by Megan Hart
Tony and Marnie weren’t moving, though the baby hadn’t stopped squalling. Cal had bent over at the waist again, coughing up more of that black goop. Even from this distance, Abbie could smell it. Bitterness, with an undertone of those flowers.
Oh, those fucking flowers.
Something in those flowers had made this happen, and the flowers had somehow come from the storms. They’d grown and bloomed and died and somehow taken root inside Cal and Tony and Marnie…but not her. Why not Abbie?
She’d done so much damage to herself and to those she loved, and yet here she sat in the car that should’ve been destroyed and still ran. She’d survived tornados that had killed and injured hundreds of people, and though she’d suffered a few bruises her real injury had come from Marnie, not the storm. Cal moved toward her, those vivid eyes focused on hers. Cal had seemed like a good man with most of his shit together, a generous lover and compassionate enough to check on his ex-wife after a natural disaster. Yet there he was, a stumbling wreck bent on doing her harm while Abbie herself remained mostly unscathed.
For one long, eternal moment she closed her eyes and thought of how easy it would be to just let him reach her, to do whatever it was he intended with his grabbing hands and snapping teeth. She’d dodged death a few times already when others worthier than she had not — Abbie sat back in the driver’s seat and thought how simple it would be to let him kill her. How…righteous that might seem.
And then she remembered the voice on the radio, talking about Glen Wild and the storms like the ones here in Oklahoma. How they’d ripped through the town along with numerous others all along the East Coast. Unusual, unexpected storms. What had they left behind? What if they’d carried the same flowers?
What if her children and Ryan were in danger?
Her eyes opened as her body twisted, swinging her feet into the car as she yanked the door closed with her good hand, the same one that then reached to twist the key in the ignition. She couldn’t grip the steering wheel with the hand attached to her throbbing, broken wrist, so she hooked her arm through it as she put the car into Drive.
She went straight for Cal, who never even moved to step out of the way. He hit the hood, then the windshield but didn’t break it. His body rolled to the side and hit the ground, and Abbie kept driving. Her tires spun up dust and grass and gravel from the drive spanged the undercarriage, but she didn’t stop. She yanked the wheel to turn, heading for the road, away from this house and the creatures in the yard.
She looked in the rearview mirror once, just before she reached the road. Tony, Marnie, the baby and Cal were all still down, but instead of the green grass and brown dirt, all she could see was a carpet of purple and blue with red runners between them. She didn’t stop to see if they bloomed or how fast they died.
Abbie drove without looking back again.
THREE
12
Three days in darkness. That’s how long I spent with nothing to hold me up, nothing to reach for but my father’s hand. I remember spinning, spinning, no stars, no earth, no heaven. No hell. And then something pulled me up and out, yanked me so hard my teeth cut the tip of my tongue, and I woke with a scream so loud it left my voice too raw to speak. It echoed off the ceramic walls and floor and the metal gurney under my naked flesh.
I screamed when I woke.
So did the doctor who was bent over me with his scalpel. He’d never had a dead man sit up in front of him before. He took several stumbling steps back. Slipped and fell. His outflung hand clattered against a tray of instruments, and they hit the floor. His body struck a gurney like mine, and that body, not alive, still dead, not brought back by the hand of our fathergod, rocked and tipped and fell onto the floor in a sprawling jumble of arms and legs. I can still hear the rotten pumpkin sound of its skull hitting the floor, but there wasn’t any blood. Corpses don’t bleed. Or breathe. But they can break open.
After that, there were a lot of people and a lot of tests. They took blood, they tapped my knees, checked my eyes, ears, nose, throat. Blood pressure. They checked me from top to toe and back again, but in the end the only thing that mattered to them and to me was that I had died, and I’d returned.
Resurrected.
I don’t in any way compare myself to Jesus Christ, no, I don’t do that. Jesus Christ was the man so many call the Savior, and I don’t deny he surely was a special, holy man. I’m the son of an auto mechanic from Oklahoma and a waitress who grew up in some small town in Texas, and neither one of them ever had much use for Jesus. Or God for that matter. Growing up in our house was all about Santa at Christmas. Easter was for chocolate eggs and pastel-colored bunnies. No, I’m not much like Jesus.
The first time the voice spoke to me, I was six years old and in the backyard playhouse. The neighbor girl from next door, Hilary, had promised me she’d show me “hers” if I showed her “mine.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, exactly, just that it was something secret, something our parents wouldn’t like. I knew it because the voice spoke to me, just a whisper in my ear, a tickle behind my eyes.
“No, Renton,” the voice said. “No, don’t do it. You’ll get into trouble.”
I didn’t show Hilary anything that day, but a week later she got Mikey Adams from down the street to go into the playhouse with her, and since her daddy dragged them both out into the backyard and beat the sin right out of them, I’m pretty sure she’d done with Mikey whatever it was she’d wanted to do with me. My mother, watching from her lawn chair with her cigarette and her beer, laughed when she heard Hilary start to wail.
“That girl’s gonna be trouble,” she told me. “You can always tell.”
Ten years later Hilary from down the street was still taking boys into the playhouse, but she never asked me. Girls never did. At sixteen, I had a face full of zits and an extra twenty pounds on me from all the leftover pie my mom brought home from work. I also had the voice whispering in my ear.
The voice told me what questions to study to pass all my tests with top grades. It told me which streets to take to avoid the bullies who would’ve liked to pull my pants down and my underwear up. It told me which drawers I should search to find the extra cash my mother squirreled away from my dad so he wouldn’t spend it on stuff she didn’t want him to have. Interestingly, the voice never seemed to care if I took that cash and spent it on the art supplies my parents didn’t think I needed, even though I don’t think there was much difference between me stealing it from my mother or the convenience store a block away. Maybe the voice just wanted me to draw comics.
Teachers didn’t love me, even though I got good grades. My parents must’ve loved me, but they were more concerned about their own business than mine — I was old enough to take care of myself and that was fine with them. I didn’t get into trouble. I stayed out of everyone’s way. I wasn’t popular, but I was mostly ignored.
I was mostly invisible.
When I was eighteen, I almost died. I’d gone to a party. Hilary invited me. Not because she liked me, but because she’d seen me stopping to get the mail from the box at the end of our driveway, and she was sitting on her front porch smoking a cigarette that hadn’t come from a store. She called me over. Looked me up and down with a knowing tilt of her head I remembered from way back in the days we’d spent in the playhouse.
“My parents are going out of town for the weekend. I’m having some people over.” She blew out smoke in long drifts and lifted her chin to study me. “You should come, Renton. It’ll be fun.”
And it was fun, watching the kids I’d gone to school with make fools of themselves with too much drink and too much drugs. I drew pictures of them, caricatures, and mostly they liked them. Gigantic foreheads and over-bulbous noses, wild eyes, huge heads on tiny bodies. The girls especially liked it when I added curves in places they wanted them and took them away from places they didn’t. Those girls hovered around me, leaning on the arm of my chair, their perfume sweet, their breath hot. One touched my hair and cupped her hand o
n the back of my neck. She leaned close to whisper in my ear, and like the voice that had been with me for so many years, her voice told me how to do things.
She took me upstairs with her hand in mine, fingers linked. She took me into a bedroom. Hilary’s brother’s, the one who’d gone away into the army and hadn’t come home. The bed had a plaid bedspread on it. Pillows covered in a thin layer of dust. Trophies on the shelves from when he’d played sports in school and pictures in frames of him wearing various sorts of uniforms.
She pushed me back onto the bed and got on top of me. She put her mouth on mine. She put my hands on her, and when the door opened and her boyfriend burst in, he broke all of my fingers. He threw me up against the wall so hard my head left a dent in the drywall. He broke the window and threw me out, where I landed on the wrought iron fence Hilary’s dad had put up around their pool. It punctured my throat, my stomach and my spine and would’ve left me permanently paralyzed if it hadn’t also stabbed me directly in the heart.
I died within minutes.
Or…actually, I did not.
Because the voice spoke to me at the top of the stairs and kept me from going into that bedroom. The voice had always been a whisper, a murmur, a soft, low tone. That night it hit me like a hammer. I stumbled back, hit a picture of Hilary and her brother hung in a golden frame. I caught it before it could fall and break the glass. It was smooth under my fingertips, and my touch smudged their faces.
The girl I was with stared at me with bleary eyes and a slack mouth. My hand had already slipped from hers, and she stared at her fingers like she could will them to link with mine again. She seemed to find it strange I’d deny her what she was offering — me, the fat, weird kid with pimples who drew funny pictures. But in the next few minutes when I’d ducked away into the bathroom and heard the thudding pound of her boyfriend’s feet coming up the stairs, and his shouts for her, I knew the voice had saved me.
Her boyfriend punched her in the face that night, made his mark, but at least he didn’t kill her. She wore those bruises around town like some badge of honor. Proof of his love for her or something crazy like that. I’d known for a long time that girls didn’t often give me the time of day, but it wasn’t until then that I realized I didn’t really care. I didn’t want to put my mark on anyone in order to make them love me.
It wasn’t the first time the voice had led me away from trouble, but it was the first time it had done more than speak to me — it had actually shown me what would happen if I kept to the path I was on. The memory of falling from that window, of those iron spikes piercing my skin, wouldn’t leave me.
In its own way, the voice had marked me, and I loved it.
Things were different after that. Not that anyone noticed. My parents kept on with their lives the way they always had, which essentially meant they worked and came home, had their separate dinners and went out with friends or stayed in to watch television while they had a few beers and argued over whose turn it was to take out the garbage. They weren’t bad people, my parents. Not cruel. They’d created me and raised me, made sure I was fed and clothed and had a place to live. In their absent, selfish way, they loved me.
Which made it just a little more difficult to kill them.
I didn’t do it because I hated them. My feelings for my parents had become as absent and selfish as theirs for me. We shared the same house but nothing else — they didn’t know about my dreams of going to technical school for graphic design, or how I’d almost-but-not-quite died at the hands of a jealous bully. They didn’t know about the voice.
I killed them because the voice had started whispering to me, not once in a while, not in times of distress, but every day. Every night. Every hour. And not just words, but pictures too.
The voice showed me the outcome of every path I could take. It showed me lives full of joy and misery, the only difference in something as simple as a missed bus. It told me which way to turn when I came out of the diner where I worked part time as a busboy. Left was one life. Right was another.
All these lives, cascading like a fistful of cards in a trick. Pick one, any one. Some days you get the king, others the joker.
Life with my parents alive was a long series of disappointments culminating in my complete and utter lack of success as a human being.
Life with my parents dead…was glory.
All spread out before me, the world to be gripped in my two hands, but not for my own pleasure. Not to raise me up for my own sake. No, I was to do the work of my true father, not the man who’d impregnated my mother and had happily spent his life with grease under his nails and his breath smelling of cheep beer. I was supposed to make a difference in the world. That’s what the voice told me.
The voice of God.
Not the one from vacation bible school, some old man with a long white beard and robes. My fathergod didn’t speak from a burning bush. My fathergod didn’t ask me to martyr myself so the sins of others would be forgiven. People needed to be responsible for their own sins.
No, my fathergod told me it was my job to bring a light to the world and show people how important it was not to follow the words some men had written down eons ago in texts that have been ruined through interpretation over the years. It’s not important to read.
It’s important to listen.
My parents died when the gas line to the stove my mother never used perforated, leaking gas into the kitchen that was ignited by a spark of unknown origin, maybe something simple like the phone ringing or the shuffle of my dad’s sock-clad feet on the carpet, making static. There were a lot of rights and lefts in that scenario; the voice showed me the myriad ways it could happen, and in the end it didn’t matter how. Just that it did.
The house was gone, and so were they, but there was plenty of money for a guy who didn’t need much. All I needed was my voice, and people to hear it. The problem was, I was still invisible.
So came the clothes. White suit, white shirt, white tie. Top to toe. The cadence of my words became an up-and-down lilt, and the message came next, shared in a way people were familiar with even if there were many who mocked. I became a caricature, just like the ones I was so good at drawing.
The Christian folk castigated me because I was making everything they ever believed into a lie. What they didn’t know was that they could keep on with their water into wine. They didn’t have to give that up. The non-believers mocked me and lumped me in with the Jesus sellers when that’s not at all the story I was telling. They didn’t have to take that on.
All they had to do was learn to listen.
I started with the website. Blog. A Connex account, a personal page not one for a business or a celebrity, because I wanted to connect with people as myself, not an entity or corporation or someone on a pedestal. I wanted everyone I connected with to see me as someone they could message and talk to, tag in their statuses. I replied to everyone, every time. I gained connexions at a startling rate. Social media, the hand of the voice. I started an internet radio show with only a few listeners at first, but as the things the voice told me to share became true, the numbers grew steadily every day, week, month. My videos went viral, reposted and reblogged and retweeted and shared all over the world.
I wasn’t invisible any more.
I saw the storms coming, of course. Not their origin, that was kept from me, but how they would tear through the country and all over the planet. The devastation they’d leave behind. The people who’d die. I saw these things when the voice whispered them to me…how my every left or right led this way or that. Different choices. Different paths.
It’s not narcissism if the world really does revolve around you.
I died for real, not just in a vision, and I came back, and the voice of my fathergod hadn’t told me that would happen. Hadn’t warned me of the pain. Maybe that was on purpose; maybe if I’d known in advance how much it would hurt, I’d have made different choices. I’d have moved along a different path.
I could’ve s
aved a lot of people in my avoidance of agony, that much is true. I could’ve turned left instead of right at several points along the way and saved lives. Property. I guess even the world, if the world had deserved saving.
But in the end, I didn’t.
13
Abbie had been through roadblocks before. She’d been pulled aside and passed roadside sobriety tests, always to her own surprise and probably that of the cops, too. She’d never had to inch her car past a pair of tanks before, or watched armed soldiers waving her through to the highway beyond.
The damage she’d seen in Oklahoma had been horrific. She’d driven from Ada and had seen evidence of other tornados in other towns, all equally terrible, but none of the damage had seemed worth this sort of nationwide government attention. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to roll down her window and ask the soldiers what had happened to make their presence necessary. She couldn’t even bring herself to listen to the radio.
She was afraid she already knew.
She had every reason to be nervous the first time the soldier waved her to a stop and gestured for her to roll down her window. She wasn’t drunk or high, but she was driving illegally. When he took her driver’s license from her, his eyes scanned it and then her face, but he handed it back without questioning the expired date. He looked inside the car, passenger seat, back seat. Then at her again.
“I need to get home to my family,” Abbie offered even thought the soldier hadn’t asked. “That’s all. I’m afraid…something’s happened.”
Other soldiers were moving along the line of cars behind and beside her. They were looking, too. Maybe for something, she thought, or maybe for nothing. Maybe they didn’t know what to look for. She had to swallow hard to keep herself from crying.