I got out of there, tucking into my fries. You might not think it’s possible to have an appetite walking past a carpet of dead bodies a hundred yards long, but foreground becomes background pretty quick. Any pattern repeated over and over is bound to turn into wallpaper eventually, whether it’s flowers or corpses.
After the fries were gone and I’d licked all the tasty grease off my fingers, I downed half a bottle of water in a hurry to rinse the salt taste out of my mouth. By then I was sometimes seeing faint little sparkles and flashes of light at the edges of my vision, which was maybe the sun glinting on all the scattered nails or was maybe just light-headedness. It didn’t seem like I’d been walking long enough to get faint, but then the night before had been a restless one.
I hadn’t gone far when I caught sight of Marc DeSpot again, hanging back about a block. He dropped his gaze straightaway and acted like he was interested in the football field, but I knew then he was still after me. I swerved toward a Starbucks on the corner, as if I wanted a latte to wash down my fries. The door was locked, of course—any fool could’ve guessed it wasn’t going to be open—but I gave the handle a tug like I expected otherwise. I peered through the tinted glass as if there were someone in there to look at. Actually, the lights were off, and there was a paper sign taped up on the door: CLOSED FOR THE END OF THE HUMAN RACE. But I gave a thumbs-up and nodded as if someone had told me to use the side door.
I slipped around the corner of the building and then busted out the best run I could manage in my shitkickers. There was a wide swath of parking lot on the other side of Starbucks, filled with a thousand crystal nails, gleaming and throwing halos. It looked like all the treasures of Aladdin had been dumped off in front of Whole Foods.
I ran about halfway across the lot, then hunkered down behind someone’s grape-colored Kia. I watched the Starbucks, looking through the space between the undercarriage and the asphalt. Sure enough, Marc DeSpot soon came wandering around the corner, peering this way and that, hunting for me. Then he looked over his shoulder, as if someone were following him. After a moment of indecision, he turned around and went back the way he’d come.
I sat and counted one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, until I reached a hundred. I got up and went crunching on across the lot, down Baseline Road, and onto the ramp leading up to the turnpike.
I thought there might be sawhorses blocking the way, but the ramp was wide open, aside from a little hatchback that had somehow caught fire and burnt down to the frame. Once I reached the turnpike, I could see in a glance there was nothing to stop me from strolling all the way to Denver right along the dotted yellow line. When the rain had come down, it was going ten in the morning on a pretty Monday in August. On the turnpike, cars had been doing seventy when the storm broke. It must’ve been like driving into antiaircraft fire. I saw a black Corvette that had been peeled open, the whole roof twisted back, the red leather seats inside ground up into hamburger. Then I looked again and saw it wasn’t red leather at all. They were white seats that had been painted red by what had happened to the people sitting on them.
There were other folks strolling along the pike, picking over the wrecks. One middle-aged lady had a shopping cart. I watched her stop alongside a Mercedes to mine the glove compartment. She was about forty, had a pink flowered kerchief over her graying hair, and the tidy, put-together look of a PTA mom. She dug through someone’s bloodstained purse, found some bills, a gold bracelet, and a copy of Fifty Shades Freed, which she deposited into her cart before going on.
A mile away, on the other side of the road, I spied a crew dressed in orange jumpsuits, doing some kind of work. It was too far away to see what.
Well, it was a nice morning for walking, as long as you paid no mind to all the dead folks chewed up in their cars. I was down to about 25-percent battery on my phone, but I was longing to hear another human voice, so I stuck in my earbuds to catch some news.
That’s why I didn’t hear them coming up on me: the comet boys. That’s why they got me.
WHAT I HEARD ON THE news was that preliminary evidence indicated the terrorists who’d made it rain nails might’ve been operating out of an area around the Black Sea. There was a company based in the region that had demonstrated a reagent that could rapidly produce synthetic fulgurite under laboratory conditions. The president had dashed to Twitter to promise a “BIBLICAL RESPONSE!” and a “HOLY WAR” and swore that the Islamists were about to learn that “WHEN IT RAINS IT PORES!!!” He said we’d be dropping a shower of our own soon enough, only it would be daisy cutters, not a bunch of namby-pamby crystal nails.
Then there was a story about a fierce downpour in Pueblo, all nails, that punctured natural-gas tanks and caused an explosion so tremendous it registered as an earthquake in Colorado Springs. They said the fire had swallowed half the town and the trucks couldn’t get close enough to effectively battle it, because they couldn’t traverse the nail-studded roads. A meteorologist said the crystal spikes in Pueblo were larger than the ones in Denver, with some darts as long as his thumb. A chemical engineer was just about to explain what it all meant, but I didn’t hear what he had to say, because that was when someone clubbed me in the head.
I went down so hard and fast I don’t remember hitting the ground. I wasn’t knocked out. It was more like when the lights in your house flicker just a bit. There was a little mental flicker, and when my head cleared, I was on all fours, seeing stars. That’s not a turn of phrase—I mean literally. I was looking down at a copper disk the size of a saucer, with constellations etched on it and my blood gilding one edge.
The comet kids were coming up through the waist-high blond grass at the side of the pike, moving fast in their tinfoil gowns. It was the three who’d been wrapping up Mr. Waldman. The boy who resembled Christ had thrown his astrolabe into my head. The other two had pulled their astrolabes off their necks and were whipping them around and around in big loops. The spinning gold medallions droned like a pair of didgeridoos.
My hands and knees were torn up from my fall. The road was carpeted in shiny tacks. I touched the crown of my head, and a pulse of blue light blinked in front of my eyes. I felt a deep throb of pain, like someone had whopped a railroad spike into my skull. When I could see again, my right hand had ten fingers instead of five, and all of them were wet with blood. I still had one earbud poked into my ear, and I heard a snatch of someone on the news, murmuring in a weird, deep, underwater voice: