Strange Weather by Joe Hill
It made a person sad to even try to talk to them, the nonsense they believed and the embarrassing things they did. They were all of them waiting on the end of the world, and in the meantime Elder Bent was showing them how to prepare their souls for the seven-dimensional existence that waited beyond death. He kept them busy studying star charts and fixing radios (which they sold at street markets on Saturdays). All of them believed that the final Testament of the Lord would be written not in words but as a diagram for some kind of circuit. I can’t pretend I understood all of it. Yolanda had more patience with Elder Bent’s basket of crazies than I did, had always been sociable with them when she ran into them on the street. She was better than me that way. She felt sorriest for the same people who pissed me off the most.
I was pissed off then, and Yolanda wasn’t on hand to calm me down. I crossed to the edge of their yard, where the three boys were getting ready to roll Mr. Waldman into their silver packing material, and I stamped on the edge of the fabric before they could flap it over him.
The fellows who’d been wrapping him into his sci-fi shroud looked up at me with surprised faces. They were the youngest of Elder Bent’s crew. The first was trim and tall, with a golden beard and shoulder-length hair—he could’ve played Our Lord in a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. The second was a soft, chubby boy, the kind of dude you just know is going to have damp, hot little hands. The third was a black fellow suffering from vitiligo, so the dark of his face was mottled with patches of bright, almost startling pink. They all had their mouths open, as if they were getting ready to speak, but none of them said anything. Elder Bent shot up one hand in a gesture to be silent.
“Honeysuckle Speck! What brings you out on this glorious night?”
“I don’t know what’s glorious about six or seven thousand people getting torn to shreds between here and Denver.”
“Six or seven thousand people have stepped out of these sorry containers of the spirit”—gesturing at his dead—“and have transitioned to the next phase. They’ve been set free! They’re everywhere now, in seven dimensions, their energy the background crackle of reality, the dark matter that holds the universe together. They prepare the way for the next great transmission.”
“What I’d like to know is why Mr. Waldman is transitioning to your front lawn. What makes you think he’d want you to wrap him up in tinfoil like someone’s leftovers?”
“He is one of the forerunners! He goes to mark the way, with so many others. It does no harm to honor his sacrifice.”
“He didn’t sacrifice himself for the likes of you. Mr. Waldman wasn’t part of your cult. He belonged to a synagogue, not a crazy house, and if he’s going to be honored, it ought to be by the precepts of his faith, not yours. Why don’t you leave him alone? Go drink some poison Kool-Aid and ride a comet, you vulture! You don’t know a damned thing.”
He beamed at me, a tall, skinny geek with a glow-in-the-dark head. It didn’t matter how you cussed him out, he always grinned at you like you were a charming scamp.
“But I do!” he said. “A damned thing is exactly what I know: The planet is damned, and I know it! I said the world would end on the twenty-third of November, this very year, at five A.M., and you see now . . . it begins!”
“What about when you said it was going to end in October, two years ago?”
“I said the apocalypse would come on October twenty-third, two years ago, and indeed it did. But it has been developing slowly. Few observers were attuned to the signs.”
“You also said the world would end in 2008, didn’t you?”
He finally looked disappointed in me. “The asteroid that was sure to hit us was turned aside by the combined will of a thousand prayers, to give us more time to perfect our minds for leaving the three-dimensional world. But the day and the hour are almost upon us now! And this time we will not turn the end aside. We’ll welcome it with a happy song in our throats. We’ll sing the curtain down on this life. We have been singing the finish for some time now.”
“Maybe you could get back to singing it in the morning. Some of us are trying to sleep. And while you’re at it, can’t you sing something that isn’t Phil Collins? Haven’t we all suffered enough today?”
“The words don’t matter! Only the joy the singing generates! We store it like batteries. We are almost up to full charge and ready to go! Aren’t we?” he called to his people.
“Ready to go!” they shouted back, swaying a little, staring at the starscape on his bald, bony head.
“Ready to go,” Elder Bent said placidly, lacing his fingers together across his flat stomach. The tattoos on his head glowed in the dark, but the stars on his knuckles had been printed there in plain black ink, while he was in jail. He had served two years for what he’d done to his wife and his stepchildren. He had kept them locked in an attic for most of one summer, giving them a tablespoon of water to split in the morning and one Nilla wafer to share in the evening, and making them map planetary orbits all day. If one of them sassed or didn’t participate in their “studies,” the others were commanded to kick her back into obedience. One evening the wife escaped from him when he allowed the family outside to make star observations. The police threw him in the clink, but he wasn’t there long. He got sprung on appeal, on account of his First Amendment right to practice his religion, which apparently included starving and abusing followers who didn’t sing his hymns in the right key. Worse yet, the stepdaughters rejoined him as soon as he was free. They were devoted sisters of the faith now. They stood just behind him, slim and pretty beneath their hubcap headgear, the both of them giving me the stink eye.
While Bent was blabbing, my attention had drifted from the three dopes crouched around Mr. Waldman. They had used the opportunity to begin wrapping him up again. I heard the crinkle of silver foil and stamped on the material once again, before they could finish cocooning him.
“You keep up with what you’re doing, boys, and the apocalypse is going to fall on you a lot sooner than you think,” I told them.
They gave Elder Bent a nervous look, and after a moment he gestured with one long-fingered hand. The three young men stood and retreated from the body.
“Do you think someone will sit shivah for him, Honeysuckle? Mr. Waldman’s wife is dead. His son is a marine stationed in some foreign part of the world and who knows when he will learn of his father’s passing, given the current crisis. And when he does hear the news —if he ever hears the news!—he may never make his way back to Boulder. The hard rains have only just begun to fall. More is coming, I assure you!”
“More is coming,” repeated the boy who looked like the Christ. He fingered his own astrolabe necklace. “And we’re the only ones ready for it. We’re the only ones who know what’s going to—”
But Elder Bent gave a brisk wave of one long-fingered hand and shut him up. Then he continued, “Shouldn’t someone honor his life? Isn’t any ceremony better than none? Does it do any harm? If his son appears back in Boulder, the discharged flesh will be here, to be mourned however he sees fit.” He paused and then said, “Or you could take him. And how will you mark his passing, Honeysuckle? Will you sit shivah for him? Do you even know how?”
He had me there. I didn’t like it, but I had my own dead to tend to.
“Well . . . at least keep it down,” I said lamely. “There’s a child trying to sleep across the street.”
“You should sing with us! You shouldn’t be alone tonight, Honeysuckle. Come sit. Don’t be by yourself. Don’t be afraid. Fear is worse than pain, you know. Let go of yours. Your fear of the rain. Your fear of us. Your fear of extinction. It isn’t too late for us all to love each other and be happy—even here as the last chapter of mankind is written.”
“No thank you. If we’re all on the way out, I want to end my life sane, not wearing a sheet-metal skirt and singing my way through the greatest hits of Phil Collins. There’s such a thing as death with dignity.”
He gave me a sad, pitying smile and
Elder Bent bowed to me and turned with a rustle of his silver gown. It is hard to take a man seriously as a spiritual leader when he’s swanning around in what looks like a prom dress made of Reynolds Wrap. The chubby kid and the boy with vitiligo bent back to Mr. Waldman’s body, but the one who looked like Jesus ran his fingers through his yellow tresses and took a half step closer to me.
“If you knew what we knew,” he whispered, “you’d beg to join us. We were the only ones ready for what happened today. A smart girl would think about that. A smart girl would ask herself what else we know—that she doesn’t.”
He sounded plenty ominous, but when he turned away with a dramatic swish, he stepped on a nail and yelped in a high-pitched voice that kinda ruined the effect. I watched him shuffle away—and then a movement, a flicker of light at the edge of my vision, caught my attention, and I glanced around.
It was Andropov, in his apartment on the first floor. He was standing behind the glass with an oil lamp, glaring out at us. Glaring at me. It made my stomach go funny, the way he was watching.
He lifted a sheet of plywood to the glass and disappeared behind it, and I heard him begin to wham away with a hammer. He was boarding up his windows, sealing Martina and himself off from the rest of the world.
WHEN I WOKE ON URSULA’S couch, the front room was flooded with strong, clear light, and I smelled coffee and warm maple syrup. Templeton stood over me, sipping espresso from a little mug, his Dracula cape flapped rakishly over one shoulder.
“It was terrorists,” he said without any preamble. “And they’re saying there’s a sixty-percent chance of nails in Wichita. Do you want pecans in your waffle?”
Ursula was in flannel pajamas, tending to a waffle iron set on her gas range. She had news streaming on her laptop again. You know what was on the news that morning: I’m sure you watched it, too. Letters had come to the Denver Times, the New York Times, and the Drudge Report. They were displayed, discussed, and disdained all morning long:
Sirs—
Now is your day of ruin. A storm as big as Alla’s fury is upon you. Blood will paint your roads. Bodys awaiting burial will cram your parks, vast farms for maggots. A million nails will rain upon you, for your wars to rob Muslim lands of oil, and your laws to bar Muslims from your racist nation. Soon you will fondly look back on 9/11 as a day of tranquility.
The names of schools and churches scrolled across the bottom of the screen, like when everything is canceled for a big snowstorm. That’s what I thought it was at first: a list of cancellations. It wasn’t until I was eating my first waffle that I realized it was a list of places to bring your dead.
They were saying at least seventy-five hundred killed in the metro Denver area, but law enforcement expected the number to go much higher by the end of the day. They showed a wedding, the bride in a red gown, all stuck full of needles. She was wailing and holding what was left of her husband. He had been torn apart, shielding her with his body. They’d been married for less than an hour. They’d been dancing in an outdoor pavilion when the rain began. The bride had lost her husband, both sisters, her parents, her grandparents, her nieces.
On CNN they had a chemist in The Situation Room. He began by repeating what we already knew—that the hard rain was made up of crystal fulgurite, what was also sometimes called “petrified lightning.” He said that while fulgurite could occur naturally, the crystals that dropped on Boulder and Denver were something new. They represented an artificial form of fulgurite that had to have been designed in a lab. Nothing else could account for the almost industrial perfection of the nails that fell on Colorado. He told Wolf Blitzer that it was possible—maybe even likely—that someone had seeded a cloud with it, perhaps using a simple crop-dusting plane, which supported the terrorist hypothesis.
He added that the hard rain was doing things no fulgurite had ever done before. Instead of drizzling down mixed with rain, it absorbed water, using every bit of moisture it could get to power its growth. It didn’t require lightning to turn to crystal; any old static electricity would do.
Wolf Blitzer said it was raining nails outside Wichita and asked his pet chemist if it was the same cloud that had rained nails on Boulder. The chemist shook his head. He said there might be a million grains of this stuff in the upper stratosphere and that it would collect in clouds like any kind of dust. Some would fall in needles and pins. Others would grow a bit, then fragment and break up, creating new grains of crystal to infect future cloud systems. Wolf asked him what that meant in simple terms. The chemist pushed his glasses up his nose and said that for all practical purposes this might become a permanent part of the global weather cycle. This new, synthetic crystal fulgurite was self-perpetuating, and it was in the atmosphere now. He said they’d need to do some modeling, but it was possible it might eventually make every rain cloud on earth into a farm for crystal. He called that the “Vonnegut scenario.” That eventually ordinary rain might be a thing of the past.
That was when Wolf seemed to forget that the cameras were pointing at him. He just stood there, looking sick. After a moment he stammered that they were going to turn to the events unfolding in Wichita, and he cautioned parents against letting children watch.
Until then Ursula had been bent over the sink, briskly scrubbing out cups and pans and setting them to dry in the dish rack. But when she heard that bit, she told me, softly, it might be best to shut off the laptop and save the battery, and I knew she wanted to spare Templeton the sight of any more slaughter.
I joined her at the sink and began to towel off wet glasses. In a low voice, I told her, “Elder Bent says the world is going to end this fall. I think the scientist on CNN just agreed with him. I feel sick. Everything is terrible, and I don’t know what to do.”
Ursula was quiet for a while, sponging the waffle iron. Then she said, “In the days after Charlie died, I’d never felt so alone or scared or helpless. There is nothing that makes a person feel worse than helplessness. I was so angry I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t have him back. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t rewind what had happened and change it. I understand how you feel, Honeysuckle. I’ve already visited the lost and lonely place at the end of the world, and all I know is, the only way to keep going is to do the things the people you loved would’ve wanted you to do. Try to imagine how Yolanda would’ve wanted you to use the time you’ve got left. That’s the one way to keep her close. If you’re scared and sick and can’t think how to live for your own self, try to think how you can live for her. You won’t feel helpless anymore. You’ll know just what to do.”
When she ran out of words, she gave the top of my head a twitchy pat, like a person who’s nervous about being snapped at might pet a big, strange dog. It was lousy affection, but I knew it took a lot for her to even try, and I appreciated it. Besides, she had let me in far enough to show me a glimpse of her own pain, and an act such as that requires more courage than giving someone a hug.
She asked if I’d mind Templeton for a bit while she raked up the nails in her yard. I sat in the garage and watched the kid standing on a bucket of rock salt, banging the keys of the big iron manual typewriter, just about the only thing his father had left behind for him. I sat under his daddy’s framed Ph.D. from Cornell; Templeton was the direct descendent of jumpy, pasty geniuses, people more comfortable with microbes on glass slides than with other human beings. I was unclear whether Charlie Blake had died by accident or on purpose, taking his car through a guardrail and down into a canyon after a couple of drinks. Yolanda had gone with Ursula to identify the body while I stayed behind to watch Templeton. Yolanda told me later that Charlie had only just been fired. His company was moving somewhere down south, and they were taking his research and all his best ideas with them but not him. All he got for a decade of work was a handshake and a gold iPad. The accid
I sat while Templeton banged at the keys, and I tried to think what Yolanda would’ve wanted me to do. I had about 30 percent charge left on my phone and used it to try her father again. This time I didn’t even get voice mail. I walked to the open garage door. A mile of blue sky stretched above the Rockies, nothing in it but a few fat, scattered islands of cloud.
Ursula stood in the middle of her lawn, leaning on her rake, studying me. At her feet was a small mound of glittering crystal shards.
“What are you thinking about?” Ursula asked.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?”
“Might be a sprinkle later,” she told me cautiously.
“I was thinking I should go see Dr. Rusted. That’s Yolanda’s father. Someone needs to let him know what happened to his daughter. Easier for me to go to him than for him to come to me. He’s sixty-four and not exactly a triathlete.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Denver.”
“How were you planning to get there?”
“I guess I’d have to walk. No one is driving anywhere. The roads are full of nails.”