Winds of Change (5 page)

“I believe I’m going to die here,” Jesse
said. “That’s what I believe.”

"Just because we can't pick up any stations
around here doesn't mean anything," Leland said, unwilling to let
our hopes die such a swift death. "There's obviously something
wrong with the atmosphere outside. That's probably what's
interfering with the radio signals. I'm sure there are still people
manning the stations. In fact, it’s very likely that people in the
next state are eating supper, tucking little ones to bed, making
love, doing everything they normally do. It's probably only a
matter of time before somebody outside the radius of the disaster
figures out that something's wrong and alerts the authorities. I'm
sure we'll be all right if we just stay put. Somebody will come to
our rescue eventually."

"I don't like that approach," Steven said.
"I'm not comfortable putting my fate in someone else's hands. I say
we try and make contact with people in one of the businesses
nearby. We stayed alive, why couldn't they have?"

"We haven't even been trapped for two hours
yet," Pete, the plumber, replied. "Why don't we give it a little
time and see how it goes?"

"I think Pete’s right," Jesse Weaver spoke
up. "There's no need to rush out and get ourselves killed. If
nobody comes to our rescue, we can always die later. I, for one,
don’t like being stuck here any better than anybody else. But I’m
not so impatient that I’m willing to risk my life when it might not
even be necessary. If we wait one day and nothing happens, that’s
one thing. If we wait an entire week and nothing happens, that’s
another. Besides, if this is some sort of terrorist attack, then we
might be committing suicide by stepping outside the doors. I vote
that we stay put for now."

"So what are we supposed to do in the
meantime?" Wayne Richards asked.

"How about taking care of your wife," Pete
suggested. "A wife as pretty as yours needs to be taken care of. I
haven't seen you doing much of that since all this started
happening. Maybe I could help."

“You watch yourself,” Wayne shouted, pointing
his finger at the burly plumber. “Keep away from her. You hear
me?”

“Jeez, man. Lighten up. It was just a little
joke.”

“It’s not funny,” Wayne said, “none of this
is. You don’t know me. You don’t know her. Why you’re even taking
sides in something you know nothing about is beyond me.”

“Enough,” I said, shouting to be heard before
things got completely out of hand. “We don’t have time for
this.”

“I agree,” Chuck said. "If we’re going to try
to survive, then we’re going to have to rely on each other. I don’t
think we’re much of a team at this point.”

“So what do you suggest, Chief?” Wayne asked,
his voice oozing sarcasm.

“I think the first thing we should do is to
get some real lights going. Flashlights are fine, but I'd rather
have my hands free in case I need them. I'll go get one of the
generators out of hardware. Steven, you gather up a few lamps from
the lighting department. Matt, round up some gas. Look around the
lawn mowers, there's probably a can lying around. Once we can see a
little better, it might be easier to think."

“I don’t think lights will have anything to
do with anybody’s ability to think,” Wayne smarted off.

Chuck headed off to find the flashlights and
then stopped. “Oh, and Wayne, I almost forgot. While we try to do
something constructive, you keep acting like a jackass. We’ll
consider that to be your contribution to the group.”

Both of the Weaver boys started laughing at
that. I could see Steven smirking in the darkness too. Wayne,
understandably, didn’t seem very amused. None of us really cared.
We left him standing there, without waiting for a reply.

As we started going our separate ways to
gather up the items on our scavenger hunt, a huge explosion outside
shook the panes of glass. I think all of us hit the floor, the
possibility of a terrorist’s bomb seeming more and more realistic
by the second. Yet, after several seconds, it became clear that the
building was still intact.

Vera Weaver, however, didn’t fare quite as
well as the store. We had just gotten to our feet and were about to
go investigate the source of the explosion when Jesse Weaver
started shouting for help.

At first I was sure that the woman was dead
given the amount of panic in Jesse’s voice. She didn’t appear to be
moving at all. But her eyes were open and she was breathing despite
the pasty pallor of her cheeks and the thin line of drool that was
trailing out of one corner of her mouth.

"It's her heart," Jesse said in a tremulous
voice. "Kenneth, go in your mom's purse and find her pills. She
needs 'em."

It was the first time I'd ever heard a trace
of humanity in Jesse Weaver's voice, and I felt sorry for him. The
possibility of losing his wife scared him more than whatever was
outside waiting to turn all of us into piles of salt. To look at
him, all tattooed and biker-chic, you would never guess that Jesse
Weaver was frightened of anything. Somehow, the fact that he was
scared made him a little more human, a little more fragile than
before. Given the nature of our situation, I wasn't sure if that
was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Hurry up,” Jesse yelled to Kenneth,
desperately needing the medicine that would keep his wife alive.
Kenneth was doing all he could. A woman’s purse is a labyrinthine
place, full of nooks and crannies and abysmal places that could
double as the hiding spot for a pirate’s treasure. Vera Weaver’s
was no exception, full of change, mints, Kleenex, car keys, a cell
phone, cough drops, tampons, and all sorts of other
paraphernalia.

“Here, let me help,” Ashley Richards said,
dumping the contents of Vera Weaver’s purse onto the floor.

It was during those few frantic seconds when
Kenneth and Ashley were rummaging for nitroglycerin pills that Vera
Weaver spoke and took us all by surprise. Nobody was really sure
what she was saying. The words were indecipherable and obviously
part of a foreign language. Her eyelids fluttered like the wings of
hummingbirds and she twitched a little with each syllable, as if
she were holding a live wire in each hand.

“Not now,” Jake Weaver muttered, thrusting
his hands into his pockets and turning his back on the whole
situation. “Not now. This isn’t even Sunday.”

I think I was the only one who heard him, and
I had absolutely no idea what he meant by that. Yet, it was clear
by the way he said it that this wasn’t the first time Vera Weaver
had done this sort of thing.

“What’s she saying?” Steven asked.

“I think she’s speaking in tongues,” Pete
said in a shaky voice. “This sounds a lot like what used to happen
in those services my grandmother took me to.”

“She’s done it before,” Jake replied.

“Hush, boy,” Jesse Weaver snapped at his son.
Wisely, Jake closed his mouth.

“Here are the pills,” Kenneth exclaimed,
fumbling with the top of the medicine bottle. After a few seconds
with no results, Ashley took the pill bottle away from him and
popped the lid.

Once they had gotten one of the nitroglycerin
pills under Vera Weaver’s tongue, the convulsions and strange
mutterings stopped. She was able to sit up after a few minutes of
lying there. She was still a little pale and trembling like a
geriatric in a nursing home. Nonetheless, she was alive. Given the
amount of death around us, that was no small feat.

Vera Weaver obviously needed immediate
medical attention, but that was out of the question at the moment.
Jesse Weaver looked relieved to see that his wife was still alive,
but it was also clear by the worried expression on his face that he
knew she wasn’t out of the woods yet.

“What are you people looking at?” he shouted.
"My wife's sick. Haven't you ever seen anyone that was sick before?
This ain’t a freak show."

Wisely, we gave him all the space he needed.
Kenneth and Jake stayed by their mother’s side, looking solemn and
hardly like the delinquents they were. In fact, none of them, Jesse
included, seemed quite so tough or menacing anymore now that Vera
was on the verge of death. We walked away from them, going in
search of whatever had made the explosion. I waited until we were
out of earshot before grilling Pete.

“Explain what just happened back there,” I
said. “You thought Vera Weaver was speaking in tongues. What does
that mean?” The group stopped, waiting to hear what the plumber had
to say.

“It’s hard to explain,” he replied. “Speaking
in tongues, from my experience, is usually an ability of those who
are most dedicated to their beliefs. It usually happens during an
extreme religious encounter, and it’s generally thought that the
words spoken are a message from God. The person speaking is simply
the conduit used to transmit the broadcast. Some denominations
think that the language is the language that the angels speak.”

“If that was a message from God,” Terry
interjected, “it won’t do us much good. We don’t speak that
language.”

Pete sighed. “I’ve had only limited contact
with this sort of thing. I got my exposure to religion while
spending summers with my grandmother. I’m really no expert.
However, the way it usually works is that one person speaks in
tongues, then another person in the congregation gives a
translation of the message. That, too, is given by God.”

“So where’s the translation?” Steven
asked.

“I thought you knew all about God,” Chuck
said.

“I was raised a Baptist. We never spoke in
tongues at our church, but -”

It was almost like Steven had given God
permission to use his lips. He immediately began to speak without
even realizing it. “
Alastor, the executioner, walks the
earth
,” he said. “
Woe to those who stand in his
way
.”

Pete, Chuck, and I all saw Steven faint in
time to catch him. He stayed unconscious for a couple of minutes,
and none of us dared to touch him. I think we were all a little
frightened of him at that point. Then his eyes popped open, and we
all jumped.

“What happened?” he asked, clearly not
remembering. Hesitantly, I told him. At first, he didn’t believe a
word of what I was saying. Then, seeing the expressions on the
faces around him, he realized that it was all true.

“I translated the message,” he said, hardly
believing it. “How is that possible, and what does it mean?”

“I think it means we need to steer clear of
anybody named Alastor,” Pete said. “Anybody in here by that
name?”

We all looked at each other nervously and
shook our heads.

“Something’s on fire outside,” Leland Kennedy
interrupted, drawing our attention away from Steven.

“That’s where the explosion came from,” Chuck
said, putting the pieces of the puzzle together. “It looks like two
cars collided head-on.”

“Somebody must have rolled down their
window,” I said. “The air got ‘em.”

“That can’t be it,” Chuck said as a car sped
by. “There’s always a way for air to get in. The air conditioning,
the windows, the exhaust. Look at that car that’s still going. The
driver would be dead by now if air was completely responsible.”

Seconds later the car slid off the road and
hit a tree. Clouds of smoke rolled lazily into the night sky.

“Then again, I could be wrong,” he added.
“Maybe it’s
prolonged
exposure to the atmosphere that does
it.”

“I’m tired of talking about this,” I
admitted. “Go and get the generator. Let’s get some lights going
and try to find a comfort zone that doesn’t involve talking about
death every second.”

“That might be the best thing,” Chuck agreed,
walking toward hardware with his flashlight held out in front of
him.

“You might as well get some rest,” I told
everybody else. “We’re not going anywhere for a while.”

For once, everyone did as they were told.
Chuck soon returned with a Honda generator. I managed to find half
a can of gas stashed behind the riding lawn mowers. Steven lugged
two of the brightest halogen work lights down the aisle, their
cords trailing behind them like entrails.

The generator was new and started on the
second try. From that point, it was just a matter of plugging the
lights in. Soon, there was no trouble seeing everyone and
everything around us. It was certainly a lot better than being
stuck in the dark with only a couple of flashlights that worked off
of D-cell batteries.

Of course, in the light we all saw more than
we wanted to see. There beneath our feet was the same grit that was
piled up in mounds outside the door. We had all mistaken it for the
dust and dirt that can always be found on warehouse floors. But it
was more than that. It was all that was left of the people who had
walked out of their houses that morning, never suspecting in a
million years that they would be reduced to something out of a
crematorium urn by the end of the day.

Nobody really said anything about the dust
underfoot. We all just kind of moved to another part of the floor
and wondered how the flesh-colored ash had found its way into the
store. None of us wanted to consider the possibility that we
weren't entirely safe, that the glass doors we felt so secure
behind weren't actually anything more than microfilters, screening
out only a small portion of the contaminant from the
atmosphere.

“I’m hungry,” Kenneth Weaver announced,
ignoring the dust underfoot. It was obvious by the boy’s girth that
he wasn’t kidding.

“Is that all you can think about?” Jake asked
his brother. “We’re all going to die here, and all you’re worried
about is stuffing your face. That sort of attitude is the reason
you’re such a whale to begin with.”

“You shut your mouth, fag,” Kenneth retorted,
his blubbery cheeks turning red from rage and embarrassment. “I
still get more girls than you do.”