Unnatural Disasters

  The plasma ate them all and surged.

  • • •

  The last human beings on the planet got involved an hour later. Assembled in a lab at the South Pole were scientists from the US, Brazil, France and Germany.

  “So what is it doing now?” the Brazilian asked.

  “Still growing,” the head scientist answered. “And still feeding.” He was white as a sheet and trembling.

  “Is there anybody left?” someone whispered.

  “I doubt it,” the Frenchman said. “The last we heard it had covered the rest of the planet and was heading south fast.”

  “We only have one option,” the head scientist said. “We keep quiet, and hope it passes.”

  The crazed fluting of Rickman’s plasma filled the air.

  The scientists sat in silence, barely breathing.

  Their generator kicked in noisily.

  The plasma surged.

  TWIST

  * * *

  DANIEL PYLE

  Del poked at the rubble with a length of twisted metal that might once have been a sign post or part of a barbed-wire fence. For all he knew, it had come from a hundred miles away. He’d found it in the shredded ruins of what had once been the master bedroom.

  He sifted through a mound of sheetrock, found a microwave door and a plunger. He overturned a splintered end table and uncovered a nest of torn magazines and paperback books. To the east, between him and the sun, a single jag of wall with a stump of chimney jutted into the sky, casting a shadow across the debris and piles of ruined possessions. He stayed clear of it, afraid it might fall at any second, though part of him wanted to go sit beneath it and wait for it to come crashing down on his head and end this nightmare.

  He surveyed the surrounding countryside. There were no neighbors within sight, but there were plenty of uprooted trees and windblown bits of garbage. The tornado had left a mile-wide scar through the region, had destroyed hundreds of homes and millions of dollars worth of property, but out here in the middle of nowhere, it was hard to remember that the twister hadn’t targeted his home specifically, come down from the heavens with the sole purpose of spinning his world away.

  When Jackson slapped his catcher’s mitt of a hand on Del’s shoulder, Del jumped and nearly shrieked.

  “Sorry,” Jackson said. And Del knew he was apologizing for more than just startling him. I’m sorry about your house, he was saying. And your things. And your family, of course.

  Del waved the word away half-heartedly but couldn’t bring himself to look the big man in the face.

  “We’ll find them,” Jackson said. “I truly believe that.”

  Del nodded, tried to respond, and couldn’t find the words. He spun the band on his left ring finger and focused every bit of his energy on not breaking down.

  What Jackson hadn’t said, what neither of them could bring themselves to say out loud, was that if they did find them, it would probably be in a field somewhere between here and Missouri, pulled apart by the twister, dead.

  A lump formed in his throat. He turned away from his friend and let out a single, loud sob. He felt a fresh wave of tears coming and could do nothing to stop it, so he sat down on the remains of a closet door and let himself cry. Jackson sat beside him, wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and said nothing.

  When Del had cried himself dry (not for the first time that day, and probably not for the last), he wiped his face on the crook of his arm and stood. Jackson, also standing, clapped him on the back, and Del gave him a trembling half-smile.

  Jackson’s house and family had come through the storm relatively unscathed. They’d lost a couple of tree limbs and a few shingles off their roof. Nothing more. Del wanted to hate the man, curse his good fortune, but it was hard to hate someone who’d stayed up all night helping you dig through the disaster that had once been your home, and you could hardly blame a guy for being lucky. Hell, half the town and surrounding farmland looked like it had never been within a million miles of a tornado.

  Del went back to searching, looking for anything worth finding, anything that had made it through, telling himself he wasn’t looking for body parts, convincing himself that his wife and kids had made it out in time, had driven to a neighbor’s when they heard the sirens, someone with a storm shelter, someone with safety.

  But if that were true, where were they now? Why hadn’t they come home (if you could call it home)? Why wasn’t he holding them in his arms?

  He’d tried to call Jen’s cell a hundred times, had tried for hours straight. But the calls never went through. Every circuit in the area was overloaded. Thousands of people looking for loved ones, wanting to check in or volunteer to help. Thousands more just wanting to know what had happened. Telephone gawkers. Del doubted you’d be able to make a reliable phone call for many days to come. Maybe weeks.

  He imagined his family huddled together in a basement or a storm shelter somewhere. Jen with her arms wrapped around their daughters. Dani, a six-year-old doll with eyes and hair almost the exact same shade of golden brown. Lucy, two years younger, blonde and rosy cheeked and equally beautiful. He wondered if they’d gotten trapped, stuck beneath a relocated barn or a blown-over tree. Maybe they were digging their way out right now. Or trying to.

  Maybe.

  He kicked over a cracked toilet. Water spilled out of the overturned tank and onto a strip of wood that might have been roof decking or a chunk of cheap cabinetry.

  He turned back into the rubble. Half the items he came across had never belonged to his family. He found papers and receipts from counties away, bits of toys and lawn furniture that could have come from anywhere. He supposed there were other people looking at similar messes, maybe picking up bits and pieces of Del’s worldly goods, wondering briefly where they’d come from before tossing them back among the detritus.

  “I should have been here,” Del said.

  Jackson sat on an exposed section of foundation, drinking from one of the two bottles of Gatorade they’d brought with them. “What?”

  “If I’d been here, maybe—”

  “Come on, man,” Jackson said and stood up. “Don’t waste your energy thinking that kind of shit. If you’d been here, you’d be d…you’d be missing too.” He capped his Gatorade and put it down on the foundation next to Del’s.

  Del didn’t have to ask what word Jackson had almost said. Dead. That’s what he’d been thinking, what he was no doubt thinking still. If Del had been here, he’d be dead. Just like the hundreds of others sucked into the sky.

  Del thought about the suitcase in Jackson’s guest bedroom, the one with the airline tags still fastened around the handle. He’d only been gone for the weekend. There were two changes of clothes in that bag, a few toiletries, a pair of stuffed tigers he’d brought back for the girls, and an iPad. As he moved through the surrounding heaps, he tried not to consider that those few items might be all he had left in the world.

  “Hey!” Jackson said and waved his arms. “Over here! I hear something moving.”

  His heart thumped. “What is it?”

  Jackson flipped over a twisted sheet of plastic and glass that Del realized had once been their television. Jackson stared down into the junk and rubbed his eyes. “What in the world is this?”

  Del frowned and waded toward his friend.

  The once-television had been covering a deep depression in the ruins, a hollow the size of

  (a little girl’s bed)

  a coffee table. At the bottom of this indention lay something Del first mistook for a ratty blue bath towel.

  “I don’t—”

  The towel moved. It separated into three segments, and then one of the pieces opened its eyes and looked up at them.

  “Jesus Christ!” Jackson fell back on his ass.

  Although Del managed to stay on his feet, he took a giant step away from the pit.

  What the hell?

  The thing (things?) in the rubble mewled. The sound reminded him of a cat. But more chitt
ery. Like a parrot imitating a cat.

  Del forced himself to take a deep breath and stepped back toward the hole.

  “What is it?” Jackson asked, still sitting on his butt, a sheaf of waterlogged papers beneath him.

  Del stared into the cavity.

  There were three of the things. About the size of kittens. Their fur looked blue, but Del thought the color might be a reflection of the sky, that the things’ fur might actually be clear, or at least very pale white.

  Reflective fur? Was that possible?

  They had flat faces and big, buggy eyes.

  “I have no idea what they are,” Del said. “But there are three of them.”

  One of the three lay very still. Del could see its left eye, glossy and bulging.

  “I think one of them is dead.”

  Jackson pushed himself up, almost falling again when the papers shifted beneath him. He moved beside Del and craned his neck.

  “Are they cats?”

  “I don’t think so,” Del said. “At least not any kinds of cats I’ve ever seen.”

  The things had no visible ears, and when one of them rolled onto its side, it revealed a row of thin legs protruding from its belly. Dozens of them. Like caterpillar legs. The creature thrashed and flipped on its back. Long loops of bright-red guts spilled out of a wound on its belly. It flailed its legs, grabbing at the innards with tiny, almost invisible fingers at the end of each limb.

  “That one’s hurt bad,” Jackson said.

  Del nodded. He wanted to turn away before he puked, but he couldn’t make himself stop watching.

  Jackson stepped away from the hole. Del listened to him rummage through the debris but never took his eyes off the creatures. When Jackson came back, he was holding a tattered plastic shower curtain.

  “This was all I could find.”

  “For what?”

  Jackson gestured toward the animals. “Whatever that thing is, it’s in some serious pain.”

  As if to confirm this, the creature cried out again. A long, reverberating wail.

  Del finally shifted his attention fully away from the creatures. He eyed Jackson and the wadded curtain. “You want to kill it?”

  Jackson huffed. “I don’t want to, but it’s the right thing to do, don’t you think? Put it out of its misery?”

  Del turned back to the creature. More of its intestines had fallen out. For every loop it pulled back into its body, two more spilled onto the surrounding debris.

  “You’re right,” Del said and held out his hand.

  Jackson didn’t hand him the curtain. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll do it. You shouldn’t—”

  “No. I’ll do it. It’s my house. Or what’s left of it. Give me the curtain.” He waggled his fingers.

  Jackson handed the curtain over, and Del spread it out flat on the ground beside the hole. He grabbed the still creature first. When he lifted it, its head flopped bonelessly to the side. Dead for sure. It didn’t stink yet and hadn’t stiffened, so Del guessed it probably hadn’t been dead long. He wondered where it had come from, how long the storm had whipped it around before depositing it on his property.

  When his shadow fell over the dead creature, it lost its blue hue. Its fur was a pale, milky white. Del could see a Picassoesque reflection of his face in the matted hide.

  He found an unripped section of shower curtain and laid the creature on it.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  He reached back into the depression for the gutted creature. It grabbed his hand when he tried to pick it up, and he almost pulled back, but its limbs and fingers were soft, almost whiskery. It didn’t seem to have either the ability or the desire to hurt him. Still, he kept his fingers away from its mouth. You never knew what an injured animal might do. Especially if the animal happened to be a mysterious, cryptozoological non-animal with no business anywhere outside a Ray Bradbury story.

  When he pulled the thing out of the hole, its guts spilled out onto his hand and wrist. The bloody coils were warm, sticky. Del placed the second creature beside the first, brushed the innards off his hand and into a pile between the animals.

  Jackson had moved around the hole to study the creatures.

  “This is some weird-ass shit,” he said. “You ever seen anything like this?”

  Del shook his head.

  “They’re like aliens or something. You think they could be aliens?”

  “I doubt it,” Del said. “Probably just mutations.”

  “Mutated from what?”

  Del shrugged and turned back to the hole.

  At first, he thought the third creature might be okay. It didn’t have any obvious wounds anyway. But when he tried to lift it out of the hole, he realized it was buried halfway in the rubble, and when he dug the debris out from around it, he found that it had been cut almost entirely in half by a triangular piece of corrugated metal. How it hadn’t already bled to death, Del had no idea. He figured pulling out the metal would probably kill the thing, but he didn’t see what choice he had. It was a goner either way, and leaving it there to suffer would have been even crueler.

  He grabbed the metal, tugged it free, and winced when the creature let loose a long, agonized screech. Blood spurted out of its halved body.

  “I’m sorry,” Del said again and quickly moved the thing from the hole to the shower curtain.

  “Fucking tornados,” Jackson said.

  Del nodded. He guessed that was as close to a eulogy as the creatures were going to get. He gathered up the edges of the curtain and formed a small sack. He squeezed out the air and then held the curtain shut as tightly as he could, so tight his fingers began to turn red and tremble.

  The curtain was clear but frosted; he could see the vague shapes of the animals inside but couldn’t make out their faces as he suffocated them.

  He was glad for that.

  He held the curtain shut for several minutes, long past the point when the creatures stopped moving. When Jackson told him that was probably good enough, he held it shut for another minute just to make sure. He counted to sixty in his head and then loosened his grip.

  “We should bury them,” Del said.

  “Later,” Jackson said. “Right now, we need—”

  “We should bury them,” Del repeated.

  Jackson pursed his lips and said okay.

  They used the bloodstained piece of corrugated metal to dig a shallow grave beneath a tree at the far end of the property. Del lowered the whole bundle—shower curtain and all—into the hole and pushed dirt on top with his bare hands.

  “All right,” Jackson said. “Back to it.” His eyes were bloodshot and the skin beneath bagged. Del didn’t wear a watch, and he couldn’t check the time on his cell because he’d killed the battery trying to call Jen, but he guessed it must be at least nine in the morning. If that was true, it meant the two of them had been awake for over twenty-four hours.

  “No,” Del said. “You need to go home and sleep.”

  “Fuck that. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Del said, “I appreciate that, but you’ve got to get some rest.”

  “What about you? I’m not leaving you here.” He crossed his massive arms over his chest, but Del could see the conflicting emotions in his face: the desire to stay here and help, be a dutiful friend, and the need to go home and catch a few winks before he used up the last of his energy and dropped on the spot.

  “I can’t leave,” Del said. “If they come back and…” He shook his head. “I can’t leave.”

  “You need to sleep too.”

  Del wiped his dirty hands on the seat of his pants. “I know. I will.”

  “You’ll come back to the house before you collapse out here?”

  “Maybe,” Del said. “Or I might just lay down in the back of the car.”

  They’d driven out here separately, Jackson in his beat-to-hell pickup and Del in the rental sedan.

  “That’s not going to do you any good. You need some sleep i
n a real bed. Not to mention food and a shower.”

  Del put his hand on Jackson’s shoulder and led him away from the tiny grave. “I know,” he said as they walked, “but none of that matters right now.”

  “It might not seem like it does,” Jackson said, “but—”

  “Just give me until tonight, okay? Come back tonight and drag me back to the house or an all-you-can-eat buffet or wherever the hell you want, but I need some more time out here.”

  Jackson let out a long sigh. “Okay, man. If that’s what you want.”

  “It is.”

  They walked around the house, through less concentrated (though no less haphazard) piles of debris, and around a massive oak that had fallen across the driveway.

  Jackson had parked with his bumper less than a foot away from the trunk. He got into the pickup, started the engine, and rolled down his window.

  “Don’t let yourself go crazy out here,” he said. “If you’re not back to the house by dinner time, I’m coming back.”

  Del nodded. “I’m counting on it. And be careful yourself. Don’t fall asleep driving home.”

  “I’ll do my best.” He reached for the emergency brake and stopped. “Del?”

  Del waited.

  “We’re going to find them, okay?”

  Del tried to smile. “Thanks for coming out here with me. For being a friend.”

  Jackson nodded, put the truck in reverse, and backed down the driveway.

  • • •

  He’s found Lucy’s stuffed frog not long after Jackson left and had been carrying it around with him ever since. It was dirty and torn but otherwise okay. Del had found a few tufts of stuffing poking out through small holes and pushed them back in with his finger.

  He couldn’t remember where Lucy had gotten the thing, whether he and Jen or some other relative had bought it for her. He knew only that she loved it and slept with it every night. He wanted to give it to her when she got back, wanted to watch her face light up when he pulled it out from behind his back.

  He spent the next several hours looking for one of Dani’s toys, sifting and overturning and digging. It wouldn’t do to have something for one girl and not the other. Any daddy knew that. He found a plastic tiara and an illustrated copy of The Wizard of Oz they sometimes read at bedtime, but the tiara was broken and the book was split down the spine and missing the second half. It struck him later that the book would have been a ridiculously thoughtless gift anyway. He did finally find an old music box Dani kept on her dresser. He didn’t think it was one of her favorite things exactly, but it still worked, and he guessed it was better than nothing.