Part 25 (1/2)

”Is that lightning?” Taylor asked.

”I don't know.”

She grabbed my hand and started pulling me down the street, west, toward the center of town. It seemed like her anger was gone. For the moment at least, it had been preempted.

People were emerging from the buildings up and down the street. Dirty, ragged refugees, some rubbing their eyes as if just awakened from a solid sleep. They were all staring up at the sky. Mute. In shock. If they weren't in shock, I thought, if they were capable of reacting in an appropriate, rational way, there'd be screaming and panic. Chaos and prayers and violence. The sky was bleeding, after all. Up above our heads, the sky had fallen. And this ...

This was its b.l.o.o.d.y corpse.

”Dean!” Taylor called into my ear, startling my eyes back down to the street. She was pulling at my arm violently. I'd stopped without realizing it. ”We've got to find out what happened. We've got to find somebody who knows!” I got my legs moving once again, and we continued west. Toward the courthouse, I realized, toward Danny and the military.

We found Mama Ca.s.s at Post Street. She was sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the road, directly in front of her restaurant. Her customers stayed back on the sidewalk, but her old Jewish cook-Hershel, I thought, remembering his name-stood at her side, his hands tucked beneath a tomato-stained ap.r.o.n. She had a bottle of beer dangling from one hand as she stared up at the sky. There was a bemused look on her face.

Taylor was going to run straight past, but Mama Ca.s.s stopped us. ”Where do you think you're going?” she asked in an amused voice. ”Running to the military, maybe?” Taylor pulled to a stop and turned back toward Mama Ca.s.s, pure hatred burning in her eyes. Mama Ca.s.s was watching us with a sly grin. ”That won't get you very far, darling.” She sounded drunk. Or high. Or out of her f.u.c.king mind.

Taylor dropped my hand and looked down the length of the street, in the direction of the courthouse. For a moment, I thought she was going to sprint off without me.

”Your friends in the military have been driving, pell-mell, up and down the street.” She pointed along the cross street, first toward the hospital, then toward the courthouse. ”Their f.u.c.king Hummers-they almost ran me over. They don't know what's going on. They have no f.u.c.king clue. They think we're under attack. They think that that-” She waited for a handful of heartbeats until a fresh crack rang out in the sky. ”-is artillery fire. They think somebody's lobbing sh.e.l.ls at us.”

”It's got to be atmospheric,” Hershel said. For someone so old, his voice was surprisingly strong. ”Vapor in the air. Colliding fronts. The red-it's got to be refracted light bouncing off of something in the atmosphere.”

”Red sky at night,” Mama Ca.s.s recited, nodding, but the smile on her lips suggested that she thought Hershel's explanation was complete bulls.h.i.+t. ”Sailor's delight.” She raised her beer bottle to the sky, toasting the chaos, and took a long swallow.

Taylor looked back down the street.

”They're not going to help you,” Mama Ca.s.s said, not even looking in Taylor's direction. ”They don't know what's going on. They don't have any f.u.c.king idea. You might as well just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

She gestured toward my backpack. ”And you ... you might want to take some pictures,” she said. ”I'm sure your Internet fans would love to see what's going on.”

I spent a moment staring up at the bloodred sky, that violent, roiling sea above our heads. Then I shrugged off my backpack and followed her suggestion.

A piece of paper torn from a lined notebook. Undated. Hand-printed words:

(The piece of paper has been crumpled repeatedly. The left-hand side is a ragged tear, torn from a notebook binding. Large, shaky words cover the top part of the page-smeared pencil, inscribed by a palsied hand.

The paper is aged and well handled. It is no longer crisp; instead, it has been transformed into a fragile cloth, by folding and refolding, by damp and greasy fingertips.

Dingy and gray; smeared graphite. Sprinkled, dipped in water, then dried once again.

The words are barely legible. But they are legible.)

-there's nothing left in me, Taylor. Not anymore.

I'm sorry.

I failed you. I couldn't stop failing you.

The sky stayed red for about twenty minutes.

I had a hard time taking pictures of that sky. Without anything in the foreground, it looked like nothing but a red, fluid pattern, an abstract collage of crimson and pink and electric blood. Finally, I went wide-angle and focused on the eastern skyline, down the length of the street. It was a view of the city from the floor of a concrete valley, with the walls on either side reaching up (and bending out) before opening onto the wide red sky. I set the camera to burst mode and shot five frames a second until I caught a couple of frames with the lightning-or the artillery fire or whatever it was-above the left-hand line of buildings.

After I captured that shot, I sat down on the asphalt and pretended to stare up at the sky, taking my place alongside Taylor, Mama Ca.s.s, and Hershel. But really, I had the camera down in my lap, angled up at Mama Ca.s.s as she watched the heavens. There was a childlike wonder spread across her face, and I tried to capture that expression, that joyful, rapturous euphoria, with the bright sky s.h.i.+ning behind her. I was shooting blind, though, so I couldn't be sure if the autofocus was locked on her or on the buildings in the background. I didn't bother to check on the LCD screen, and after a minute, I just shut down the camera and tucked it back into my backpack.

The street was still eerily quiet. I knew that there were people on the sidewalk behind us-I'd seen them as Taylor and I had approached-but they didn't make a single sound.

I reached out and took Taylor's hand, gently, trying not to startle her. She looked down from the sky, first glancing at our joined hands and then looking up at my face. She was perplexed and overwhelmed; I could see that in her glazed eyes. I gave her a rea.s.suring smile, and she turned back toward the heavens.

She didn't drop my hand, at least. For that I was grateful.

The sky turned back to gray. The change from red to gray was slower than the change from gray to red. There was no earth-rending roar, no quick unnatural movement up in the atmosphere. The red just darkened gradually, and a new cloud front blew in from up north. It took a couple of minutes for the last of the red to disappear. Then it was just your typical overcast early-winter sky.

The reaction to this event, this return to normality, was surprisingly subdued. Mama Ca.s.s stood up and stretched lazily. She handed her empty beer bottle to Hershel, then folded up the lawn chair and tucked it under her arm. Back on the sidewalk, people looked down from the sky. They exchanged muted words and then walked away. I even saw one man yawn as if just getting up from a midafternoon nap.

It was over. Life-this parody of life here inside the city-could resume.

”Come back to the restaurant with me,” Mama Ca.s.s said, using her free hand to gesture toward the open storefront. She was smiling, relaxed. ”I'm thinking you two can help me out with something. A delivery.”

”What?” Taylor asked. She sounded genuinely offended. How could Mama Ca.s.s confuse their relations.h.i.+p so thoroughly? Why would she for one second think that Taylor would do anything to help her out?

”Don't play it that way, girl,” Mama Ca.s.s said. ”We're in this together, right?” She smiled. It was a staged, artificial smile, and it put the lie to her words. ”Besides,” she continued, ”if it bugs you so much, you can think of it as giving Terry a hand.”

”Terry?”

”Yeah ... Terry. Your mentor. I'm running some errands for him. I'm doing him a favor.” She spit out this last word-favor-giving it barbs. Suddenly, her drugged euphoria was gone, and she was wielding nothing but venom. ”I'm acting like an adult here, Taylor, and if you can't do the same, if you can't ditch that holier-than-thou bulls.h.i.+t, maybe you should just keep on running. Maybe you should get out of the way and leave the adult interactions to people who aren't complete f.u.c.king p.u.s.s.ies.”

Taylor's eyes widened with surprise, and her mouth fell open in a wordless gape. She didn't have a reply.

After a moment of silence, Mama Ca.s.s turned back toward me and smiled, once again picking up that relaxed, mellow att.i.tude. ”C'mon, Dean,” she said. ”I'll show you what I was thinking.” Then she headed toward her restaurant.

It was as if the red sky hadn't even happened.

There was laughter in Mama Ca.s.s's dining room. People had drifted back to their tables; they'd picked up their abandoned forks and resumed their interrupted meals. The laughter, the mindless chatter-it made me think that perhaps they'd picked up the same conversations, too. Hershel went on ahead, disappearing into the kitchen, while Mama Ca.s.s paused at a couple of tables to chat with her customers. Taylor and I stayed a couple of paces back. Taylor was stewing. Her arms were crossed, and her head was turned, refusing to even look in Mama Ca.s.s's direction.

After a couple of minutes, Mama Ca.s.s waved us toward the back of the dining room. She escorted us through the kitchen and into her office.