Bad Glass

She turned abruptly and started back around the side of the house, heading toward Second Avenue. “Now get the fuck out of my mom’s yard, before she finds her shotgun shells.”

I followed Taylor through the city streets. She stayed about ten feet ahead of me. Each time I tried to catch up, she put on a burst of speed, leaving me behind. She was pissed off. I couldn’t reach her.

Her father had fallen through the floor over a month ago. She’d been living with that, bearing that responsibility. How could I prove that it wasn’t her fault?

I can’t, I realized. Unless I somehow managed to figure out this whole thing, there was absolutely nothing I could do to convince her otherwise.

And then—

There was a great tearing sound in the sky just as we reached the middle of the 290 bridge. It was loud and 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.