Strange Weather by Joe Hill
He flinched. Pat shrieked, “Gross!”
Sean wiped his eye and glared at me. “If I were you, I’d save my spit. Elder Bent takes the view that physical suffering prepares your spiritual energies to leave the body behind. You aren’t likely to get much to drink in the next couple months.”
“If physical suffering is good for building up spiritual energy,” called someone from up in the road, “I am about to fully recharge your batteries. Get ready for a high-voltage ass-kicking, you sonsa bitches.”
We all looked around, and there was Marc DeSpot, who I thought I’d ditched back at Starbucks. His stony visage stared out beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. His shirt flapped open to show the magnificent black X inked across his reddish-bronze chest. His right hand was clenched in a fist. Nails stuck out between his fingers.
The Three Stooges gathered around me had one moment to gawp before he fell upon them, dropping down the side of the embankment so fast his hat flapped off. Randy was the only one of them who still had an astrolabe to fight with. He was pulling it from around his neck when DeSpot got to him, throwing all his weight behind his right fist. He hit Randy so hard they both fell over. The side of Randy’s face was raked off like he’d been struck with a gardening fork. DeSpot’s nail-studded fist clawed deep red furrows in his cheek, puncturing straight through into his mouth.
The one named Pat screamed, then turned and ran. He tripped over me with both feet and hit the dirt. Well, that was his one and only chance to get away. By then Marc DeSpot was back up, growling like a dog sick from the heat. He caught up to Pat and kicked him in the ass and drove him back down onto his stomach. Pat flattened with a cough. Marc kept going, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked his head back. He grabbed Pat’s nose and gave it a horrible twist. It made a sharp, brittle crack, a sound like someone stepping on a china plate. To this day I have never heard another sound so horrible. He dropped Pat, and the chubby boy went down squirming in a kind of palsy.
In all this time, Sean, the team’s Christ look-alike, hadn’t moved. He stood frozen, his eyes wide, his face rigid. When he heard Pat’s nose crack, though, it broke his paralysis, and he turned to run. I guess it doesn’t hurt your quantum energy none to be a lickspittle coward who leaves your buddies in the dirt.
DeSpot caught up to him in three lunging steps, snatched him by the back of the tinfoil gown, and yanked him right off his feet. As Sean fell backward, DeSpot snapped up his right knee and clubbed him in the base of the skull. If that was how he fought in the ring, I never wanted to meet any of the men who’d beaten him.
Sean stared up at him, his eyes rolling like those of a panicked horse. Marc was about to stomp on his face when I hollered, “Wait!”
Marc glanced at me with an irritable frown, like he thought I was going soft and womanly on him. I rocked to the left, then to the right, and finally I was able to roll across the slope until I thumped up alongside Sean.
We were stretched out side by side, me in my shroud of silver wrap, him in the weeds with Marc’s boot resting on his chest.
I stared up into DeSpot’s face and said, “They were following me?”
He peered down at me, his brow furrowed. “All morning long. I was sitting there with Roswell when I saw them the first time. Following you from two blocks back. Didn’t look right, so I figured I’d trail along and see what they wanted with you. Thought it was the least I could do. When I had a minute to collect myself, I kinda got to feeling like I owed you.”
We latched gazes, but only for a moment; he blushed and looked away.
I twisted my head to stare into Sean’s dazed, frightened face. “Why the hell would you and your empty-headed pals follow me five miles just to bushwhack me, three against one? What’d I ever do to you besides make fun of the way you dress and the way you talk and all your stupid crackpot ideas?”
His voice, when he spoke, was rusty and thin. “You were going to tell! You were walking to Denver to meet with the FBI and tell them what we’ve been up to! You were going to tell them that Elder Bent, of all men, knew the rains would fall! He knew! He was foretold!”
“What do you mean, he was foretold?”
“He knew what was coming. He knew the hour and the day, when the ignorant would be cut down, leaving behind only the prepared. Only us!”
I considered that for a moment, then said, “And what gave Elder Bent the idea I was going to the FBI? Did he get that information from one of his contacts in the seventh dimension?”
Sean bit down on his lower lip as if he felt he had already said too much. Marc DeSpot put his weight on his left foot, pressing down against Sean’s chest, and the air exploded out of the kid.
“The Russian!” he cried. “He left a message! It said you knew what we had been up to and if we didn’t stop you, Elder Bent would be hauled away by the FBI! Because of what he knew about the rains!”
“Andropov left you a message?”
Sean let out a little laughing gasp. “Yeah.” And in an atrocious Russian accent, he said, “‘You must stop Miss ’Onysuck! Girl is going to talk to FBI.’ I don’t think he wants the law digging around the neighborhood any more than we do!”
“Who talked to him?” I asked. “Who took his message? Did he say anything else?” But it turned out we were all done talking.
This whole time the one named Randy had been surreptitiously crawling away through the high grass. When he reached the edge of the road, he got up and hotfooted it. DeSpot saw him making his break and snatched up one of the big astrolabes that had brought me down. He didn’t bother with the gold chain but threw it like a Frisbee, and it hit the back of Randy’s head with the kind of gong that would’ve been quite amusing in a slapstick cartoon. Randy collapsed.
While this was happening, Sean scrambled to his knees. A blade flashed in one hand. I recognized it right off—it was my own knife, part of the little multitool I had stuck in my backpack. Before he could poke it into Marc’s kidneys, I twisted and threw my legs and swept his feet out from beneath him. Sean toppled backward down the embankment. His head struck the shallow, concrete-lined ditch at the bottom with a sickening crunch.
I shouted for Marc to have a look and make sure I hadn’t just murdered him. Marc knelt beside him at the base of the slope, took his pulse, and looked into his eyes. He glanced up at me with a sorry, disappointed look on his battered face.
“Bad luck,” he said. “I think he’s fine. Just out cold.”
He came back to me at a rangy lope and bent and started ripping tape free.
“You almost lost me back at Starbucks,” he said.
“I didn’t nearly lose them, I guess. I feel like a fool for not realizing they were after me. Dressed like they are, they should’ve stood out like flashing lights.”
“It’s easier for three people to tail a person than one. Besides”—he held up a set of connected brass cylinders—“they could stay farther back and still follow you. Your boyfriend down there had a telescope.”
By then he was pulling that silver shroud free. It looked like tinfoil, but it was as resilient as canvas. It flashed the sun into my eyes, and in that instant it struck me that maybe I’d come close to spotting them after all. I remembered sometimes noticing a sparkle and glint at the very periphery of my vision and wondering if I was getting faint. That had been them, hanging back, hiding in doorways, shadowing me from a distance.
Marc was looking glum and avoiding my gaze, folding and unfolding that big sheet of silver packing material. I thought I knew what was troubling him.
“You can stop worrying about what you said to me when you were so upset,” I told him. “We’re even now. More than even. I’m awfully sorry about what I had to do to Roswell.”
He nodded. “Yeah, well.”
“What’s your real name? Marc DeSpot is the kind of joke that would amuse a five-year-old.”
He glared, then said, “DeSoto. No money in a name like that.” He looked around him at the comet clowns. “Did you understa
I sat up and stretched. Some of what Sean had babbled was the usual cosmic rubbish spouted by all of Elder Bent’s people. But I thought there’d been fragments of something that mattered mixed in with all Sean’s space-cadet nonsense. I needed time to try to untangle it in my head, see if I could make some sense of it.
When I didn’t reply, Marc murmured, a little uneasily, “He said this Elder Bent . . . knew what was going to happen. That they were all preparing for it. You think there’s any chance . . . ?” His voice trailed off.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t answer. Instead I said, “Some nasty old biddy gave me up to these white slavers here just to get my iPhone Plus. She walked off without a look back.”
“The one with the shopping cart? I saw her.” He picked his hat out of the dirt and set it on his head.
“I guess losing my phone isn’t the worst thing. I could be on my way to a dank basement cell in a house full of end-of-the-world cultists, forced to do who knows what to satisfy their demented wishes.” I had an urge to get up and walk around, kicking all of the comet kids in their heads. But it was hot and I had a long road still ahead of me. “Can you think of any way we can keep them from getting up and coming after me again? Or of going after you?”
He opened Sean’s telescope and peered down the turnpike. “Those are convicts working on the highway, sweeping up nails under the eye of the state police. Why don’t you wander down there and tell ’em you’ve got three more that belong in leg irons? I’ll tape them up in their shiny dresses, the way they taped you up, so they don’t wander off.”
He offered me a hand, and I took it. He pulled me to my feet. We stood together in a tired, comradely silence for a moment. He squinted at the blue sky.
“You think these boys are right? You think these are the end times? I had an aunt who said it was a matter of fact that this was the last human century. That anyone who understood the book of Revelation could see a judgment was coming.”
“I hate the idea these blockheads could be right about anything,” I said. “Tell you what, though. If the apocalypse holds off another couple of days, why don’t you stop by the white house on Jackdaw Street, with the staircase on the outside of the building? Or look for me across the street at the little butter-colored ranch, where my friend Ursula lives with her son. We can have a couple beers and try to brainstorm a better fighting name for you than Marc DeSpot.”
He grinned, flapped his blue denim shirt open. “Too late. Once you got a big X on your chest, who else could you be?”
“The X-Terminator?”
“I thought about X-Rated, but a lot of kids come to the fights. You don’t want to give their parents the wrong idea.”
“Thanks for rescuing me, friend,” I said. “Try to stay out of the rain.”
“You, too,” he said to me.
He squeezed my hand then, turned, and descended the hill to Sean. I hung out long enough to watch as he began to wrestle with Sean’s gown, tucking his arms inside it, wrapping it tight around him. I didn’t think I’d ever see Marc DeSpot again and wished there were more to say, but it seemed like we’d already said everything that mattered. Some people you can never thank enough, so you might as well quit after saying it once, because too much gratitude will just make them embarrassed.
I turned on my heel, crystal pins grinding under my boots, and went on into the noonday light. Behind me I heard the first loud ripping sound as Marc DeSpot tore off a strip of tape.
IT WAS A HOT, DUSTY half an hour walking up the turnpike to the chain gang. As I approached, a state trooper who’d been leaning against the hood of an abandoned red Audi stood up, and stared at me through a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
Strung out behind him there were maybe thirty convicts wearing orange jumpsuits that said SUPERMAX on the back. Most of the prisoners had push brooms and were sweeping the nails from the road. Maybe six others were working in teams of two to wrestle corpses out of cars and fling them onto a flatbed trailer, latched to a monstrous John Deere tractor down in the grass. The tractor had heavy chains on the tires, but I’m not sure it needed them. The tires themselves were as big as doors, so thick and massive that I doubt the sharpest of those crystal darts could’ve pierced them.
Another couple of staties were starting the cars that could be started and driving them to the center island between the east- and westbound lanes. They had cleared the turnpike all the way to Denver, the road open and empty and quiet. The skyscrapers of the city soared pale blue and distant below us.
“S’your business?” asked the cop who’d been sitting against the Audi. He adjusted the elephant rifle propped against his shoulder.
A lot of the convicts had paused to look up from their sweeping. They’d been at it all morning and smelled that way. It was a ripe man stink, mingled with the corrupted-meat smell of blood baking into the upholstery of all those ditched cars. A hundred thousand flies had been born overnight. The air seemed to vibrate from the beehive hum of them.
“There’s three boys back that way you might want to talk to. They bushwhacked me as I was headed down from Boulder to Denver and tried to abduct me for their end-of-the-world cult. They would’ve got me, too, if I wasn’t rescued by a Good Samaritan who beat the pants off them. He left them taped up in the silver gowns they were wearing. Also, there was a woman with a shopping cart who agreed to turn a blind eye to my kidnapping in trade for my iPhone Plus. But you don’t need to bother with her. A cell phone seems a small thing to worry about in the midst of a national crisis.”
“Got blood in your hair,” said the state trooper in the aviator glasses.
“Yessir. One of ’em belted me with a chain.” I didn’t want to say they had attacked me with astronomical instruments, on account of I didn’t feel that would make my story any more credible.
“Lemme see,” he said.
I ducked my head and gestured to where I’d been struck. He pushed a few rough, callused fingers into my hair, then drew his hand back and wiped his red fingertips off on the hip of his uniform.
“This needs stitches.” He had the clipped, disinterested inflections of Yul Brynner, but for all that, he’d inspected my injury with sensitivity and the blood on his hands didn’t bother him. In the West you will find men like that, fellows with gentle hands and hard, flat voices. Horses and dogs are instinctively loyal to such fellows, while yellowbellies and equivocators instinctively fear them. They make mediocre husbands, good officers of the law, and top-notch bank robbers. He half turned and called out, “Dillett! You do a couple stitches for the lady?”
There was a skinny gink in a state-police uniform, a guy who was mostly knees and Adam’s apple, standing in the flatbed behind the tractor, using a pitchfork to move bodies around. He paused and waved his gray felt campaign hat in acknowledgment.
The head guard looked down into my face and said, “You shouldn’t be walking in this road anyway. We’re in a state of emergency. Unless someone is dying, you shouldn’t be in the open.”
“It’s not someone dying. It’s someone dead. My girlfriend and her mother were struck down in the storm, and I set out for Denver to let her father know.”
He looked away from me and shook his head, like his team just gave up a big lead in the late innings. He didn’t express any condolences, but he did say, “And you were going to walk all the way there, from Boulder to Denver? What if it rains again?”
“I’d hide under a car, I guess.”
“It can be hard to tell the difference between decency and stupidity sometimes. I’m not sure which side of the line this one falls on. But I’ll take a couple of my guys up the pike, and if I come across this gang of girlnappers, I’ll radio back. Officer Dillett will haul you down to Denver on his dad’s John Deere. He’s got a full load of dead folks to drag back to town anyway. You’ll have to make a statement to authorities there.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “What are you guys going to do if it rains? What are all
“Take cover and start sweeping again when it’s over. If the roads aren’t clear, what good are they? If a government can’t keep the roads open, what good is a government at all?” He cast an unhappy look at the sky and said, “Wouldn’t that be a sad epitaph for the world? ‘Democracy was canceled on account of rain. The human season will be suspended until further notice.’” If he knew he’d just said some poetry, his sunburned, hard-ass, Yul Brynner face didn’t show it.
“Yes, sir. We’ll hope for sun.”
“And try not to worry about how we’re going to raise crops when the clouds are spilling rocks instead of water.”
“Yes, sir.”
I crunched over the loose gravel of a thousand diamond-bright needles and said hello to Dillett, the skinny gink on the flatbed. He said to climb up on the bumper and he’d have a look at my scalp.
Strange to say, that was the best part of that whole long, menacing nightmare of a weekend. I took a shine to Dillett, who was as gangly and loose-jointed as the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz and just as friendly. He pulled on latex gloves and threaded shut my scalp wound, working so light and careful that I didn’t feel any pain at all and was surprised when he was done. Afterward he asked if I wanted an orange soda and a chicken-salad sandwich. I had them both, sitting on the bumper of the trailer with the daylight shining in my face. The sandwich was on sun-warmed slices of seeded rye, and the soda was in a can sweating drops of ice water, and for a while I felt almost human.
A convict—the sort of fat man who is described as morbidly obese—sat on the trailer with the dead folks. He had his right boot off and the foot mummied up in bandages. I caught his name—Teasdale—but didn’t learn much more about him, not then. We didn’t talk until later.