Strange Weather by Joe Hill
Just as I drained the last fizzy-sweet mouthful of soda, a voice, flat and staticky, burst from the walkie-talkie on Dillett’s hip. It was Yul Brynner.
“Dillett, you there? Over?”
“Copy.”
“I’ve got three males here in shiny silver dresses, claiming they were ambushed by the lady with you and her deranged boyfriend, Mr. X. I’m placing them all under arrest. If we can’t make the kidnapping charge stick, we can still get ’em for crimes against fashion. Pack it up and haul that flatbed down to Denver. I want to remind you to get off at Uptown Avenue and take the cargo to the Ice Centre. If there’s photos of what you’re carrying on CNN tonight, you’ll be lucky to wind up working as a crossing guard. That order is straight from the governor, y’hear, over?”
“Copy that,” Dillett said. I noticed neither of them ever used the word “corpse” on the radio.
Dillett and Teasdale spent a few minutes arranging a crinkly orange tarp over their harvest of the dead and strapping the bodies down with bungee cords. Then all of us climbed up into the cab of Dillett’s John Deere, the corpulent prisoner sitting in the middle. Dillett handcuffed one of Teasdale’s wrists to a steel bar under the dash.
Dillett’s John Deere was the size of a shed on wheels, and when I was up in the cab, I was a full nine feet off the road. This was no little family tractor. When he got it going, the engine roar was so loud I thought it might shake the teeth out of my gums.
“What’d you do?” I asked Teasdale.
“I cut my landlord’s head off with a hacksaw,” he said in a cheery voice. “It was self-defense, but you can’t find a jury anywhere that isn’t biased against people who struggle with their weight.”
“No,” I said. “I meant what happened to your foot?”
“Oh. I stepped on an eight-inch nail. Went right through the sole of my boot into my heel. Blame my extreme size. When there’s been unhappiness in my life, my obesity has usually been the cause.”
“Ouch! Eight inches? Are you messing with me?”
“No,” Dillett answered for him. “I took it out myself. It was about the size of a walrus tooth.”
“I didn’t know the nails could get that big.”
“She ain’t heard about Enid,” Teasdale said.
Dillett looked glum and nodded somberly.
“What about Enid?” I asked. “Enid, Oklahoma?”
Dillett said, “It’s gone. It poured spikes as big as carrots there. Killed people in their houses! Storm only lasted twenty minutes, and they’re saying over half the city’s population was wiped out. The storms are tearing their way east and getting worse as they go. The sparkle dust—the stuff that grows into crystals—is following the westerlies right across the nation.”
“We can’t say we weren’t warned,” Teasdale told us in a contented tone.
“When were we warned it might rain nails?” Dillett asked him. “Was that on the Weather Channel and I missed it?”
“It’s global climate change,” Teasdale said. “They’ve been talking about it for years. Al Gore. Bill Nye. We just didn’t want to listen to them.”
Dillett couldn’t have looked more stunned if Teasdale had opened his mouth and a dove flew out. “Climate change, my ass! This isn’t climate change!”
“Well, I don’t know what else you’d call it. It used to rain water. Now it’s raining blades of silver and gold. That is a change of climate.” Teasdale rubbed a thumb against his chin, then said, “Ghosts is next.”
“You think it’s going to rain ghosts?”
“I think we’ll have ghosts instead of fog. The mist will wear the faces of the departed, all those we had and lost.”
“You better hope for clear weather, then,” Dillett said. “If a fog made out of ghosts rolls in, your landlord might turn up wanting his back rent.”
“I count my blessings to live in a dry mountain climate,” Teasdale told me complacently. “I’ll face whatever blows in on the wind. It may come to blow gales of pure sadness instead of air and leave us all taking shelter from grief. Maybe time itself will begin to crest and drop instead of temperature. We might have the nineteenth century for winter. For all we know, we might’ve already slipped into the future without noticing it.”
Dillett said, “Dream on, Teasdale. There aren’t going to be ghosts, and there aren’t going to be downpours of emotion either. We are dealing with chemical warfare, plain and simple. The Arabs who were behind 9/11 are behind this. Our president knew it was a mistake to ever even let ’em in here, because this is what happens. The NSA only just established that the company that invented hard-rain technology was financed with Arab money. They developed the science of it with American researchers, then brought the technology to their headquarters in old Persia. Congress is working on a declaration of war tonight. They think they unleashed a storm, they don’t know the half of it. The president has already promised to go nuclear. There might be some more strange weather coming after all! I doubt they’ve had much snow in I-ran, so a faceful of atomic fallout should be quite the refreshing experience for them!”
By then we had reached a cloverleaf of on-ramps and off-ramps at the outskirts of Denver. Dillett steered us off the turnpike and onto US-287. Off the thruway things were in bad shape. Cars had been shoved to the sides of the road, but the blacktop was covered in broken glass and shards of crystal. A Tastee-Freez was boiling a greasy cloud of black smoke, but no one was fighting the fire.
We spent another fifteen minutes thundering down to the Ice Centre at the Promenade, a big indoor rink surrounded by a few acres of asphalt. A dozen official-looking black cars were parked in the area around the loading docks, along with several ambulances, a jumble of police cruisers, a pair of big armored prisoner-transport vehicles, and a fleet of hearses. Dillett pulled up to a stainless-steel garage-type door. He turned the tractor and carefully reversed, until the flatbed was right up against the closed roller door.
“You’re sticking the dead here?” I asked, feeling queasy. Years before, when my parents were still together, they’d taken me to see Disney on Ice here.
“It’s one place to keep ’em cold,” Dillett said. He blatted his horn, and someone opened a regular-size door at the top of a loading dock.
It was another state trooper, a freckled redhead who looked like Archie from Riverdale. Dillett rolled down his window and yelled for him to open the garage door to the rink. The kid who looked like Archie shook his head and screamed something about a Zamboni, but it was hard to tell what he was yelling over the thresher roar of the tractor. They hollered back and forth like that, neither of them making any sense to the other, and finally Dillett opened the driver’s-side door and stepped onto the running board.
No sooner had he straightened up than Teasdale stuck out his left foot—his bandaged bad foot!—and kicked Dillett in the ass. Dillett waved his arms and looked foolish for a few seconds before spilling down to the blacktop.
Teasdale pulled the driver’s-side door shut and slid in behind the steering wheel. He put the tractor into gear. His handcuffed right hand couldn’t reach the steering wheel, but it was in the perfect place to handle the stick. The tractor began to rumble across the lot.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.
“I am making a bolt for freedom,” he said. “They won’t never come after me what with all that’s going on, and I have family in Canada.”
“Do you plan to drive there in this John Deere, hauling eighty dead bodies behind you?”
“Well,” he said mildly, “one thing at a time.”
Archie from Riverdale jumped up onto the running board. He had crossed the parking lot at a sprint to catch us before we got on the road. Teasdale opened the driver’s-side door, hard and fast, and clouted him off.
We drove on, picking up speed. We were doing almost thirty when Teasdale swerved into the road, catching a piece of the curb. Bungee cables popped. Bodies sailed off the flatbed and into the air, rolled across t
“Were you going to let me out, or were you planning to take me on your mad dash to the Yukon?”
“You can jump anytime you like, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be convenient to slow down just yet.”
“I’ll wait.”
“I don’t suppose if we passed a hardware store you’d run in and grab me a hacksaw so I can cut myself loose of the cuffs? I’d drive you on to see this fella you’re looking for, even though it’d be going out of my way.”
“Considering what you last used a hacksaw for, you’ll have to find someone else to do your shopping.”
He nodded in an understanding way. “Fair enough. I appreciate I don’t have a great track record with household tools. I forgot to mention that I also took a hammer to my landlord’s wife. I didn’t kill her, though! She’s fine! I understand she recently recovered full use of her legs.”
I didn’t recover full use of my legs for fifteen minutes. He tore along without stopping, taking corners hard, throwing corpses off the trailer at every turn. I didn’t bother to tell him he was leaving a trail any fool could follow. A man who steals a ten-ton John Deere isn’t thinking about being inconspicuous.
Finally we reached an intersection blocked by a jackknifed tractor-trailer, and the only way around was to drive up over the curb and across a small green park in front of a credit union. To navigate this new terrain, it was necessary to slow almost to a crawl. Teasdale shot me a friendly look.
“How’s here?” he asked.
“Better than Canada,” I said, and opened the door. “Well, take care of yourself, and don’t murder anyone else.”
“I’ll try not to,” he said. He peered speculatively into the rearview mirror, at the line of stony peaks behind us. “Keep an eye on the skies. I do believe it’s clouding up.”
He was right. A cold, icy-looking range of clouds stood above the mountains themselves. They weren’t thunderheads but rather a great mass of vapor that promised a long, steady drizzle.
Teasdale chunked the tractor back into gear as soon as I was on the running board. I hopped down and watched him rumble away.
Once he was out of sight, I fumbled for my cell phone to call the police and report on what Teasdale was planning. I had to check the pockets of my jeans twice before I remembered I didn’t have a phone anymore. I didn’t have a clue where I might find the nearest cop, but I did know which way it was to Dr. Rusted’s house, and I set out once more.
As I tramped into downtown, the wind rose behind me, funneled through the deep trenches between high-rises. It smelled like rain.
AS I ENTERED CENTRAL DENVER, I was struck most by the hush. No traffic. No shops open. On Glenarm Place I could hear a woman sobbing from an open third-floor window. The sound carried for blocks. The nails were scattered all over the streets, flashing silver and rose in the late-afternoon light.
The storm had lashed the high, vertical sign in front of the Paramount, so it just read R OU T. The other letters had come loose and dropped in the street.
A girl wandered along wearing a wedding gown that didn’t fit and a homemade tiara fashioned from gold wire and crystal nails. She had on elbow-length silk gloves and carried a heavy-looking burlap sack. Close up it was possible to see that the gown was in tatters, and her cheeks were dribbled with smeared mascara. She walked beside me for a while. She told me she was the Queen of the Apocalypse and said if I’d kiss her and swear my fealty to her, she’d pay me ten thousand dollars. She opened the sack to prove she had the money. It was packed full with bundles of cash.
I told her I had to pass on the kiss—I informed her I was in love and didn’t play around. I said she ought to use some of that money to get off the street and into a hotel room. Rain was going to fall. She said she wasn’t afraid of bad weather. She said she could walk right between the raindrops. I said I couldn’t, and at the next corner we went our separate ways.
The whole town wasn’t a post-Rapture wasteland, and I don’t want to give you the idea it was. The National Guard had cleared East Colfax for most of a mile and installed first-aid stations in storefronts. They had established a thriving HQ and information center at the Fillmore. The marquee promised BOTTLED WATER FIRST AID SHELTER INFORMATION. Generators roared noisily, and several places had lights on. The wrought-iron fence outside was plastered over with photocopies showing people’s faces above their names and the words MISSING SINCE STORM PLEASE CONTACT.
But the soldiers I saw looked flushed and scared, barking at people to find shelter. A Humvee rolled up and down the avenue with PA loudspeakers on top, broadcasting information from the National Weather Service. A woman said an area of depression was building over the Boulder-Denver Metro Region and rain was expected within the hour. She didn’t say what kind of rain and didn’t need to.
I headed north to East Twenty-third Avenue and into City Park, the last stretch of my long hike. It was the quietest place I’d been yet, and the most mournful. I slowed as I neared the zoo.
An eighteen-wheeler had been parked in the road, and there was an adult giraffe spilled across the open flatbed trailer, legs sticking off the side and long neck curled up, so her head touched her breast. A guy in a hard hat motored a little crane over, crystal splinters snapping under its heavy tires. He pulled alongside the eighteen-wheeler. Hydraulics whined, and the crane operator lowered a net with a baby giraffe in it. He placed the calf daintily between its mother’s legs. They were both stained with blood and filth, and the sight of them broke my heart like nothing else I’d seen all day.
The air was rank, and on my left, in a broad green meadow, arranged neatly in pairs, were dead lions and dead walruses and dead gazelles. It was like some horrible parade leading toward a cruel parody of Noah’s ark, a ship for everything that was gone and never coming back, everything that would not be saved. There was a pile of penguins almost ten feet high. They stank like week-old fish.
I plodded the last dreary quarter mile under lowering skies, in a strange, pearly twilight. My sewed-up skull was banging, and the steady throb of it nauseated me. The closer I got to Dr. Rusted’s house, the less I wanted to get there. It was impossible, after all I’d seen, to imagine I would find anything good. It seemed childish to hope for any small mercy now.
Dr. Rusted and his family had lived in a pretty brick Tudor east of the park, a place with tangles of ivy matting the walls between the mullioned windows. It looked like the sort of place where C. S. Lewis might meet J. R. R. Tolkien to share some scotch and discuss their favorite ancient Germanic poems. It even had a modest tower on one end. Yolanda slept in the round room at the top, and whenever I visited, I’d yell up, “Hey, Rapunzel, how they hangin’?”
I slowed as I stepped into the front yard. Leaves shivered in the aspens to either side of the house. I could not say why the dark and the stillness of the place so troubled my mind. Most of the houses on the street were dark and still.
Across the road a small, tidy, compact man was sweeping nails out of his concrete driveway. He quit what he was doing, though, to stare at me. I had seen him around: a fifty-something who sported square-framed glasses, a conservative haircut, and an air of chilly disapproval. He was packed into a shiny, violently green tracksuit that brought to mind radioactivity, the Jolly Green Giant, and Gumby.
I rapped twice on the door and, when there was no reply, turned the latch and stuck my head in.
“Dr. Rusted? What’s up, Doc? It’s me, Honeysuckle Speck!” I was going to call again, and then I saw a shadow I didn’t like, near the bottom of the stairs, and let myself in.
Dr. Rusted was on his face, halfway to the kitchen. He wore a gray vest, a white oxford shirt, and charcoal slacks with a sharp crease in them. Black socks, no shoes. He lay with one cheek against the dark wooden floor. His face looked bare and bewildered without his gold spectacles. His hands were mittened in bandages, and the oxford shirt was torn and spotted with blood, but he hadn’t died from those wounds. It looked as though a headfirs
I had walked a long way to carry a message I hadn’t wanted to deliver, and now it turned out there was no one to receive it. I was tired and headachy and sick at heart. After I came out to my parents, my father wrote me a letter saying he’d rather his daughter was raped to death than be a lesbian. My mother simply refused to acknowledge I was gay and would not look at or talk to any of my girlfriends. When she was in a room with Yolanda, she pretended she couldn’t see her.
But Dr. Rusted always liked to have me around, or if he didn’t, he always made the effort to pretend. We drank beer and watched baseball together. Over dinner we’d rag on the same right-wing politicians, getting each other riled up, competing to see who could insult them the most creatively without actually being obscene, until Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted pleaded with us to talk about anything else. Is it odd to say I liked the way he smelled? It always made me feel cozy and content to catch a whiff of his bay-rum aftershave and the faint odor of the pipe he wasn’t supposed to smoke. He smelled like civilization; like decency.
The phone was dead, no big shock there. I drifted from room to room, wandering the museum of the departed Rusted family. As I roamed, I was seized with the certainty that no one would ever live there again. No one would heave themselves down on that big striped couch to watch the latest UK imports, The Great British Baking Show and Midsomer Murders, the kind of programs Mrs. Rusted had liked best. No one would pick through the cans of tea in the kitchen cupboard, trying to decide between Lady Londonderry and Crème of Earl Grey. I climbed the tower stairs to Yolanda’s room, my throat constricting with grief even before I pushed open the door to look in there for a last time.
Her round room was done in pinks and yellows like a hollowed-out birthday cake. She had left it in her usual state of manic disarray: a heap of unwashed clothes in one corner, a single sneaker in the center of her desk, half the drawers hanging out of her dresser, and a watch with a broken leather strap in the middle of the floor. Her jewelry was scattered across the top of her dresser instead of in the jewelry box, and tights had been hung over the foot of the bed to dry. I picked up a throw and pressed my face to it, inhaling the faint scent of her. When I left the room, I wore the blanket over my shoulders, like a robe. It was August outside, but in Yolanda’s room it felt like late fall.