From The Sky
Keri Knutson
Copyright 2011 Keri Knutson
Image licensed by DepositPhotos.com/aelita
Cover design by Keri Knutson
TABLE OF CONTENTS
From The Sky
Lagniappe - About the Story
Sneak Preview - Running Red
Sneak Preview - Darker By Degree
Follow Me!
FROM THE SKY
It was an ordinary day, and then it wasn’t.
I was cramming for the trig final, for all the good it was doing. I could feel the angles poking into the soft places in my brain, lines intersecting into crossed swords, numbers dancing menacingly like something out of one of those cartoons I watched as a kid.
Brian was leaning on the handrail in the front hall, forehead millimeters away from the sun-bright expanse of glass that looked out onto the quad. His eyes were closed, and every once in a while his lips moved soundlessly.
“It’s not going to work, man,” I finally said.
He kept up the inner chant for another minute, then tilted his head toward me, a smile tugging up the corners of his mouth in the way that made giggly cheerleader types want him for their slacker boyfriend.
“A little meditation never hurt anybody.”
“Yeah, but meditation ain’t gonna save your ass when you slept through a whole semester of trig.”
“Zen, buddy, Zen. Better to relax than to go in there all hopped up with your notes clutched in your sweaty paws.”
I glanced down at the scribbles in front of me. He was right about one thing, I wasn’t going to cram anything meaningful into my head in the next few minutes.
“Someday,” Brian said. “You’re gonna look back on high school as a particularly nasty little dream and regret all the mental energy you wasted.”
Good old Brian, the trenchcoat philosopher.
“Yeah, and someday you’re gonna look back and wish you’d studied for at least one fucking test. When you’re sitting in your trailer eating fucking Beenie-Weenies.”
Brian let out a short bark of laughter. We both knew that his ACT scores were good enough to insure he wouldn’t be packing his butt off to state college. I was the one who had to sweat the next year and sometimes it pissed me off.
I shoved my notes into my backpack and we both stared out the window, waiting for a bell 15 minutes off. The quad was surprisingly deserted for such a pretty day, but I reasoned that most kids with 5th hour lunch were still in the cafeteria or had locked themselves in the library to study for finals. As you got older you realized that studying outside was not so much studying as jacking around. Most of the thirty or so people outside were freshmen. In front of the administration office, Amanda Connelly’s mom was talking to Mrs. Wilmot, the career counselor. Mrs. Connelly had the twins in tow, a boy and girl about four years old, blond and looking like they stepped out of a TV ad. My mom always referred to Mrs. Connelly as “that crazy woman,” partly because of some long forgotten dispute they’d had when they were both on the PTA when I was in elementary school, and partly because she felt that anyone who had their kids 14 years apart was just not planning well. Mrs. Wilmot, in a pantsuit with her hair piled atop her head and shellacked immobile, was nodding impatiently, probably trying to figure out how to tell Mrs. Connelly that regular cheerleading attendance and the perfect shade of lip gloss were not going to make up for a D in chemistry.
Most everybody else was clustered in little groups of twos and threes. Troy Kellogg, the kind of guy who insisted on wearing his letter jacket even if it was 80 degrees, was bullshitting with some other football players in front of the gym. Everyone else was sitting on the concrete boxes that served as seating, talking or halfheartedly glancing at the books spread out around them. The one lone figure was Vera Rattery, who had a cube all to herself. She was another one of the kids who I’d known since grade school, but unlike Amanda, she hadn’t fared so well in the lottery. Her mom prefaced every sentence with “You know my daughter has a heart condition…” as if that was the most salient fact that anyone would ever know about Vera. She was the kid who couldn’t swim in the pool, couldn’t go on the field trips, couldn’t dress out for gym. When we hit high school, she’d tried to re-invent herself, insisting that her name be pronounced V-ray, like that would instantly transform her into a European supermodel, and wearing too much make-up and low-cut tops that showed the tip of the surgical scar she tried all those years to cover up. It didn’t take. Kids have the longest and most unforgiving memories of anyone, and what you are in 6th grade is, more often than not, what you’ll be until you graduate. She’d turned to donuts and Jesus, putting on the pounds as if that would insulate her from the world and carrying a Bible as a shield. Sometimes I still felt sorry for her, but if you spent all your time feeling bad for the kids that got picked on, you’d fucking shoot yourself.
Brian elbowed me and I followed his gaze to Lindsey Greene, who was talking to the art teacher, Mr. Lundquist, her portfolio clutched across her chest, her dark hair bobbing as she talked. Lindsey was what passed for Goth out in the sticks: an excess of eyeliner, cute little tartan skirts paired with motorcycle boots, and a line of silver studs marching around the perimeter of each perfect ear. I’d been half in love with her since I’d sat behind her in English comp last year, but I wasn’t sure if she even knew my name.
“How come you never asked Lindsey out?” Brian asked.
After assuming for a second that was a rhetorical question, I tried to formulate a response that would sound cool, like I didn’t really care that Lindsey would probably much rather hang out with Brian than a dweeb like me. Before I could, Brian said, “Hey what the hell’s wrong with Lundquist?”
Art Lundquist, who taught drawing and composition, had apparently stopped listening to whatever Lindsay had been so earnestly telling him, and was slapping his forearm like it was on fire. The papers he’s been carrying fluttered around them like loose birds and Lindsey took a few steps back.
“Maybe he got stung by a bee or something, “ I said. It was a beautiful spring day, warm and clear, perfect bee weather.
“Must have been one hell of a bee,” Brian said.
Lundquist had stopped the slapping and was digging frantically at his arm. Even from the distance, I could see drops of blood spattering the cement at his feet. A boy seated on a rectangle to the left of Mr. Lundquist suddenly flung his textbook away and it tumbled for a few seconds and came to rest. He was up on his feet in the same odd dance, slapping at the back of his neck. It looked like it was starting to rain, quarter-sized spots of liquid appearing on the concrete, but the sky was still empty and blue, no clouds, no distant sound of rolling thunder to indicate a storm coming in.
“What the fuck is that,” Brian said, pointing to a spot a few feet in front of the window. There was a glob of something there, purple-pink and translucent. It was about the size of an egg and had a shimmery quality to it, an iridescence like soap bubbles. As I watched, it crawled toward the window.
“Holy cow,” Brian said. “That shit’s alive.”
I barely had time to process that fact or the fact that Brian had actually uttered the words “holy cow.” More globs fell, some small as fat raindrops, some considerably larger. Another one hit the kid who’d thrown his textbook, and he pounded wildly on the top of his head while his study partner looked on with his mouth wide open.
Mrs. Wilmot began walking purposely toward Lundquist. A glob the size of a fist hit her and her hair cripsed with a little puff of smoke and collapsed, the blob proceeding down the side of her head, taking the left side of her face with it. I could see the clean white bone of her skull for a moment before she pitched forward and began writhing on the ground.
Someone
outside was screaming, the sound distant and tinny. The stuff began to rain down faster, but the people outside seemed to react with excruciating slowness. Vera Rattery stood up and smoothed down the front her dress. She looked around for a moment as if she wasn’t quite sure where she was or how she got there, and then lifted her gaze to the sky and let out a bellow that I could hear clearly through the glass. A girl ran past Vera, who shot out an arm and clotheslined the girl, sending her sprawling to the ground. For a moment the girl seemed transfixed then began to crawl away backwards, crablike, toward the safety of the administration building. More people ran past Vera, towards the closed cafeteria doors on the far side, and she just kept batting at them, knocking a few of course, tumbling a few more to the ground. One kid crawling past her must have stuck his hand in a glob of the stuff, because I saw him stop and roll on his back, clawing at the sky.
Brian punched me in the arm, and I glanced away from Vera.
He pointed past the still twitching form of Mrs. Wilmot to where Mrs. Connelly had been standing. She was nowhere in sight, but the twins were there, the little boy holding the girl’s hand while she cried and shifted back and forth from one foot to another.
In the few seconds it took me to register the fact that somebody should do something, maybe I should do something, they were just little kids, for chissakes, Toby Kellogg came barreling across the quad in his letter jacket and scooped them up, one under each arm, and ran. He ducked wads of falling goo, juking past crazy Vera and sprinting towards the black cafeteria doors, which was pretty fucking amazing considering he probably had better than seventy pounds of screaming kid under his arms.
Another kid ran straight toward us, windmilling his arms like some crazy wind-up toy and hit the glass window with a smack, his mouth a surprised O as he fell backward.
Brian grabbed my arm and started pulling me toward the double doors at the end of the hall. He elbowed past the kids and teachers who were wandering out of classrooms to see what the ruckus was, slowly filling up the hall. He shoved open one door and the sound rushed in, the screaming and sobbing that had seemed so distant, the fat, splatting sounds as globs hit the concrete. Six or seven kids ran past him from outside as he yelled at people to get in.
Mr. Lundquist had gone down and I couldn’t tell if he was unconscious or dead, but his arm looked all wrong, sticking out from the rolled-up sleeve of his checked shirt, all melty and pink. Lindsey didn’t seem to have moved; she just stood there and stared down at Lundquist with a frozen look of horror. The last thing I remember well is Brian rushing out with his jacket pulled over his head like some half-assed caped crusader. I followed him. The rest of it comes to me sometimes in bits and pieces, mostly when I’m waking from dreams I don’t recall, like snapshots taken by someone else. Brian dragging Art Lundquist by his good arm, some kid in a black Yankees t-shirt yelling that we were under attack, Lindsey grabbing my arm so hard her nails left little half-moons that immediately filled with blood.
The next thing I knew, I was back inside the main hall with Lindsay held tight against me as she shook with silent sobs. Brian was out on the quad again, his black coat flapping around him, grabbing whoever was closest to him and shoving them toward the open doors. I watched as a huge gobbet hit the back of the jacket and burned through it, but it didn't stop Brian. He grabbed another kid and pulled him through the door, tossed the coat down like it was on fire and danced on top of it. It seemed to go on forever, although the whole thing took less than a half an hour.
The cops got there eventually, and by the time they did, it was all over. The people in hazmat suits came later, herding us from place to place, the cafeteria and then the gym, until our parents screamed loudly enough that they let us all go. Some people died, but a lot of them didn't. Mr. Lundquist made it, and he does pretty good for a one-armed art teacher.
There were newspaper article and TV interviews and a ceremony where they handed out plaques to Toby Kellogg and Brian and even me. A reporter asked me afterward what if felt like to be a hero, and I told her I didn't know. Nobody asked about how Amanda Connelly's mom had run like a rabbit and left two little kids alone, or how Vera Rattery had stood there screaming at the sky like a maniac and knocking people down. Brian's still got the jacket, and sometimes he’ll show it to people, sticking his hand through the hole burned in the back. He doesn't do it like a jerk, more like he's saying, "Look what a fucking idiot I am."
Lots of people had theories about what had happened, that it was a terrorist attack, or an alien invasion, or that it was some caustic chemical accidentally jettisoned from a passing airplane. Some people, probably people like Vera’s mom, thought it was a sign of God's disapproval, like God just got pissed off one day and leaned down over Clement High School and hocked up a big wad of spit. In the end, they couldn't prove anything. The pink stuff evaporated into nothing, like it had never been there at all.
Brian and I don't talk about it, except when he reminds me that the only reason Lindsey Green gives me the time of day is because I saved her life. Neither of us ever turns to the other and says, "Hey, what do you think it really was?"
Because Brian and I already know. Sometimes shit happens. And sometimes, no matter how much you want to know, there is no reason why.