by Joe Hill
We weren’t going to make it to Elder Bent’s house. A nail struck my hand and went all the way through it, like a bullet. I yelped and let go of the screwdriver.
I still had Templeton around the neck, and I pushed him four more steps, to the rear end of Mrs. Rusted’s car. I put a hand on top of his head and shoved, driving him to his knees. I dropped beside him. A nail struck me in the small of my back, four inches of icy crystal. Another hit my upper left shoulder. I ducked under the bumper and wriggled beneath the car, hauling Templeton with me by his cape. Over the deafening, obliterating roar, I heard Ursula screaming his name.
I don’t think Templeton realized I’d lost the screwdriver until we were under the car. I was flat on my belly, squeezed so tightly between the undercarriage and the road that I had almost no mobility at all. He began to squirm. I grabbed a fistful of his cape, and it came right off him.
I lunged to grab a hold of him again and banged my head on the undercarriage. It was the second time in the last minute I’d managed to catch my skull, and this time I struck myself right along the stitches. A galaxy of black suns exploded and faded before my eyes, a map of the stars and Elder Bent’s seventh dimension visible on the far side. By the time my vision cleared, Templeton was out from under Mrs. Rusted’s Prius.
“Mom!” he screamed. I could barely hear him over the bellow of the crashing rain. The road shook like I was sprawled on the rails with a freight train thundering straight toward me.
I turned myself around to watch him sprint back for his house. Nails struck him in the back of the thigh, in one heel, in the upper back, and he was flung to his face at the foot of the drive. That’s where he was when his mother reached him.
He was trying to stand again, up on one knee. Ursula covered him with her body, curving herself over him and enclosing him in her arms. She held him down and beneath her as the full force of the rain struck at last—the obliterating August rain.
AND THAT’S ABOUT ALL I have to tell.
Templeton was transferred to a unit at Boulder Community Health. A six-inch spike pierced his right lung before his mother could get to him, but Ursula shielded him from the worst of it, and he was released to state foster care two weeks ago.
Ursula herself had, I heard, 897 nails in her by the end. She was a red carpet stuck full of blades. I hope she died knowing her boy was going to live, that she had saved him. What she did to us—to the world, to the sky—is unforgivable, but I wouldn’t want any mother to die feeling she’d failed to protect her child. Justice and cruelty are not the same, and knowing that is the difference between being right in your head and being someone like Ursula Blake.
This was all five weeks ago, and as you know, in the time since, the sparkle dust has coated the entire troposphere. The last rain that was water, not nails, fell on the coast of Chile in mid-September. The only other precipitation since then has been radioactive ash. Our armed forces nuked Georgia, wiping out the firm that had developed Charlie Blake’s vision of crystal rain and annihilating most of the scientists who might’ve been able to reverse the process. ISIS fell for fake news claiming that the crystal rain was the work of Jewish scientists and launched rockets at Israel. In response Israel obliterated Syria with half a dozen warheads; they leveled Tehran while they were at it. Russia took advantage of the international chaos to storm the Ukraine. In Jakarta it rained nails the size of broadswords and killed nearly 3 million people in an hour, which was almost as bad as a nuke. The president’s latest move has been to offer tin umbrellas on his web store, $9.99 a pop, made in China. Admit it, the guy knows how to turn a buck.
It isn’t all a nightmare, although some days it seems close. A single colleague of Charlie Blake’s, a researcher named Ali-Rubiyat, was in London when Georgia was baked at 5 million degrees Fahrenheit. Although crystal generation was not his area of study, he had some crucial files on his laptop, and the scientists in Cambridge have cooked up a neutralizing agent that stops crystal growth and might make it rain normal again. It works half the time in the lab, but no one is sure what it will do in the wild.
I remember how Yolanda used to send me photographs of clouds and tell me what she saw when she looked at them. This one was an island paradise for the two of us, where we would live the rest of our days in hula skirts, feeding each other pineapple. That one was a big smoky gun that we would use to shoot the moon. Another was God’s own camera, taking a picture of us as we kissed. All I’ll ever see when I look at the clouds from here forward is weapons of mass destruction.
That’s how we got to now—all of us watching the Internet (what’s left of the Internet) to bear witness when the drones take off from Heathrow to disperse the neutralizing powder. If they can take off. There’s a 60-percent chance of nails in that part of the United Kingdom this evening.
I’ll be watching myself, on the couch with Marc DeSpot, who has taken up digs in Andropov’s old apartment and who often limps upstairs to see how I’m doing. We’ll be surrounded by half a dozen purring felines. Marc and I have kept ourselves busy rescuing neighborhood cats. Or, really, I rescue them and he pets them and gives them silly names, like Bill Due and Tom Morrow. His mobility isn’t what it used to be, although Marc has assured me he’ll be back to chasing tail soon enough.
Less than a quarter of the world has power or web access, but everyone who does will be tuned in tonight for the most watched public science experiment since the moon landing. I’m sure the comet cult will be watching next door, Elder Bent and his stepdaughters and Andropov, hoping the powder doesn’t work. They’ve got the end of the world penciled in for just a couple weeks from now. They’d hate to be wrong again.
Me, I’ve got my fingers crossed and a heart full of H-O-P-E, hope. The meteorologists predict that a big storm front will pass across the Rockies at the end of the week. If the Ali-Rubiyat formula works, it’ll be coming down cats and dogs. If it fails, it’ll be pins and needles instead.
If we do get real rain, I’ll run right out to dance in it. I’ll stomp in puddles like a little kid, all the rest of my days.
They say into every life a little rain must fall.
God, let it be so.
AFTERWORD
THESE STORIES WERE WRITTEN IN LONGHAND over the course of four years. I began the first of them, Snapshot—then titled Snapshot, 1988—in Portland, Oregon, in 2013, while I was on tour for NOS4A2. It came to fill two notebooks and the back of a placemat from one of those 1950s-themed diners. After the story was done, I put a rubber band around the notebooks and placemat, stuck the whole mess on a shelf, and more or less forgot it existed.
I completed my fourth novel, a very long book titled The Fireman, in the fall of 2014. I wrote The Fireman in longhand as well; it wound up occupying four and a half giant Leuchtturm1917 notebooks. That left half of a very large notebook untouched. I hate to see so much paper go to waste, so I used the remaining pages to write Aloft. At that point it occurred to me that I was working on a collection of short novels.
Most of my favorite stories as a reader come in at this length. Short novels are all killer, no filler. They offer the economy of the short story but the depth of characterization we associate with longer works. Little novels aren’t leisurely, meandering journeys. They’re drag races. You put the pedal to the floor and run your narrative right off the edge of the cliff. Live fast and leave a pretty corpse is a shitty objective for a human being but a pretty good plan for a story.
My favorite novel, True Grit, is just over two hundred pages long. Maybe the best novel published in this century, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, is six tightly constructed novellas, thematically laced together in an elegant cat’s cradle of story. Neil Gaiman’s most perfect novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, is not one sentence longer than it needs to be and came in at less than two hundred pages. Tales of horror and fantasy especially thrive at a length of about twenty-five thousand to seventy-five thousand words. Think of The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Jekyll and Hyde, most of R
ichard Matheson’s brief, sinewy novels, and Susan Hill’s (no relation) brilliant Woman in Black. You want to be able to read such stories in just one or two sittings. You want them to feel like a hand on your throat.
And for me, after writing a couple seven-hundred-page novels back-to-back, it felt particularly important to get lean and mean, if possible. Nothing against long novels. I love discovering a big, fantastic world to explore, to get lost in. But if epic-length works are all you ever write, you risk becoming the bore at the dinner party. As the deejay Chris Carter says, don’t overstay your welcome or you’ll never be welcome to stay over.
I think Rain arose from a desire to spoof myself and my own sprawling end-of-the-world novel, The Fireman. I’m a big believer in making fun of yourself before anyone else can. I wrote it in the early part of 2016, as the presidential race was heating up, and initially the president in my story was a fatigued, besieged, but basically competent woman. Also the tale had a much happier ending. After the election . . . things changed.
Loaded is the oldest story in the book, although I only got around to writing it in the fall of 2016. I've had that one in my head ever since the massacre of twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut. Loaded was my attempt to make sense out of our national hard-on for The Gun.
That said, my politics are my own. Lieutenant Myke Cole (U.S. Coast Guard, Ret.) read over Loaded and helped me get my facts right on the subjects of guns and military service. He isn’t on the hook for my fuckups, and you shouldn’t assume he in any way shares my agenda or point of view. Myke is more than capable of speaking for himself and does, in his novels, on his TV show Hunted, and on Twitter. That goes, too, for Russ Dorr, who also vetted Loaded for accuracy and provided me with first-rate research on the subject of law and disorder in Florida.
Each story in this collection was enriched with illustrations by a different artist. Snapshot features the art of Gabriel Rodriguez; Zach Howard armed Loaded with a pair of fine images; Charles Paul Wilson III graced Aloft with a couple of visuals; and the team of Renae De Liz and Ray Dillon delivered some crystalline eye candy for Rain. The book is a far more beautiful thing because of their craftsmanship and care.
HarperCollins produced a lovely audiobook of Strange Weather, employing the vocal gifts of four remarkable performers: Dennis Boutsikaris, Wil Wheaton, Stephen Lang, and Kate Mulgrew. My gratitude to them all—thank you for being my voice.
An earlier version of Snapshot appeared in a double issue of Cemetery Dance magazine. My thanks to Brian Freeman and Richard Chizmar for giving the story its first home and for treating it so well.
Quite a few people lent their talents and hard work to make Strange Weather look good. In the United States, they include my superstar of an editor Jennifer Brehl, Owen Corrigan, Andrea Molitor, Kelly Rudolph, Tavia Kowalchuk, Priyanka Krishnan, and Liate Stehlik. Maureen Sugden has done the copyediting in every single one of my books and has always made my prose much more direct and clear. Over in the UK, this book was loved and nurtured by editor Marcus Gipps, Craig Leyenaar, Jennifer McMenemy, Jennifer Breslin, Lauren Woosey, Jo Carpenter, Mark Stay, Hannah Methuen, Paul Stark, Paul Hussey, Jon Wood, and Kate Espiner.
My mother and father looked at each of these stories as they were written and offered their usual encouragement and editorial suggestions. My brother, the novelist Owen King, gave Strange Weather a read and offered several astute observations. Jill Bosa is a sweetheart for reading a late draft and correcting the sorts of goofs that slip in when you’ve lived with a thing for too long and can no longer see the glitches staring you right in the face. I’m grateful to my agent, Laurel Choate, for looking after this book from its earliest stages to final delivery, and to Sean Daily for representing Strange Weather on the film and television fronts. My gratitude to Dr. Derek Stern for his support, thoughts, and advice.
Finally: Thanks to my three sons for sharing the sunny days and the stormy ones alike. And my love to Gillian, who is the best of company and the best of friends, no matter what the weather.
Joe Hill
March 2017
Exeter, New Hampshire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOE HILL is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Fireman, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box and the prizewinning story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of a six-volume comic-book series, Locke & Key. He lives in New Hampshire.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
ALSO BY JOE HILL
The Fireman
NOS4A2
Horns
Heart-Shaped Box
20th Century Ghosts (story collection)
Graphic Novels
Locke & Key, Volumes 1–6 (with Gabriel Rodriguez)
Wraith (with Charles Paul Wilson III)
COPYRIGHT
Art credits:
Gabriel Rodriguez—Snapshot
Zach Howard—Loaded
Charles Paul Wilson III—Aloft
Renae De Liz—Rain
“Snapshot” first appeared in a different form as “Snapshot, 1988” in Cemetery Dance: The Magazine of Horror and Suspense, Issue #74/75, copyright © 2016 by Cemetery Dance Publications.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
STRANGE WEATHER. Copyright © 2017 by Joe Hill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
Cover design and illustration by Alan Dingman
EPub Edition October 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-266313-9
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ISBN 978-0-06-283702-8 (B&N Black Friday Signed Edition)
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