While Bent was blabbing, my attention had drifted from the three dopes crouched around Mr. Waldman. They had used the opportunity to begin wrapping him up again. I heard the crinkle of silver foil and stamped on the material once again, before they could finish cocooning him.
“You keep up with what you’re doing, boys, and the apocalypse is going to fall on you a lot sooner than you think,” I told them.
They gave Elder Bent a nervous look, and after a moment he gestured with one long-fingered hand. The three young men stood and retreated from the body.
“Do you think someone will sit shivah for him, Honeysuckle? Mr. Waldman’s wife is dead. His son is a marine stationed in some foreign part of the world and who knows when he will learn of his father’s passing, given the current crisis. And when he does hear the news —if he ever hears the news!—he may never make his way back to Boulder. The hard rains have only just begun to fall. More is coming, I assure you!”
“More is coming,” repeated the boy who looked like the Christ. He fingered his own astrolabe necklace. “And we’re the only ones ready for it. We’re the only ones who know what’s going to—”
But Elder Bent gave a brisk wave of one long-fingered hand and shut him up. Then he continued, “Shouldn’t someone honor his life? Isn’t any ceremony better than none? Does it do any harm? If his son appears back in Boulder, the discharged flesh will be here, to be mourned however he sees fit.” He paused and then said, “Or you could take him. And how will you mark his passing, Honeysuckle? Will you sit shivah for him? Do you even know how?”
He had me there. I didn’t like it, but I had my own dead to tend to.
“Well . . . at least keep it down,” I said lamely. “There’s a child trying to sleep across the street.”
“You should sing with us! You shouldn’t be alone tonight, Honeysuckle. Come sit. Don’t be by yourself. Don’t be afraid. Fear is worse than pain, you know. Let go of yours. Your fear of the rain. Your fear of us. Your fear of extinction. It isn’t too late for us all to love each other and be happy—even here as the last chapter of mankind is written.”
“No thank you. If we’re all on the way out, I want to end my life sane, not wearing a sheet-metal skirt and singing my way through the greatest hits of Phil Collins. There’s such a thing as death with dignity.”
He gave me a sad, pitying smile and put his fingertips together in a gesture that made me think of Spock, and thinking of Spock made me sad again. Yolanda and I both had gay-girl crushes on Zachary Quinto.
Elder Bent bowed to me and turned with a rustle of his silver gown. It is hard to take a man seriously as a spiritual leader when he’s swanning around in what looks like a prom dress made of Reynolds Wrap. The chubby kid and the boy with vitiligo bent back to Mr. Waldman’s body, but the one who looked like Jesus ran his fingers through his yellow tresses and took a half step closer to me.
“If you knew what we knew,” he whispered, “you’d beg to join us. We were the only ones ready for what happened today. A smart girl would think about that. A smart girl would ask herself what else we know—that she doesn’t.”
He sounded plenty ominous, but when he turned away with a dramatic swish, he stepped on a nail and yelped in a high-pitched voice that kinda ruined the effect. I watched him shuffle away—and then a movement, a flicker of light at the edge of my vision, caught my attention, and I glanced around.
It was Andropov, in his apartment on the first floor. He was standing behind the glass with an oil lamp, glaring out at us. Glaring at me. It made my stomach go funny, the way he was watching.
He lifted a sheet of plywood to the glass and disappeared behind it, and I heard him begin to wham away with a hammer. He was boarding up his windows, sealing Martina and himself off from the rest of the world.
WHEN I WOKE ON URSULA’S couch, the front room was flooded with strong, clear light, and I smelled coffee and warm maple syrup. Templeton stood over me, sipping espresso from a little mug, his Dracula cape flapped rakishly over one shoulder.
“It was terrorists,” he said without any preamble. “And they’re saying there’s a sixty-percent chance of nails in Wichita. Do you want pecans in your waffle?”
Ursula was in flannel pajamas, tending to a waffle iron set on her gas range. She had news streaming on her laptop again. You know what was on the news that morning: I’m sure you watched it, too. Letters had come to the Denver Times, the New York Times, and the Drudge Report. They were displayed, discussed, and disdained all morning long:
Sirs—
Now is your day of ruin. A storm as big as Alla’s fury is upon you. Blood will paint your roads. Bodys awaiting burial will cram your parks, vast farms for maggots. A million nails will rain upon you, for your wars to rob Muslim lands of oil, and your laws to bar Muslims from your racist nation. Soon you will fondly look back on 9/11 as a day of tranquility.
The names of schools and churches scrolled across the bottom of the screen, like when everything is canceled for a big snowstorm. That’s what I thought it was at first: a list of cancellations. It wasn’t until I was eating my first waffle that I realized it was a list of places to bring your dead.
They were saying at least seventy-five hundred killed in the metro Denver area, but law enforcement expected the number to go much higher by the end of the day. They showed a wedding, the bride in a red gown, all stuck full of needles. She was wailing and holding what was left of her husband. He had been torn apart, shielding her with his body. They’d been married for less than an hour. They’d been dancing in an outdoor pavilion when the rain began. The bride had lost her husband, both sisters, her parents, her grandparents, her nieces.
On CNN they had a chemist in The Situation Room. He began by repeating what we already knew—that the hard rain was made up of crystal fulgurite, what was also sometimes called “petrified lightning.” He said that while fulgurite could occur naturally, the crystals that dropped on Boulder and Denver were something new. They represented an artificial form of fulgurite that had to have been designed in a lab. Nothing else could account for the almost industrial perfection of the nails that fell on Colorado. He told Wolf Blitzer that it was possible—maybe even likely—that someone had seeded a cloud with it, perhaps using a simple crop-dusting plane, which supported the terrorist hypothesis.