The wind was still shoving mightily at his back, but after what seemed like eight hours of walking yesterday and at least five today, he was about to topple to the ground. He carried the exhausted child in his arms, as he had for the past two hours, and walked stiff-legged, the soles of his feet oozing with blisters and blood in shoes that were coming apart at the seams. He thought he must look like a zombie, or like the Frankenstein monster carrying the fainted heroine in his arms.
They had spent last night in the windbreak of an overturned pickup truck; bound-up bales of hay had been scattered around, and Josh had lugged them over to build a makeshift shelter that would contain their body heat. Still, they’d been out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wasteland and dead fields, and both of them had dreaded first light because they knew they had to start walking again.
The dark town—just a scatter of wind-ravaged buildings and a few widely spaced houses on dusty lots—beckoned him onward. He saw no cars, no hint of light or life. There was a Texaco station with one pump and a garage whose roof had collapsed. A sign flapping back and forth on its hinges advertised TUCKER’S HARDWARE AND FEEDS, but the store’s front window was shattered and the place looked bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. A small cafe had also collapsed, except for the sign that read GOOD EATS! Every step an exercise in agony, Josh walked past the crumbled buildings. He saw that dozens of paperback books lay in the dust around him, their pages flipping wildly in the restless hand of the wind, and to the left were the remains of a little clapboard structure with a hand-painted
SULLIVAN PUBLIC LIBRARY sign.
Sullivan, Josh thought. Whatever Sullivan had once been, it was dead now.
Something moved at the corner of his vision. He looked to the side, and something small—a jackrabbit? he wondered—darted out of sight behind the ruins of the cafe.
Josh was stiff with cold, and he knew Swan must be freezing, too. She held onto that Cookie Monster doll like life itself and occasionally flinched in her tormented sleep. He approached one of the houses but stopped when he saw a body curled up like a question mark on the front porch steps. He headed for the next house, further along and across the road.
The mailbox, supported on a crooked pedestal, was painted white and had what appeared to be an eye, with upper and lower lids, painted on it in black. The hand-lettered name was Davy and Leona Skelton. Josh walked across the dirt lot and up the porch steps to the screen door. “Swan?” he said. “Wake up, now.” She mumbled, and he set her down; then he tried the door but found it latched from the inside. He lifted his foot and kicked at its center, knocking it off its hinges, and they crossed the porch to the front door.
Josh had just put his hand on the knob when the door flew open and the barrel of a pistol looked him in the eyes.
“You broke my screen door,” a woman’s voice said in the gloom. The pistol did not waver.
“Uh ... I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t think anybody was here.”
“Why’d you think the door was locked, then? This is private property!”
“I’m sorry,” Josh repeated. He saw the woman’s gnarled finger on the trigger. “I don’t have any money,” he said. “I’d pay you for the door if I did.”
“Money?” She hawked and spat past him. “Money ain’t worth nothin’ no more! Hell, a screen door is worth a bagful of gold, fella! I’d blow your damn head off if I wouldn’t have to clean up the mess!”
“If you don’t mind, we’ll just go on our way.”
The woman was silent. Josh could see the outline of her head, but not her face; her head angled toward Swan. “A little girl,” she said softly. “Oh, my Lord ... a little girl ...”
“Leona!” a weak voice called from inside the house. “Leo—” And then it was interrupted by a strangling, terrible spasm of coughing.
“It’s all right, Davy!” she called back. “I’ll be there directly!” She turned her attention to Josh again, the pistol still stuck in his face. “Where’d you two come from? Where’re you goin’?”
“We came from ... out there.” He motioned toward one end of the town. “And I guess we’re going that way.” He motioned to the other end.
“Not much of a travel plan.”
“I don’t guess it is,” he agreed, uneasily watching the black eye of that pistol.
She paused, looked down at the little girl again and then sighed deeply. “Well,” she finally said, “since you’re halfway broke in already, you might as well come on in the rest of the way.” She motioned with the gun and retreated through the doorway.
Josh took Swan’s hand, and they entered the house.
“Shut the door,” the woman said. “Thanks to you, we’ll be up to our ears in dust pretty soon.”
Josh did as she asked. A small fire was burning in the fireplace, and the woman’s squat figure was outlined in red as she moved about the room. She lit a hurricane lantern on the mantel, then a second and third lantern placed strategically around the room to give the most light. The pistol was uncocked, but she kept it at her side.
She finished with the lanterns and turned around to get a good look at Josh and Swan.
Leona Skelton was short and wide, wearing a thick pink sweater atop ragged overalls and furry pink slippers on her feet. Her square face appeared to have been carved from an apple, then dried under the sun; there wasn’t a smooth place on it for all the winding cracks and ravines. Her large, expressive blue eyes were surrounded by webs of wrinkles, and the deep lines in her broad forehead looked like a clay etching of ocean waves. Josh figured she was in her mid-to late sixties, though her curly, swept-back hair was dyed garish red. Now, as her gaze wandered between Josh and Swan, her lips slowly parted, and Josh saw that several of her front teeth were silver.
“God A’mighty,” she said quietly. “You two got burnt, didn’t you? Oh, Jesus ... I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stare, but ...” She looked at Swan, and her face seemed to compress with pain. There was a glimmer of tears in her eyes. “Oh, Lord,” Leona whispered. “Oh, my Lord, you two have been ... hurt so bad.”
“We’re alive,” Josh said. “That’s what counts.”
“Yes,” she agreed, nodding. Her eyes found the hardwood floor. “Forgive my rudeness. I was brought up better’n that.”
“Leona!” the man rasped, and again he was savaged by a fit of coughing.
“I’d best see to my husband,” she said, leaving the room through a hallway. While she was gone, Josh looked around the room; it was sparsely furnished, with unpainted pine furniture and a threadbare green throw rug in front of the fireplace. He avoided peering into a mirror on one wall and walked toward a glass-fronted cabinet nearby. On the cabinet’s shelves were dozens of crystal spheres of varying sizes, the smallest about pebble-sized and the largest as big as both of Josh’s fists clenched together—about half as big as a bowling ball. Most of them were the size of baseballs and perfectly clear, though others held tints of blue, green and yellow. Added to the collection were different kinds of feathers, some dried-out corncobs with multicolored kernels, and a couple of fragile-looking, almost transparent snakeskins.
“Where are we?” Swan asked him, still hugging her Cookie Monster. Beneath her eyes were dark purple hollows of fatigue, and thirst burned the back of her throat.
“A little town called Sullivan. There’s not much here. It looks like everybody’s already gone, except these people.” He approached the mantel to examine some framed Polaroids displayed there; in one of the pictures, Leona Skelton was sitting in a porch swing with a smiling, stout, middle-aged man who had more belly than hair, but his eyes were young and a bit mischievous behind wire-rimmed spectacles. He had his arm around Leona, and one hand appeared to be creeping toward her lap. She was laughing, her mouth full of silver flash, and her hair wasn’t quite as red; in any event, she appeared to be at least fifteen years younger.
In another picture, Leona was rocking a white cat in her arms like a baby, the cat’s feet stuck up contentedly in t
he air. A third picture showed the pot-bellied man with a younger fellow, both of them carrying fishing rods and displaying bite-sized fish.
“That’s my family,” Leona said, coming into the room. She had left the gun behind. “My husband’s name is Davy, our son’s named Joe and the cat’s called Cleopatra. Was called Cleopatra, I mean. I buried her about two weeks ago, out back. Put her deep, so nothin’ could get at her. Have you two got names, or were you hatched?”
“I’m Josh Hutchins. This is Sue Wanda, but she’s called Swan.”
“Swan,” Leona repeated. “That’s a pretty name. I’m pleased to meet the both of you.”
“Thank you,” Swan said, not forgetting her manners.
“Oh, Lordy!” Leona bent and picked up some farming and House Beautiful magazines that had tumbled off the coffee table, and then she took a broom from the corner and started sweeping dust toward the fireplace. “House is a godawful wreck!” she apologized as she worked. “Used to be able to keep it as neat as a needle, but lately time slips away. I ain’t had no visitors for quite a number of days!” She swept up the last of the dust and stood staring out a window at the red gloom and the wind-lashed remains of Sullivan. “Used to be a fine town,” she said listlessly. “Had more’n three hundred people livin’ right around here. Fine people, too. Ben McCormick used to say he was fat enough to make three more folks. Drew and Sissy Stimmons lived in that house, over there.” She pointed. “Oh, Sissy loved her hats! Had about thirty of ’em, wore a different hat every Sunday for thirty Sundays and then started over again. Kyle Doss owned the cafe. Geneva Dewberry ran the public library, and oh, Lordy, could she talk about books!” Her voice was getting quieter and quieter, drifting away. “Geneva said she was gonna sit down and write herself a romance someday. I always believed she would.” She motioned in another direction. “Norm Barkley lived down there at the end of the road. You can’t see the house from here, though. I almost married Norman, when I was a young thing. But Davy stole me away with a rose and a kiss on a Saturday night. Yes, sir.” She nodded, and then she seemed to remember where she was. Her spine stiffened, and she returned the broom to its corner as if she were giving up a dance partner. “Well,” she said, “that was our town.”
“Where’d they all go?” Josh asked.
“Heaven,” she replied. “Or Hell. Whichever claimed them first, I reckon. Oh, some of ’em packed up and lit out.” She shrugged. “Where to, I can’t say. But most of us stayed here, in our homes and on our land. Then the sickness started hitting folks ... and Death moved in. It’s like a big fist a-knockin’ at your door—boom boom, boom boom, like that. And you know you can’t keep it from comin’ in, but you got to try.” She moistened her lips with her tongue, her eyes glazed and distant. “Sure is some kinda crazy weather for August, ain’t it? Cold enough to freeze a witch’s tit.”
“You ... do know what’s happened, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Lee Procter had the radio goin’ full blast at the hardware store when I was there buyin’ nails and wire to hang a picture. I don’t know what station he was tuned to, but all of a sudden there was a godawful squallin’, and this man’s voice came on talkin’ real fast about a state of emergency and bombs and all. Then there was a sizzlin’ noise like grease in a hot skillet and the radio went dead. Couldn’t raise a whisper on it. Wilma James come runnin’ in, yellin’ for everybody to look up at the sky. We went out and looked, and we seen the airplanes or bombs or whatever they were passin’ overhead, some of ’em near about to collide with each other. And Grange Tucker said, ‘It’s happenin’! Armageddon is happenin’!’ And he just plopped down on the curb in front of his store and watched those things fly past.
“Then the wind came, and the dust, and the cold,” she said, still staring out the window. “The sun went blood-red. Twisters passed through, and one of ’em hit the McCormick farm and just took it away, didn’t leave nothin’ but foundation stones. Not a trace of Ben, Ginny or the kids. ’Course, everybody in town started comin’ to me, wantin’ to know what lay in the future and all.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell ’em I saw skulls where their faces used to be. How can you tell your friends somethin’ like that? Well, Mr. Laney—the postman from Russell County—didn’t show up, and the phone lines were down and there was no ’lectricity. We knew whatever had happened had been a whomper. Kyle Doss and Eddie Meachum volunteered to drive the twenty miles to Matheson and find out what was goin’ on. They never come back. I saw skulls where their faces were, too, but what could I say? You know, sometimes there just ain’t no sense in tellin’ somebody their time’s about up.”
Josh wasn’t following the old woman’s ramblings. “What do you mean, you saw skulls where their faces were?”
“Oh. Sorry. I forget that everybody beyond Sullivan don’t know about me.” Leona Skelton turned from the window, a faint smile on her dried-apple face. She picked up one of the lamps, walked across the room to a bookcase and withdrew a leather-bound scrapbook; she took it to Josh and opened it. “There you go,” she said. “That’s me.” She pointed to a yellowed picture and article, carefully scissored from a pulp magazine.
The headline read, KANSAS SEER FORETOLD KENNEDY DEATH 6 MONTHS BEFORE DIXON! And below that, a smaller line proclaimed, Leona Skelton sees riches, new prosperity for America! The photograph showed a much younger Leona Skelton surrounded by cats and crystal balls.
“That’s from Fate magazine, back in 1964. See, I wrote a letter to President Kennedy warning him to stay out of Dallas, because he was giving a speech on television and I saw a skull where his face was, and then I used the tarot cards and the Ouija board and found out that Kennedy had a powerful enemy in Dallas, Texas. I even got part of the name, but it came out as Osbald. Anyway, I wrote this letter, and I even made a copy of it.” She flipped the page, showing him a battered, almost illegible handwritten letter dated April 19, 1963. “Two FBI men came to the house and wanted to have a long talk with me. I was pretty calm, but they like to have scared poor Davy out of his clodhoppers! Oh, they were silky-talkin’ fellas, but they could look a hole right through you! I saw they thought I was a crazy lunatic, and they told me not to write any more letters and then they left.”
She turned another page. The headline on this article read TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL AT BIRTH, KANSAS ‘JEANNE DIXON’ VOWS. “That’s from the National Tattler, about 1965. I just happened to mention to that writer lady that my mama always told me she had a vision of an angel in white robes kissin’ my forehead when I was a baby. Anyway, this one came out right after I found a little boy who’d been missin’ from his folks in Kansas City. He just got mad and ran away from home, and he was hidin’ in an old house about two blocks away.” She flipped more pages, proudly pointing to different articles from the Star, the Enquirer, and Fate magazine. The last article, in a small Kansas newspaper, was printed in 1987. “I haven’t been doin’ so well lately,” she said. “Sinus trouble and arthritis. Kinda clouded me up, I guess. Anyway, that’s who I am.”
Josh grunted. He’d never believed in extrasensory perception, but from what he’d witnessed lately, anything was possible. “I noticed your crystal balls over there.”
“That’s my most favorite collection! Those are from all over the world, you know!”
“They’re real pretty,” Swan added.
“Thank you kindly, little lady.” She smiled down at Swan, then returned her gaze to Josh. “You know, I didn’t see this thing happenin’. Maybe I’m gettin’ too old to see much anymore. But I had a bad, deep-down gut feelin’ about that astro-nut president. I thought he was the kind to let too many cooks stir the pot. Davy and me, neither one of us voted for him, no sir!”
The coughing rattled from the back room again. Leona cocked her head, listening intently, but the coughing faded, and Leona visibly relaxed once more. “I don’t have much to offer in the way of food,” she explained. “Got some old corn muffins as hard as cinder blocks and a pot of vegetable soup. I
can still do my cookin’ over the fireplace, but I’ve gotten used to eatin’ food that’s as cold as a virgin’s bed. Got a well in the back yard that still pumps up clean water. So you’re welcome to whatever you’ll have.”
“Thank you,” Josh said. “I think some soup and corn muffins would be pretty fine, cold or not. Is there any way I can get some of this dirt off me?”
“You mean you want to take a bath?” She thought for a minute.”Well, I reckon we can do it the old-fashioned way: heat buckets of water in the fire and fill the tub up like that. Little lady, I expect you ought to scrub up, too. ’Course, my drains might clog with all the dirt, and I don’t believe the plumber makes housecalls anymore. What’ve you two been doin? Rollin’ in the ground?”
“Sort of,” Swan said. She thought a bath—warm water or cold— was a fine idea. She knew she smelled like a pigsty; still, she was afraid of what her skin might look like under all the dirt. She knew it wasn’t going to be very pretty.
“I’ll fetch you a couple of buckets, then, and you can pump your own water. Which one wants to go first?”
Josh shrugged and motioned to Swan.
“All righty. I’d help you pump, but I’ve got to be close to Davy in case he has a spell. You bring the buckets in, and we’ll warm ’em up in the fireplace. I’ve got a nice claw-footed bathtub that hasn’t nestled a body since this damned mess started.”
Swan nodded and said thank you, and Leona Skelton waddled off to get the buckets from the kitchen. In the back bedroom, Davy Skelton coughed violently a few times, then the noise subsided.
Josh was tempted to step back there and take a look at the man, but didn’t. That coughing sounded bad; it reminded him of Darleen’s coughing just before she’d died. He figured it must be radiation poisoning. “The sickness started hitting folks,” Leona had said. Radiation poisoning must have wiped out almost the whole town. But it had occurred to Josh that some people might be able to resist the radiation better than others; maybe it poleaxed some right off and slowly crept up on the rest. He was tired and weak from walking, but otherwise he felt okay; Swan, too, was in pretty good shape except for her burns, and Leona Skelton seemed healthy enough. Back in the basement, Darleen had been fit and boisterous one day, laid low and scalding with fever the next. Maybe some people could go for weeks or months without feeling the full effects of it. He hoped.
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