Bad Glass

violent, and it shook me so deeply that I nearly fell over. At first, I thought it was an earthquake, but the ground wasn’t moving. It was just a sound, so loud that it confused my senses, a physical pounding in my eardrums.

I covered my ears with my hands and turned toward Taylor. She was doing the same thing; her hands were pressed against the sides of her head, and there was a pained, confused grimace on her face. She was looking up at the sky.

The clouds above our heads were coming apart, like eddies of water spilling downhill. It couldn’t have been a wind in the upper atmosphere; it was moving too fast, fleeing a point in the sky somewhere over the middle of the city. Massive dark gray thunderclouds gathering, clumping, and spilling away, all in a matter of seconds. And the sky they left behind—

I felt my breath hitching in my throat. For a dozen seconds, I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I couldn’t remember anything but that sky. My God, that sky!

The sky was red. Varying shades of red—a vast field of shifting density—from neon pink all the way to dark oxblood crimson. It was an unnatural paint box of color.

The clouds were gone in a matter of seconds, leaving behind nothing but that depthless red plane. The earth-shattering sound disappeared with the clouds. It was the sound of a massive vacuum cleaner, I thought absurdly as I stared up into the crimson void. The sound of the clouds being sucked away, like a bucket of spilled sand.

“What’s going on?” Taylor yelled, partially deafened.

I shook my head.

A corner of the sky lit with an electric spark of light, followed by a loud momentary crack. The sound of artillery fire or a dead tree snapping in two. It was nowhere near as loud as the original rending noise that had shaken me to my very core. This was followed by another burst of light and another crack, lighting up a different portion of the sky.

“Is that lightning?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t know.”

She grabbed my hand and started pulling me down the street, west, toward the center of town. It seemed like her anger was gone. For the moment at least, it had been preempted.

People were emerging from the buildings up and down the street. Dirty, ragged refugees, some rubbing their eyes as if just awakened from a solid sleep. They were all staring up at the sky. Mute. In shock. If they weren’t in shock, I thought, if they were capable of reacting in an appropriate, rational way, there’d be screaming and panic. Chaos and prayers and violence. The sky was bleeding, after all. Up above our heads, the sky had fallen. And this …

This was its bloody corpse.

“Dean!” Taylor called into my ear, startling my eyes back down to the street. She was pulling at my arm violently. I’d stopped without realizing it. “We’ve got to find out what happened. We’ve got to find somebody who knows!” I got my legs moving once again, and we continued west. Toward the courthouse, I realized, toward Danny and the military.

We found Mama Cass at Post Street. She was sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the road, directly in front of her restaurant. Her customers stayed back on the sidewalk, but her old Jewish cook— Hershel, I thought, remembering his name—stood at her side, his hands tucked beneath a tomato-stained apron. She had a bottle of beer dangling from one hand as she stared up at the sky. There was a bemused look on her face.

Taylor was going to run straight past, but Mama Cass stopped us. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked in an amused voice. “Running to the military, maybe?” Taylor pulled to a stop and turned back toward Mama Cass, pure hatred burning in her eyes. Mama Cass was watching us with a sly grin. “That won’t get you very far, darling.” She sounded drunk. Or high. Or out of her fucking mind.

Taylor dropped my hand and looked down the length of the street, in the direction of the courthouse. For a moment, I thought she was going to sprint off without me.

“Your friends in the military have been driving, pell-mell, up and down the street.” She pointed along the cross street, first toward the hospital, then toward the courthouse. “Their fucking Hummers—they almost ran me over. They don’t know what’s going on. They have no fucking clue. They think we’re under attack. They think that that—” She waited for a handful of heartbeats until a fresh crack rang out in the sky. “—is artillery fire. They think somebody’s lobbing shells at us.”

“It’s got to be atmospheric,” Hershel said. For someone so old, his voice was surprisingly strong. “Vapor in the air. Colliding fronts. The red—it’s got to be refracted light bouncing off of something in the atmosphere.”

“Red sky at night,” Mama Cass recited, nodding, but the smile on her lips suggested that she thought Hershel’s explanation was complete bullshit. “Sailor’s delight.” She raised her beer bottle to the sky, toasting the chaos, and took a long swallow.

Taylor looked back down the street.

“They’re not going to help you,” Mama Cass said, not even looking in Taylor’s direction. “They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t have any fucking idea. You might as well just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

She gestured toward my backpack. “And you … you might want to take some pictures,” she said. “I’m sure your Internet fans would love to see what’s going on.”

I spent a moment staring up at the bloodred sky, that violent, roiling sea above our heads. Then I shrugged off my backpack and followed her suggestion.

A piece of paper torn from a lined notebook. Undated. Hand-printed words:

(The piece of paper has been crumpled repeatedly. The left-hand side is a ragged tear, torn from a notebook binding. Large, shaky words cover the top part of the page—smeared pencil, inscribed by a palsied hand.

The paper is aged and well handled. It is no longer crisp; instead, it has been transformed into a fragile cloth, by folding and refolding, by damp and greasy fingertips.

Dingy and gray; smeared graphite. Sprinkled, dipped in water, then dried once again.

The words are barely legible. But they are legible.)

—there’s nothing left in me, Taylor. Not anymore.

I’m sorry.

I failed you. I couldn’t stop failing you.

The sky stayed red for about twenty minutes.

I had a hard time taking pictures of that sky. Without anything in the foreground, it looked like nothing but a red, fluid pattern, an abstract collage of crimson and pink and electric blood. Finally, I went wide-angle and focused on the eastern skyline, down the length of the street. It was a view of the city from the floor of a concrete valley, with the walls on either side reaching up (and bending out) before opening onto the wide red sky. I set the camera to burst mode and shot five frames a second until I caught a couple of frames with the lightning—or the artillery fire