Strange Weather

by Joe Hill

  “What the fuck?” said the sportswriter in a strangely shrill voice. He was standing in the doorway leading to the stairwell, ready to slow-walk the dolly down the steps. Lanternglass heard him but did not look over, was deep in her story space, forming the next sentence in her mind.

  She did not look until the AR-15 went off with one flat, deafening crack, and then another, and then a third. She glanced around in time to see the sportswriter’s head snap back, blood scattering in a fine spray across the particleboard ceiling above and behind him. He fell backward, bringing the iron dolly down on top of him, boxes sliding out from under the bungee cables holding them in place and crashing to the floor.

  Kellaway stepped in and over the body, the Bushmaster just above the level of his hip, the strap thrown over his shoulder. Big man in a dove-colored polo already stained with blood. Shane Wolff, in the far corner of the room, rose to his full height, holding several loops of Ethernet cable. He lifted his free hand, palm out.

  “Hey, whatever you want—” he said, and Kellaway shot him in the stomach and the chest, driving him back into the window behind him. Shane’s shoulders hit the glass hard enough to put a pair of spiderweb cracks in it.

  Lanternglass shoved her chair back with her rear and dropped to one knee. Dorothy had stood up to see what was happening, but Lanternglass grabbed her wrist and pulled, hard, and the girl dropped to her knees. Lanternglass put her arms around her daughter and dragged her in under the desk.

  The Bushmaster went off with more of those flat, hard reports. That would be the sound of Kellaway killing Julia, the intern. From her position in the footwell under her desk, Lanternglass could see the windows overlooking the parking lot and a bit of Tim Chen’s private office through the wide panel of glass that served as one wall. Tim stood behind his desk, staring out into the office pool with bewildered eyes.

  Beyond the windows the smoke boiled and rushed, driven by the wind. Another spinning wheel of sparks blew past. Dorothy shuddered, and Lanternglass held her daughter’s head to her breast and pressed her mouth to her daughter’s hair. She breathed in the deep smell of her child’s scalp, of Dorothy’s coconut-crème shampoo. The child’s wiry arms were around her mother’s waist. And Lanternglass thought, Don’t let him have seen us. Please, God, don’t let him have seen us. Please, God, let this child live.

  Tim Chen disappeared from Lanternglass’s view, moving toward the door of his office. He had picked up a marble bookend, a block of pink-and-white stone, the only thing he could find to fight with. Lanternglass heard him shout, an inarticulate cry of horror and rage, and the Bushmaster went off again, chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk, not eight feet away, just the other side of her desk. Tim Chen fell so hard the floor shook.

  Her ears rang strangely. She had never held her daughter so tightly, could not have squeezed her any harder without breaking something. Lanternglass took the tiniest sip of air, was afraid that if she inhaled too deeply, Kellaway would hear. But then maybe he would not be able to hear anything after firing so many shots. Maybe after all that gunfire, he would be deaf to the small sounds of a shaking girl and a quietly gasping mother.

  The wind roared, rising and rising in volume. Lanternglass stared out through the windows, into the smoke, and with a kind of horrified wonder saw a twisting rope of flame, three hundred feet tall, out in the murk: an incendiary top whirling down the middle of the highway. A slender tornado of fire, reaching up into the suffocating white sky and disappearing. If it turned toward the building, perhaps it would strike, and tear apart the bricks, and carry her daughter, Dorothy, away to some golden, burning, terrible yet wonderful Oz. Maybe it would carry them both away. At the sight of it, Aisha Lanternglass’s chest filled with an awe that was like breath, swelling her lungs, swelling her heart. The beauty of the world and the horror of the world were twined together, like wind and flame. The smoke rose, filthy and dark, and pressed against the glass, and then subsided, and suddenly that blazing, twisting stairwell into the clouds was gone.

  One combat boot appeared, coming down in front of their hiding place in the footwell beneath the desk. Dorothy’s eyes were squeezed shut. She didn’t see. Lanternglass stared out over her daughter’s head, holding her breath. The other boot appeared. He was standing right in front of the desk.

  Slowly, slowly, Kellaway bent down to look in at them. Holding the butt of the Bushmaster under his right armpit. He stared upon Lanternglass and her little girl with something very like serenity in his pale blue, almost white eyes.

  “Just think. If you had a gun,” he said to her, “this story might have a different ending.”

  ALOFT

  1

  HE HATED IT IN THE back of the little plane, squished in with the others. He hated the reek of gasoline and moldy canvas and his own rancid farts, and by the time they reached six thousand feet, Aubrey Griffin decided he couldn’t go.

  “I’m so sorry to do this, man—” Aubrey began, calling over his shoulder to the guy he thought of as Axe.

  His jumpmaster’s name had flown out of his head as soon as the dude introduced himself. By then Aubrey was having trouble hanging on to even the most basic information. In the half hour before they had boarded the single-engine Cessna, Aubrey’s panic was making a roar of static that filled his head. People looked him right in the face and said things—shouted them, really, everyone souped up on adrenaline—but all he heard was unintelligible noise. He could grasp the occasional obscenity, nothing more.

  So Aubrey began to think of him as Axe, short for Axe Body Spray, because the guy looked like he’d walked off the set of a commercial featuring hot rods, explosions, and models having pillow fights in their underwear. The jumpmaster was fit and lanky, with golden-red hair cut short and feathered back, and he possessed a coked-up energy that amplified rather than subdued Aubrey’s terror. How absurd was it to have considered putting his life in the hands of someone he didn’t even know by name?

  “Whadja say?” Axe yelled.

  It didn’t seem like it should be so hard to make himself heard, especially to a guy who was strapped to his ass. They were harnessed together; Aubrey sat in Axe’s lap like a child getting cozy with a shopping-mall Santa.

  “I can’t do this! I hoped like hell I could. I really thought—”

  Axe shook his head. “That’s normal! Everyone gets that!”

  He was going to make him plead. Aubrey didn’t want to plead, not in front of Harriet. To his dismay, he uncorked another string of greasy farts. They were inaudible over the drone of the engine, but they burned and stank. Axe had to be tasting every one of them.

  It was awful to be pathetic in front of Harriet Cornell. It didn’t matter that he and Harriet were never going to date, never be in love, never lie nude beneath cool sheets in St. Barts with the French windows open and the sound of the waves crashing on the reefs in the distance. He still had his daydreams to protect. It dismayed Aubrey to think this was the last memory of him that Harriet would take with her to Africa.

  Harriet and Aubrey were both on their first jumps. (Or maybe it was more accurate to say Harriet was on her first jump. Aubrey had come to see in the last few moments that he was not.) They were going tandem, which meant each of them was buckled to a jumpmaster, men who did this every day. Brad and Ronnie Morris were in the plane as well. This was old hat for them, though, both boys experienced skydivers.

  June Morris was dead, and they were all jumping in her memory: her brothers, Brad and Ronnie; Harriet, who had been her best friend; and Aubrey himself. June had been dead six weeks, wiped out at twenty-three by cancer. That was some odds-defying shit right there, Aubrey thought. It seemed to Aubrey you were about as likely to become a rock star as you were to die that young of something like lymphoma.

  “There’s nothing normal about it!” Aubrey shouted now. “I have a clinical diagnosis as a quivering pussy. Seriously, if you make me jump, I’m going to fill my pants with hot, creamy shit, man—”

  At that moment the sound
dropped in the hollow, roaring stainless-steel capsule of the light aircraft, and his voice carried from one end of the plane to the other. Aubrey was aware of Brad and Ronnie turning to look at him. They both had GoPro cameras screwed to their helmets. Presumably all this would be on YouTube later.

  “The first rule of skydiving: Don’t take a shit on the jumpmaster,” Axe said.

  The mindless thunder of the engine rose again. Brad and Ronnie looked away.

  Aubrey didn’t want to glance over at Harriet but couldn’t help himself.

  She wasn’t staring at him, although he thought she had only just turned her face away. She clutched a small purple stuffed horse with a silver horn protruding from its brow and twee iridescent wings behind its forelegs: the Junicorn. Harriet and the Junicorn were turned to face the door, a big, loose, rattling hatch made out of clear plastic. Every time the plane tilted to the left, Aubrey was consumed by the sickening certainty that the door would flap open and he’d slide right out while Axe Body Spray hacked a maniacal, coked-up laugh. It seemed like nothing was holding it shut, fucking nothing.

  The way Harriet was pointedly not looking at him was almost as unpleasant as if she’d been staring at him with a mixture of pity and disappointment. Aubrey didn’t need Axe to give him permission to stay in the plane. His opinion didn’t matter. What Aubrey wanted was for Harriet to tell him it was all right.

  No. What he wanted was to go out the side of the plane with her—ahead of her. But to do that he would have had to be someone else. Maybe that was what he hated most: not his queasy stomach, not his sick farts, not the collapse of his nerve. Maybe what he despised most was being found out. Was anything in all the world more heartrending than being found out by someone you wanted to love you?

  He leaned forward and thunked his helmet against hers to get her attention.

  She turned her face toward him, and he saw, for the first time, that she was pale and drawn, lips pressed so tightly together that all the color had gone out of them. It came to him with something like relief that she was terrified, too. He grasped at an idea with an almost frantic hope: Maybe she would stay in the plane with him! If they were cowards together, the situation would no longer be shameful and tragic; it would be the most hilarious thing ever.

  He had meant to tell her he was backing out, but now, seized by this new notion, he shouted, “How you doing?” Prepared to comfort her. Looking forward to it, in fact.

  “I’m this close to throwing up.”

  “Me, too!” he cried, perhaps with a dash too much enthusiasm.

  “I’m shivering like a leaf.”

  “Jesus. I’m so glad I’m not the only one.”

  “I don’t want to be here,” she said, her helmet resting against his, their noses almost touching. Her eyes, the cool greenish brown of a frozen marsh, were wide with undisguised anxiety.

  “Fuck!” he said. “Me neither! Me neither!” He was close to laughter, close to taking her hand.

  She shifted her gaze back to that door of clear, rattling plastic. “I don’t want to sit one more second in this plane. I just want to be out there doing it. It’s like waiting in line for a roller coaster. The wait just about kills you. You can’t stop building it up in your mind. But then, when you’re on the ride, you’re like, ‘Why was I so scared? I want to do this again!’”

  A weak, small, oily fart of disappointment slipped free. The enthusiasm, the swell of sweet courage he heard in her voice, filled him with Seattle-grunge levels of despair.

  Harriet’s eyes widened. She pointed out the clattering door and shouted with an almost childlike excitement, “Hey! Hey, guys! Spaceship!”

  “What’s that?” cried the big lumbersexual spooning her from behind.

  Harriet was strapped to a chunky guy with the kind of bushy beard that suggested a closetful of flannel shirts and a second job serving fair-trade espresso in an upscale coffeehouse. When it was time to pair up with a jumpmaster, Aubrey had acted quickly to claim Axe Body Spray. He didn’t want Harriet leaping out a plane with the dude, her ass nestled against the guy’s probable erection all the way down. The Wookiee had paired with Harriet. Unfortunately (and predictably), she and the furry fat guy had been falling around laughing from their first moments together. By lunch the two of them were dueting to an a cappella version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” her chubby jumpmaster singing the male parts in a warm, low, surprisingly soulful voice. Aubrey loathed him. It was Aubrey’s role to be soulful and to surprise Harriet with laughter. He loathed all clever, decent fat men who cozied their way into Harriet’s spontaneous hugs.

  “There!” Harriet cried. “There, there! Aubrey! You see it?”

  “See what?” yelled her Wookiee, even though she wasn’t talking to him.

  “That cloud! Look at that weird cloud! It looks just like a UFO!”

  Aubrey didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to go anywhere near that door. But he couldn’t help himself—Axe was edging closer to see what she was pointing at and taking Aubrey along for the ride.

  Harriet pointed at a cloud, shaped just like a flying saucer from a 1950s alien-invasion flick. It was wide and circular and at the center it was mounded up in a cottony dome.

  “Kinda big for a UFO!” shouted Chewbackish. He was right—that cloud had to be almost a mile across.

  “It’s the mother ship!” Harriet cried with glee.

  “I saw one that looked like a doughnut once,” Axe said. “Like God blew a smoke ring. Had a big hole in the middle. We’re much closer to the supernatural up here. Everything gets very surreal when you’re falling from twelve thousand feet. Reality gets as flimsy as parachute silk, and your mind opens to new possibilities!”

  Oh, fuck you and your flimsy parachute-silk reality—that was Aubrey’s view. Fuck Axe and his promise that the experience would open Harriet to new possibilities (like maybe a post-jump three-way with Axe and Harriet’s furry jumpmaster).

  Harriet shook her head with satisfaction. “June would’ve loved that cloud. She believed ‘They’ walk among us. The Greys. The Visitors.”

  Fat-and-Furry said, “We’ll get a closer look pretty soon. We’re almost at jump altitude.”

  Aubrey felt a poke of fresh alarm, like the stick of a needle, but for an instant anyway the jump was only the second thing on his mind. He leaned forward, hardly aware he was doing it, surprising Axe, who had to lean forward with him. The harness joining them together creaked.

  Aubrey watched the cloud for half a minute as they climbed and began to circle toward it—they would pass right above it in a moment or two. Then he looked past Harriet at the guy with the beard.

  “Yeah!” he said. “Yeah, man, she’s right. That cloud is fucked up. Look again.”

  Harriet’s jumpmaster said, “It’s a fine specimen of a cumulonimbus. Very cool.”

  “No it’s not. It’s not cool. It’s weird.”

  The Wookiee gave him a glance of appraisal that seemed to mingle boredom with contempt. Aubrey shook his head, annoyed that the guy didn’t get it, and pointed again.

  “It’s going that way,” Aubrey said, jabbing a finger to the north.

  “So what?” Brad Morris called out. For the second time in the last few minutes, everyone was looking at Aubrey.

  “All the other clouds are going in the opposite direction!” Aubrey yelled, pointing south. “It’s going the wrong way.”

  2

  THE CLOUD HELD THEIR ATTENTION for one shared moment of respectful silence before the chubby jumpmaster explained. “It’s called an air box. It’s a pattern of circular flow. The air pushes in one direction at one altitude, then folds back and shoves everything in the exact opposite direction at a different altitude. When you go up in a hot-air balloon, a current like that means you can float away from your point of departure, then drop a couple thousand feet and float back to the exact same place you took off.” The chubby jumpmaster did hot-air-balloon rides, too, and had offered to take Harriet up sometime for free—an e
vil suggestion as far as Aubrey was concerned, tantamount to inviting her to a sex club for a lazy night of cocaine and hand jobs. Aubrey supposed most men who went into skydiving and ballooning and other forms of high-altitude devilry did it for the pussy. There were all those opportunities to buckle girls into safety harnesses, to cop a feel when comforting them in a moment of high anxiety, to win their admiration with cheery shows of fearlessness. Of course, to be fair, Aubrey himself wouldn’t have been in the plane if not to impress Harriet.

  “Oh,” Harriet said, shrugging with mock disappointment. “Too bad. I thought we were about to make contact.”

  Axe held up two fingers, Churchill declaring victory on VE-Day. “Two minutes!”

  Harriet bopped her helmet against Aubrey’s and met his gaze. “Yes?”

  Aubrey tried a smile, but it felt more like a grimace.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “You can, though!” Axe shouted, finally deciding not to pretend he couldn’t hear. “This whole experience is about the power of ‘can’!”

  Aubrey ignored him. Axe Body Spray didn’t matter. The only thing that concerned him was how Harriet took it.

  “I really wanted to,” he told her.

  Harriet nodded and took his hand. “I have to. I promised June.”

  Of course he had promised June, too. When Harriet said she would jump, Aubrey had sworn he’d be screaming all the way down right beside her. At the time June was dying, and it had seemed like the right thing to do.

  “I feel like shit—” Aubrey began.

  “Don’t worry!” Harriet yelled. “I think it’s rad you came this far!”

  “I doubled up on my antianxiety meds and everything!” He wished he could stop explaining himself.