“Hey, Temp,” I said. “Your mom sees you outside, you won’t have to pretend you sleep in a coffin.”
Right on cue his mother shouted, “TEMPLETON BLAKE!” She had materialized on the front step of their pleasant, butter-colored ranch. “INSIDE! NOW! HONEYSUCKLE!” This last directed at me, like it was my fault he’d gone wandering. She was just about quivering—she did not take her son’s health lightly—and as it was, her concern for his well-being saved my life, too.
“I got him,” I said.
“We’ll get the chair inside,” Yolanda’s mother told me.
“Leave it. I’ll be right back,” I told them—the last thing I ever said to either of them.
I walked Templeton across the street. You could see that no one knew whether to go in or not. The thundercloud was a lone Everest of darkness in the immensity of the sky. Anyone could tell that it was going to pour hard for six minutes and then be clear and hot and nice again. But the next time the thunder boomed, a blue flashbulb of lightning popped off inside the cloud, and that got folks moving, sort of. Mr. Waldman, who had been reshingling, hung his hammer on his belt and started making his way down the pitch of his roof, toward his ladder. Martina was off the phone and on the porch with her folded lawn chair, peering with a mix of curiosity and excitement at the darkening sky. That’s where she was when Andropov slued in, driving his black Chrysler too fast, shrilling the brakes, and then jumping out and slamming the door behind him. She smirked at him while he came steaming across the little scrap of yard. He was so red in the face that it looked like someone had shown him a photograph of his mother having sex with a clown.
I nodded amiably to Ursula, who shook her head with a certain weary disapproval—it always distressed her whenever Templeton forgot to act like an invalid—and disappeared back inside. I led Templeton to the garage, scooped him up, and sat him on the stool at his father’s workbench. The father was gone—had died when he got himself drunk and drove off the road and into Sunshine Canyon—but he’d left behind a manual typewriter missing the h and the e, and Templeton was writing his vampire story on it. He had six pages so far and had already drained the blood out of most every wench in Transylvania. I told him to write me something good and bloody, tousled his hair, and started back toward Yolanda and her mother. I never got to them.
Yolanda was up on the rear bumper of the Prius, wrestling with one bungee cord. Her mother stood in the road with her hands on her hips, offering her well-meant emotional support. One of the comet-cult bid dies was in the street, picking up paper plates. The fat girl working the grill squinted up at the thunderhead with a sour look of resignation. Mr. Waldman perched on the top rung of his ladder. Andropov grabbed Martina by the wrist, gave it a twist, and dragged her into their apartment. That’s what they were all up to when the storm hit.
I took one step into the driveway, and something stung my arm. It was like that shock of pain and then the achy numbness you get after the nurse sticks a syringe in you. My first thought was that I’d been bitten by a horsefly. Then I looked at my bare shoulder and saw a bright red drop of blood and something sticking out of the skin: a thorn of gold. I sucked in a sharp breath and wiggled it free and stood there staring at it. It was about two inches long and looked like a pin made out of needle-sharp amber glass. It was pretty, like jewelry, especially all bright and red with my blood. I couldn’t think where it had come from. It was hard, too, hard as quartz. I turned it this way and that, and it caught the weird pink stormlight and flashed.
Mr. Waldman yelled, and I glanced around in time to see him slap at something on the back of his neck, as if the same horsefly that bit me had just bitten him.
By then I could hear the rain coming, a furious rattling, building in volume. It was loud, a roar like a thousand thumbtacks being poured into a steel bucket. A car alarm went off, the horn going blat-blat-blat, somewhere up the hill. It seemed to me that the very ground under my feet began to shudder.
It’s one thing to be scared, but what came over me then was bigger than that. I had a sudden premonition of disaster, a sick flop in the stomach. I shouted Yolanda’s name, but I’m not sure she heard me over the gathering rackety-tackety of the rain. She was still up on the rear bumper. She lifted her chin, looked into the sky.
Templeton called to me, and the anxiety in his voice made him sound like the very small boy he was. I turned and found he had approached as far as the entrance of the garage, drawn by the roar of the oncoming rain. I put my hand on his chest and pushed him back into the garage, which is why he lived, and why I lived, too.
I looked back just as the rain broke over the street. It crackled where it hit the blacktop and pinged when it hit cars, and some part of me thought it was hail and some part of me knew it wasn’t.
The comet-cult gal who was picking paper plates out of the road arched her back, very suddenly, and went all wide-eyed, as if someone had pinched her rear end. I could see pins hitting the road and spraying this way and that by then: needles of silver and gold.
Up on his ladder, old Mr. Waldman went ramrod stiff. He already had one hand on the nape of his neck. The other flew to the small of his back. He began to do an unconscious jig on the top of the ladder as he was stung and stung again. His right foot dropped for the next rung, missed it, and he plunged, striking the ladder and flipping over on his way to the ground.
Then the rain was coming down hard. The chubby woman at the grill still had her face to the sky—she was the only one who didn’t run—and I watched as she was torn apart in a downpour of steely nails. Her crinkly silver gown was jerked this way and that on her body, as if invisible dogs were fighting over it. She lifted her hands, a woman surrendering to an advancing army, and I saw that her palms and forearms were stuck with hundreds of needles, so she looked like a pale pink cactus.
Mrs. Rusted turned in a circle, keeping her head down, took two steps from the car, then changed her mind and went back. She fumbled blindly and found the latch. Her arms were prickled all over with needles. Her shoulders. Her neck. She struggled with the driver’s-side door, got it open, and began to crawl in. But she had made it only halfway behind the wheel when the windshield exploded in on her. She collapsed and didn’t move again, her legs still hanging out into the street. The backs of her round, full thighs were a dense thicket of needles.
Yolanda leapt off the rear bumper and turned toward me. She made a run for the garage. I heard her scream my name. I took two steps toward her, but Templeton had me by the wrist and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t make him let go, and I couldn’t go out there with him attached to me. When I looked back, my girl had been driven to her knees, and Yolanda . . . Yolanda . . .
Yolanda.