“Me either, I understand that.”
From the house where something had dropped comes the gruff voice of a man. “Ain’t nobody coming out and ain’t going no where till we get back our lost peoples.”
“What happened to your people?” Shelton moves toward the next yard where the man seems to be speaking near a window with a patching of cardboard on the side facing the house with the rose curtains.
“You tell us.”
Shelton speaks lower. “I don’t know.” He’s sure they are listening, that they can hear him. He can feel others watching through the windows of the houses behind him. It’s good to be talking to someone just as troubled as he is. “Last Friday my wife didn’t come home from work. I went looking for her and South 41 was clogged with wrecked cars. All kinds of stuff. My wife’s jeep was just stopped in the right lane. No sign of her.”
The man shouts, “What you think went with her?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to Valdosta to try to find her. May be at a friend’s house. I figure she couldn’t get around all the wrecked cars, you know, so she hitched a ride going back into Valdosta. What I’m hoping anyway.”
The man, a husky dark-skinned fellow of about forty in a white t-shirt, khaki shorts and no shoes, appears around the back corner of the house, waving away mosquitoes.
“You try to call her on the phone, I reckon?”
“Yes sir.” Shelton pulls his cell out of his jeans pocket. “Won’t work.”
“Yo’ lectricity off?”
“Yes sir.”
The man walks closer, stops on the edge of the driveway between houses. “A bumb musta gone off.”
“Yeah. A bomb or maybe a terrorists’ attack.”
“What they wanta mess with us for?”
“Moody Air Force Base is my guess.”
The man bores in one ear with a finger—baby ears on a giant—and shakes his head.
“What about these cars? Do they work?”
“They work but we too scared to go anywhere.”
“How many of your people are missing?” Shelton asks.
The beating of a military helicopter out of the west bears down on them, hovering. They pause speaking till it rotors away north, taking its clatter with it, and they can hear each other again. The sun through the smoke looks like the moon.
“Twenty-five, thirty. All the little chirren gone.”
The woman behind the window suddenly cries out in a shrill, desperate voice. “I know what went with them. Ask me. I tell you what happen. The Rapture, that what!”
“Hey, Sis’ Shirley,” the man in the other yard calls out. “Hesh up in there, will you? We bout sick of yo mouth, the whole bunch of us.”
“You hesh up!” She starts sobbing, choking and coughing. “After all I do for the church.”
“What does that mean—Sis’ Shirley? What’s she talking about?” Shelton asks the man.
“She called Sis’ Shirley cause she a sister in the church, and she all up in the air cause she think the Lord Jesus come and take his people home to heaven and leave her here. Been like this since it happen, moaning night and day. Course, used to, on Sundays, you couldn’t sleep for her preaching and trying to drag us all to church.”
“Who lead the singing?” she shouts, winding up into preaching mode. “Who superintendant of Sunday school, going on fifteen year? Who present the flowers at funerals? Who clean the church?”
“We know,” he shouts back. “We know. You tell us often enough.
“She’s crazy,” the man says to Shelton, circling over his head with a stumpy pointer finger. “Soon as she find out Sis’ Ida over there”—he points to the house across the way facing Sis’ Shirley’s house—“be missing she start carrying on.”
Sis’ Shirley calls out from behind the window. “What she ever do but eat and sing in the choir? How come her to get raptured and not me?”
Shelton feels his body folding in on itself, his breath sucked away. Raptured? What if...? He hadn’t been listening in church when he went with Elaine, but he seems to recall something...something like this called the Rapture. Nah, that was a Baptist thing, a trick to keep the masses in line. What you call it in Sociology? An opiate for the masses.
The trick is to make all born-again Baptists believe that a place called Heaven is within reach for those who walk the straight and narrow. Which would include Shelton, because he’s always gone to church; he’s never killed or stole or even used God’s name in vain, more than occasionally. He’s been good. Besides, his mother and daddy told him that when he was about five years old he made a confession of faith and was baptized. No. They said he’d had some kind of “changing experience.”
Well, how much could one change at five? Had he done dope? Had he beat his brother and set fire to the house? He remembers having wet the bed and tipping over his mother’s cart at the grocery store and everybody helping her gather up her cans and boxes while she cried.
The Rapture—superstitious nonsense. And this old crazy church-lady they call Sis’ Shirley is proof.
***Before Shelton reaches the Valdosta City limits, he expects that the wreckage will include the city, since Moody Air Force Base is located ten miles north of there and the damage has extended so far south of Valdosta. He’d like to know how much farther north and south.
Whatever has happened, the government and the Red Cross surely will be at work, restoring order, recovering the lost and returning them to their families.
Tired as he is, and hot, he’s so glad he came, so happy to finally be close to finding Elaine. She has to be at Kim and Dan’s. He won’t even think about what if she’s not there.
Burned and parked and wrecked cars are everywhere, not only on the two main one-way streets through Valdosta, but on every side street he passes.
It is about three o’clock and the sun still looks like the moon through the smoke, and Shelton has to dodge building to building, and around the wreckage, hoping to avoid the police, who so far he hasn’t spotted. He still has another couple of miles, several blocks, before he will make it to Kim and Dan’s house, on the northerly side of town.
At one building, an old feed store with a wooden loading dock, down a brick alley, he sees a skinny white man in a sleeveless white t-shirt scuttling along with a sacked bottle of what must be whiskey. A police car cruises past on Ashley Street and the fellow with the bottle ducks behind a green dumpster. Shelton steps around the corner of the feed store and freezes into a bricked-up inset that used to be a window or a door. When the police car has gone, Shelton waits about thirty seconds, then steps out to see it top the overpass to the south.
Shelton sidles north along the fronts of closed stores and businesses, hearing on the upper floor windows perched pigeons moaning and flying off with squeaky wing-beats. To Shelton, their chalky splats on the sidewalk are proof that life is going on, that whatever has happened is just a brief interlude of horror that will pass.
At the courtyard of the old pillared courthouse Shelton hears the European Union flag snapping in the smoky air atop a dome of copper. From somewhere comes the smell of grilling meat. Or maybe it’s just the smoke and Shelton is growing used to it. Anyway he is starving, needing to eat as much as wanting to eat.
Ducking tree to tree in the neatly mowed courtyard, he canvasses for humans among the wrecked and parked and burned cars. Across the street, a shiny green pickup has barreled through a plate glass window, half in, half out of a lawyer’s office. An upholstered tapestry chair is wedged against the driver’s door. Nobody is out but, same as in the settlement, Shelton can almost feel them behind brick walls and windows.
A black sheriff’s car with silver lettering crawls along the street behind him, east to west. It backs up and takes a right, heading north toward where Shelton is hiding down an alley between two small brick buildings. At the corner, Shelton watches as it passes up Ashley Street.
Somebody slams a door inside the small red brick office on his right.
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He walks on, set to cross the open concrete parking lot of the post office. More cars, as if the workers had come back to the post office like any ordinary day. But then he sees on the concrete ramp of the main building an overturned mail buggy with its load of envelopes and circulars and magazines dumped and spilling down the ramp, paper bloated with rain.
Further on, he catches a glimpse of a stout middle-aged woman in white furry bedroom slippers hurrying across the back yard of a two-story yellow colonial house. Then he loses her.
He’s growing panicky again because he’d been so sure that when he got to Valdosta he would find plenty of people to ask about what has happened. And too he’s beginning to doubt that Elaine will be at Kim and Dan’s house. He has to keep going and he has to quit thinking negatively. Recalling his tackling the highway patrol gives him strength. What if he’d just given in and let him haul him off to jail? He wouldn’t have been able to go look for Elaine. He’s on the right track now.
The worst wreckage is at Valdosta State University—cars crisscrossed and jammed like toys over the front lawn of the Spanish-style main building. From across the street, in a park, Shelton stands behind a tree and tries to spot students, any humans, around the campus buildings or among the palms. He sees three girls in blue jeans hugging themselves as if they are cold and racing from one building to another.
Okay, so everybody is waiting for this mess to be cleared up, for the electricity and phones to come on and for explanations and information—what to do next?
But fear, disguised as heat, rushes through his body, as he realizes it’s not that simple. Why are all buildings standing as before, undamaged, and apparently automobiles alone have been affected? A large bomb would have equally damaged or destroyed everything.
He tries to remember all he knows about magnetic fields, about radio waves and radar weaponry. Could what has happened have something to do with the magnetic field, the space between the sky and the ground, between positive and negative magnets? What about radar?
Just one block up from the university and Shelton will be in the back yard of Kim and Dan’s house. His feet ache and his right boot has rubbed a blister on his heel, where the focus of his fear seems lodged. For some reason being among the empty playground equipment—the swings and monkey bars and slides—with the smoke pressing down and it Sunday causes him to feel almost unbearably edgy and alone. Not even a bird singing in the smoky trees. To calm himself, he steps down into a dried creek bed and takes from his backpack a bottle of water and a cellophane tube of beef jerky.
Eating and drinking he looks up and around at the dense shrubs and trees, listening to the helicopters and planes overhead that have become as familiar to him as his heartbeats. Without them he would truly be alone and just the thought of the silence is horrifying.
It is cool in the creek bed, with an earthy damp smell. The smoke is above him and he breathes deeply. He is so tired and sleepy and generally miserable that he has to force himself to stand. But thinking about his Elaine so nearby, maybe, he crawls up the bank, level with the smoke.
Slipping through back yards, bush to bush, tree to tree, he hears people inside the houses talking low and walking softly. A small dog yips and hops up into a window behind beige drapes. “Missy, down!” a woman says. “Down.” The little brown dog yips once more and hops down. “Bad girl! Don’t hop up in that window again, you hear?”
Shelton stops in the small wooded-in back yard of Kim and Dan’s house, an old long white-painted duplex fronting a quiet side street. It looks empty. No sound coming from inside.
Stooping low and running, he heads for the black back door with six window panes on the top half. No lights on inside and he has to shield his eyes with his hands and press his face to one of the glasses.
The baby’s highchair, at the metal-legged square kitchen table, with its tray swung wide, has a blue terry bib draped over the back. He can smell coffee, or thinks he can, as he scans for food and dishes on the counter and sees the glass coffee-maker carafe half full.
His eyes wander on to the open door from the kitchen to the short hall and the outside light shining through. Dan’s Georgia boots are paired by the front door, eerie in their emptiness. He sees a shadow suddenly laid across the dark wood of the hall floor from an open door on the left.
He taps on the windowpane and waits till the shadow steps back, then up again. “Hey,” he calls low. “It’s Shelton.”
“Shelton?” The muffled voice is a young woman’s, maybe Elaine’s.
“Elaine?” he calls.
The shadow glides forward and Kim steps out and stares at the door with her serious gray eyes. She walks slowly into the kitchen and stops about halfway to the door—heavy thighs and hips in faded blue jeans. Always pink-cheeked, her cheeks are pinker, almost hectic red. She seldom smiles, so Shelton cannot tell if she is upset. No give-away to what she believes is going on.
Another few steps and she opens the door and Shelton smells the coffee stronger.
“Is Elaine here?”
She shakes her head no. “What’s happened, Shelton?”
“Something to do with terrorists, I think. Maybe an attack on Moody. Could be a massive radar wave.”
“Where are Dan and Buck then?”
“They’re not here?”
“Dan picked him up from daycare on Friday. They never made it home. Last time I talked to him, he was on his way.”
“Where was he when you talked to him? Did he say?”
She shakes her head. Her gray eyes glass over. “I’m afraid to leave the house. Keep thinking any minute they’ll be back.”
Shelton slips an arm around her and holds her close. She feels soft and warm and smells clean. “Hey now.” He chuckles. “They’re just now starting to get everything back in order. Soon Dan and Buck will be home. Elaine will be back.”
Kim steps away. “When did you talk to her last?”
“On Friday, around noon. When she didn’t come home by dark I took the truck and went looking for her.” He decides not to paint the horrifying picture of wrecked and burning automobiles and his almost getting arrested. “I found her jeep switched on and out of gas on the southbound side of the highway.”
“Have you seen anybody to talk to?”
“Some, yeah. But they don’t know any more than we do.” He pulls out a chair from the table and sits. “What about your laptop? Your cell phone?”
She shakes her head and dries her eyes on the puffy sleeves of her white blouse.
“Not charged, huh?”
“Not working.” She shrugs her shoulders.
“What about your car? You have gas?”
“Yes. About a quarter of a tank, but I’ve been afraid to go out. One of the neighbors warned me that the police are arresting people outside of their homes. Looting suspects.”
So that was why he almost got arrested. Next time, it would be for resisting arrest and taking down an officer of the law. “Do you mind if I take off my boots? I’ve been walking since daybreak.”
“You mean you walked all that way from your house?”
“Yes ma’am.” He has his right boot and sock off, checking the blister. His feet smell like the goats. “All the way. And I’ve got to walk all the way back to tend to Elaine’s dog and goats.”
Shelton’s never liked Kim because she takes herself too seriously. Depressing being around her. He expects to see a smile now, but nothing. Her dark hair as always is unfixed, just hair being hair.
“You can stay here if you want to, till... you know. But I guess you need to be home in case Elaine shows up.”
He doesn’t want Kim to know how terrified he is at having not found Elaine in the one place she should have been if she is still alive. He will still call South Georgia Medical Center and the police station when the electricity comes back on and he charges his cell phone, but the fact that her jeep wasn’t wrecked or in any way damaged makes him doubt that she was injured. He could walk to the hos
pital, only a few blocks north of Kim’s house, but he’s afraid of being picked up by the police and he’s afraid of what another disappointment will do to him, not only emotionally but physically.
He is shaking inside. His head hurts, his feet hurt, his lungs ache from exertion and smoke. If he gets put in jail he could be there for a long time and then he won’t be home if Elaine should come back; and if she doesn’t he won’t be able to search for her. Besides, he has a nagging suspicion that justice for all has been replaced with judgment by a few. It’s something he’s known for awhile but felt unable to do anything about so, as with other lost individual rights and privileges—like his guns, his constitutional right to bear arms—he quit thinking about it till finally he quit caring.
“I tell you what I would like if you don’t mind,” he says to Kim. “I’d like something to eat and drink.”
“Food’s gone bad in the frig. But I can make you a peanut butter and banana sandwich.” Kim has already turned to the counter and a half-loaf of wheat bread.
The white door of the refrigerator is tiled in pictures of little Buck in blue short pants. One is of him dumping a basket of apples over his blond head and another of him wearing the emptied basket like a hat.
Shelton is glad to have Elaine’s searching eyes off his face. He feels like he might cry and keeps swallowing back salty water. He feels genuinely sick. He feels out of place and aimless. He knows the dog and goats will be fine if he waits till tomorrow to go home. And who knows what another night might bring? He could wake in the morning and find the nightmare left behind.
The filmy sun sinking into the smoke beyond the trees of Kim’s back yard signals to Shelton an ending, and not of the nightmare. He’d felt like this the first sunset alone after being let go from his real estate group. The aimlessness of the unemployed and henceforth unemployable. But just about everybody he and Elaine know have lost their jobs: Kim used to teach music at an area high school, before state funding had been withdrawn; Dan had been a loan officer at a local bank before the economy collapsed and the World Banking system was created in Great Britain. Now Dan works waiting tables at a Texas Longhorn Steakhouse, for two Euros an hour, plus tips from those who can afford to both eat out and tip. Elaine is one of the few still working in her chosen field of dental hygiene, but since hardly anybody can afford the luxury of having their teeth cleaned, she’s working fewer and fewer full days.