Strange Weather: Four Short Novels

“Whoa, Mom, it’s really blowing,” she said.

Lanternglass rotated in her office chair for a look. For a moment they all stopped what they were doing and stood still to stare through the windows. Fog roiled and foamed on the other side of the glass, all but obscuring the parking lot below. The wind roared, rushing the cloud along, the smoke a poisonous shade of yellow. Sparks whirled. For the first time, Aisha Lanternglass wondered if it had been a good idea to bring her daughter along with her to the office, if there was a chance of the flames overwhelming the fire department and reaching the building while they were still in it. But no, that was ridiculous. They didn’t even have to be out of the facility until tomorrow morning. The Park Service would not have allowed them so much time to evacuate if there was any real danger. Besides, people were still arriving to help with the move. Down in the lot, she dimly saw a bright red Prius turning in off the highway. Then the smoke thickened and she lost sight of it.

“Come on,” Lanternglass said. “Finish up, honey. I just need to do this, and we can go.”

She began to type again, new title: A SINGLE BULLET CHANGES EVERYTHING. There, that had plenty of zing. Anyone who read that would just have to go on to the next line. Whatever the next line was going to be. Lanternglass would find her way to it in a moment. She narrowed her eyes, squinting at the screen, like a shooter taking aim.

“What the fuck?” said the sportswriter in a strangely shrill voice. He was standing in the doorway leading to the stairwell, ready to slow-walk the dolly down the steps. Lanternglass heard him but did not look over, was deep in her story space, forming the next sentence in her mind.

She did not look until the AR-15 went off with one flat, deafening crack, and then another, and then a third. She glanced around in time to see the sportswriter’s head snap back, blood scattering in a fine spray across the particleboard ceiling above and behind him. He fell backward, bringing the iron dolly down on top of him, boxes sliding out from under the bungee cables holding them in place and crashing to the floor.

Kellaway stepped in and over the body, the Bushmaster just above the level of his hip, the strap thrown over his shoulder. Big man in a dove-colored polo already stained with blood. Shane Wolff, in the far corner of the room, rose to his full height, holding several loops of Ethernet cable. He lifted his free hand, palm out.

“Hey, whatever you want—” he said, and Kellaway shot him in the stomach and the chest, driving him back into the window behind him. Shane’s shoulders hit the glass hard enough to put a pair of spiderweb cracks in it.

Lanternglass shoved her chair back with her rear and dropped to one knee. Dorothy had stood up to see what was happening, but Lanternglass grabbed her wrist and pulled, hard, and the girl dropped to her knees. Lanternglass put her arms around her daughter and dragged her in under the desk.

The Bushmaster went off with more of those flat, hard reports. That would be the sound of Kellaway killing Julia, the intern. From her position in the footwell under her desk, Lanternglass could see the windows overlooking the parking lot and a bit of Tim Chen’s private office through the wide panel of glass that served as one wall. Tim stood behind his desk, staring out into the office pool with bewildered eyes.

Beyond the windows the smoke boiled and rushed, driven by the wind. Another spinning wheel of sparks blew past. Dorothy shuddered, and Lanternglass held her daughter’s head to her breast and pressed her mouth to her daughter’s hair. She breathed in the deep smell of her child’s scalp, of Dorothy’s coconut-crème shampoo. The child’s wiry arms were around her mother’s waist. And Lanternglass thought, Don’t let him have seen us. Please, God, don’t let him have seen us. Please, God, let this child live.

Tim Chen disappeared from Lanternglass’s view, moving toward the door of his office. He had picked up a marble bookend, a block of pink-and-white stone, the only thing he could find to fight with. Lanternglass heard him shout, an inarticulate cry of horror and rage, and the Bushmaster went off again, chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk, not eight feet away, just the other side of her desk. Tim Chen fell so hard the floor shook.

Her ears rang strangely. She had never held her daughter so tightly, could not have squeezed her any harder without breaking something. Lanternglass took the tiniest sip of air, was afraid that if she inhaled too deeply, Kellaway would hear. But then maybe he would not be able to hear anything after firing so many shots. Maybe after all that gunfire, he would be deaf to the small sounds of a shaking girl and a quietly gasping mother.

The wind roared, rising and rising in volume. Lanternglass stared out through the windows, into the smoke, and with a kind of horrified wonder saw a twisting rope of flame, three hundred feet tall, out in the murk: an incendiary top whirling down the middle of the highway. A slender tornado of fire, reaching up into the suffocating white sky and disappearing. If it turned toward the building, perhaps it would strike, and tear apart the bricks, and carry her daughter, Dorothy, away to some golden, burning, terrible yet wonderful Oz. Maybe it would carry them both away. At the sight of it, Aisha Lanternglass’s chest filled with an awe that was like breath, swelling her lungs, swelling her heart. The beauty of the world and the horror of the world were twined together, like wind and flame. The smoke rose, filthy and dark, and pressed against the glass, and then subsided, and suddenly that blazing, twisting stairwell into the clouds was gone.

One combat boot appeared, coming down in front of their hiding place in the footwell beneath the desk. Dorothy’s eyes were squeezed shut. She didn’t see. Lanternglass stared out over her daughter’s head, holding her breath. The other boot appeared. He was standing right in front of the desk.

Slowly, slowly, Kellaway bent down to look in at them. Holding the butt of the Bushmaster under his right armpit. He stared upon Lanternglass and her little girl with something very like serenity in his pale blue, almost white eyes.

“Just think. If you had a gun,” he said to her, “this story might have a different ending.”





ALOFT





1


HE HATED IT IN THE back of the little plane, squished in with the others. He hated the reek of gasoline and moldy canvas and his own rancid farts, and by the time they reached six thousand feet, Aubrey Griffin decided he couldn’t go.

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