But there was something else. Among the shattered pieces of lumber and shards of broken glass that orbited the trunk of the storm, I could see these little silhouettes. As they twirled on winds strong enough to rip ancient trees from the clutches of the earth, I could see tiny legs and arms flailing, searching for purchase where there was none.
I couldn’t help but picture these airborne zombies more clearly in my mind: their flesh being stripped away by sand and chunks of metal, splinters of wood driven through their torsos by the sheer force of nature, body parts severed with sheets of tin… and somehow still trapped within the shadows of Life and Death, not alive but not really dead either.
Suddenly there’s fingers snapping right in front of me and I see Doc’s face, leaning in so close that I can smell Spam wafting from his breath.
“Carl, hey buddy, come back to me.”
I blink several times and I’m back in the shed again, far from that Iowa rooftop and the finger of God that had reached down from the sky to rake the earth.
“Look, my man,” Doc continues, “I mentioned that tornado to make a point… not to send you off on a trip to Emerald City.”
“I don’t know wha…”
My voice sounds thin and strained, even to my own ears, and every couple syllables it cracks like a man whose been wandering in the desert.
“Save your strength. Don’t talk.”
I want a drink of water so badly… just a sip, enough to wet my lips and ease the swollen burning in the back of my throat. But my canteen was emptied hours ago and Doc doesn’t seem to have any supplies with him. Which is odd. If there was one thing that man always made sure he had with him, it was water.
“The way I see it,” he says, “is that you’re a lot like that tornado. You’ve got all this death and destruction revolving around you and you’re just tearing across the countryside and bustin’ up anything that gets in your way.”
He leans back in the chair with that self-satisfied grin he gets when he thinks he’s said something particularly clever; but his eyes tell another story. I can see concern in the furrowing of his brow, sadness and fear in the way he squints and blinks. When you really know a person, you get to where you can read these things.
“Problem is, even an EF-5 can’t go on indefinitely. Sooner or later, that rear flank downdraft just wraps around and chokes off the twister’s air supply. The vortex starts to weaken and then
Doc looks as if he might be on the verge of tears. His eyes glisten and when he blinks it almost seems forced, as if he’s squeezing his eyes shut instead of allowing it to come naturally.
“Once Josie died things really went to hell for you, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, I know. I could see it in the way you two looked at each other.”
Did I say that last part aloud? Or had Doc somehow tapped into my thoughts like the Jedi Knights he held in such high regard?
“When you were with her, you weren’t the tornado. You were the sun rising over a misty field at dawn. Shit, the world may have fallen apart all around you but you were at peace, man.”
I wish I could believe like she did. Doesn’t even have to be reincarnation. If only there really was something beyond all of this other than an eternal void. I would love to think that I’ll actually see her again in some mansion in the sky with crystal walls and golden ceilings; that we will play harps and laugh and sing and all of that other happy horse shit. That I’ll actually get the chance to tell her that I loved her.
“She knows.” Doc says, apparently reading my mind again. “And she’s closer than you think, brother.”
He turns toward the window and is silent for a moment as he watches the trees sway in the wind.
“Storm’s coming.” he finally says. “And when it does, you’re going to have to make a decision. You gonna stay out in the rain? Or are you gonna come in where it’s warm and dry?”
Just like Doc to pull some sort of Zen psychobabble on a dying man. Like Josie too, now that I think about it.
I start to ask Doc not to play with words, to just come out and say whatever the hell he’s driving at; but as I watch, he begins fading like cigarette smoke on the wind. One moment he’s there and the next he’s breaking up into little tendrils that melt into obscurity the further they drift.
But I can still hear his voice, as if he were still sitting just across the way.
“I’ll miss you dearly, my friend.”
And then there is only the sound of branches scratching against the roof and the whistling of the wind as it blows through cracks in the wall.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: JOSIE
Why do I have to see him like this? What good can I do if I can’t stroke his hair and try my best to comfort him? If I can’t hold his hand and mop the sweat from his brow? He’s dying and all I can do is stand here and watch as the light slowly fades from his eyes.
I’d rather remember him as he was during our time at the farmhouse: that crooked little grin that would creep across his face whenever I’d speak to him, the way he would genuinely laugh at even my feeblest attempts at humor….
When we sat together at night, he’d get this distant look in his eyes as he described a place we both so desperately wanted to believe existed: a small town surrounded by walls too high for the freshies and rotters to scale, packed with cottages where smoke curled from stone chimneys and fresh water was only a hand-pump away. In the mornings, he said, you’d be able to hear babies crying for their mothers’ breasts as you sat on the porch, sipping chicory root coffee and waving to the neighbors across the way. Being a vegetarian, I would fit right in seeing as how meat would be so rare of a commodity that it could be traded like gold. Instead, the garden would be our main source of nourishment and the produce would be fresh and abundant.
And then he’d tell me how what he really missed – more than television, movies, or even music – were fried green tomatoes. He’d had a little patch in his backyard during his former life and he’d describe how it had that earthy smell after a rain, how the fruit would plump up until they practically fell into his hands at the slightest touch. He’d gather the tomatoes in his hands and head to the kitchen where he’d slice them into thin circles, dredge them in flour seasoned with salt and pepper, and then savor the aroma as they sizzled in the cast iron skillet. It almost sounded like a religious experience, the way he told it; and it was little details like this that began to blossom the simple seed of physical attraction into something so much more beautiful.
At the same time Carl and I were growing so much closer, however, Sadie was in decline. It had started as nothing more than tightness in her chest and a tickle in the back of her throat.
“Just a bit under the weather.” she’d claimed. “No use getting your panties all in a bunch.”
Within days, though, the tickle had mutated into a cough that rattled deep within her chest. You could hear the phlegm in her lungs gurgling as it tried to break up and she would double over in a fit of coughing so bad that it wouldn’t have surprised me if she had vomited. But nothing ever came of it other than a raspy voice and a fever so high you could feel it without even touching her.
Watchmaker stayed by her side the entire time, giving her sips of water that had been melted from the snow and occasionally singing snippets of a song that was, as Carl later informed me, and old ballad by Johnny Cash. Her hand looked so small and dainty in his, as if with the slightest bit of pressure he could crush the brittle bones into indiscernible fragments; but there was tenderness there, a delicacy in the way he touched his wife that told a lifetime of stories in a single gesture.
“She needs meds.” Carl whispered from the dining room. “She’s just gonna get worse otherwise.”
Doc and I stood in silence, watching as Watchmaker pulled the tattered quilt up to Sadie’s chin. His hands
