Blue World

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Too lucky.” Howard Carnes slapped his cards down—a measly aces and fours—and reached for the pitcher. He poured himself a glassful of high-octane.

  “So I was sayin’ to Danny,” Ray Barnett went on, speaking to the group as he waited for Gordon to shuffle and deal. “What’s the use of leavin’ town? I mean, it’s not like there’s gonna be anyplace different, right? Everything’s screwed up.” He pushed a plug of chewing tobacco into his mouth and offered the pack to Johnny.

  Johnny shook his head. Nick Gleason said, “I heard there’s a place in South America that’s normal. A place in Brazil. The water’s still all right.”

  “Aw, that’s bullshit.” Ike McCord picked up his newly dealt cards and examined them, keeping a true poker face on his hard, flinty features. “The whole damn Amazon River blew up. Bastard’s still on fire. That’s what I heard, before the networks went off. It was on CBS.” He rearranged a couple of cards. “Nowhere’s any different from here. The whole world’s the same.”

  “You don’t know everything!” Nick shot back. A little red had begun to glow in his fat cheeks. “I’ll bet there’s someplace where things are normal! Maybe at the north pole or somewhere like that!”

  “The north pole!” Ray laughed. “Who the hell wants to live at the damned north pole?”

  “I could live there,” Nick went on. “Me and Terri could. Get us some tents and warm clothes, we’d be all right.”

  “I don’t think Terri would want to wake up with an icicle on her nose,” Johnny said, looking at a hand full of nothing.

  Gordon laughed. “Yeah! It’d be ol’ Nick who’d have an icicle hangin’ off somethin’, and it wouldn’t be his nose!” The other men chortled, but Nick remained silent, his cheeks reddening; he stared fixedly at his cards, which were just as bad as Johnny’s.

  There was a peal of high, false, forced laughter from the front room, where Brenda sat with Terri Gleason, Jane McCord and her two kids, Rhonda Carnes and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Kathy, who lay on the floor listening to Bon Jovi tapes on her Walkman. Elderly Mrs. McCord, Ike’s mother, was needlepointing, her glasses perched on the end of her nose and her wrinkled fingers diligent.

  “So Danny says he and Paula want to go west,” Ray said. “I’ll open for a quarter.” He tossed it into the pot. “Danny says he’s never seen San Francisco, so that’s where they want to go.”

  “I wouldn’t go west if you paid me.” Howard threw a quarter in. “I’d get on a boat and go to an island. Like Tahiti. One of those places where women dance with their stomachs.”

  “Yeah, I could see Rhonda in a grass skirt! I’ll raise you a quarter, gents.” Gordon put his money into the pot. “Couldn’t you guys see Howard drinkin’ out of a damn coconut? Man, he’d make a monkey look like a prince char—”

  From the distance came a hollow boom that echoed over town and cut Gordon’s jaunty voice off. The talking and forced laughter ceased in the front room. Mrs. McCord missed a stitch, and Kathy Carnes sat up and took the Walkman earphones off.

  There was another boom, closer this time. The house’s floor trembled. The men sat staring desperately at their cards. A third blast, further away. Then silence, in which hearts pounded and Gordon’s new Rolex ticked off the seconds.

  “It’s over,” old Mrs. McCord announced. She was back in her rhythm again. “Wasn’t even close.”

  “I wouldn’t go west if you paid me,” Howard repeated. His voice trembled. “Gimme three cards.”

  “Three cards it is.” Gordon gave everybody what they needed, then said, “One card for the dealer.” His hands were shaking.

  Johnny glanced out the window. Far away, over the rotting cornfields, there was a flash of jagged red. The percussion came within seconds: a muffled, powerful boom.

  “I’m bumpin’ everybody fifty cents,” Gordon announced. “Come on, come on! Let’s play cards!”

  Ike McCord folded. Johnny had nothing, so he folded too. “Turn ’em over!” Gordon said. Howard grinned and showed his kings and jacks. He started to rake in the pot, but Gordon said, “Hold on, Howie,” as he turned over his hand and showed his four tens and a deuce. “Sorry, gents. Read ’em and weep.” He pulled the coins toward himself.

  Howard’s face had gone chalky. Another blast echoed through the night. The floor trembled. Howard said, “You’re cheatin’, you sonofabitch.”

  Gordon stared at him, his mouth open. Sweat glistened on his face.

  “Hold on, now, Howard,” Ike said. “You don’t want to say things like—”

  “You must be helpin’ him, damn it!” Howard’s voice was louder, more strident, and it stopped the voices of the women. “Hell, it’s plain as day he’s cheatin’! Ain’t nobody’s luck can be as good as his!”

  “I’m not a cheater.” Gordon stood up; his chair fell over backward. “I won’t take that kind of talk from any man.”

  “Come on, everybody!” Johnny said. “Let’s settle down and—”

  “I’m not a cheater!” Gordon shouted. “I play ’em honest!” A blast made the walls moan, and a red glow jumped at the window.

  “You always win the big pots!” Howard stood up, trembling. “How come you always win the big pots, Gordon?”

  Rhonda Carnes, Jane McCord, and Brenda were peering into the room, eyes wide and fearful. “Hush up in there!” old Mrs. McCord hollered. “Shut your traps, children!”

  “Nobody calls me a cheater, damn you!” Gordon flinched as a blast pounded the earth. He stared at Howard, his fists clenched. “I deal ’em honest and I play ’em honest, and by God, I ought to…” He reached out, his hand grasping for Howard’s shirt collar.

  Before his hand could get there, Gordon Mayfield burst into flame.

  “Jesus!” Ray shrieked, leaping back. The table upset, and cards and coins flew through the air. Jane McCord screamed, and so did her husband. Johnny staggered backward, tripped, and fell against the wall. Gordon’s flesh was aflame from bald skull to the bottom of his feet, and as his plaid shirt caught fire, Gordon thrashed and writhed. Two burning deuces spun from the inside of his shirt and snapped at Howard’s face. Gordon was screaming for help, the flesh running off him as incandescent heat built inside his body. He tore at his skin, trying to put out the fire that would not be extinguished.

  “Help him!” Brenda shouted. “Somebody help him!” But Gordon staggered back against the wall, scorching it. The ceiling above his head was charred and smoking. His Rolex exploded with a small pop.

  Johnny was on his knees in the protection of the overturned table, and as he rose he felt Gordon’s heat pucker his own face. Gordon was flailing, a mass of yellow flames, and Johnny leapt up and grasped Brenda’s hand, pulling her with him toward the front door. “Get out!” he yelled. “Everybody get out!”

  Johnny didn’t wait for them; he pulled Brenda out the door, and they ran through the night, south on Silva Street. He looked back, saw a few more figures fleeing the house, but he couldn’t tell who they were. And then there was a white flare that dazzled his eyes and Ray Barnett’s house exploded, timbers and roof tiles flying through the sultry air. The shock wave knocked Brenda and Johnny to the pavement; she was screaming, and Johnny clasped his hand over her mouth because he knew that if he started to scream it was all over for him. Fragments of the house rained down around them, along with burning clumps of human flesh. Johnny and Brenda got up and ran, their knees bleeding.

  They ran through the center of town, along the straight thoroughfare of Straub Street, past the Spector Theatre and the Skipp Religious Bookstore. Other shouts and screams echoed through the night, and red lightning danced in the cornfields. Johnny had no thought but to get them home, and hope that the earth wouldn’t suck them under before they got there.

  They fled past the cemetery on McDowell Hill, and there was a crash and boom that dropped Johnny and Brenda to their knees again. Red lightning arced overhead, a sickly-sweet smell in the air. When Johnny looked at the cemetery again, he saw there was no
longer a hill; the entire rise had been mashed flat, as if by a tremendous crushing fist. Ard then, three seconds later, broken tombstones and bits of coffins slammed down on the plain where a hill had stood for two hundred years. Gravity howitzer, Johnny thought; he hauled Brenda to her feet, and they staggered on across Olson Lane and past the broken remnants of the Baptist church at the intersection of Daniels and Saul streets.

  A brick house on Wright Street was crushed to the ground as they fled past it, slammed into the boiling dust by the invisible power of gravity gone mad. Johnny gripped Brenda’s hand and pulled her on, through the deserted streets. Gravity howitzers boomed all across town, from Schow Street on the west to Barker Promenade on the east. The red lightning cracked overhead, snapping through the air like cat-o’-nine-tails. And then Johnny and Brenda staggered onto Streiber Circle, right at the edge of town, where you had a full view of the fields and the stars, and kids used to watch, wishfully, for UFOs.

  There would be no UFOs tonight, and no deliverance from the Earth. Gravity howitzers smashed into the fields, making the stars shimmer. The ground shook, and in the glare of the red lightning Johnny and Brenda could see the effect of the gravity howitzers, the cornstalks mashed flat to the ground in circles twelve or fifteen feet around. The fist of God, Johnny thought. Another house was smashed to rubble on the street behind them; there was no pattern or reason for the gravity howitzers, but Johnny had seen what was left of Stan Haines after the man was hit by one on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Stan had been a mass of bloody tissue jammed into his crumpled shoes, like a dripping mushroom.

  The howitzers marched back and forth across the fields. Two or three more houses were hit, over on the north edge of town. And then, quite abruptly, it was all over. There was the noise of people shouting and dogs barking; the sounds seemed to combine, until you couldn’t tell one from the other.

  Johnny and Brenda sat on the curb gripping hands and trembling. The long night went on.

  3

  THE SUN TURNED VIOLET. Even at midday the sun was a purple ball in a white, featureless sky. The air was always hot, but the sun itself no longer seemed warm. The first of a new year passed, and burning winter drifted toward springtime.

  Johnny noticed them in Brenda’s hands first. Brown freckles. Age spots, he realized they were. Her skin was changing. It was becoming leathery, and deep wrinkles began to line her face. At twenty-seven years of age, her hair began to go gray.

  And sometime later, as he was shaving with gasoline, he noticed his own face: the lines around his eyes were going away. His face was softening. And his clothes: his clothes just didn’t fit right anymore. They were getting baggy, his shirts beginning to swallow him up.

  Of course Brenda noticed it too. How could she not, though she tried her best to deny it. Her bones ached. Her spine was starting to bow over. Her fingers hurt, and the worst was when she lost control of her hands and dropped J.J. and a piece of him cracked off like brittle clay. One day in March it became clear to her, when she looked in the mirror and saw the wrinkled, age-freckled face of an old woman staring back. And then she looked at Johnny and saw a nineteen-year-old boy where a thirty-year-old man used to be.

  They sat on the porch together, Johnny fidgety and nervous, as young folks are when they’re around the gray-haired elderly. Brenda was stopped and silent, staring straight ahead with watery, faded blue eyes.

  “We’re goin’ in different directions,” Johnny said in a voice that was getting higher-pitched by the day. “I don’t know what happened, or why. But…it just did.” He reached out, took one of her wrinkled hands. Her bones felt fragile, birdlike. “I love you,” he said.

  She smiled. “I love you,” she answered in her old woman’s quaver.

  They sat for a while in the purple glare. And then Johnny went down to the street and pitched stones at the side of Gordon Mayfield’s empty house while Brenda nodded and slept.

  Something passed by, she thought in her cage of dreams. She remembered her wedding day, and she oozed a dribble of saliva as she smiled. Something passed by. What had it been, and where had it gone?

  Johnny made friends with a dog, but Brenda wouldn’t let him keep it in the house. Johnny promised he’d clean up after it, and feed it, and all the other stuff you were supposed to do. Brenda said certainly not, that she wouldn’t have it shedding all over her furniture. Johnny cried some, but he got over it. He found a baseball and bat in an empty house, and he spent most of his time swatting the ball up and down the street. Brenda tried to take up needlepoint, but her fingers just weren’t up to it.

  These are the final days, she thought as she sat on the porch and watched his small body as he chased the ball. She kept her Bible in her lap, and read it constantly, though her eyes burned and watered. The final days were here at last, and no man could stop the passage of their hours.

  The day came when Johnny couldn’t crawl into her lap, and it hurt her shoulders to lift him, but she wanted him nestled against her. Johnny played with his fingers, and Brenda told him about paradise and the world yet to be. Johnny asked her what kind of toys they had there, and Brenda smiled a toothless grin and stroked his hair.

  Something passed by, and Brenda knew what it was: time. Old clocks ticking down. Old planets slowing in their orbits. Old hearts laboring. The huge machine was winding to a finish now, and who could say that was a bad thing?

  She held him in her arms as she rocked slowly on the front porch. She sang to him, an old, sweet song: “Go to sleep, little baby, when you wake…”

  She stopped, and squinted at the fields.

  A huge wave of iridescent green and violet was undulating across the earth. It came on silently, almost…yes, Brenda decided. It came on with a lovely grace. The wave rolled slowly across the fields, and in its wake it left a gray blankness, like the wiping clean of a schoolboy’s slate. It would soon reach the town, their street, their house, their front porch. And then she and her beautiful child would know the puzzle’s answer.

  It came on, with relentless power.

  She had time to finish her song: “…I’ll give you some cake and you can ride the pretty little poneeee.”

  The wave reached them. It sang of distant shores. The infant in her arms looked up at her, eyes glowing, and the old woman smiled at him and stood up to meet the mystery.

  Blue World

  1

  HIS COWBOY BOOTS CLOCKED on the wet pavement, where streams of neon oozed like the rivers of hell.

  A fog had drifted over San Francisco, blanking out the stars. With it had come a stinging drizzle, and diamonds of Pacific rain glittered in the man’s sandy-blond crew-cut hair. He walked along Broadway, east into the heart of the tawdry Tenderloin, brushing past grinning Japanese businessmen, hayseed gawkers, and tourists with a taste for the wild life.

  Here it was to be tasted. The neon signs and gaudy flashing lights stood like the gates into another world, announcing the wares that lay within the dark domains. The man in the cowboy boots stopped, a gust of wind riffling the knee-length brown canvas coat he wore. His dark brown, hollow-socketed eyes scanned the signs: Girls and Boys Live Onstage! Dominant Females in Black Leather! Sorority Girls in Heat! All Sizes, All Flavors!

  At the outer corners of his eyes were three small crimson teardrops, tattooed on the smooth pale flesh as if he were weeping drops of blood.

  He went on, past the open doors that bellowed loud rock drumbeats and snared knots of gaping Japanese. His thumbs hooked in the ornate silver buckle of his belt, and his pace began to slow.

  Just past the All Nude! All Crude Honeys! parlor was the sign he’d been seeking. It announced Porno Queens Want to Meet Ya and had glossy pictures of attractive though heavily made-up young women covering the front window. Captions identified some of them, names like Tasha Knotty, Kitt Cattin, Easee Breeze, and Paula Bunyan. The man, who was of indeterminate age, possibly in his late twenties, regarded the photographs for a moment. Then he looked down at the sill, where dead flies la
y and one was still feebly kicking.

  This must be the place.

  He strode through a red door into a corridor where a burly Chicano man sat reading a Slash Maraud comic book behind a caged-in ticket booth. “Ten bucks,” the Chicano said in a bored voice. He didn’t put aside the comic. “You want to meet anybody special?”

  “Yes,” the cowboy said in a toneless, whispery voice. “Easee Breeze.”

  The sound—like the hiss of a snake—made the Chicano look up. He stared at the tattooed teardrops.

  “You see somethin’ you don’t like, amigo?”

  “No. No, man.” The Chicano shook his head and sat up a little straighter. The crew-cut guy was lean, about six-two or six-three, and he looked like a dude you didn’t want to mess with. “Yeah, Easee’s in here, man. You want to party?”

  “Maybe. Easee was in a movie called Super Slick, wasn’t she?”

  “She’s been in a lot of flicks, man. She’s a star!”

  “I know that. I saw her in Super Slick.” He glanced toward another red door further along the corridor. From beyond it was a bass-heavy boom. “I want to meet her.”

  “You go in there and sit down, man. Enjoy the show. If Easee’s onstage, you ring her number. If she’s not, she’ll be up in a few minutes. Ten bucks. Okay?” He tentatively tapped the countertop.

  The cowboy took a wallet from the inside of his duster, opened it, brought out a ten-dollar bill, and slid it through the bars. A light sheen of sweat had begun to glisten on his bony face.

  “Tippin’s extra, man,” the Chicano said. “Easee ain’t cheap.”

  “Neither am I.” The cowboy smiled faintly, but it was a cold smile. Then he strode on toward the door, and the Chicano hit a switch that unlocked it. The cowboy went through, and the door locked again as it swung shut.

  Speakers in the red-velvet-covered walls emitted a steady drumbeat. Three rows of tattered theater seats, where four other men sat in a smoky gloom, faced a large plate-glass window. Behind the glass gyrated three nude women, each with a numbered card hanging between her breasts. Easee Breeze was not among the dancers, and the cowboy took a seat on the back row and propped his boots up to wait.