by Joe Hill
It seemed like half of Boulder was there, wandering in a daze—packs of children with grimy faces, old ladies in housecoats. When I got closer, I could see dead people laid out in rows along the yard lines of the football field, from one set of goalposts to the other. The trucks were collecting the dead, and family members had followed in their wake to see that the remains of their loved ones were treated right.
You would expect them all to be sobbing, for the field to be a Greek chorus of wails and screams, but people were better behaved than that. We’re people of the heartland, we don’t make too much of a fuss. It seems impolite. I imagine that a lot of people were too sleepless and shocked to carry on. Maybe it would’ve felt rude to rend your clothes and tear your hair with so many other grief-stricken people around.
There were folding tables set up at one end of the field, manned by two crews: a team from Staples and a gang of kids from McDonald’s. The McDonald’s squad had a few charcoal braziers going. Under the diesel stink of the trucks, I could make out the cheery, greasy odor of McMuffins and burgers.
A line of about twenty people led up to the tables. I don’t know why I got into the queue. Maybe it was that hungry-making smell, or maybe I was thinking I could see if there was a place here for Yolanda and her mother. Maybe I was just hoping Marc DeSpot would lose interest and decide to stop trailing me now that I was in a crowd. He was still there, pretending not to look at me but hovering at the outskirts of the action.
I waited my turn, and when I got up to the table, a tall, gawky gal wearing a pair of giant glasses and a red Staples shirt said, “Are you looking for someone or bringing someone in?” In front of her, she had a set of rotary files and a bag full of manila tags.
“Neither right yet. How does it all work?”
“Staples will tag your loved one and file their location on the field for future reference. If you have a Staples Rewards account, we’ll even e-mail you all the burial information. It’s all free to show our commitment to rebuilding the greater Boulder area through the combined forces of local volunteers and Staples’ great products and services.” She recited her lines in a dazed drone.
“I might want to bring my friend and her mom down. I don’t know yet. It’d be a long way to haul them.”
“We’re arranging pickups, too, but it might be three to four days.”
“Will there even be any room left on the field by then?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes, absolutely. We’re burying the first wave at one P.M. There’ll be prayers from six different faiths, and Sizzler will provide catering.” She pointed to some other trucks under the goalposts, filled with dirt and rocks. “After we cover them over, I’m afraid it’ll be necessary to bury another group on top of them. We’re hoping to manage three a plot.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and she nodded, and then a teenager standing beside her asked if I wanted large fries or an Egg McMuffin and told me that McDonald’s wanted to express their sorrow for my loss. It was the end of the world, but you could still hit the drive-thru on your way to oblivion.
Of course it was good of them all to be doing what they were doing, helping folks lay their loved ones to rest and making sure everyone got fed. When the sky starts raining nails, you find out pretty fast what parts of a culture are the sturdiest. One thing Americans do well is make an assembly line. Not twenty-four hours after a few thousand people were ripped to shreds by falling needles, and we were burying our dead with all the efficiency of packing a Happy Meal.
I got out of there, tucking into my fries. You might not think it’s possible to have an appetite walking past a carpet of dead bodies a hundred yards long, but foreground becomes background pretty quick. Any pattern repeated over and over is bound to turn into wallpaper eventually, whether it’s flowers or corpses.
After the fries were gone and I’d licked all the tasty grease off my fingers, I downed half a bottle of water in a hurry to rinse the salt taste out of my mouth. By then I was sometimes seeing faint little sparkles and flashes of light at the edges of my vision, which was maybe the sun glinting on all the scattered nails or was maybe just light-headedness. It didn’t seem like I’d been walking long enough to get faint, but then the night before had been a restless one.
I hadn’t gone far when I caught sight of Marc DeSpot again, hanging back about a block. He dropped his gaze straightaway and acted like he was interested in the football field, but I knew then he was still after me. I swerved toward a Starbucks on the corner, as if I wanted a latte to wash down my fries. The door was locked, of course—any fool could’ve guessed it wasn’t going to be open—but I gave the handle a tug like I expected otherwise. I peered through the tinted glass as if there were someone in there to look at. Actually, the lights were off, and there was a paper sign taped up on the door: CLOSED FOR THE END OF THE HUMAN RACE. But I gave a thumbs-up and nodded as if someone had told me to use the side door.
I slipped around the corner of the building and then busted out the best run I could manage in my shitkickers. There was a wide swath of parking lot on the other side of Starbucks, filled with a thousand crystal nails, gleaming and throwing halos. It looked like all the treasures of Aladdin had been dumped off in front of Whole Foods.
I ran about halfway across the lot, then hunkered down behind someone’s grape-colored Kia. I watched the Starbucks, looking through the space between the undercarriage and the asphalt. Sure enough, Marc DeSpot soon came wandering around the corner, peering this way and that, hunting for me. Then he looked over his shoulder, as if someone were following him. After a moment of indecision, he turned around and went back the way he’d come.
I sat and counted one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, until I reached a hundred. I got up and went crunching on across the lot, down Baseline Road, and onto the ramp leading up to the turnpike.
I thought there might be sawhorses blocking the way, but the ramp was wide open, aside from a little hatchback that had somehow caught fire and burnt down to the frame. Once I reached the turnpike, I could see in a glance there was nothing to stop me from strolling all the way to Denver right along the dotted yellow line. When the rain had come down, it was going ten in the morning on a pretty Monday in August. On the turnpike, cars had been doing seventy when the storm broke. It must’ve been like driving into antiaircraft fire. I saw a black Corvette that had been peeled open, the whole roof twisted back, the red leather seats inside ground up into hamburger. Then I looked again and saw it wasn’t red leather at all. They were white seats that had been painted red by what had happened to the people sitting on them.
There were other folks strolling along the pike, picking over the wrecks. One middle-aged lady had a shopping cart. I watched her stop alongside a Mercedes to mine the glove compartment. She was about forty, had a pink flowered kerchief over her graying hair, and the tidy, put-together look of a PTA mom. She dug through someone’s bloodstained purse, found some bills, a gold bracelet, and a copy of Fifty Shades Freed, which she deposited into her cart before going on.
A mile away, on the other side of the road, I spied a crew dressed in orange jumpsuits, doing some kind of work. It was too far away to see what.
Well, it was a nice morning for walking, as long as you paid no mind to all the dead folks chewed up in their cars. I was down to about 25-percent battery on my phone, but I was longing to hear another human voice, so I stuck in my earbuds to catch some news.
That’s why I didn’t hear them coming up on me: the comet boys. That’s why they got me.
WHAT I HEARD ON THE news was that preliminary evidence indicated the terrorists who’d made it rain nails might’ve been operating out of an area around the Black Sea. There was a company based in the region that had demonstrated a reagent that could rapidly produce synthetic fulgurite under laboratory conditions. The president had dashed to Twitter to promise a “BIBLICAL RESPONSE!” and a “HOLY WAR” and swore that the Islamists were about to learn that “WHEN IT RAINS IT PORES!!!” He said we’d be dropping a sh
ower of our own soon enough, only it would be daisy cutters, not a bunch of namby-pamby crystal nails.
Then there was a story about a fierce downpour in Pueblo, all nails, that punctured natural-gas tanks and caused an explosion so tremendous it registered as an earthquake in Colorado Springs. They said the fire had swallowed half the town and the trucks couldn’t get close enough to effectively battle it, because they couldn’t traverse the nail-studded roads. A meteorologist said the crystal spikes in Pueblo were larger than the ones in Denver, with some darts as long as his thumb. A chemical engineer was just about to explain what it all meant, but I didn’t hear what he had to say, because that was when someone clubbed me in the head.
I went down so hard and fast I don’t remember hitting the ground. I wasn’t knocked out. It was more like when the lights in your house flicker just a bit. There was a little mental flicker, and when my head cleared, I was on all fours, seeing stars. That’s not a turn of phrase—I mean literally. I was looking down at a copper disk the size of a saucer, with constellations etched on it and my blood gilding one edge.
The comet kids were coming up through the waist-high blond grass at the side of the pike, moving fast in their tinfoil gowns. It was the three who’d been wrapping up Mr. Waldman. The boy who resembled Christ had thrown his astrolabe into my head. The other two had pulled their astrolabes off their necks and were whipping them around and around in big loops. The spinning gold medallions droned like a pair of didgeridoos.
My hands and knees were torn up from my fall. The road was carpeted in shiny tacks. I touched the crown of my head, and a pulse of blue light blinked in front of my eyes. I felt a deep throb of pain, like someone had whopped a railroad spike into my skull. When I could see again, my right hand had ten fingers instead of five, and all of them were wet with blood. I still had one earbud poked into my ear, and I heard a snatch of someone on the news, murmuring in a weird, deep, underwater voice:
“You juust dount beeelieeeve the skyyyy can really faaaalll on yoooou, but guesss whoooot? It’s falllllling no wwwww. . . .”
I couldn’t figure out why they wanted to pick a fight with me, and I didn’t feel like hanging around to ask them. I scooped myself up and tried to run, but I was woozy and reeling from the thwack in the head. I staggered this way and that, and then another comet clown let go of his astrolabe, and it hit me in the small of the back. It was like getting stabbed. My knees folded, and I dropped again. I hit face-first and caught a chinful of fulgurite stickers. Fortunately, by then I had staggered to the edge of the road, and I fell into thick grass instead of against hard blacktop and rolled a few feet down the embankment.
I felt the way I imagine a caterpillar must when she’s closed into the fuzzy shroud of her cocoon. I could hear, and I could see a little—although everything had gone cloudy and out of focus—but I couldn’t feel my limbs, which were numb and boneless. All the thought had been knocked out of me. I wasn’t even in what you might call pain. I didn’t have enough sensation to feel pain.
They crowded in. I could see past them, too. The action had drawn the attention of the PTA mom pushing her shopping cart. She craned her head to see what was happening, her expression nervous but also excited.
The fat boy saw her looking and hissed, “Oh, man, oh, shit, we shouldn’t have done this right here, Sean, where people can see—”
“Shut up, Pat,” said the one who looked like Christ. Course the fat boy was named Pat. I’ve never seen anyone who was more Pat in his life.
Sean—Christ in a tinfoil gown—glanced up the embankment at the PTA mom.
“It’s for her own good,” he told her. “She’s crazy. We’re bringing her home to look after her. Right, Randy?”
The black kid who had vitiligo nodded with a frantic enthusiasm. “She gets like this when she’s off her meds. She thinks everyone’s after her!”
“Can’t imagine what gave her that idea,” the PTA mom said.
“You want her iPhone?” Randy gobbled. He had a querulous, jittery sort of voice. He picked my phone out of the dirt, dusted it off, and held it out to her. “It’s the new one.”
“The 7?”
“The 7 Plus! Take it. We just don’t want any trouble.”
“That’s right,” Sean said. “We’re doing what’s best for her—and for us. Same as you’re doing what’s best for you . . . even though the police might not see it that way. A cop might think you’re looting, when really you’re just surviving, aren’t you?”
Her face assumed a faintly sulky cast. “The people I took from aren’t going to complain.”
“No, they won’t. And this girl is mentally feeble and hysterical and needs looking after by her family. But some people might say we’re committing abuse, dragging her back home this way. It’s easiest to mind your own business, don’t you think?”
She didn’t reply for a moment but went on staring at the phone in Randy’s hand. “I always wanted to try the bigger one. But I bet you can’t unlock it.”
“Bet we can. It’s the one works off fingerprints,” Sean said.
He nodded at Randy, who bent down and grabbed my hand and squeezed my thumb against the sensor. The phone unlocked with an audible click.
Randy tossed it to PTA Mom, who caught it in both hands. In his nervous, twitchy voice, Randy said, “You’ll wanna reset the security right away, before it locks itself again.”
“Enjoy it,” Sean said. “Think different—we do!”
She laughed. “I can see that! Take care of the poor girl.” And she turned and puttered off, playing with my phone.
My insides hurt at the thought of losing it. It had all my text messages from Yolanda on it. She would send me pictures of the sky, big blue western skies with little lumps of white cloud in them, and she’d write: The cloud in the middle is my pet unicorn. Or: That cloud over the mountains is you hiding under a sheet. Once she sent me a picture of a mountain pool, a cloud reflected in it as if it were a mile-wide mirror, and texted: I want to hold you like the water holds the sky.
Seeing that woman wander off with my phone was worse than getting my head smashed in with an astrolabe. It was like wrapping Yolanda in her shroud all over again.
Randy, Pat, and Sean watched her go, with hunted, rascally eyes. You never saw a more demented-looking pack of weasels. I tried to move—to rise onto all fours—and just the thought of the effort pushed a sound out of me, something between a sob and a groan. That got their attention back. They circled me again.
“You know what the best thing would be, guys? Guys?” Pat said. He was the kind of huffy, breathless boy who’s always saying things that no one else listens to. “Guys? I think it would be easiest to kill this bitch. We could bang a nail into her temple. No one would ever know she didn’t die in the rain.”
“The Finders would know,” said Sean. “The Finders would see homicide in your mind and leave your quantum energy to fall into dissolution with all of the others who are unprepared.”
Or something like that. I’ve never had much of a grip on their cuckoo-bird theology. I think the Finders might be a higher breed of intelligence? And your soul, I guess, is your quantum energy? It’s hard to believe anyone could choke down Elder Bent’s fourth-rate Flash Gordon story. But humans are pack animals by nature and most will accept whatever they have to accept—wholly, enthusiastically—to keep an honored place in their tribe. Give a man a choice between reality and loneliness or fantasy and community, he’ll pick having friends every time.
“It’s not just the Finders we got to worry about,” Randy said, wiping a hand under his nose and sniffing. “She dragged Yolanda and Yolanda’s ma into the house across the street. You know, where the vampire kid lives.”
“Yeah, the Blakes,” said Sean. “Who cares about them?”
“Well, wouldn’t the woman wonder when she never hears from Honeysuckle again? I bet she’s expecting her to check in.”
“If Ursula Blake and her creepy little kid turn out to be a problem, th
en we’ll deal with them like we’re going to deal with her,” Sean said. “It’s not like we have to worry about getting locked up. Humanity will be extinct before the year is out. There’s not a prison in the world that can hold us, boys. We’ve got an escape tunnel that goes all the way to the seventh dimension!”
It’s funny: The world always manages to ensnare you, even when you’re most sure you’re free and clear of its hooks. After I wrapped up Yolanda and said good-bye to her, it seemed to me that I’d come unplugged from the emotional charge that keeps most of us going, day in, day out. I was like a circuit board that had been popped out of the big, lively, whirring machine of human society. I didn’t serve anyone; I didn’t solve anything; I didn’t have any useful functions to offer. Without Yolanda I was obsolete hardware.
Then Sean started talking about going after Ursula and Templeton—who had taken me into their house when I was in shock, fed me, and tended to me—and I felt a sick frisson of alarm that finally sent some strength to my limbs. Not enough to do me any good, mind you. I tried to get on my hands and knees, and Sean put his boot in my ass and slammed me back down onto my face. Lying there with my nostrils full of dust and needles sticking into my chest, it came to me that if anything happened to Ursula and her son on my account, I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
“Yeah, that’s right, Sean! The Big Flash is coming!” Randy said. “In ten weeks Ursula Blake, her kid, Honeysuckle—they’re dead meat, along with all the rest of the disorganized, and we’ll be with the Finders!”
“Learning how to make universes of our own,” Pat whispered in a reverential hush.
“So . . . so what did we decide?” Randy said, and he licked dry lips with a sandpapery tongue. “Nail her?”
“No. Better. Save her,” Sean said. “We’ll bring her back to Elder Bent and force an awakening. Come on. Let’s wrap her up.”
He drew a big folded square of that crinkly, foil-like material out of a backpack and spread it on the ground next to me. The other two wrapped me in it just like they were rolling up carpet. I tried to kick my way loose. But I was too weak to work up a decent struggle, and in a minute they had me wound up with my arms pinned to my sides and that tough shiny fabric wrapped around me from ankle to throat. Sean was down on one knee, with a roll of black electrical tape, binding my silver cloak tight around me when I hawked a fat gob of spit into one of his eyes.
