We've been waiting in our motel room, glued to the weather on TV. The tornado siren over the town jolts us to our feet and we're running outside to the Jeep, whooping and shouting. Overhead the sky is livid orange. Individual hairs stand up straight from our heads as we clamber in. Then we're racing out of town, towards thick grey clouds clotting up on the horizon. Our side of the road is empty, the other is crammed with panicky drivers going the other way. Noticing this, I'm laughing again, the laughter rising up past my pounding heart.

All our eyes are fixed on the horizon, squinting. You can tell an old stormchaser by the crows' feet around their eyes. None of us are that experienced; we can't tell just by sight where the really beautiful ones will form. "Supercell over there?" "Could be. Not sure." "Ted?" Ted's sitting in the back with a barometer and a GPS locator and a bunch of other gadgets. He looks like a surfer boy but he does love his geek toys. "Yeah, there's some dramatic stuff happening over there," he says, deadpan. "Some ultra-high pressure building up." Ted never shows excitement. I wonder what he gets out of this. For me, being on the chase is the best feeling in the world. I have another life, typing in a succession of offices in uncomfortable shoes, saving for these trips, but that's not relevant. Secretary Laura doesn't really exist. This is me, powering down the wide flat road, heading for something everyone else runs away from.

Tornadoes are amazing. When one's about to form the sky turns an indescribable shade of green. Yeah, really, green, and there's a hush in the air, and then you hear it coming with a sound like a heavily loaded freight train. The big ones drop debris as far as eighty miles away. I was almost killed last summer in Kansas when we went too close, but that's no big deal. Everyone who does this has their near-miss story. Well, Ted's never told his, but he must have one.

"Supercell's moving westwards," he says now. "Take the next right. Step on it." I take the turn on what feels like two wheels and then floor the accelerator. The clot of cloud is ahead of us now. Is it sagging downward, considering how far it is to the ground, thinking about putting a finger down to touch the cornfields? Come on, come on. Steve and Amy are readying their cameras, snapping lenses into place and "hmm"-ing and changing their minds and putting other lenses on, moving almost in unison the way they always do with camera cases braced between their knees. Me, I just drive. In the wing mirror I can see our wake of dust hanging in the tense, still air. The road tucks itself in underneath the leading edge of the cloud-clot. Parts of the cloud are swirling, slowly and tentatively. The air pressure pushes down on my forehead and my scalp and I jump, hair-trigger tense, when I feel warmth on the back of my neck. It's breath. Ted. He's kneeling up behind the seats, using his eyes now. His breath is short. I drive.

But nothing's happening. The blanket of cloud hangs there and nothing moves but our dust. I slow down. "If anything's going to happen it'll be here," I say. There's a village in the distance and some grain silos. Nothing but corn on either side of us as I pull up. We wait in total silence for a few moments. Amy breaks it. "Ted, what's the pressure now?"

"What?" says Ted. "Oh, yeah." He turns back to his collection of toys. Clicks and system sounds come from the back. "It's not looking good," he says, muffled. "I think the cell's breaking up." Steve slumps, Amy lets out a sigh. In the moment she breathes out, rain sighs down from the sky, the sort of rain that falls from a sky that has given up any plans of activity, flat fat drops like saucers on the windscreen. I flick on the wipers. "Maybe tomorrow," says Amy. I twist round to look at Ted and catch him looking at the sky. There are tears in his eyes.

We are in the bar in the nearest town. We're booked into the local shoebox motel, but when we got here our disappointment was crackling in the air like the electricity from earlier and we had to have a drink to blunt it, and then another to blunt it some more.

"Doesn't it freak you out to think how destructive these things are?" says Amy. She and Steve are exactly the same when they're sober, but after a few drinks she talks a lot and he just nods and squeezes her hand. "Like, this town might have been levelled if we'd got a good one earlier. I feel guilty sometimes, wanting to see them so much. Willing them to happen."

She's got a point. But it's not like we have a choice to stop them, I'm about to say, when Ted lifts his head from staring into his drink. "They're not evil," he says. "They're just following their nature. Just coming and going as they please."

He sounds weird. Intense. "Do storms have a nature?" I ask. "You're talking like they're creatures, not just weather phef–, phenomenons." I'm drunker than I thought.

"I think they are," says Ted. Amy opens her mouth; here we go, I think, another speech from the biologist. But Ted cuts her off. "They don't understand about us. They don't know that people can get hurt." The word 'hurt' sounds like it's squeezed out over a lump in his throat. There's a silence and then Steve says, "No, I suppose they don't. Hey, what's everyone drinking?"

And there's no more talk about whether storms are evil, just laughing and telling tales (though still none from Ted), until Steve and Amy say goodnight and head off to their double room holding hands and I'm left behind with Ted talking the sort of crap you talk when you're drunk, that you think is profound at the time, and wanting to put my arm around him. Then finally the bartender, who's been giving us suspicious looks all night anyway, shouts that he's closing and I have to put my arm around Ted in any case because he can't walk in a straight line. We wobble unsteadily back to the twin room at the motel. Steve and Amy's window is dark. Inside, we flop down on one of the beds. I leave my arm there. Some part of my pickled reptile brain seems to have decided to go for it. "Ted," I say, putting my other arm around him, "has anyone ever told you that you're very cute, for a geek?" I add the 'for a geek' part and a nervous laugh so that if he doesn't go for it I can pass it off as one of our usual name-calling sessions, but I'm reasonably sure he will.

I'm wrong. Ted pulls away and sits up. "Yeah, someone did once. Someone... do you want another drink?" He starts rummaging in his rucksack and comes up with a bottle of vodka. He's probably too out of it to even realise I'm hitting on him, I tell myself. Now if I could only get up the nerve to try some other time. "None for me," I say, but he pushes the bottle into my hands and I decide I might as well and swig back a mouthful, like a teenager drinking in secret. "Someone great," he says. "But she didn't call me a geek. She was great."

I want to say okay, stop with the ex-girlfriend stories, but Ted never tells stories, maybe I should let him talk. But he shuts up anyway and scoots over beside me again. "You're nice," he says, and then his long sun-freckled arms fold around me and he kisses me. Nice is hardly the best compliment in the world but I can't bring myself to care. If only I hadn't drunk so much. I can't really get into it. He pushes against me and I put my hand back to keep from falling off the bed. Then he's pulling away a little, then he has me at arm's length and when he touches me now it's like he's measuring me, the space I take up. And then he lets go and just sits there looking at me. I look back at him, trying to get a grip on things.

"You're so... solid," says Ted. I splutter incredulously but can't make words. "You've got arms and legs and a body and they're all connected to each other," he goes on. His eyes are aimed somewhere over my shoulder. He's totally lost the plot now. "Not like her," he says.

What? The girl had detachable limbs? "Who? Not like who?" I ask.

He lies back across the bed and stares at the ceiling. "She went away in the morning," he says. "She came on the night of the hurricane. When she walked away the street was covered in slates. I never saw her again. She had grey eyes, like smoky glass," he goes on. My eyes are brown, and at this moment they're fixed on the carpet, following its swirling pattern. "Her arms and legs were so thin," he says, "so thin, so smooth, they seemed to go on for ever." "Great," I say. "That's great." The carpet's blurred before my eyes now. I take a deep breath and force back the lump of tears. "Well, I'd love to sit here all night dissecting your lovelife but–" There's a noise from beside me. It's a snore. He's passed out.

After a while I crawl into the other bed. I pull the blankets over my head and my knees up to my chin, but it's still a long time before I can sleep.

Next thing I know there's a banging on the door. I sit up with a groan. My head hurts. It's almost noon and Steve and Amy are shouting that there's a D4 building up somewhere near Aurora. I get up carefully, wash two aspirin down with a Coke and shuffle out to the Jeep. Ted won't meet my eyes. When he's got the laptop running he sucks in his breath. "This could be the day," he says. I close my eyes, feeling the caffeine trickling down the capillaries in my brain like clear water, then start the engine.

It's a long way. We flash through little towns and pass through miles and miles of corn and soybeans before there's a hint of cloud. But when it comes, it's big. The cloud leans over us, piled high. The whole sky is clenched around it. Awe and fear wipe through the fog in my head and I'm properly awake, properly alive, at last. It's going to be incredible, I can feel it. "Yes," mutters Ted, "yes, baby." Not to me, though, I think with a touch of bitterness. "Take the right fork," Ted says, "it's getting heavy over there."

"There," shouts Steve. "There it is. Cone." A feathery wisp on the horizon, the end swivelling like a questing tentacle, halfway to the ground. "Whoo!" yells Ted. My heartbeat is swishing in my ears. "How much closer can we get?" I ask him.

"Closer than this. It's going to turn west in a minute. We'll lose it."

I swing down a dirt road. Through the tall corn I catch glimpses of the tornado. It reaches, draws back, reaches down again, swaying, and now the corn is moving in the spinning wind as it approaches. Ted clutches the seat back with white knuckles, his equipment forgotten. "We can still get closer than this," he says, breathless. The road rises up above the level of the field and there it is right in front of us. It's a notch in the horizon now, growing and growing. From all the way over here, I can see the debris flying as it drills into the ground. But it's not moving from side to side. Only growing. That means– 

"Fuck," says Steve. "We're much too close. It'll come right past here." "No, no," Ted says, "it'll be fine." "We've got to go back," I say. "And now." I make a three-point turn on the narrow road, the fastest I've ever done. "It's fine," Ted says, "it's fine." "You're insane," I tell him, maybe with more feeling than I meant. We're streaking back down the road as fast as this thing can go.

Then Amy squeals and points off to the side. There's no time for words. Half a shed is hurtling across the field towards us and I swerve hard and the Jeep swings half off the road, two wheels in the ditch. Hangs there for a moment balanced and then topples over into the cornfield, shoved by the circling wind and we're thrown, swearing, in a pile against the passenger side. It's lurching, it might roll again. "Get out," Amy cries. We manage to get the back door open. There's a dip underneath, in the ditch, and we crawl in there. The monster scatters the next fence over and comes on.

You know in your head that something must be huge if it goes all the way up to the sky but nothing can prepare you for seeing it. It's incomprehensibly tall, it goes up forever, the sight of it punches right through your eyes and makes your brain reel, spinning in time with it. This is closer than when I almost died last summer. It's going to pass right over us. Ted's not afraid. He is smiling fiercely. We all squirm further back under the car except him. He looks back at us over his shoulder. "Get back in here, Ted," says Steve tightly. He just answers "This is it," that's all he says before scrambling out into the open and running straight into the storm. He's gone before we can work out what's happening. Then we're yelling after him. "Ted, you're crazy, man! Come back! Ted! Ted!" He ignores us. He runs, stumbling in his haste, straight for the tower of glass. Atop a small rise in the field he stops dead, feet planted, and waits. Too far for us to run out and drag him back; the tornado is a monster and it's almost on us. "You'll be killed!" howls Steve into the roar and as he speaks an awful certainty hits me. I hear Amy start to cry.

I'm lying on the ground with my cheek in clay and corn stubble. For one last second I can see Ted, tiny against the tower of grey, standing on tiptoe, arms outstretched. Above the howl I can just barely hear him, he's shouting but it's not a scream, it's a call. He stands fast. Then it's upon him, stooping over him, it scoops him up almost gently in the crook of its grey glass arm and he's gone. Bearing down on us too and I try to scream but it's like the air is being plucked from my lungs and no sound comes out. I think of Ted travelling those eighty miles as it closes in, the longest second I've ever lived, then at the last instant it swerves and passes us and everything's a blur of dust getting in my eyes and then it's gone. Gone, gone and I'm still here. Silence. Then gasps, Amy saying "Oh God, oh God." I lie there heavy on the ground, still clasped by gravity. My mind is stunned and blank. All I can think is that – for a moment – I wanted to go with him.