward the flashlight.
I met Michael Howard on the first day of school. He was in three of my classes. He lived
on the first floor of Booker. It seemed inevitable that we would become friends. He introduced
me to disc golf. It gave us a chance to unwind and talk. “You fake it till you make it,” he told me
once. “I just haven’t made it yet.”
Mike was on the other side of the flashlight. I grabbed the first aid kit behind the dorm’s
front desk and headed down the hall toward Jack. The RAs were beginning to move the students
towards the lobby to spread them out and make them more comfortable. But none of this
mattered to me. I had made my decision already and would be heading out.
We left through room 123; the door was already open. Mike threw the light around the
room and I could see a bit more of the destruction. Everything that had been in the room was
somewhere else. There was no bed, no desk, no shelves. In their place were bricks, boards, mud.
We climbed over the rubble and out through the place that once had been a window
We were soaked before we could even leave the building. The lightning was sporadic
now, but it gave us enough light. Booker Hall was on the edge of the tornado’s path. A few
hundred feet more and everything was gone. The town had been scraped down to the dirt. Whole
buildings had disappeared. They were slabs of concrete with boards and brick thrown
haphazardly around and on top of them. The miracle was that anyone in the path of the tornado
actually survived.
Paper blew across our path. Sheet after sheet dancing soggy along the ground. We walked
through it, and pieces of paper clung to our legs as they continued moving in the wind.
Migrating. Escaping the carnage. We walked the other way, toward the missing pieces.
The fourth floor and half of the third floor of Booker were gone. Some of it was piled on
top of the building, but most of the dormitory was scattered. I stepped around two window
frames that had remarkably maintained their shape, though not their glass.
As we approached Meyer Hall and Alison, I began to lose hope. Meyer had not been hit
by the edge of the tornado. It had suffered the full impact. I could see a crumpled mass that had
once been the dormitory. The four floors had been reduced to one and a half. Girls were crawling
their way out of the rubble and into the rain. Huddling in the first floor hallway had not been
enough for them.
Emily Williams sat next to me in geology. On the second day of class she woke me up
when I had fallen asleep. Seconds later the teacher singled me out with a question. Emily
underlined the answer in her notes as I looked down, pretending to check mine. She enjoyed the
class. I was taking it because I needed a lab science.
As Jack, Mike and I approached Meyer Hall, the chaos increased. Other people were
outside, braving the heavy rainfall, or perhaps too shocked or disillusioned to care. I noticed
something on the ground in the dancing flashlight beam. It did not have the straight outlines of
bricks or boards. It was not an indiscriminate mound of dirt and mud and building crumbles. It
was something in between. It was human.
I ran over to the body and noticed that it was still breathing. Shallowly. The breath was
barely audible above the crashing sound of rain against rubble and the violent wind that swept
everything away, including sound itself. The body was covered in mud and dirt, filthy and
formless. A large piece of wood jutted out of its side. I noticed one more smell above the rain
and mud. It was a harsh metallic smell. Blood. Mike’s light reflected off the dark trickle flowing
and mixing with everything else the tornado had left behind.
I wiped the mud off of her face and recognized Emily for the first time. “Shit.” I didn’t
know what else to say.
“Jack, hold the flashlight. Keep it on the wound. Ben, open the first aid kit,” said Mike,
taking charge, doing whatever he could to help her.
“We need to get her to a hospital,” said Mike. We didn’t know if any cars had survived
the storm. We didn’t know if any roads were even passable. We didn’t know if the hospital was
still there. It was 3:46 AM.
We were lucky on all three counts. Mike stopped what bleeding he could then ran to see
if his car were operable. Jack stayed with Emily while I moved closer to Meyer Hall. He told me
what happened later.
Mike’s car had survived. It didn’t have any windows, and the trunk was underneath
another car, but it was nothing a little nudge on the accelerator couldn’t fix. He drove as close as
he could to Emily, but Jack still had to help him carry her about a quarter of a mile. They drove
to the hospital through whatever clear streets and open fields they could find, following the path
of least resistance.
The hospital wasn’t inundated yet; it would be within the hour. Nearly 400 people were
injured that night. Mike left Jack at the hospital with Emily and drove back. He had a first aid kit
and a car. He could still do some good.
Unfortunately, what he did for Emily was not enough. After nearly twelve hours in the
hospital, she couldn’t hold on anymore. I was there when she died.
Paul Cordero and Amanda King were inseparable. They had been dating for four months,
but were already discussing marriage. Paul was a spontaneous sort. He actually followed all of
the random thoughts and plans that flashed through his mind.
Two weeks before the tornado hit, Paul had found a storage building full of chairs.
Different groups used the chairs for various outdoor events, but they usually put the chairs up the
day before and took them down the day after. Paul got a few people together and set up the
chairs in the middle of the quad. No one else knew who put the chairs up, so they stayed there.
Everyone else was afraid that they were there for a reason.
Walking toward Meyer, I saw several of our chairs scattered around the campus. Some of
them were twisted and ruined. Some looked to be in working condition. One chair was sitting
upright on the ground, waiting for someone to sit down. It was on top of the debris, clean and
eerie in the few lightning flashes still echoing in the distance. The rain was finally dissipating.
Small groups of girls from Meyer Hall passed me silently. I trudged on, looking at the haggard
faces, hoping to see Alison.
At 3:52 AM, as I approached the edge of Meyer Hall’s rubble, I saw a girl feverishly
pulling up debris. It was Amanda, struggling with a large piece of a brick wall. I paused. Alison
was still in there somewhere.
I helped Amanda pull the bricks away. That was when I noticed Paul’s head sticking out
of the pile, twisted in pain. I worked quickly to remove whatever I could, trying to expose the
rest of Paul. When he cried out, I stopped pulling on the board in my hand and looked closer. I
had ripped a large piece of glass out of his thigh, and blood was pouring out.
I pulled off my shirt and tried to keep pressure on the wound, but my shirt was already
soaking wet and the blood wouldn’t stop. Paul’s face was already looking much paler.
“Shit.” My vocabulary hadn’t improved since the tornado hit. “I think it hit something
big.” I watched, still trying to stop the bleeding, as Paul’s face grew white and his breathing
deteriorated. He died silently. There were no last words. There were no expressions of love.
There was nothing but the pained breathing that stopped suddenly.
I had tried to move the piece of wood. I had pulled out the glass. I had torn the hole open.
I don’t know if he would have died anyway. I want to think the wound was already fatal. I have
to think the wound was already fatal.
I met Sarah Kelly in the library. She was not a workaholic; she just had too many
interests. She was on the equestrian team and the debate team. She was an RA at Meyer Hall and
a photographer for the school newspaper. We met in the Egyptian section of the library. She had
decided to teach herself hieroglyphics, while I was trying to write the ten-page research paper for
my ancient world cultures class that was due the next day.
I saw her standing outside the dorm, staring at the rubble. It was the first time I had ever
seen her doing nothing. I think it was the first time she didn’t know what to do. I grabbed her
arm and led her over to Amanda, who was still trying to hold my makeshift bandage against
Paul’s leg. She was weeping, shaking over his body. Sarah lifted Amanda and led her away from
Paul. I turned back to Meyer Hall and entered through a black, jagged hole in the rubble at 4:03
AM.
The first thing I saw when I got inside was a large wooden dresser. It was perfectly intact,
just upside down. I began to help the injured girls out of the building. I moved them outside and
away from the unstable remains of the building.
My flashlight weakly penetrated the quiet darkness beyond. As I walked down what was
left of the hallway, I saw a hand sticking out of the rubble. It was cold and alien. I saw a shoe,
still tied, on the opposite side of the hall. I didn’t get any closer. I didn’t want to find out if it was
still tied to something. I prayed it was empty and moved on.
I could hear moans all around me. Maybe it was just one person’s voice, echoing in the
hallway, but it sounded like hundreds of girls, crying out for help. I knew I couldn’t save them. I
knew that there was no hope for Alison. But I couldn’t give up.
I began moving debris, looking for bodies and searching the faces. I saw faces that were
in class with me, faces that ate behind me at lunch, faces that passed me every day between
classes, but I did not see Alison’s face. At 4:27 AM, the emergency relief arrived.
Alison Martin grew up down the street from me. Our parents were friends and we were
always at each other’s houses. When Jack moved in during the eighth grade, I was just beginning
to realize what Alison really meant to me. I realized I was in love with her.
We were the high school couple that everyone talked about. The sweethearts that would
get married and live happily ever after. Sure, we had our problems and we had our fights, but we
worked through everything. We truly loved each other.
I remember the first time we kissed, outside any children’s games. It was before our
junior year of high school. June 21, 2004. The first official day of summer. We knew there was
something between us, something romantic, maybe, but were both hesitant to follow through.
We were friends and didn’t want to ruin that.
On June 21, though, we spent the day at the city pool with several of our friends. It was
biking distance from our houses and we kept a slow pace the whole way back, talking. At the
park on the way home, I proposed a detour to the playground. We sat on the swing set next to
each other while the sun dropped in the sky.
As the sun set, we sat together on top of the playground, looking out over the park. She
leaned her head on my shoulder and I looked over at her. I felt myself falling into the kiss. It was
something inescapable. Our nervous lips met. In that instant, I didn’t care if it ruined our
friendship. I didn’t care about anything else but her. Her lips. Her eyes. Her scent. Her taste. I
took it all in.
And then it was over. We made our way back to our bikes and rode home in the fading
dusk. I was in love.
The firefighters began to carefully remove the wreckage, looking for the girls still
missing. They wouldn’t let me stay in the building, so I stood outside. That was where Mike
found me. He had been doing what first aid he could for the injured around Meyer Hall. The
firefighters took the bodies out one by one. Some of them were still alive. Many of them were
not. None of the girls they brought out were Alison.
Two hours later, I watched the sun rise on the devastation. Half of the campus was gone.
Wiped off the map. Meyer Hall was the only dormitory hit directly by the tornado. It was
leveled. Only parts of the bottom floor remained. People were crawling around the campus,
sifting through the junk that had been left behind, but it all seemed so distant. I was alone.
The firemen found Alison’s body at the base of the giant, twisted oak at 7:25 AM. Four
hours after the tornado hit.
75 percent of the casualties from the tornado were students at Huntington. Of the 39
college students who died, 31 of them lived in Meyer Hall. 5 died in an apartment complex just
south of campus. 2 students were killed in their house north of campus. Paul, who bled to death
after I pulled out the piece of glass, made 39.
At 7:39 AM, three minutes after I saw Alison’s broken, lifeless body, I walked back
toward Booker Hall. It was easier to navigate the wreckage in the daylight. As I entered the
lobby, I saw people huddled together in small groups, crying and talking. I couldn’t cry. Crying
was such a small action to express something so large and so empty.
I made my way down the hall to the doorway of room 123. I had been there at the
moment Alison had died. I looked into the room and saw a strange world, harsh and desolate. It
was a place without structure. Without life. Without Alison.