by Rob Smales
He tightened his grip and tugged lightly, pulling her just the slightest bit off-balance before licking his suddenly dry lips, and taking the plunge.
“Of course, you could give me a reason.”
Her lovely eyes, blank with surprise when he’d revealed his identity, had hardened over the course of his speech. Now they went round with confusion, and just a touch of hope.
“A reason? Me? To do what, change your way of doing business? What do you mean?”
“Oh, I think you know.” He hoped to God she knew. He didn’t think he could bring himself to explain. “A beautiful young woman such as yourself, out here, alone, with a man.”
Her eyes remained uncomprehending. He bit his mental lip and tried to smile confidently, though it felt like a weak, awkward grin.
“Come, come, Evangeline. You’re a grown woman. Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
He held his breath.
Her eyes went suddenly wide with shock as the import of his words finally struck home. Reading her correctly, Devin squeezed just as she jerked back, and her hand remained trapped within his own, though he was nearly pulled from his feet.
“If your father is in the house,” he said, words fueled by lust and panic tumbling out of his mouth, tripping over one another in their effort to be heard, “we can always go into the barn for privacy—I understand that’s how things are done out this way?”
“Mr. Capshaw!” She tried to free herself again, but Devin hung on, desperate to keep some kind of control over the rapidly worsening situation. “But . . . you’re a married man!”
Devin thought about Margaret, still back in Boston with their daughters. Never an attractive woman, even when they were younger, he’d married her for the money her father would eventually bequeath to her. She had started out homely and had only gotten older, their two children more a testament to the power of strong drink than to love. Nowadays, when she puckered up for a kiss she resembled nothing so much as a cat’s backside—and was nearly as lust-inducing.
Still, the thought of the trouble he’d be in if Margaret somehow found out about this little attempted indiscretion caused his throat to constrict, his voice trembling ever so slightly.
“I won’t tell her if you won’t.”
Eva’s mind went blank for a moment when the little man with one muddy shoe introduced himself. He waited a beat, apparently letting his identity sink in, then started speaking once more. Her first coherent thought was well, well, so this is The Banker from Boston. At least that explains why he’s talking through his nose.
Shock followed this thought, then anger at the realization that her long-wished-for confrontation had just happened, and she had effectively missed it. She felt a flicker of pride at the thought of what she had said and how she had said it, though she knew herself well enough to admit she would never have been able to make that speech had she known just whom she was making it to.
Then his words penetrated the emotions roiling inside her, and it all just swirled away—the shock, the anger, and the pride, like he had pulled the plug from a drain.
Everything I said, pouring out my heart, and he simply brushes it aside! All this—the casual ruining of people’s lives—it’s all just business to him.
The more he spoke, the more her heart filled once again with indignation, though it was tempered by the sure knowledge that nothing she said or did was going to affect him in any way. The cold emptiness in her heart moved into her stomach, and seemed to crowd out everything inside. She had a sudden and powerful urge to visit the outhouse.
Everything: all Father’s hard work, all of her prayers—none of it mattered.
We’re losing the farm. My God, where will we go?
“Of course,” he said, “you could give me a reason.”
Her heart fluttered in her hollow breast, a startled bird in a cage. “A reason? Me?” She reviewed his last few words in her mind, trying not to let hope push her into misapprehension. “To do what, change your way of doing business? What do you mean?”
Please, Lord, let him be as aboveboard as he claims. I don’t think I could take it if this were a trick.
She more than half-expected him to laugh in her face at the suggestion he might alter his personal business practices just for her, and you could have knocked her over with a feather when, rather than laughing outright, his answer was somewhat encouraging.
“Oh, I think you know.”
Evangeline had, in the privacy of her own mind, occasionally thought trousers on a woman to be a good thing, at least out here on the farm where sometimes dresses simply got in the way when one was trying to work. Today, however, and at this moment specifically, she was thankful for her ankle-length garment, as it masked the tremble that had set into her knees.
Smiling as if the expression were new to him, he offered a clue, though in her tizzy she nearly missed it, he spoke so softly.
“. . . young woman such as yourself, out here, alone, with a man.”
She sifted the conversation for meaning, praying this apparent chance would not be snatched from her grasp before she managed to puzzle it out, but it seemed all a muddle. People’s debts. His rights. People—the Clarkes included—losing their homes. And what in the name of the Savior did her age have to do with anything?
Every road in her mind ran in a different direction, none of them making any connections . . . though he had said something just before mentioning her age, and though she had not quite caught it, it had sounded a little like . . .
A suspicion of what he was going on about clawed at the edges of her mind trying to get in; she could feel it, but didn’t quite have it yet. The feeling that she wouldn’t like it when it did arrive was clear as a bell, however. She was aware of him watching her as she tried to puzzle it out, when suddenly he again gave her that strange smile that seemed to have nothing to do with happiness.
“Come, come, Evangeline. You’re grown woman. Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
A grown woman, she thought, pieces beginning to click into place in her mind. A grown woman . . . alone with a man . . . can do something to change his mind?
The pieces locked.
Oh my stars! He wants to—that’s a leer, an honest-to-goodness leer! This evil little man comes out here to destroy our lives, and then says he may offer us an extension if I’ll—
She tried to pull her hand away, but his grip was surprising.
“If your father is in the house,” he said smoothly, his voice filled with what she now recognized as carnal intent, “we can always go into the barn for privacy—I understand that’s how things are done out this way.”
That last was said with a sneer, making it perfectly clear what this man from the east thought of people “out this way.”
“Mr. Capshaw!”
She tried to pull away again, harder than before, but Capshaw retained her hand with compact strength, and a competence that suggested this was not his first time manhandling a woman. His other hand, the one still holding his all-important papers, flashed at her in the afternoon sun, and her eye was drawn to the shiny gold ring on his third finger. She said the first thing to pop into her head, wanting only to be rid of this horrible man.
“But . . . you’re a married man!”
His eyes took on a momentary calculating expression.
“I won’t tell her if you won’t.”
But you would know, she thought, shocked at his callous attitude. And I would know . . . and God would know.
That stiffened her spine. Any man who could so casually cast aside an oath made in the house of the Lord was not a man she would deal with. She straightened, glaring into his upturned face, finally snapping her hand free.
“I used to pray for you, Mr. Capshaw. I used to pray for God to find His way into your heart, to turn you from this path of moral destruction you have set yourself upon. But now, now that I’ve met you and seen the depths to which your soul has sunk, I can see that nothing I or anyone
else can say or do will bring you back into the light.”
She glared at the envelope still clutched in his hand, the legal papers that spelled out their doom, and sunlight glinted off the ring on his finger—the symbol, now, of his broken covenant with God. Any uncertainty burned away in a towering anger, unlike anything she had ever felt in her young life.
“Now, Mr. Capshaw, I only hope that God can see His way clear to giving you exactly what you deserve, whether it be striking you down or casting you out of Heaven to burn for all eternity.”
She was surprised by the words even as she said them, even more so because she realized there was no exaggeration in them.
Lord, she thought, I have never prayed ill for anyone before, no matter how angry I was, be they man, woman, or child, but I do pray to you now, God, to let this man feel your wrath and give him exactly what he deserves in full measure.
Eva had the satisfaction of seeing Devin Capshaw’s eyes widen at her harsh words, and was about to add more—she wasn’t sure what yet, but she was positive it would simply shrivel his bones with its righteousness—when she saw something in the distant sky past the Boston banker’s hat. Whatever she’d been about to say, the words dried up, unspoken, as she shielded her eyes to take a better look.
A cloud. Dark, like a storm cloud, it spread across the sky to the northwest.
“What is . . .” she began, but trailed off as she took an unconscious step forward, trying to see better. Capshaw stepped back, turning to look as well.
“What is that?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
It looked like a cloud, but it didn’t move like a cloud. It appeared to come with the wind, but faster. And it moved . . . oddly. Wrongly. Rather than spreading evenly, as she had first thought, now that it was closer (and it had drawn noticeably closer, even in this short time) she saw the front edge of the dark mass thrusting forward arm-like extrusions, sparkling here and there with reflected sunlight as they snaked across the sky. She looked east and west but saw no break in this cloud, as if a curtain were being drawn across the world from horizon to horizon, leaving the earth in darkness. It flew closer as they watched, shrouding the land before them with threatening rapidity.
“What’s that noise?” Capshaw’s voice was tinged with fear. “Is that thunder?”
Eva heard it too, a low, humming rumble. Unlike thunder, however, this sound did not roll or fade, but grew. It grew, she realized, with the approaching cloud, riding it rather than preceding it.
“I don’t know,” she said, watching the line of shadow racing toward them as above the first tendrils of the cloud wound over the house, and the rumble grew into a buzzing roar.
Something fell from the sky like a stone, whirring through the air to land in the road before the house with a sharp thack and a puff of dirt. Another landed, farther away, but then a third came in, to light with the tiniest of thuds on the edge of the porch.
It was a locust, both longer and fatter than Eva’s thumb. Eva saw it, and her heart became a solid, frozen lump in her breast.
“What the hell is that?” Capshaw cried, shouting to be heard over the noise.
“That, I think,” Eva whispered through a mouth gone suddenly dry, “is Judgment.”
She backed through the door, closing it and slipping the bolt home just before small, desperate fists began to beat upon the far side.
The Clarke woman’s reaction to his suggestion was like something out of a nightmare for Devin. To be dressed down by one of his daughters’ contemporaries was bad enough, but when she was actually in the right, and he knew it, it was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat. He’d wanted to interrupt her angry tirade, but she had sounded so much like Margaret he just hadn’t dared.
When she’d ground to a halt, looking past him with a quizzical expression, his relief had been monumental. When she’d taken a step forward, murmuring the beginning of a question, he’d been only too happy to step aside and let her look at whatever she wanted.
Anything that distracts her from me right now, he’d thought, is okay in my book!
Then he saw the cloud. At least, he thought it was a cloud, though it was moving like no cloud he’d ever seen. The weather out here was all a mess, though—nothing like the sensible weather they had back east. He’d never seen anything like it in all his years in Boston.
“What is that?” he said, and heard the girl’s distracted “I don’t know.”
He stared at the dark wall of cloud as it came, oozing over the horizon until it filled the sky. He didn’t like the way it moved, surging and squirming through the air like something alive rather than a weather phenomenon. He glanced at his rented buckboard, the horse tossing its head, agitated, and felt something in his stomach. Odd . . . it felt like when he was too near those big drums they sometimes used for parades back home, though rather than a beat this was a steady feeling, like a feather twiddling deep in his guts.
Then he heard it.
“What’s that noise?” he asked, the growing roar tickling his innards even more. “Is that thunder?”
“I don’t know,” said Evangeline, though something in her voice made him think she had a suspicion. One she did not like. He glanced back at her, but her focus was still on the strange, thrumming shadow blotting out the sky. There was a strange whirr behind him, and he turned to face whatever it was just in time to see something, a small stone perhaps, strike the road in a small cloud of grit. There was another thud somewhere, but before Devin could ask what was going on he heard humming, like when he riffled the pages of one of his bank’s thick ledger books, and something struck the edge of the porch right in front of him.
It was a bug, brownish green and nearly the size and shape of the cigars he smoked whenever Margaret was not around. He gaped as it folded away wings nearly the span of his hand and appeared to regard him with the round, reddish eyes set to either side of its squat head.
“What the hell is that?”
He shouted over the growing roar of the cloud overhead, and if he hadn’t been backing toward her in gut-wrenching horror he would have missed the Clarke girl’s whisper entirely. As it was, he caught only one word, but hearing it nearly unmanned him.
“. . . Judgment.”
The door closed behind him.
“No!”
Devin spun, the envelope containing all his proofs of power, both legal and financial, half-crumpled and forgotten in his left hand as he pounded with both fists. The door held firm. He tried the knob and found the bolt was thrown. He returned his attention to beating the thing down, though it was too stout by far to be forced by the likes of him.
Behind him, more whirr-thuds came, then more, gaining in intensity like increasing rain. Several struck the wooden porch, and he flinched at each hollow sound, redoubling his efforts to open the door.
“Miss Clarke, please! You can’t leave me out here! What’s happening?”
He heard her voice, but through the closed door and his own panic he couldn’t make out her meaning. He’d just started another round of yelling when the first of the whizzing little horrors struck him in the back.
With a breathless shriek he spun, flattening himself against the too-solid door. He felt the disgusting pop of the thing clinging to his suit coat, heard the sharp crack of its carapace as he smashed his full weight against it. Before his stomach had time to rebel at the thought of the crunchy, gooey mess now coating his back, another of the things struck him in the chest. Then another. Then two came whirring in to impact his left leg.
He could see them now, falling like living hail, some swerving into a more horizontal track to come in beneath the porch overhang. More and more hurtled into him, so many that, try as he might, he could not bat them away fast enough. He swept them from his chest and legs, but for every one he knocked away, two, three, or even four replaced it.
The cloud! It’s all bugs—enough to cover the sky!
Terrified thoughts of Egypt and holy plagues were in
terrupted as a whinny cut the air, high and terrified. He looked down and saw the buckboard he’d left in the road lurch forward several feet as the panicking horse lunged about, shaking its head furiously, dislodging a dozen or more of the huge insects from its mane.
Good God, I forgot to set the brake!
With no brake set, the only thing that had kept the horse from simply wandering away, wagon and all, during his conversation with Evangeline Clarke was its good manners; manners that were swiftly disappearing as the beast was pelted with more and more of the flying, clinging, climbing bugs.
If it fled now, he realized, he’d have no way to get to town or find cover, and the Clarke woman seemed all too happy to leave him out here in this Hell on Earth.
“Hey!” he shouted, trying to calm the horse, or at least get its attention. “He—awwwk!”
The locust that had flown into his open mouth scrabbled at his tongue with sharp, twig-like legs. He choked, spitting the thing out to flop, disoriented, on the porch before him. He tried to stomp on it as, retching, he started down the two steps to the front yard, but he stumbled, nearly falling as the things continued to land on him. They covered him front and back, crawling up his sleeves and pant legs, clinging to his hat and hair, their weight enough to actually slow him down as he lumbered toward the buckboard.
Devin flailed, frantic, beating at his own torso and head, but no matter what he did the number of his attackers did nothing but grow, so many of them now falling, flying, and whizzing through the air that he lost sight of the horse and wagon in the hellish blizzard. There was a new sound now, rising up to drown out the roar of billions of buzzing wings: a loud and angry hiss, reminiscent of a hard rain beating upon the ground. Terrified thoughts rolled through his head, though one idea was repeated again and again, as if the thought itself was trying to get his attention:
It’s the end of the world! The end of the world!
He glanced down as he staggered toward the buckboard, his crunching feet obliterating locusts with each step, more falling every second to fill the holes he made in the squirming chitinous carpet. That buff-colored envelope, still clutched in his left hand, was half-gone now, locusts clinging determinately to the ragged upper edge of the thing, gnawing and chewing away.
