“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Celeste stalked toward him, shoved him none too gently aside, reached her arm up the vent, and grasped the can. She twisted her wrist sharply to the left and pulled the can out. “Here! Take the damned thing!”
Suddenly he didn’t want it so much. Her arm was skinny as a rail, and he figured that’s how she’d done it. “Naw,” he said, “you can have it.”
Normally she only drank diet colas, but the air was so hot and stifling she didn’t care to be choosy. She popped the tab and drank several cool swallows. “Thanks,” she said. “My throat was kinda dry.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. The water fountain’s not workin’, either.” He nodded toward it, and when he did he caught a strange scent: like cinnamon, or some kind of fragrant spice. He realized a second later that it must be coming from Celeste Preston, maybe the scent of her shampoo or soap. Then the aroma drifted away, and he could smell his own sweaty self again. He wished he’d put on some more of his Brut deodorant, because it was wearing off fast.
“You’ve got blood on your face,” she said.
“Huh? Yeah, reckon I do. Glass cut me.” He shrugged. “Don’t matter none.” His nose searched for another sniff of cinnamon.
Just like a man! Celeste thought as she finished off the drink. Damn fools get cut and bleed like stuck pigs, and they pretend they don’t even notice it! Wint was the same way, slashed his hand open on barbed wire once and acted like he’d gotten a splinter in his finger, tryin’ to be tough. Probably wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Wint and Vance, if you could shave about fifty pounds of fat off him.
She jerked herself back to reality. Either the heat was getting to her, or it was the smoke in the air; she’d never felt an iota of compassion for Ed Vance, and she sure didn’t intend to start. She flung the can into a wastebasket and said stridently, “I want to know what the hell’s goin’ on around here, and I want to know now!”
Vance stopped sniffing. It wasn’t cinnamon, he decided; it was probably witch hazel. He went to his desk and got the patrol car’s keys.
“I’m talkin’ to you!” Celeste snapped.
“I’ve gotta go over to Danny Chaffin’s house and pick him up. My night deputies have vamoosed. You want to hear about it, you’ll have to go with me.” He was already on his way to the door.
“Don’t you walk out on me!”
He paused. “I’ve gotta lock up. You comin’, or not?”
Her idea of hell was to be in that patrol car with Vance’s blubber shaking behind the wheel, but she saw she’d have to endure it. “I’m comin’,” she said through gritted teeth, and followed him out.
24
Act of God
“LORD HAVE MERCY!” DODGE Creech peered out a cracked window at the pyramid. He was still wearing his yellow-and-blue-plaid sport coat, his red lick of hair damp with sweat and glued to his sparkling scalp. “Ginger, I’m tellin’ you: if that thing had come down two hundred yards more north, we’d be laying in our graves right now. How in hell am I gonna explain this to Mr. Brasswell?”
Ginger Creech thought about it. She was sitting in a rocking chair across the pine-paneled living room, wearing her plain blue robe, her feet in Dearfoam slippers and pink curlers in her graying hair. Her brow furrowed. “Act of God,” she decided. “That’s what you’ll tell him.”
“Act of God,” he repeated, trying it out. “No, he won’t buy that! Anyway, if it was a meteor or somethin’ that fell without a mind to it, then it would be an act of God. If it’s somethin’ that’s got a mind, you can’t call it an act of God.” Harv Brasswell was Creech’s supervisor, based in Dallas, and he had a powerfully tight fist when it came to damage claims.
“You sayin’ God doesn’t have a mind?” she inquired, her rocking coming to a halt.
“No, ’course not! It’s just that an act of God has to be like a storm, or a drought, or somethin’ only God could cause.” That still sounded lame, and he didn’t want to stir Ginger up; she was a PTL, Ernest Angsley, Kenneth Copeland, and Jimmy Swaggart fanatic. “I don’t think God had anythin’ to do with this.”
The squeaking of her chair continued. The room was illuminated by three oil-burning lanterns that had been hung from the wagon-wheel light fixture at the ceiling. A couple of candles burned atop the television set. Bookshelves were packed with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, stacks of National Geographics, insurance law and motivational salesmanship books, as well as Ginger’s collection of religious tomes.
“I’ll bet that thing threw every house in town off its foundations,” Dodge fretted. “I swear, ninety percent of the windows must be broken. Streets all cracked too. I never believed in spaceships before, but by God if that’s not one, I don’t know what is!”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Ginger said, rocking harder. “No such thing as spaceships.”
“Well, it sure ain’t the Big Rock Candy Mountain out there! Lord, what a mess!” He rubbed the cool glass of iced tea he was holding across his forehead. The refrigerator had quit along with the power, of course, but the freezer unit still held a few trays of cubes. In this heat, though, they weren’t going to last very long. “That Colonel Rhodes is havin’ a meetin’ with the sheriff and Mayor Brett. Didn’t ask me, though. Guess I’m not important enough, huh? I can sell everybody in town their insurance and wait on ’em hand and foot, but I’m not important enough. There’s thanks for you!”
“The meek shall inherit the earth,” Ginger said, and he frowned because he didn’t know what she was talking about and he didn’t think she knew, either.
“I’m not meek!” he told her. She just kept rocking. He heard the deep, rhythmic tolling of the bell at the Sacrifice of Christ Catholic Church across the river, calling the parishioners. “Sounds like LaPrado’s openin’ up for business. Guess Reverend Jennings will too. It’s gonna take more than church bells to keep folks—”
There was another sound, one that stopped him midsentence.
It was a sharp, cracking noise: bricks being wrenched apart.
Under my feet, Dodge Creech thought. Sounds like the basement floor’s rippin’ to—
“What’s that noise?” Ginger cried out, standing up. The rocking chair creaked on without her.
The wooden floor trembled.
Dodge looked at his wife. Her eyes were glassy and wide, her mouth open in a straining O. Above their heads the wagon-wheel fixture shook, the oil lamps beginning to swing.
Dodge said, “I … think we’re havin’ an earthqu—”
The floor heaved upward, as if something huge had battered it from below. Nails leapt loose, glittering in the lamplight. Ginger staggered backward and fell, shrieking as Dodge toppled to his knees.
She saw the floor split open underneath him with a scream of tortured wood, and her husband’s body dropped into the seam up to his neck. Dust billowed around him and filled the room, but she could still see his face: chalky pale, eyes holes of shock. He was looking at her as she crawled away from the collapsing floor on her back.
“Somethin’s got me,” he said, and his voice was a thin, awful whine. “Help me, Ginger. Please …” He lifted his hand out of the hole for her, and what looked like gray snot was drooling from his fingers.
Ginger wailed, curlers dangling from her hair.
And then Dodge was gone, down the hole in the living-room floor. The house shook again, the walls moaning as if in pain at giving up their master. Plaster dust welled through cracks in the pinewood like ghost breath—and then there was silence but for the creakings of the rocking chair and the wagon-wheel fixture. One of the lamps had fallen and lay unbroken on the round red throw rug.
Ginger Creech whispered, “Dodge?” She was shaking, tears running down her face and her bladder about to pop. Shouted it: “Dodge!”
There was no answer, just the chuckling of water down below, running from a broken pipe. The water soon ran out, and the chuckling ceased.
Ginger pushed herself toward t
he hole, her muscles sluggish as cold rubber bands. She had to look down it—did not want to, must not, should not—but she had to, because it had taken her husband. She reached the jagged edge and her stomach threatened eruption, so she had to squeeze her eyes shut and ride it out. The sickness passed, and she looked over into the hole.
Just dark.
She reached out for the oil lamp and turned up the wick. The flame guttered and rose to a knifelike orange point. She thrust the lamp down into the hole, her other hand gripping the splintered edge with white-knuckled fingers.
Yellow dust sifted and stirred in small, cyclonic whorls. She was peering down into the basement eight feet below; and in the basement floor was another hole that looked—yes, she thought, oh Jesus son of God Holy Christ yes—gnawed through the concrete bricks. Beneath the basement floor lay more darkness.
“Dodge?” she whispered, and it echoed Dodge? Dodge? Dodge? Her fingers spasmed; she lost the oil lamp, and it fell through the hole in the basement floor, kept falling, maybe ten or twenty more feet, finally shattered against red Texas dirt and the flames gouted as the rest of the oil caught. Down in that hole, Ginger could see the glimmering of ooze where something had dragged her husband to hell.
Her senses left her altogether, and she lay trembling on the warped floor, her body drawn up in a tight fetal position. She decided to recite the Twenty-third Psalm seven times, because seven seemed like a holy number and if she recited loud enough and wished hard enough she would lift her head and see Dodge sitting in his easychair across the room, reading one of his motivational salesmanship books, and the TV set would be tuned to PTL and the thing that could not possibly be a spaceship would be gone. She began to recite, but she almost gagged with terror; she’d forgotten the words.
A church bell was ringing.
It must be Sunday, she thought. Sunday morning, bright and new. She sat up, listening to the bell. What was that violet glow coming through the window? Where was Dodge, and why was that hole—
She had always loved the sound of a church bell, summoning her to worship. It was time to go now, and Dodge could come along later. And if he wore that red suit today, she’d skin him, just skin him alive. She stood up, her eyes empty and tear tracks glistening through the dust on her face. She left the house, walked out of her Dearfoams, and kept going barefoot along Brazos Street.
25
Sarge’s Best Friend
“DON’T YOU BE SCARED now, Scooter. I’m not gonna let anythin’ bad happen to you, no siree!” Sarge Dennison patted Scooter’s head, and the invisible animal curled up against his leg. “Don’t you worry. Ol’ Sarge’ll protect you.” He was sitting on the edge of the bandstand in the middle of Preston Park, and had just witnessed the helicopter take off with the pilot and two men aboard. The aircraft reached a height of sixty feet and zoomed to the east, the chatter of its rotors rapidly fading.
Sarge watched it go, until its blinking lights were lost to sight. The bell of the Catholic church across the river was tolling, and a few people stood out on Celeste Street and Cobre Road, looking at the black pyramid and talking, but most had retreated to their homes. He observed the column of violet light, rotating slowly around and around; it reminded him, more than anything, of a barbershop pole. The top of the purple grid was lost in motionless clouds of ebony smoke, and the air smelled burnt. It was a smell he didn’t like, because it made dark things in his mind start to move again.
Scooter whimpered. “Uh-uh, don’t you cry.” Sarge’s voice was soothing, his fingers gentle as they stroked the air. “I’m not leavin’ you.”
There was a movement beneath him, and suddenly he was looking down at a little girl’s face, washed with violet light, her auburn hair full of dust. She had poked her head out from the small crawlspace underneath the bandstand, and now watched him with eyes full of puzzlement.
“Howdy,” Sarge said. He recognized the child. “You’re Mr. Hammond’s daughter. Stevie.”
She said nothing.
“You know me, don’t you? Sarge Dennison? Your mama brought you to school one afternoon. Remember?”
“No,” Daufin said tentatively, ready to draw herself back into the protection of the shell she’d found.
“Well, I surely do. Guess it was last year, though. How old are you now?”
Daufin pondered. “Old,” she said.
She’s got a funny voice, he thought. Kinda raspy, or whispery, or somethin’. Sounds like she could use a cough drop. “What’re you doin’ under there?” Again, no answer. “Why don’t you come on up and say hello to Scooter? I ’member he liked you.”
She hesitated. This creature didn’t seem threatening, and there was a pleasant … what was it termed? A pleasant smile on his cliff of features. Wasn’t that a symbol of nonaggression? And she was curious as well; she’d seen him approach, heard him sit on the surface above her head. He’d been solitary; why was it, then, that he was communicating with an entity he kept referring to as Scooter?
Daufin crawled out. Sarge saw that her clothes were covered with dust, her hands and arms dirty, her sneaker laces untied and dragging. “Your mama’s gonna tan your hide!” he told her. “You’re a walkin’ dustball!”
“I thought I was a daugh-ter,” Daufin said, newly puzzled.
“Well … yeah, you are. I just meant … aw, forget it.” He touched the whitewashed plank at his side. “Take a seat.”
Daufin didn’t fully understand what he meant, since she saw no chair, bench, or stool for the purpose of resting the rump of the human body, so she simply decided he was inviting her to imitate his position. She started to sit down.
“Hold it! Don’t sit on Scooter!”
“Scoot-er?” she inquired.
“Sure! He’s right here! Scooter, move your butt and give the little girl room. You ’member her, don’t you? Stevie Hammond?”
Daufin tracked Sarge’s line of sight, saw he was talking to what she perceived as empty space.
“There y’go,” Sarge said. “He’s moved now.”
“I pre-fer to …” What was the term? “To take the up-right po-si-tion.”
“Huh?” Sarge frowned. “What kinda talk is that?”
“Web-ster,” came the reply.
Sarge laughed, scratched his head. His fingers made a grainy noise in the stubble of his hair. “You’re a card, Stevie!” She watched the fingers move across his skull, then she plucked up a bit of her own hair and examined the difference. Whatever these life forms called human beings were composed of, they certainly had very few common characteristics. “So why are you hidin’ under the bandstand?” Sarge asked, his right hand rubbing Scooter’s muzzle; Daufin’s eyes followed the wavelike movements. He took her silence as sullen. “Oh. Did’ja run away from home?”
No reply.
He went on. “Ain’t much to run to when you run away from home around here, is there? Bet your folks are kinda worried about you, huh? ’Specially with that big booger sittin’ over there?”
Daufin gave the towering object a quick, cold glance, and a shudder passed through her host body. “Is that what you call it?” she asked. “A big …” This term was not in Webster language. “Boo-ger?”
“Sure is, ain’t it?” He grunted, shook his head. “Never seen the like. Scooter ain’t either. You could just about put the whole town inside that thing and still have room left over, I’ll bet.”
“Why would you?” she asked him.
“Why would I what?”
She was patient, sensing that she was dealing with a life form with minimal capabilities. “Why would you want to put the whole town in-side that big boo-ger?”
“I didn’t mean really. I just meant … y’know, for instance.” He regarded the skygrid. “I saw a plane hit up there and blow—boom!—just like that and gone. Sittin’ on my porch, I saw it happen. Talkin’ to the reverend a little while ago. The reverend says it’s like a glass bowl turned upside down over Inferno. Says nothin’ can get in, and nothin’ can get ou
t. Says it’s somethin’ from …” He motioned with a wave of his hand toward the night. “Out there, a long ways off.” His hand reached back to touch Scooter. “But me and Scooter’ll make out all right. Yessir. We’ve been together a long time. We’ll make out all right.”
De-lu-sion, she thought. A persistent belief in something false (opposite of true) typical of some mental (of or relating to the mind) disorders. “What is Scoot-er?” she asked.
He looked up at her, as if startled by the question. His mouth opened; for a few seconds his face seemed to sag on the bones, and his eyes glazed over. He stayed that way as she waited for an answer. Finally: “My friend,” he said. “My best friend.”
There was a growl, a noise of a kind Daufin had never experienced before. It seemed to gain volume, a harsh rolling and tumbling of tones that she could feel at her very center.
“You must be hungry.” Sarge’s eyes had cleared. He was smiling again. “Your stomach’s talkin’.”
“My … sto-mach?” This was a new and astounding revelation. “What mes-sage does it send?”
“You need food, that’s what! You sure talk funny! Don’t she, Scooter?” He stood up. “Better get on home now. Your folks’ll be huntin’ you.”
“Home,” Daufin repeated. That concept was clear. “My home is …” She searched the sky. The grid and the smoke clouds blocked off her reference points, and she could not see the star corridor. “Out there, a long way off.” She mimicked his gesture, because it seemed an appropriate way to demonstrate great distance.
“Aw, you’re joshin’ me now!” he chided her. “Your house is just up the street. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”
His intention was to escort her back to the box where Stevie, Jessie, Tom, and Ray dwelled, she realized. There was no reason to hide anymore; there was no exiting this planet. The next move was not hers. She stood up on stalks that still felt gangly and precarious, and began to follow this creature across a fantasy landscape. Nothing in her deepest dreams had prepared her for the sights on this planet: rows of insanely built boxes brooding on either side of a flat, brutally hard surface; towering, ugly-hued growths studded with fearsome-looking daggers; the people’s means of conveyance smaller boxes that jarred along the hard surfaces with sickening gravitational pressures and made noises like the destruction of worlds. She knew the terms—houses, cactus, automobiles—from that nightmarish collection called Britannica, but absorbing the written descriptions and flat images was far less disturbing than the realities. As they walked along and Daufin struggled with gravity, she heard the Sarge Dennison creature talking: “Come on, Scooter! Don’t run off and get all dirty, now! No, I ain’t gonna throw you a stick!” She wondered if there was a dimension here of which she was unaware—another world, hidden beyond the one she saw. Oh, there was much here to study and contemplate, but there was no time.