He marched past them, going for the bins of freeze-dried food. He grabbed a couple boxes of packets, then took a hatchet off the shelves, stood there staring at it. Everyone who passed by got to hear how the phones were dead and the TV was off the air. It was to be expected, Mitch figured, but you could almost see the panic threading through the store.
“Radio’s dead, too,” some teenaged kid announced, a waterproof poncho tucked under one arm.
Hubb pulled his oxygen mask off. “Try that fucking radio,” he told his college girl. “Go ahead for chrissake, turn the cocksucker on.”
Nervously, she tried the radio on the shelf above Hubb’s head. Then she tried the phone, shook her head.
Hubb scowled. “Well, what in the fuck next? Jesus H. Christ!”
“Yup,” Hardy said, “seen this shit before. The Red October of fifty-two. Weather got funny like this. Summer was hot. Wicked hot. Fall was too cold. By Sept the fifteenth, we had an inch of snow on the ground. Then that Red Rain came. It was ugly, by God, it was ugly.”
The college girl was intrigued. Possibly a bit naive, too. “What happened? Did it really rain red?”
“Ahhhhhh…don’t encourage him, honey,” Knucker said. “He’ll go on all day if he has an audience.”
Hardy ignored her. “Sure did, missy. Pissed outta the sky red as blood. Poisoned wells and rivers and killed twenty people. That was nineteen-fifty-two.”
“Ahhhhhh…forty-nine that was,” Knucker said, not looking up from her crossword.
“Fifty-two.”
“Forty-nine!”
“Fifty-two, you stupid old bat! I should know! That was the fall my kid brother got electrocuted up on the roof.”
“Ahhhhhh…your brother lives in Sauk City.”
Tommy laughed. “Goddamn Hardy. What a guy. Red Rain, my ass.”
Hubb looked over at college girl. “What’re you fucking standing there for, sweet cheeks? We got cocksucking people here! Chop! Chop!”
Back on went the oxygen mask.
Tommy shook his head. “That silver-tongued devil. He just has a way with the ladies.” He laughed and turned back to Mitch. “Least that radio’s off the air. You been hearing what Brother John’s been saying?”
“Yeah, I heard all right.”
“Last night it was build your own ark and today it was something about the rain falling and the dead rising. How you like that shit?”
Mitch said he didn’t like it at all.
But what he was thinking about was Lily. How was she going to be handling this? Christ, she wasn’t holding herself up these days with much more than a wet straw and with no radio and no TV, phones down, she might just lose it completely.
“I should be getting back home,” he said.
“Sure,” Tommy said. “Don’t want to be leaving your family, not with all this shit happening. Especially Lily, you know.”
Mitch was going to leave, but he didn’t. He wasn’t exactly sure why. His wife was probably needing him and if Chrissy had come home, there was every possibility they would start fighting. Chrissy was a good kid-smart, witty, and oddly urbane for a fifteen-year old-but she was still a teenager. And if God had ever created a more self- serving, sassy, and selfish tribe than teenagers, Mitch didn’t want to know about them. Lily wasn’t up to putting on the gloves and knocking Chrissy down to size the way she needed from time to time. Not these days. And Chrissy? Well, her teenage drive of self-pity and vanity had amped up to full power these days and it was very hard for her to sympathize with her mother sometimes, particularly when she had trouble seeing anything not reflected in her hand mirror.
So, Mitch should have left and made ready to play referee, but he didn’t. He stood there, almost wishing Tommy would volunteer to come home with him.
“It’s that goddamn Army base, that’s what it is!” somebody said. “That’s what this is all about!”
Tommy and Mitch turned, both saw the woman doing the talking. She was maybe forty, her hair dyed so blonde it was white and set in a spiky ‘do like summer grass baked dead and dry. She had to go in at an easy two- hundred but had decided to squeeze herself into a cherry-red skintight set of Capri’s and matching sleeveless terrycloth blouse. An outfit like that might have looked spectacular on the college girl behind the counter, but on this one the profile was that of an over-nourished gourd.
Tommy, ever the mature adult, started giggling soon as he saw her. “Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.”
Her face was going about as red as her outfit as she stabbed the air with one straining, pudgy finger. “The government’s behind it all! That explosion with the nuke or the poison gas out there at Providence! You think they want word of that getting out? You think they want you people here telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there about these funny rains? Course they don’t! That’s why they’re locking us in here!”
Tommy laughed at her. “Jesus Christ, lady, that was three days ago! You think they’re just getting around to clamping down on us?”
“Who asked you?” she said to him, jabbing the air in front of his face with that finger. Her face was flushed almost purple now, sweat beading her brow. “Why don’t you just stay the hell out of it?”
Tommy laughed again.
“Guess she told you,” Mitch said.
“Guess so. Fucking Hot Tamale.”
Another doomsayer, just what the goddamned city needed, Mitch thought.
But people were ringing around her, their common sense telling them to laugh it off, but something else telling them to listen, that this woman had something important to say. People maybe claimed to despise suffering and atrocity, but they loved things like that, Mitch knew. If it disgusted them or frightened them or disturbed them, well, dammit, that was a pie they wanted a piece of and they intended on cutting into it for seconds, thank you very much. It was the same sort of thing that made children ring around some older kid as they described in graphic detail the maggots in that dead dog’s head at the side of the road or what their sister’s hamster had smelled like after they dug it up a week after it was dead.
“They’re loving this shit,” Tommy said.
And they were.
They had suckered their mouths to the soft white underbelly of dread and were feeding on it, on the horror and dark prophesy that crazy fat bitch was slinging like grisly leftovers.
Tommy shook his head. “I had a cousin like that. Linda. Everything was death and doom with her. She’d get worked up about any old thing. She had a gas pain in her stomach, she thought it was cancer. A plane flew too low, it was crashing. She smelled smoke, her house was on fire.”
“What happened to her?”
Tommy shrugged. “She got leukemia, I think. But then a plane crashed into her house and she burned up with it.”
Mitch just shook his head.
“The phone’s won’t work,” Hot Tamale said, “because they’re not supposed to work! Can’t any of you see that? This goddamn valley is full of death and the Army don’t want us leaking it! So you know what they’re doing? They’re shooting stuff into the air, signals and vibrations that screw-up your TV and radio and phone signals, they’re, they’re-”
“Jamming frequencies?” someone suggested.
“-that’s it! That’s it exactly! Jamming our frequencies so we’re cut off while all that crap they sprayed in the air or blew up settles down on us and makes us all sick! If you’re smart, you’ll go to your families and get out while you can! Because by tonight, there’ll be no way out! Nothing to do but wait here to die! Do you hear me? Wait here to die!”
She made a mad rush for the front door, leaving a heady and slightly nauseating wake of strawberry perfume. Three or four others followed her. The others just sort of stood around foolishly, feeling silly, and dispersing gradually like an offensive odor.
