Strange Weather by Joe Hill
“One minute!” Axe yelled.
“It’s all right, Aubrey,” Harriet said, smiling impishly. “Hey, I better get myself ready, right?”
“Right,” he agreed, nodding feverishly.
“I’m set to go!” Ronnie Morris shouted. “I could use the fresh air.”
Brad Morris laughed, and they slapped each other five. It stung Aubrey that they could make a joke out of the cowardly farts stinking up the compartment. Bad enough that he was pitifully scared, but even worse to be betrayed by his body and then ridiculed for it.
Aubrey looked at Harriet, but her gaze was intent on the clear plastic door now. He had been dismissed from her thoughts. That felt worse than he had imagined it would. He had expected her to be disappointed in him, but she wasn’t disappointed, just indifferent. He’d made himself believe he had to do this, had to be here for June, for Harriet, but in fact his presence one way or another was of no matter.
And now that he was sure he wasn’t going, he felt listless and deflated. Harriet was holding up the Junicorn and whispering to it, pointing it out at the vast UFO-shaped cloud, just as the Cessna banked toward it.
Axe fiddled with the camera on his own helmet. “Hey, listen. Audrey, man.” It was a small, bitter pleasure that the jumpmaster didn’t know his name either. “If you’ve made up your mind, it’s your right to back out. But you should know it costs the same whether you go or not. I can’t even refund you the cost of your DVD.”
“I’m sorry I ruined everyone’s good time,” Aubrey announced, but the really miserable thing was that he hadn’t ruined anything for any of them. No one was even listening.
The plane tilted ever more steeply into its turn.
“We’re going to circle back over the landing strip—” Axe began, which was when everything shut off.
The propeller on the nose of the little Cessna whined and clattered and stopped turning very abruptly. Wind whooshed under the wings, the soft bellow filling the sudden silence. The running lights inside the jump compartment blinked out.
The vast, whistling silence amazed Aubrey more than it frightened him.
“What happened?” Harriet asked.
“Lenny!” Axe shouted toward the front of the plane. “What the hell, man? We just stall out?”
The pilot, a curly-haired guy in a puffy headset, flipped a toggle switch, pulled a long steel stick out of the dash, and poked a button.
The Cessna floated, a sheet of newspaper hovering above a subway grate.
Lenny the pilot looked over his shoulder at them and shrugged. He wore a white T-shirt with the Kool-Aid mascot on it, that inanely smiling pitcher of red juice. He yanked his headset down around his neck.
“I don’t know!” Lenny yelled. He didn’t sound worried—more annoyed. “Maybe! But I also got no electric! Everything just died. S’like a connection is loose in the battery.”
The Cessna quivered, wings tilting minutely, this way and that.
“No big deal to me,” Brad said. “I was going to step out right around here anyway.”
“Yeah,” Ronnie said. “I was thinking I’d like to stretch my legs.”
“Go on!” Lenny called. “Jump! After everyone is out, I’ll dive and pop it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to glide her in. Hope I hit the runway. Gonna be bumpy if I don’t.”
“Oh, come on!” Aubrey shouted. “Come on, this is bullshit! I don’t believe a word.”
Brad scooted to the door and rotated the stainless-steel latches that held it shut, one after the other. He pushed it up and out of the way. The opening was roughly as wide as a soccer net. He put a foot onto the piping that ran under the door.
“Audrey, my friend,” Axe said gently.
“No!” Aubrey shouted. “This isn’t funny! Make him start the plane! You can’t coerce someone to jump this way!”
“See you on the dirt,” Brad said. He clung to the side of the plane, facing in toward them, one hand holding the rail above. With his free hand, he snapped off a jaunty salute—asshole—stepped from the plane, and was snatched away by the sky.
“Audrey! Audrey, breathe!” Axe said. “No one is running a game on you. There is a problem with the aircraft.” He spoke very slowly and enunciated each word with care. “We would never shut a plane off to scare you into jumping. Honestly. A lot of people back out last minute. I don’t care. I get paid the same either way.”
“Why would the plane just stop working?”
“I don’t know. But believe me, we don’t want to be in it when he tries to pop the engine.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s going to point it at the ground.”
Ron Morris scooted to the edge of the open door, preparing to follow his brother. He sat for a moment, feet on the bar that ran along the outside of the plane, elbows resting on his knees, enjoying the view. The blast of the wind made his skin ripple, distorted the loose flesh of his chubby face. Gradually, almost like a man nodding off, he tipped forward, then dropped headfirst and was gone.
“Hurry up back there!” shouted Lenny from the single seat at the controls.
Harriet had been sitting between her jumpmaster’s legs, looking from Aubrey to Axe to the pilot with a fearful fascination. She squeezed the Junicorn to her chest, as if worried someone might be about to try to snatch it away from her. The Junicorn was a stand-in for June herself, and Harriet was under orders to look after it and take it with her while she did all the things June was never going to get to do: see pyramids, surf in Africa, skydive. Aubrey had the ridiculous sense of being stared at by girl and stuffed animal alike.
“Aubrey,” Harriet said, “I think we ought to go. Right now. Both of us.” She looked past Aubrey to Axe. “Can we go together? Like, hold hands?”
Axe shook his head. “We’ll be three seconds behind you.”
“Please, if we could just hold hands. My friend is scared, but I know he can do this if we go together,” she said, and Aubrey loved her so much he felt like crying. He wanted to tell her right now that he loved her, but that was even more beyond him than stepping out over a twelve-thousand-foot drop.
“It’s not a good idea on a first jump. Our drogue chutes could tangle. Harriet, please go. We’ll follow.”
The chubby jumpmaster began to scoot across the steel floor on his butt, shifting Harriet away and closer to the door.
“Audrey?” Axe said. His voice was soothing and calm and reasonable. “If we do not go, you are risking my life as well as your own. I want to jump while we can. I’d prefer your consent.”
“Oh, God.”
“Close your eyes!”
“Oh, God. Oh, my God. This is fucked.”
Harriet and her jumpmaster had shifted all the way over to the open hatch. Harriet’s legs were hanging out. She cast a final pleading look at Aubrey over her shoulder. Then she grasped her jumpmaster’s hand and they were gone.
“You’ll have solid ground under your feet before you know it,” Axe said.
Aubrey shut his eyes. He nodded okay.
“I’m sorry I’m so chickenshit,” Aubrey said.
Axe humped them across the bare steel, sliding them toward the opening in modest increments. Aubrey thought, randomly, that he was glad Harriet wasn’t sitting in Axe’s lap, feeling him pump his hips against her ass this way.
“Have you ever jumped with anyone worse than me?” Aubrey asked.
“Not really,” Axe said, and pushed them out the side of the plane.
It was more than ten thousand feet to the ground, one minute of free fall and perhaps four minutes of slow, gliding hang time in the parachute. But Aubrey Griffin and his jumpmaster dropped just under four stories before they struck the edge of the UFO-shaped cloud that wasn’t really a cloud at all and stopped falling.
3
FEAR THICKENS TIME, TURNS IT slow and viscous. One second of deeply felt terror lasts longer than ten regular seconds. Aubrey fell for only a moment, but it was an instant that lasted longer than the wh
As they went through the door, Aubrey tried to turn, to stay in the plane, just as Axe was pulling them out. He plunged backward, looking up at the aircraft, with the jumpmaster beneath him. Aubrey dropped with a great tingling thrill of emotion that ran from balls to throat, a single thought beating in his mind as he fell:
STILL ALIVE STILL ALIVE STILL ALIVE STILL—
—and then they hit.
What they struck didn’t feel at all like earth but much closer to raw bread dough. It was thick and rubbery and cold, and if they had dropped only ten or even fifteen feet into it, it might’ve been a soft, springy landing. In fact, though, they had fallen thirty-nine feet, and Axe absorbed the full brunt of the impact. The fragile hoops of his pelvis snapped in three places. The upper part of his right femur broke with a pop. Aubrey’s helmet snapped back into Axe’s face and smashed his nose, which shattered with a glassy crack.
Aubrey himself was not entirely unhurt. Axe kneed him in the hip hard enough to make a gruesome bruise. He also banged his funny bone so sharply he lost all the sensation in his right hand.
Dry, cold smoke erupted around them in a great puff. It had a sharp odor, like pencil shavings, like the wheels of a train, like lightning.
“Hey,” Aubrey said, in a thin, shaking voice. “Hey, what happened?”
“Aaa!” Axe cried. “Aaa!”
“Are you all right?”
“Aaaa! Oh, Jesus. Oh, cocksucker.”
All that high, singing emotion had been slammed out of Aubrey on impact. All the thought had been slammed out of him, too. He waved his arms and legs in the helpless, struggling motion of a beetle turned over on its back. He stared up into the clear blue. He could still see the plane, the size of a toy, above them but tilting away to the east. It was funny how far away it was already.
Axe sobbed.
The sound was so unexpected, so dreadful, it shocked Aubrey out of his stunned, blank, amazed state. He made a fist with his right hand, trying to work the feeling back into it.
“Can you unbuckle me?” he asked.
“I don’t know!” Axe said. “Oh, man. I think I’m really fucked up.”
“What did we hit?” Aubrey asked. It looked like a cloud, which didn’t make any sense. “What are we on?”
Axe panted in a horrible, frantic sort of way. Aubrey thought he was working up to another sob.
“You have to unclip me,” Aubrey said.
Axe groped up and down Aubrey’s sides. One carabiner snapped loose, then another, then a third, and finally the fourth, and Aubrey rolled off him, wrestled his way up into a sitting position, and looked around.
He sat on the cloud, an island of churned white cream, adrift in a vastness of serene blue. They were at one tip of a mass almost a mile long, with a great central bulge in the shape of a dome. It reminded Aubrey of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
A sense of nausea tickled the inside of his throat. His head swam.
He pressed his tingling right hand into the cloud. At first he was pushing his palm down into cool, drifting vapor. But as he sank his weight into it, the fog stiffened into a solid, with the consistency of cream cheese or maybe mashed potatoes or, really, Play-Doh. When Aubrey lifted his hand, the cloud melted back into mist.
“Fuck,” he said. For the moment it was the most sophisticated response he could manage.
“Oh, dude. Oh, God. Something is really broken inside me.”
Aubrey turned a stunned stare upon the other man, who was writhing and twisting weakly in the unsettled smoke. His heels kicked at the mist, drawing furrows in that weird, semi-solid cream. Axe’s sporty goggles—the lenses were the coppery red of a Cape Cod sunset—were smashed. He probably couldn’t see, was feeling around blindly with one hand. The GoPro camera mounted on his helmet gazed blankly and stupidly at Aubrey.
“Did I pull the chute?” Axe asked. “I musta, huh, if we’re on the ground. What happened? Did I bang my head on the side of the door going out the plane?” His voice was strained and feeble with pain. He didn’t know where they were. He didn’t understand what had happened to them.
Aubrey didn’t understand what had happened either. It was hard to think. Too much had occurred too quickly, and none of it made sense or seemed real.
Axe had not opened their chute—although the drogue chute had deployed automatically. This was a very small secondary chute, a little bucket of red-and-yellow silk, just big enough to wrap a Thanksgiving turkey. The wind pulled it out and straight back, and now it fluttered kitelike over the edge of the cloud, swerving this way and that. Aubrey wasn’t sure what a drogue chute did. Axe had tried to explain, but at the time Aubrey had been too nervous to retain any information.
It came to Aubrey that Axe wasn’t writhing and twisting after all. He wasn’t kicking his feet either. He was lying perfectly still, one arm curled over his torso, the other hand clapped to his hip. His heels were making shallow indentations in the milky paste of the cloud because the drogue chute was slowly but steadily hauling him away.
“Hey,” Aubrey said. “Hey, man, watch out.”
He grabbed the harness around Axe’s chest and tugged, and Axe shrieked in pain, a sound so piercing that Aubrey immediately recoiled and let go.
“My chest!” Axe screamed. “My fucking chest! What are you doing?”
“I just want to pull you back from the edge,” Aubrey said. He reached for the harness again, and Axe elbowed his hand aside.
“You don’t move someone who’s been in an accident, you neurotic asshole!” Axe cried. “Don’t you know anything?”
“I’m sorry.”
Axe panted for breath. His cheeks were smeared with tears.
“Edge of what?” Axe asked at last, in a miserable, almost childish voice.
At that moment the breeze rose, churning the cloud milk around them. The drogue chute swelled, lifted, and suddenly snapped straight back, jerking upward into the bright blue sky. The wind yanked all the parachute cords taut and half lifted Axe into a sitting position. The jumpmaster screamed again. His boots dragged through the rubbery, puffy cloud stuff, making trenches six inches deep. Aubrey thought again of uncooked bread, of someone sinking fingers into raw, elastic dough.
Aubrey grabbed for one of those trailing boots, caught it with his still-numb right hand. But there was no feeling in his fingers, and he held it for only a moment before it was yanked right out of his grasp.
“Edge of what?” Axe screamed as he was carried away.
The wind sucked the drogue chute up and back and took him off the edge of the cloud with a sudden whisking motion, like a maid yanking a sheet off a hotel-room bed. Axe yelped, grabbed the parachute cords rising around him. He was pulled up into the sky, about six or seven feet. Then the wind flagged, and he promptly dropped, past the cloud and out of sight.
4
THE WIND SANG, A SHRILL jeering tone, barely audible.
Aubrey stared at the place where Axe had been, as if he might reappear.
After a time he discovered he was trembling helplessly, although he had left his panic behind, on the airplane. What he felt now was bigger than fight or flight. It was shock, perhaps.
Or maybe it was just the cold. In the world below, it was the third day of August, an afternoon of dry, wilting heat. Pollen coated cars in a layer of mustard-colored grime. Bumblebees droned their sleepy trancesong in the dry, baked grass. Up here, though, it was a cool morning in early October, as crisp and chilly and sweet as a bite of a ripe apple.
He thought, This isn’t happening.
He thought, I was so scared something snapped in my mind.
He thought, I struck my head on the side of the plane, and this is my last giddy fantasy as I die of a skull fracture.
Aubrey riffled through these possibilities like a man dealing cards, but only in a remote, half-aware sort of way, barely registering them.
There was no arguing with the brisk chill in the air or
For a long time, he remained on all fours, peering off the trailing edge of the cloud, wondering if he could move. He was not sure he dared. He felt that if he moved, gravity would notice him and drop him through the cloud.
He patted the mist ahead of him, stroked it like a cat. It firmed up into a lumpy, pliant mass at the first touch.
Aubrey crawled, his thighs quaking. It was very like moving across a surface of soft clay. When he’d gone a yard or so, he looked back. The path he was making across the cloud melted after he’d started on his way, turning back to slow, curdling fog.
When he was five feet from the ragged, trailing southern edge of the cloud, he sank to his belly and lay flat. He squirmed a bit farther on his stomach, his pulse whamming so hard that the day brightened and darkened with each beat of his heart. Aubrey had always been scared of heights. It was a good question, why a man with a dread of heights, a man who avoided flying whenever he could, would agree to jump from an airplane. The answer, of course, was maddeningly simple: Harriet.
The cloud tapered off at the edge . . . tapered off but did not give way. The very end of the cloud was only an inch thick but the firmest, hardest stuff yet, as hard as concrete, with no sense of give at all.
Aubrey peeked over the edge.
Ohio lay beneath him, an almost perfectly flat expanse of variegated squares in shades of emerald, wheat, richest brown, palest amber. Those would be the famous waves of grain mentioned with such admiration in “America the Beautiful.” Ruler-straight ribbons of blacktop bisected the fields below. A red pickup slid along one of those black threads like a bright steel bead on an abacus.
He saw, to the south and west, the runway of baked red dirt, behind the hangar that housed Cloud 9 Skydiving Adventures. And there was the Cessna, just touching down. Either Lenny had gotten the plane going again or he’d done a fine job of gliding it in.
A moment later Aubrey saw a parachute, a vast, straining tent of gleaming white silk. He watched it sink to the ground and settle in a field that had been planted with something: green rows separated by lines of dark earth. The chute crumpled in on itself. Axe was on the ground then. He was on the ground, and he had been aware enough to pull the rip cord. Axe was down, and soon help would reach him, and he would tell them—