And just as no two snowflakes are the same, neither were any two meteors; each was a laboratory of its own featuring unknown biochemical and geologic matter. But the strikes came in common clusters. In the United States, omnimetal came to the north, a new spore spread through the dank forest of the Pacific Northwest, and today researchers are still trying to understand what’s happening in Alaska. The terrestrial became suddenly alien.
At some point you read a bedtime story to your child for the last time. At some point you run through a sprinkler or hit a home run or stand on your head for the last time. At some point you go from hating to tolerating to loving to requiring coffee. At some point you go from grieving a lost parent to remembering him or her fondly. Most transitions are gentle and unrecognized and individual. This one was violent and collective. Everyone could point to the same date on the calendar and say, Then. That was when everything changed.
In northern Minnesota, the night birds went silent. Worms and salamanders twisted out of the dirt. Cats yowled in yards, and dogs whimpered under beds. Some people suffered from sudden migraines and others noticed their fillings tanging their mouths with the taste of metal and others shook their cell phones and said, “Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?”
And then the sky fell. The meteors, some the size of golf balls, hailed down, one after the other, a constant fusillade. Some were as big as zeppelins and knuckled up huge mounds of earth spiked with woods. Trees splintered and caught fire as though struck by cannonballs. Silos opened up and spilled their grain in a hissing rush. Lakes splashed and chimneyed with steam. Houses vanished.
A woman named Jessica Peterson was driving a semi north along Highway 1, hauling a tankful of milk. She leaned over the steering wheel, craning her neck to take in the sky. The radio fuzzed in and out—country music, Bible-thumping preachers, news reports; a chaotic babble. She spun the dial until it settled on classic rock. The station was running a themed show, a comet countdown. David Bowie’s “Starman” gave way to Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” A hula girl was anchored to the dash. The paint on her belly was worn away because Jessica liked to rub it for luck, and she rubbed it now. But it was too late for luck. She didn’t see the meteor itself, only the crown of the fire-edged asphalt rising before her. A crater had opened in the road and she couldn’t brake fast enough. The semi chunked over the lip of rubble and descended into the sudden pit. The grille struck the far side of it and the semi accordioned with the doom and shriek of rent metal. The tires melted and the milk glugged out of the fissured tank and formed a scalding pond that boiled and steamed.
A man named Paul Weitz was washing dishes after dinner while his daughters watched television in the living room. They kept complaining about the quality of the picture and he kept telling them, “If it’s so horrible, shut it off and get your butts to bed.” He added more soap to suds up the water and scraped some dried yolk off a plate with his fingernail and then noticed that the half- and quarter-full glasses on the counter beside him were trembling. Water shivered inside them. Their rims chimed against each other. He looked out the window in time to see the shining paths of a dozen or more meteors. He charged into the living room and scooped up his daughters with his soap-splattered hands just as the house began to shake. Holes opened in the ceiling and the floor. Cinders splintered the air. He dodged between columns of short-lived light, and when he glanced up he could see rough patches of the sky. His daughters were screaming when he laid them in the bathtub and covered their body with his and said, “It’s going to be okay. Daddy will keep you safe.”
Ken Pierce was out on Miners Lake in his Vee Sport cruiser. He had a six-pack of Hamm’s on ice in the cooler and a pole baited with a leech in the water. Fish probably wouldn’t be biting this time of night, but what the hell—here he was, waiting on the meteor shower to get going, so he might as well try his luck. When the sky began to streak and strobe, so did the reflective surface of the water, so he felt he was floating inside a globe of shaken stars. The air trembled with the thunder of sonic booms and cratered moorings, so Ken didn’t hear the water splashing and plopping all around him as fish leaped, crazed by what was happening. He spilled his beer when a walleye flopped onto his lap. One sunfish and then another smacked the deck. A trout arched over the railing and rattled directly into the ice-filled cooler. He didn’t need his pole after all.
And on a four-hundred-acre lot thirty miles outside of Northfall, a quick succession of impacts pounded the earth. Not much remained of the Gundersons’ maple forest but scorched stumps and burning leaves. The displaced dirt had nudged the foundation of the house up on one side so it sat crookedly, but it was otherwise spared. Its windows had shattered. Some of the vinyl siding had melted. Bricks still fell from the chimney. Water gurgled from a broken pipe.
One meteor hit close to the house and produced a splash of molten metal like a muddy wave of lava. And the little boy named Hawkin was slammed by the final burning reach of it. He barely had time to throw up his arm before it struck him. His scream was silenced before it ever left his mouth. He went rolling across the lawn cowled in red-hot metal. The lawn scorched and smoked beneath him. His clothes and hair were incinerated. He lay there for several minutes, his body tremoring, and the metal cooled to a silver sheen that slowly shrank to patches, like puddles drying in the sun, before being absorbed into his skin entirely.
He went still. And then rose with a gasp, deep and hungry. He looked around at a landscape that was unrecognizable: all smoke and fire and what looked like some hellish lake, a massive silver reach veined through with red. He ran then. Into the night. He had forgotten about the stranger with the shotgun. He had forgotten about his parents. He had forgotten his name. For the moment he was nothing but fried nerve endings and he had no plan except to escape the pain that seemed centered in this place. He would later be discovered wandering naked down the middle of the highway with a blank look on his face. When asked what happened, he could only say, “The sky fell on me.”
11
* * *
Now . . .
After Stacie files her paperwork and clocks out with the night supervisor and changes out of her uniform, she drives to the duplex she’s renting and parks and then pauses her hand at the ignition. The dash clock reads 3:17 a.m. She’s worked a twelve-hour shift, but she doesn’t feel at all tired.
Her parents couldn’t understand why she wanted to move in here when she could have remained rent-free in her old bedroom. But how can she feel like she has any authority if she’s still sleeping in the four-poster princess bed they got her when she was eight? Her life is like a continuous stream of Stacies, each one of her over the years connected to the next by a series of invisible threads, all the way from infancy to the present. When she smiles or sneezes or combs her hair now, she imagines all those previous versions of herself doing the same. She wants to cut the strings. She wants her new self to be her only self. Moving five miles away feels like some kind of severance, at least.
It’s nearly impossible to find housing due to the boom, but exceptions are made for townies. There’s a whisper network among the real estate agents, who are loyal to their own. So while a half a dozen miners might cram into the same trailer, she has a place to herself. She has mostly unpacked, but even after six months, she still has plenty to do. Breaking down boxes for recycling. And painting the bedroom sunshine yellow. And hanging the framed posters she ordered from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. She thinks she wants Monet’s Water Lilies in the bathroom. And maybe above her desk she’ll nail the image of the tiger with the word Determination printed below its snarling face.
But not tonight. She nudges the gearshift into reverse. And continues the search for Dan Swanson, the missing deputy.
She had been looking all night, glancing out the window on patrol, but the radio never seemed to stop squawking and the radar never seemed to stop registering cars going 70 in a 45 mph zone. They handed out DWIs. They answered a call for a bar fight involving ten people and spen
t the next few hours trying to figure out who’d hit whom and why and whether any of them wanted to press charges. Then they investigated a burglary and responded to a complaint about a broken car window, and then there were the three domestics, one of which involved Stacie drawing her Glock while talking down a drunk husband with a knife.
But she hadn’t forgotten about Swanson’s disappearance. Northfall’s police department has a new fleet of cars outfitted with GPS, but he was driving one of older-model Chargers that couldn’t be traced. Now she notes the address and the time of his last interaction with dispatch. He was leaving a home after serving child-custody papers. Either his phone is powered off or its battery is dead, but his wife checked in with Verizon and they were able to confirm that his number had pinged off a tower in that same neighborhood.
Someone had called him. Verizon supplied the number to the Northfall PD, and it’s untraceable, either phreaked or from a Blackphone. Whoever the caller was, the conversation lasted only fifteen seconds. A fifteen-second conversation, in Stacie’s mind, consists of someone saying, “Meet me at this place at this time.” And since Swanson ignored a hail from dispatch ten minutes later, she assumed that meant he had already arrived at the rendezvous.
She’d tried talking over some possibilities with her partner, but Hank dismissed her concern every time. “Just slow down there, Nancy Drew.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What’s wrong with showing some initiative? You don’t find any of this suspicious? That a police officer would be communicating with someone who’s using an encrypted line?”
“Now, I get what you’re doing here, rookie,” he said. “You’re excited. You want to make a difference. I think that’s great. But I guess I’m a little worried about your tone.”
“My tone?”
“You seem to be suspicious of Swanson. You seem to be implying he’s up to something. Piece of advice: You don’t ever want to talk like that around any of the other boys, okay? Ever heard of the blue wall? You’re part of it. We’re part of it. And the wall stands true because we all know we’re the good guys. We are. And we watch each other’s backs accordingly. Don’t you forget that.”
We’re the good guys. That sounds like something Stacie herself would say. And she wishes it felt as true as it did when she swore the oath and first pinned the badge to her breast. But bit by bit, her notion of what it means to be a peacekeeper keeps getting chipped away.
Earlier, at Arby’s, when they’d placed their order, Hank said, “This is on me.” And when he pulled out his wallet and riffled through it, she saw it was thickly leafed with bills, all of them hundreds.
When they collected their food, Hank sucked at his soda and dug out some curly fries and pushed through the door with his hip and let it shut right in front of an old man waiting to enter. Stacie hung back and sighed and saw her reflection in the glass. There was the uniform, the holster, and utility belt—what she had always dreamed of wearing—but her expression was one of total disappointment. She had to force herself to smile when she held the door for the man and said, “Good evening! Would you like some candy?”
She drives a forest-green Jeep Wrangler with a tan shell, a car she bought in high school from money she’d earned as a lifeguard and waitress. Deep in the console there might still be cracked lipstick and fossilized energy bars and even a few mix CDs from that time. She loves and hates the car for the same reason she loves and hates the town. It’s hard to become an adult in the place where you grew up. Because you can never escape who you were.
She starts at the address where Swanson was last reported, a ranch home with a four-wheeler parked in the front yard. There is a limit to how far someone can travel in ten minutes. And all the roads in Northfall are laid out in a grid.
She starts squaring herself outward, going slow—five, ten, fifteen miles an hour—turning left, and left again, and again, squinting through the window, craning her neck, sometimes getting out to check an alley or a tree cluster. She grew up knowing every inch of the town, but its parameters expand every day.
There isn’t enough housing in Northfall. The construction can’t keep up with the influx of people, so companies—including Frontier Metals and Black Dog Energy—clear acres of forest to build barracks for their workers. Man camps, they’re called. She drives past one of them now and can see a bonfire with dark figures in lawn chairs settled around it, can feel music throbbing from a sound system cranked high.
Some of the men are fresh out of high school with dreams of making their fortune, and some are middle-aged with a wife and kids in another state, and a few are old and desperate with faded tattoos and tobacco-stained teeth. Some are vets. Some have criminal records. Some have crippling student-loan debt. But all are men. Six or seven of them to a trailer. Buses and vans come every morning to haul them away and return every evening to drop them off again, filthy and exhausted and ready to drink and smoke and snort and fight and fuck. People have a lot of names for them: diggers, dredgers, miners, moles, cowboys, metal-heads.
Ten to one. That is the ratio of men to women in Northfall. There are the women who grew up here and there are the women who have come since the boom, and of them, many are strippers and prostitutes. Their flyers are stapled to telephone poles. Their business cards litter the tables at restaurants and bars. It is the unofficial policy of the Northfall PD not to prosecute sex workers. “Weren’t for them, these good old boys would go out of their minds,” the sheriff says.
Sometimes it feels like they already have. Stacie notices it when she walks down the sidewalk and trucks honk their horns and voices shout from open windows. She notices it at the Big Muskie Tavern, where she can’t go without one man after another demanding to buy her a drink. She notices it at Walmart, where a man angled his cart so that she couldn’t get past him in the aisle, and when she asked him to please move, he said, “Only if you’re real nice and give me your phone number.” And she notices it at work, as the only woman in a department of sixty-three full-time deputies.
The Northfall PD covers the city as well as the county, one thousand square miles that include one hundred and ten thousand acres of water. The newly constructed, ten-million-dollar station sits on a piny lot at the edge of town and boasts a gym, a lounge, and a firing range. Frontier and Black Dog largely funded the facility.
A few months ago, when Stacie was brand-new to the job, she’d signed in for her shift, tightened her holster and her ponytail, tapped her finger on the fresh name tag on the door to her locker—Toal—and smiled, but the smile died a second later when she spun the combo and opened the door and discovered a lime-green dildo inside. She slapped a hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, dear.”
She wrapped it in a paper towel and put it in the garbage and tried not to notice the sergeant smiling at her when she reported to her supervisor and received a pile of eviction notices to serve, an act of vandalism to investigate, and a domestic complaint to follow up on.
She didn’t want to mention the dildo, but she felt flushed and distracted the entire day and at the end of her shift knocked on Sheriff Barnes’s door. He called her in and asked her to sit down. The walls of his office were decorated with photos of him fishing with his family and shaking hands with the president during one of his visits; the shelves held some bowling trophies and fly-fishing lures he had tied and framed. Barnes had had cancer several years ago, and during chemo, all of his hair had fallen out and never grown back. His skin had a loose-wrinkled quality that reminded her of an elephant’s. He kept the thermostat in his office at a crisp sixty degrees that made her body tighten. She wanted to sit on her hands.
She had trouble meeting his eyes when he asked what was bothering her. When she told him about the sex toy, he shook his head and inhaled through his teeth and said, “Boys will be boys.” He explained that everyone in the department went through some sort of hazing and she shouldn’t take it personally. “But your father asked me to keep an eye on you, so I’ll look into it and make sure
it doesn’t happen again.” He stood up and walked over to her and patted her on the shoulder and she felt a flash of hatred for him. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she said and then, “Actually, you know what? No. No, thanks. Forget I asked.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Her father, Oliver Toal, had played high-school football with Barnes. The two of them weren’t friends, but in a town like Northfall, going to the state tourney together is the equivalent of going to war together; the high drama of the shared experience bonds you for life. She hated the fact that her getting this job felt like a favor, that the sheriff considered himself a babysitter as much as a boss, that she had so much to prove before anyone here viewed her as anything more than a token female.
And that’s why she drives through the night hunting for what no one else can find. She finally discovers Swanson’s Charger parked in a lot used for county storage. Here are rows and rows of the massive concrete pipes that will be used to expand the water system. She stares at the squad car a long minute, then unwraps a Starburst and pops it in her mouth and lets the candy melt on her tongue. A warmth spreads through her, tingling her hair, the tips of her fingers, giving her a buzzy feeling all over that she identifies as courage. Or its sugary substitute.
In the sky she can see the red hint of the sun when she climbs out of the Jeep and slowly approaches the cruiser, afraid of what she’ll find. The door is unlocked, the cab empty. The dome light reveals the standard mess of rubber-banded notebooks and ammo clips, fast-food bags, pens, pencils. The shotgun is still locked in the floor mount. She taps the keyboard of the computer by the dashboard, and the screen lights up.
The Ninth Metal Page 8