“I’ve got three males here in shiny silver dresses, claiming they were ambushed by the lady with you and her deranged boyfriend, Mr. X. I’m placing them all under arrest. If we can’t make the kidnapping charge stick, we can still get ’em for crimes against fashion. Pack it up and haul that flatbed down to Denver. I want to remind you to get off at Uptown Avenue and take the cargo to the Ice Centre. If there’s photos of what you’re carrying on CNN tonight, you’ll be lucky to wind up working as a crossing guard. That order is straight from the governor, y’hear, over?”
“Copy that,” Dillett said. I noticed neither of them ever used the word “corpse” on the radio.
Dillett and Teasdale spent a few minutes arranging a crinkly orange tarp over their harvest of the dead and strapping the bodies down with bungee cords. Then all of us climbed up into the cab of Dillett’s John Deere, the corpulent prisoner sitting in the middle. Dillett handcuffed one of Teasdale’s wrists to a steel bar under the dash.
Dillett’s John Deere was the size of a shed on wheels, and when I was up in the cab, I was a full nine feet off the road. This was no little family tractor. When he got it going, the engine roar was so loud I thought it might shake the teeth out of my gums.
“What’d you do?” I asked Teasdale.
“I cut my landlord’s head off with a hacksaw,” he said in a cheery voice. “It was self-defense, but you can’t find a jury anywhere that isn’t biased against people who struggle with their weight.”
“No,” I said. “I meant what happened to your foot?”
“Oh. I stepped on an eight-inch nail. Went right through the sole of my boot into my heel. Blame my extreme size. When there’s been unhappiness in my life, my obesity has usually been the cause.”
“Ouch! Eight inches? Are you messing with me?”
“No,” Dillett answered for him. “I took it out myself. It was about the size of a walrus tooth.”
“I didn’t know the nails could get that big.”
“She ain’t heard about Enid,” Teasdale said.
Dillett looked glum and nodded somberly.
“What about Enid?” I asked. “Enid, Oklahoma?”
Dillett said, “It’s gone. It poured spikes as big as carrots there. Killed people in their houses! Storm only lasted twenty minutes, and they’re saying over half the city’s population was wiped out. The storms are tearing their way east and getting worse as they go. The sparkle dust—the stuff that grows into crystals—is following the westerlies right across the nation.”
“We can’t say we weren’t warned,” Teasdale told us in a contented tone.
“When were we warned it might rain nails?” Dillett asked him. “Was that on the Weather Channel and I missed it?”
“It’s global climate change,” Teasdale said. “They’ve been talking about it for years. Al Gore. Bill Nye. We just didn’t want to listen to them.”
Dillett couldn’t have looked more stunned if Teasdale had opened his mouth and a dove flew out. “Climate change, my ass! This isn’t climate change!”
“Well, I don’t know what else you’d call it. It used to rain water. Now it’s raining blades of silver and gold. That is a change of climate.” Teasdale rubbed a thumb against his chin, then said, “Ghosts is next.”
“You think it’s going to rain ghosts?”
“I think we’ll have ghosts instead of fog. The mist will wear the faces of the departed, all those we had and lost.”
“You better hope for clear weather, then,” Dillett said. “If a fog made out of ghosts rolls in, your landlord might turn up wanting his back rent.”
“I count my blessings to live in a dry mountain climate,” Teasdale told me complacently. “I’ll face whatever blows in on the wind. It may come to blow gales of pure sadness instead of air and leave us all taking shelter from grief. Maybe time itself will begin to crest and drop instead of tem perature. We might have the nineteenth century for winter. For all we know, we might’ve already slipped into the future without noticing it.”
Dillett said, “Dream on, Teasdale. There aren’t going to be ghosts, and there aren’t going to be downpours of emotion either. We are dealing with chemical warfare, plain and simple. The Arabs who were behind 9/11 are behind this. Our president knew it was a mistake to ever even let ’em in here, because this is what happens. The NSA only just established that the company that invented hard-rain technology was financed with Arab money. They developed the science of it with American researchers, then brought the technology to their headquarters in old Persia. Congress is working on a declaration of war tonight. They think they unleashed a storm, they don’t know the half of it. The president has already promised to go nuclear. There might be some more strange weather coming after all! I doubt they’ve had much snow in I-ran, so a faceful of atomic fallout should be quite the refreshing experience for them!”
By then we had reached a cloverleaf of on-ramps and off-ramps at the outskirts of Denver. Dillett steered us off the turnpike and onto US-287. Off the thruway things were in bad shape. Cars had been shoved to the sides of the road, but the blacktop was covered in broken glass and shards of crystal. A Tastee-Freez was boiling a greasy cloud of black smoke, but no one was fighting the fire.
We spent another fifteen minutes thundering down to the Ice Centre at the Promenade, a big indoor rink surrounded by a few acres of asphalt. A dozen official-looking black cars were parked in the area around the loading docks, along with several ambulances, a jumble of police cruisers, a pair of big armored prisoner-transport vehicles, and a fleet of hearses. Dillett pulled up to a stainless-steel garage-type door. He turned the tractor and carefully reversed, until the flatbed was right up against the closed roller door.
“You’re sticking the dead here?” I asked, feeling queasy. Years before, when my parents were still together, they’d taken me to see Disney on Ice here.
“It’s one place to keep ’em cold,” Dillett said. He blatted his horn, and someone opened a regular-size door at the top of a loading dock.
It was another state trooper, a freckled redhead who looked like Archie from Riverdale. Dillett rolled down his window and yelled for him to open the garage door to the rink. The kid who looked like Archie shook his head and screamed something about a Zamboni, but it was hard to tell what he was yelling over the thresher roar of the tractor. They hollered back and forth like that, neither of them making any sense to the other, and finally Dillett opened the driver’s-side door and stepped onto the running board.
No sooner had he straightened up than Teasdale stuck out his left foot—his bandaged bad foot!—and kicked Dillett in the ass. Dillett waved his arms and looked foolish for a few seconds before spilling down to the blacktop.
Teasdale pulled the driver’s-side door shut and slid in behind the steering wheel. He put the tractor into gear. His handcuffed right hand couldn’t reach the steering wheel, but it was in the perfect place to handle the stick. The tractor began to rumble across the lot.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.
“I am making a bolt for freedom,” he said. “They won’t never come after me what with all that’s going on, and I have family in Canada.”
“Do you plan to drive there in this John Deere, hauling eighty dead bodies behind you?”