Continuing our conversation with Jake Simmons, star reporter and blogger for stormchasers.com and his experiences covering the exploits of Storm Chasers: The men and women who dive into natural disasters, hoping to trigger their transformation into metahumans. You can read Part I of the interview (here).
Jake Simmons is flying out from JFK International Airport to Caracas, Venezuela to cover the opening of the first government-sanctioned foray into Danger Tourism at the Maracaibo Resort. The newly built resort is situated in the path of an ongoing storm that hits the region 180 days a year for ten hours at night with violent lightning storms. Jake has agreed to discuss the phenomenon of Storm Chasing with us, a dangerous hobby that kills one in a hundred of its pursuers. In today’s installment, he tells us how it can be even more dangerous, and recounts an episode with one of today’s most frightening villains.
HERO BEAT: What’s your most memorable moment in Storm Chasing?
JAKE: You’re talking positive? It had to be that massive sandstorm that hit Syria and Lebanon last year. I was in the region, putting together a report on the Syrian War and seeing if the conflict created more opportunities for triggers.
HERO BEAT: But you’re usually against promoting war zones for Storm Chasers.
JAKE: Yeah, no, absolutely. This was something I was doing privately for a U.S. firm as one of several experts on trigger events. The Syrian and Yemen Civil Wars were pulling in a lot of Arab metahumans and freelancers, and I was trying to see if it created conditions for more triggers or not.
HERO BEAT: Did you find anything interesting?
JAKE: Nothing I can report on now, but I have exclusive rights to post the findings first, so I’m hoping to share those soon. Anyway, we’d just landed in Rafik Hariri International for some R&R when the sandstorm rolled in. Trigger events from sandstorms were rare, but I’d never been in one, so I figured it’d be a good article for the site. The entire experience was surreal. Once I checked in to my hotel, I wandered around Beirut. It felt like I was the last man standing. The streets were empty and visibility went murky after a few feet. Seriously, I’d seen better visibility on dives. It was like everything was lit through an orange filter. The sun doesn’t go out the way you’d expect during torrential rainfall; sunlight is refracted until it’s almost a nimbus that settles in. There’s an orange glow, sound is muffled—it doesn’t carry.
HERO BEAT: Sounds eerie.
JAKE: That’s not the half of it. I was wandering around Taleet Jounblat when I hear a boom—it’s muffled and it’s somewhere above me. I’m thinking artillery, I’m thinking any second now, I’m going to see debris or a shell come down. But it keeps going, keeps moving, and I’m hearing two sounds now. One’s a ‘boom,’ one’s a ‘fwoosh,’ and they keep pushing the sand away. I start feeling it too, the pressure waves through the sandstorm, and I’m seeing the sand ripple. It was a trip.
HERO BEAT: Metahumans?
JAKE: Yeah, Alnnar Alzzll and al Muhandis it turns out, and I was pissed. I was right there, and I couldn’t see the fight. I could only hear them, flying and blasting each other. I caught a flash now and again, but I didn’t see shit.
HERO BEAT: But both are listed as heroes, right?
JAKE: Alnnar Alzzll is Sunni and al Muhandis is Shiite, so yeah, they’re technically heroes but in opposite sects, so that’d make them villains to each other. The two sects came to blows in Lebanon back in July, so this was an encore, I’m guessing. Nobody saw what happened, but the next day, I find this nice coffee shop and sit there while these old timers told me what they heard. Man, you should hear the way they spun the fight. It sounded like the match of the century. I just wish I could have seen it.
HERO BEAT: But that wasn’t your most dangerous experience?
JAKE: No, not even close. The sandstorm was just surreal and kinda beautiful and all kinds of frustrating. But mostly tourism apocalypse… something I felt safe doing—the worst that happened? My throat was raw at the end. The most dangerous thing that happened to me, though…that was the time I almost retired. I saw people die, I got battered something rough, and it, uh… it was because I’d been kidnapped. We got kidnapped, I mean.
HERO BEAT: Kidnapped? And who’s we?
JAKE: I’m not sure what else to call it? Those of us who got pushed into it don’t like to talk about it, but I’ve never felt so—vulnerable in my life. So violated. I thought I was going to die, and for a while, I wanted to.
At this moment, I realized Jake was having a problem reliving the moment, so I gave him a minute to compose himself. He sipped his cup of coffee, and the nervousness I’d seen earlier had been replaced by introspection. When he spoke again, his voice was cautious, the words careful.
JAKE: It was a few years back, close to 1:00 in the morning. I’d just finished writing an article for stormchasers.com, and I was ready to crash. Then the air changed, like all of a sudden. I could feel it, like someone had flipped the dimmer switch on everything. Then he was standing in the room… Bangarang.
HERO BEAT: You were face-to-face with Bangarang?
JAKE: Yeah, and I swear… never again. The way he looked at me like, I don’t know, a bird checking out a worm, it freaked me out. It was like he wasn’t even human. And then he chirped or something, poked me with his staff, and my apartment disappeared. It’s suddenly daylight, and I’m out by the side of the road. At a bus stop. It’s warmer, but not by much, and there’s no snow. I’m dressed in slacks and a white shirt, and I’m not myself. I know that. I can think clearly and all that, but I’m not me. I am, but I’m in someone else’s skin. There’s all these other people standing around, some looking confused. About maybe a dozen, and they’re all Japanese and we’re all staring at each other.
HERO BEAT: When was this?
JAKE: March 11th.
HERO BEAT: March 11th?
JAKE: 2011. The Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami.
He leaves that hanging in the air a moment, and I don’t know what to say, what to ask. The journalist side of me wants to doubt what he’s saying, but I can’t. After a moment, he continues, calmly.
JAKE: So, I say “what’s going on?” in English, but it comes out kinda garbled, like I haven’t spoken English for years. And this old woman answers in English but with this French accent. Other people start talking, and we realize it’s happening to all of us, different people in someone else’s body, and we’re all hyped on adrenaline and some of us looked scrapped up. Like we’d gotten into a fight or something. I can remember mandarins lying in the road, and a grocery bag on the ground. Some cars are parked, the drivers looking dazed and walking over to us. It was surreal. Then we hear the chirp again. Bangarang is there. And he’s looking past us, over our shoulders. We look and I saw it, the way the horizon seemed to be moving, shifting. And there’s this thunder, and the ground’s trembling.
HERO BEAT: How come nobody heard any of this?
JAKE: We kept our mouths shut, are you kidding? We didn’t want him coming back. He knew where we lived and he plucked us from our lives like it was nothing.
HERO BEAT: So… what happened?
JAKE: I was expecting him—Bangarang—to be laughing or something, you know, but by the time we look back, he’s just gone and this thing is growing larger. Panic and adrenaline kick in, but it’s weird. It’s someone else’s panic and adrenaline, and it feels like I just put on someone else’s sweaty socks. But we started running across this open field to these buildings we see in the distance, but man, every time I look back, and I looked back a lot, that line of black water seems miles closer. It was this black smudge, and everything it touches just vanishes, like it never mattered enough to leave an echo or shadow. I saw the fires burning on top of this layer of white. My brain couldn’t process it. I thought it was an oil spill, I thought it was the ocean on fire.
He’s quiet a moment and looks to the side, unwilling to make eye contact with me, like something inside him is ready to break if he looks my way. He shakes his head and finds the strength to continue, but I notice he can’t maintain eye contact for the rest of his experience.
JAKE: This thing’s bearing down on us. And every time I look back, we’ve lost someone. They’ve fallen, or they can’t run, or they’ve split off for some patch of higher ground that’s not high at all. I know there’s nothing high enough for miles… nothing I can see. The buildings in the distance aren’t any closer, and it’s all just, fucking flat terrain. That’s when I spot them… specks in the sky, darting around and swooping down to save people.
HERO BEAT: Metas?
JAKE: Yeah. I screamed at them, begging them to save us. I remember being so fucking angry that they weren’t coming down for us, but there’s no way they could see us. After, I saw the footage. I saw what they were looking at from that high up. I can’t imagine how helpless they felt, watching this thing just crush a countryside. All they could do was pull people from out of its way, knowing that every life they got to higher ground, a hundred more had to die. How do you live with that?
HERO BEAT: But some managed to save more, right?
JAKE: Definitely. Gentle Mountain diverted the tsunami around a couple of villages and Hero Fleet mobilized over a hundred of his drones to save people from drowning. But that was a drop in the bucket, and Japan’s metas suffered from some heavy PTSD after the tsunami.
HERO BEAT: What about you? How did you survive?
JAKE: Survive… that’s, uhm, that’s not what I’d call it. I fell and watched other people run past me, but it was too late for all of us. There was nowhere to go, and I just, kinda gave up. This thing, this surge of black water and debris, and fire and black smoke and thunder… it was like hell had come for me. Then just like that, there he was again, Bangarang. Standing near me, staring up at it. No fear. Just curiosity. And I swear, just as the first surge of water was about to barrel into me, I was home again.
HERO BEAT: Just like that?
JAKE: Just like that, like it never happened. Only it did, and there I was in my kitchen, alone, sweating through my t-shirt, my heart hammering like I’d run a marathon and lost. After, I tried to convince myself it was a bad dream, until I started seeing the news wires pick this thing up.
HERO BEAT: What happened after that?
JAKE: I couldn’t sleep for days. I was terrified and sleeping pills couldn’t even put a dent in me. I even checked myself into a hotel, I couldn’t go back home. I couldn’t stop watching the news. And then I start hearing chatter on some of hardcore storm chaser sites, people I knew and respected, asking if “anything strange” happened to anyone else during the tsunami or if anyone knew if Bangarang could transplant your thoughts into other people’s bodies. Slowly, we reached out and connected with each other. It was such a relief, knowing you weren’t alone, weren’t crazy. There were about two dozen of us… I wasn’t the only one, and I heard a couple of storm chasers even died… strokes during the event.
HERO BEAT: And none of you approached the police?
JAKE: And say what? Some of us tried, and we were laughed out of the stations. Others were scared shitless that Bangarang would come for us, but we couldn’t figure out why he’d done it. Was it a game? Was he making a point?
HERO BEAT: Not that I’m not grateful for the story, but why talk about it now? And why to me? Isn’t this the kind of thing you’d want to cover in your own blog?
JAKE: My editor doesn’t believe me and she’s worried about offending the Japanese people. She’s afraid we’ll look insensitive or callous. We’ve fought about putting this thing out there. I’ve been through enough therapy that I’m tired of being afraid of talking about it. I’m tired of keeping it in. I’m hoping you can reach more people through Hero Beat, and maybe someone can give us answers.
HERO BEAT: So what would you like to ask my readers?
JAKE: Please, I just want answers. I’ve been doing Google searches, trying to figure out where we were. Who we were in. But, I’ve got nothing. I can provide more details about what I saw, so if anyone out there knows anything, please, contact me. But I guess, the thing I’m really hoping to know is… why? That’s the part I really want to know. Why?