Strange Weather by Joe Hill
I walked out into the road, sort of sliding my feet along to push needles ahead of me, so I wouldn’t get stabbed by any more of them. Yolanda was at the base of the driveway. I sank to my knees, ignored the stick of pain as my weight settled onto all those slim, glittering nails. Nails. The sky had opened and rained nails. The idea was settling upon me at last.
Yolanda had wrapped her arms over her head to fend off the crystal downpour. It hadn’t mattered. She’d been ripped apart, same as everyone else who hadn’t made it to shelter. Her back bristled with needles, as dense as a porcupine’s coat.
I wanted to hold her, but it wasn’t easy, as now she was a lump of brilliant, glittering spikes. The best I could manage was to put my face close to hers, so we were almost cheek to cheek.
Crouched there with her was like being in a room she had just left. I could smell her sweet fragrance of jojoba and hemp, the products she used in the glossy whips of her dreads; could sense that her light, sunny energy had just passed through, but the girl herself was somewhere else. I took her hand. I didn’t cry, but then I have never been much of a crier. Sometimes I think that part of me is broken.
Slowly, the rest of the world began to fill in around me. The whoop of car alarms. Screams and weeping. Tinkling glass. What had happened to Yolanda had happened from one end of the street to the other. Had happened to all of Boulder.
I found a place on Yolanda I could kiss—there were no quills in her left temple—and put my lips against her skin. Then I left her to check on her mother. Mrs. Rusted was facedown under an avalanche of blue safety glass, stuck through with a hedgehog pelt of shiny nails. Her face was turned to the side, and there were nails in her cheek, a nail through her lower lip. Her eyes were wide and staring, bulging in a grotesque parody of surprise. There were nails in her back, bristling from her hip.
The fob dangled from the ignition, and on impulse I turned the key to switch on the power. The radio sprang to life. A newsman spoke in a fast, breathless voice. He said that Denver was experiencing a freak weather event and that needles were falling from the sky and to stay indoors. He said he didn’t know if it was an industrial accident or some kind of superhail or a volcanic event, but people caught outside were at high risk of death. He said reports were coming in from all over the city of fires and people killed in the street, and then he said, “Elaine, please call my cell and let me know you and the girls are inside and safe,” and he started crying, right on the FM. I listened to him sob for most of a minute and switched the car off again.
I went to the rear of the Prius, opened the hatchback, and dug around until I found a quilt that Yolanda’s grandmother had made for her. I took it back to Yolanda and rolled her into it, needles crunching and gritting underfoot. I meant to carry her up the stairs to my apartment, but no sooner had I finished folding her into her shroud than Ursula Blake appeared at one end of her.
“Let’s take her to my house, dear,” she said. “I’ll help you.”
Her quiet, forceful calm and the almost brisk way she settled into looking after Yolanda and myself brought me as close to tears as I would come that afternoon. My chest tightened with emotion, and for a moment it was hard to breathe.
I nodded, and we lifted her together. Ursula took her head, and I held her feet, and we walked her back to the Blake house, that little butter-colored ranch with its tidy yard. Or it had been tidy. The daylilies and carnations had been torn to rags.
We put Yolanda down in the dim front hall, Templeton watching us from a few paces away. His plastic fangs had come out of his mouth, and he was sucking his thumb, something he probably hadn’t done in years. Ursula disappeared down the hall and returned with another bedspread, and we went back outside to collect Mrs. Rusted.
We put the two of them side by side in the foyer, and Ursula touched my elbow—just lightly—and steered me into the den and sat me on the couch. She went to make tea and left me staring at a television that didn’t work. The power was out all over Boulder. When she came back, she had a mug of Irish Breakfast for me and her laptop, running off the battery. Her modem was down, but she was able to get Internet through her cell signal. She put the computer on the coffee table in front of me. I didn’t move till after dark.
Well, you know what the rest of that day was like, whether you were in Colorado or not. I’m sure you saw all the same stuff on TV as I saw on Ursula’s generic black laptop. Reporters went outside to kick through the needles and record the damage. The storm had cut a four-mile-wide swath down the mountain, through Boulder, and into Denver. There was a skyscraper with every window on its western face smashed in and people staring out from forty stories up. Abandoned cars littered the streets helter-skelter, all of them ready for the junkyard. Shell-shocked Coloradans wandered the lanes, carrying tablecloths and curtains and coats and whatever they could find to cover the corpses on the sidewalks. I remember one reporter yammering into the camera and a dazed man stuck full of pins walked through the shot behind him, carrying a dead Yorkie. It looked like a bloody mop with eyes. This guy’s face was a blood-smeared blank. He had to have over a hundred nails sticking out of him.
The operating theory—lacking any other credible explanation—was terrorism. The president had disappeared to a secure location but had responded with the full force of his Twitter account. He posted: “OUR ENEMIES DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY STARTED! PAYBACK IS A BITCH!!! #Denver #Colorado #America!!” The vice president had promised to pray as hard as he could for the survivors and the dead; he pledged to stay on his knees all day and all night long. It was reassuring to know our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus.
Late in the afternoon, this one reporter found a guy sitting on a curb cross-legged with a square of black velvet spread out in front of him and delicate nails of all colors scattered across it. At first glance he almost looked like one of these dudes you see selling watches on the street. He was studying his collection of pins with a jeweler’s loupe, looking at one, then another. The reporter asked what he was doing, and he told her he was a geologist and he was analyzing the nails. He said he was pretty sure they were a form of fulgurite, and she asked what that was, and he said a kind of crystal. By that evening all the cable channels had experts saying much the same, talking about spectrographic analysis and crystal growth.
Fulgurite had formed in clouds before. It happened whenever volcanoes blew. Lightning would flash-cook flakes of ash into fangs of crystal. But there hadn’t been any eruptions in the Rockies in more than four thousand years, and fulgurite had never formed into such perfect little needles before. The chemists and the geologists couldn’t come up with any natural process that would account for what had happened—which meant it had to be the result of an unnatural process. Someone had figured out how to poison the sky.
So they knew what had hit us but not how it could’ve happened. Wolf Blitzer asked one chemist if it might’ve been an industrial accident, and the guy said sure, but you could see from the nervous-scared look on his face that he had no idea.
Then there were the plane crashes. Two hundred seventy people died in one plane alone, after it passed directly through the cloud. There were roasted bodies buckled into airplane seats bobbing in Barr Lake like corks. The whole tail section sat a few hundred yards away, in the northbound lane of I-76, boiling with black smoke. Aircraft had come down all around Denver, crashes decorating an eighty-mile radius encircling the airport.
At some point I swam up out of my daze—the deep trance cast by scenes from the unfolding catastrophe, the same spell 9/11 cast upon us all—and it came to me that my parents might want to know I was alive. This was followed by another thought: that someone needed to tell Dr. Rusted what had happened to his wife and daughter, and that someone was going to have to be me. It was a Saturday morning, so he hadn’t come to Boulder with them but had remained behind to write the sermon for that evening’s services. It was inexplicable that he hadn’t called me a
I tried my mother first. It didn’t matter we didn’t get on. I don’t care who you are. It’s a human instinct to seek out your mother when you’ve skinned your knees, when your dog has been hit by a car, when the sky opens and rains nails. But I couldn’t get through to her, didn’t get anything but an annoying squawk. Of course it would’ve just been an annoying squawk if she answered, too!
I tried my father, who was in Utah with his third wife, and didn’t get him either—just a long, staticky hiss. I wasn’t surprised the cellular network was overloaded. Everyone was calling someone, and no doubt the relay towers had sustained a lot of damage. It was a surprise, really, that Ursula was able to keep us online.
By the time I tried Dr. Rusted, I wasn’t expecting the call to go through. None of the others had. But after eight seconds of dead air, it began to ring, and then I found myself hoping he wouldn’t answer. I still feel rotten about that. The idea, though, of telling him he’d lost his wife and daughter made my whole body throb with dread.
It rang and rang, and then there was his voice, sweet and happy and kind, saying to leave a message and he would be so glad to ’ear from me. “Hey, Dr. Rusted. You better call me, soon as you can. It’s Honeysuckle. I need to tell you— Just call me.” Because I couldn’t let him find out what had happened from a recording.
I put the phone down on the coffee table and waited for him to call back, but he never did.
We watched streaming video into the late evening, Ursula and I. Sometimes the video fragmented and froze—once for almost twenty minutes—but it always came back. I might’ve watched until the laptop battery died, but then the CNN stream went to video of a school bus turned over on its side, full of six- and seven-year-olds, and that was when Ursula got up and closed her browser, shut her computer down. We had sat together on the couch most of the day, drinking tea and sharing a blanket tossed across our knees.
At some point I took Ursula’s hand without knowing it, and for a while she let me, which couldn’t have been easy for her. Maybe she’d been different before the husband died, but in the time I had known her, she could hardly bear physical contact with anyone except her son. She liked plants better, had a degree in agricultural science, and probably could’ve grown tomatoes on the moon. She wasn’t much for conversation unless you wanted to shoot the shit about the best fertilizers or when to spray your fields, but in her own way she was comforting, even sweet.
She took the blanket that had been across our legs and flapped it over me, as if we had already agreed I was sleeping on her couch that night, and she tucked me in like a seed in a warm, fragrant bed of earth. I had not been tucked in by someone else in years. My father was a no-good drunk who stole the money I made on my paper route and spent it on women of negotiable affections; he was hardly ever home when I went to sleep. My mother was perpetually disgusted with me for dressing like a boy and said if I wanted to be a little man instead of a little girl, I could put myself to bed at night. But Ursula Blake enfolded me in that blanket just as if I were her own child, was so tender I half expected her to kiss me good night, though she didn’t.
She did say, “I am so sorry about Yolanda, Honeysuckle. I know she was dear to you. She was dear to us, too.” That was all. Nothing more. Not that night.
IT WAS GOOD OF HER to offer me the couch, but when she was gone, I took my quilt and carried it out into the foyer. I had myself a little pray, kneeling beside the two dead women bundled there. I don’t mind telling you, I had some pretty warm comments for the Man Upstairs. I said whatever was wrong in the world, there were a lot of good people in it, like Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted, and if He thought slaying them in a hail of nails served some kind of just purpose, I had a revelation or two for Him! I said I was sure the world was full of awful sin, but riddling a pack of little kids headed to summer camp was going to eliminate absolutely none of it. I told Him I was disappointed in His performance over the last twenty-four hours, and if He wanted to make it up to me, He’d better hurry up and get to smiting whoever had set loose the nail-storm on us. I said Dr. Rusted had spent his whole adult life spreading the Good News, telling folks about how to find forgiveness and live the life Christ wanted for them, and the least God could do was let him still be alive and tend to him in his time of mourning. I informed Our Father that I thought He was a damn bad sport for taking away the doctor’s loved ones. That was a fine way to show appreciation for all his service! One good thing about being a butch queer is you already figure you’re going to hell, so there’s no reason not to give God a piece of your mind when you feel like it.
After I was worn out cussing the Lord, my fatigue got the best of me, and I stretched out between Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted. I drew the quilt over me and threw an arm over Yolanda’s waist. It’s funny how tired I was, even though I hadn’t done anything except stare at a computer all day. Grief is hard work. It’ll run you down like you spent the day digging ditches. Or digging graves, I guess.
Anyway, I had a good sleepy talk with Yolanda, curled beside her on the floor. I told her I would owe her the rest of my life for sharing her family with me. I said I was sorry like heck we weren’t going to have more silly times together. I said it always made me feel good to hear her laugh, so loud and free, and I hoped someday I’d learn to laugh that way. Then I shut up and held her as best I could. I couldn’t quite spoon against her—even with her wrapped in a quilt, those hundreds of spines in her back made it impossible to cuddle. But I could drape an arm over her and put my thighs against the backs of her legs, and in that way I fell asleep at last.
Only an hour or two passed before I opened my eyes. Something had changed, but I didn’t know what. I peered blearily around and discovered Templeton standing just above my head, Dracula cape tossed over his shoulders and his thumb in his mouth. He hadn’t been outside in days, and his face was corpse pale in the dark. The lord of the vampires, visiting with his colony of the dead. At first I thought Templeton was what had stirred me, but it was something else, and a moment later he told me what.
“They’re singing,” he said.
“Who?” I asked, but then I shut up and listened, and I heard them myself.
A dozen sweet voices carried in the warm August night, all of them harmonizing to that Phil Collins song “Take Me Home.” They’d been at it for a while. It was the sound of them, not Templeton standing over me, that had brought me awake.
I peeked out the thick square window in the center of the door. It looked like the whole Church of the Seventh Dimensional Christ were out in the night, dressed up in their shiny silver cowls and robes, carrying paper lanterns with candles in them. They had collected their dead, the three women who’d been out making lunch, and rolled them up in shrouds of metallic Bubble Wrap, so the bodies looked like monstrous burritos swaddled in tinfoil. The congregation had assembled in a pair of concentric rings, with the corpses in the center. The inner ring walked clockwise; the other ring marched in the opposite direction. It was almost lovely if you didn’t think about how crazy all of them were.
I picked Templeton up, brought him down the hall to his bedroom, and tucked him back in. His window was open a crack, and the song of the comet cultists came through clear and rich and full. For a pack of deluded and pathetic wastrels, they sure could carry a tune.
I stretched out beside Templeton for a bit to see if I could settle him down. He asked me if I thought Yolanda’s soul had gone up to the clouds. I said it had gone somewhere, because it wasn’t in her body anymore. Templeton said his mother had told him his daddy was in the clouds looking down at him. Templeton said when he turned into a bat, he was always sure to go looking for his father in the sky. I asked him if he went flying often, and he said every night, but he hadn’t spotted his father yet. I kissed his eyebrow on what Yolanda called his shiver spot, and he gratified me with a weak, happy shudder. I said no flying anywhere tonight, time for bed, and he nodded solemnly
I told Templeton no more thinking and got up to shut his window and said good night to him. I could only keep my smile on my face until I got out into the hallway. I stepped around the bodies of my own loved ones and let myself out into the humid, perfumed summer night.
I meant to ask them to save their singing for some hour when people weren’t trying to sleep, but as I approached, I saw something that irritated me even more than their harmonizing. Three hardy young men were at the edge of the lawn with Mr. Waldman, had dragged him across the street. They were busy winding him up in more of that shiny silver quilting. Elder Bent watched from a few paces away. His bald head was tattooed with a map of the solar system in black-light ink. Mercury and Venus, Earth and Mars, Saturn and Neptune shone with a spectral blue-gray glow on his skull, while phosphorescent dotted lines showed the path they would follow around a goblin-colored sun. I’d heard he’d been a trapeze artist in a former life, and he had the physique to back it up: lean muscle, ropy arms. He wore a silver gown, like all the rest. He also had a large gold astrolabe hung around his neck by a gold chain, a decoration allowed only to the men.
I call them a comet cult, but that’s just a lazy tease and doesn’t really sum up their beliefs at all. Most of them were middle-aged and visibly not right. There was one who had lost all three of her children in a house fire and who would tell you with a smile that they hadn’t died at all—they had crossed into a new, seven-dimensional form of existence. There was a man who put a nine-volt battery in his mouth sometimes, to receive “transmissions” from various religious figures who he said were broadcasting from Neptune. He didn’t hear their voices. He tasted their advice and ideas in the battery’s coppery zing. One parishioner had a lazy eye and a tendency toward nervous spitting fits, as if she’d just gotten a bug in her mouth. Another of the devout had smiley-face scars up and down his arms, the result of deliberate cutting.