She’s the tying run. We may win this game after all.
“I hit it! I did it!” Jenna screams, over and over. She falls to the ground, hysterically laughing—or crying. I can’t tell which.
Three weeks after that awful first day of school, the leaves had fallen, and so had my hopes of being anything other than what I was last year, that nerd who hung out with Vinny. I went to the Track a few times, but Maeve was never there, and when I passed her in the hall, she just nodded politely and kept on walking. Whenever I brought up the subject with Vinny, he just cracked his neck and said, “Tragic.”
As Mr. Verini droned on about the Peloponnesian War, I stared out the window at the approaching black clouds. I hoped for a violent thunderstorm, something to break my boredom. I watched Maeve’s left hand scrawl out neatly written notes and wondered how it was possible to sit so close to her and yet be so far away. Last week I’d heard she started dating Eric Kellerman, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d stayed at the Track that first day of school, it would have been me.
I decided that when I got home I’d trash the new Nimbus game levels I’d created, even if they did give Vinny a hard-on. They bored me, and I had ideas for new ones, better ones, with hundred-story skyscrapers, and bridges that spanned chasms of fire. I started to sketch them out in my notebook, when our classroom shook with thunder.
The lights flickered. Diana Golina yelped, and the class laughed. “Settle down,” Mr. Verini said. He resumed his lesson. He would not be thwarted by mere weather. But the next tremor knocked the corkboard from the wall, and a look of worry crossed his face. I glanced at Maeve, whose mouth was open as if to speak.
Then it happened.
A tremendous groan and screech, like a battleship being torn in two. The lights sparked and went out. Everyone screamed. In the twilight I saw a wall come rushing toward me. I panicked, covered my head.
I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes, everything was quiet. My legs were covered with broken cinder blocks, but somehow my head had ended up under a desk. My legs were cut and bleeding, but I managed to free myself from the rubble. I stood on a heap of fallen stone, shivered in the strangely warm air, and looked around me.
The school was destroyed. Crooked rebar poked from steaming piles of shattered stone. Small fires burned. Trapped kids cried, their voices muffled by tons of concrete. The sky shined with an endless spray of stars, a sky like you’d see in the deepest, darkest woods. But that didn’t make sense because the sun was up and glowing, bright as noon, giving everything long, strange shadows that shook like rattlesnake tails. And there were mountains in the air. No…not mountains. It seemed as if whole towns had been ripped from the earth and flung into the sky. I blinked, shivered, didn’t understand what I was seeing, when I heard cries beneath me.
Under a pile of broken cinder blocks was a hand, a pen still wrapped in its fingers. I tossed away stones, revealing a shoulder, a neck…a head.
Her cherry red Ray-Bans had snapped in two. Her eyes were open, unblinking, pushed from their sockets. I turned away, threw up.
I heard more cries, heaved more stones, but I quickly realized that I couldn’t do this alone. I listened but heard no sirens, no evidence of help arriving. I walked in a daze around the school, trying to convince myself this was just a bad dream, when I saw a figure at the edge of the school property. He twisted his neck, cracking it. I ran to him, screaming.
“Vinny, Vinny! Ohmygod, what happened? An earthquake? God, Maeve’s dead. She’s dead, Vinny! What’s wrong with the sky?” I spoke so quickly I didn’t realize I was crying. He stared calmly at me, waited for me to finish. And that’s when I realized his skin had a pale glow, that through his expressionless face I could see the crumbled houses on the other side of the street. He twisted his neck, released. I didn’t hear a crack.
“Vinny?” He twisted his neck again. And again. And again. “
All around me, see-through kids and teachers climbed out of the smoking rubble. They seemed confused, lost. I poked and prodded, shook and slapped, but none woke from their mindless trance. “Listen to me, goddamnit!” And, as if choreographed, all heads turned in my direction together. Terrified, I ran.
Five blocks away, on a street that had buckled up as if the earth had been unzipped, I ran out of breath, and I remembered. “Oh, god! Jenna! Mom!”
I ran past dozens of translucent people on my way to Birch Lane Elementary, gave them a wide berth, which was just as well because they didn’t seem interested in me or, for that matter, anything at all. Houses had collapsed, and mindless people milled about in upturned yards, standing, staring. I tried to ignore the sky, but was mesmerized by a billion overbright stars and an asteroid belt made of stones etched with the circuit-board landscape of cities, leaking water from broken sewers in long, sparkling tails.
I found her sitting on the curb in front of the school, her Hello Kitty knapsack on her back, her eyes wide and vacant. I gasped.
“Jenna! Jenna! Are you all right?”
She didn’t move. “Mom was supposed to pick me up from school today.” A line of blood trickled from her left ear. I was so happy when I realized I couldn’t see through her, that she was real flesh and bone.
“C’mon,” I said, taking her hand. “I’m taking you home.”
I led her down a buckled street. Three houses attached to a clump of dirt tumbled overhead. In one of the backyards a dangling swing spun around three hundred and sixty degrees, like a clock’s hand, as the houses rolled in the air. “That blue one’s Chrissie’s house,” Jenna said. A row of tall spruces scraped their tops along the street, leaving a trail of pine needles. “She has a lot of American Girl dolls. But I have more Barbies.” The houses drifted off with the wind.
We reached a break in the road, a cliff where the earth just fell away. I held Jenna’s hand as we peered over the edge. Below the pavement was a layer of red clay, veined with the severed roots of trees. Below that lay an assortment of broken sewers and torn electrical cables, spilling foul liquid, popping and sparking. Farther down, a thick layer of bedrock. And a few hundred feet after that, the layers ended. Beyond were stars a million light-years away, nebulae that crossed the sky like smeared lipstick, all within an infinite sea of black. Then I knew. We weren’t on Earth anymore. We were floating on a clump, too.
“But this is the way home, Russell!” Jenna said, looking up at me. “How do we get home?”
A Ken is up after Jenna. Why I chose this particular batting order baffles me now. A home run from me could win the game, but the soul-eating umpire won’t let me change the order. After seeing the tortured faces in its hide, I decide it’s best not to argue.
The Ken looks like he was about thirty-five when the event happened, and judging by his suit and name tag (“Arthur”), possibly worked in a bank or a hotel. I tell him to step up to the plate, do his best to hit the ball, and if his empty eyes comprehend anything at all, they don’t show it. But, like all the Kens and Barbies, he does what he’s told.
He lifts the bat over his left shoulder. A lefty. And based on his stance, I figure he might once have played this game when he still had a soul. I’m not sure how much of the person is left behind, or if the Kens and Barbies are more like tires rolling down a hill, unable to alter their course once set in motion until something smacks into them from the outside.
I see the ball through the Ken’s translucent body. Three perfect pitches. All strikes. Jenna curses, stomps up and down on first base. “You idiot! You asshole!” The Ken—I don’t want to call him Arthur because that would imply he was more than just a rolling tire—hasn’t moved since he lifted the bat over his shoulder. The umpire tells him again that he’s out, asks him to step away from the plate, but the Ken remains.
I approach. The Ken’s body glows like headlights in rain.
“You’re out, buddy,” I say. His eyes are glassy, distant. “Go sit in the dugout.”
The bat falls to his side, and he turns, walks to his seat. His expression never changes. There’s a wedding ring on his left hand, and I wonder if his wife’s still alive, or if she’s wandering the clumps in a body without a soul.
I realize with a pang of fear that I’m up next. There are two outs, and I’m the winning run. If I strike out, we lose. Jenna looks at me, expectant, as the sky begins to rain little phosphorescent puffs of light that seem to fall right through the ground. They fill the sky, brighter than the stars.
