The Remaining (8 page)

Things look worse outside the hotel.
Much
worse.

Jack seems to know where he’s going, but Tommy can’t tell for sure. Maybe he’s only going around the cars that are stopped in the middle of the road. Maybe he’s stepping around the bodies that are plopped right in the middle of the street or on the sidewalk like barricades. Everything he sees looks wrong and unreal. His mind wants to tell him this isn’t happening, and he wants to scream himself awake, but Tommy knows better.

This is all real and there’s nothing any of us can do.

Even if he did scream, he’d just be a voice in the crowd.
One of the many. Like the woman who walks by them muttering to herself in a jumbled and endless run-on sentence. Or the guy in the suit sitting against a building, weeping and staring at the ground. Or the couple holding hands as they rush down the street like there’s some kind of rescue they’re running toward.

Dan is holding on to Skylar. For a quick moment he glances at Tommy but doesn’t say anything.

Tommy knows. Tommy can feel the terror in that look.

The dead bodies and the abandoned cars, some crushed and others simply stuck, aren’t the only damage in front of them. The earthquake has left everything shaken and broken. Windows are blown out. Garbage cans overturned. A water line is flooding the center of a street. Smoke billows from a building. The smell of gas lingers in the air.

They pass the open door of a Mexican restaurant where the owner is yelling out curses at the sky. Tommy doesn’t know Spanish very well but he can tell what the old guy is saying. Cursing is cursing in any language.

Jack stops at an intersection. For a second Tommy wonders what’s wrong; then he sees it. The blonde ponytail. It belongs to a girl who must be seven or eight years old lying dead in the street.

“Oh man,” Tommy says.

“This way,” Jack tells them, heading down another sidewalk.

“What do you think did this? What killed all these people?”

Jack ignores Tommy’s question as they walk. Dan and Skylar are moving slowly behind them, taking everything in with looks of dread and silent, open mouths.

“Why are we still alive?” Tommy continues. “What was that earthquake? And that lightning
 
—I’ve never seen lightning like that before.”

“I don’t know, Tommy.” Jack sounds confused, irritated, stressed. He stops for a minute as if to make sure they’re heading the right way.

“Their eyes,” Skylar says. “Did you see their eyes?”

I did thanks for mentioning it and oh yeah I saw your parents’ eyes and I can’t forget about them.

“Is this an alien invasion?” Dan asks.

Tommy looks at Dan to make sure, but he can tell Dan is serious just by his tone.

Jack looks sharply at him and shakes his head. “Yeah, Dan. I’m sure it’s an alien invasion. Maybe Tom Cruise or Will Smith will come save us.”

As they walk across a street, a man is pulling someone out of the back of an SUV that is pinned in place by cars. Tommy almost goes to help the man, but the stranger doesn’t seem to want help.

“Come on,” Jack says. “This way.” He leads them through an alleyway littered with bricks. Tommy sees a No Trespassing sign painted on the side of one of the buildings flanking the alley. As they near the end of the narrow passageway, they see a cop and an elderly man pulling
someone from the rubble of a building that must have collapsed. Jack keeps going, walking across another road.

When Tommy exits the alley and reaches the street, he’s able to see the sky again. It has an eerie, muted yellow glow to it, one he’s never seen before.

This is bad.

He’s moving fast just like Jack but then he notices Skylar lagging behind.

“Skylar, you okay?”

She’s almost in a trance. The sky must’ve freaked her out a bit too. “I think I know what’s happening,” she says.

“Huh?” Tommy says.

“I heard my parents talking about this for years.”

“Talking about what?” Dan asks, out of breath as he wipes his forehead.

“The end of the world. Like it happens in the Bible.”

Jack overhears and calls back, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” Skylar says. “The good people have been taken away and the bad are left here.”

“No,” Tommy says as he smells gasoline leaking from a wrecked car they pass. “There’s got to be a scientific reason for everything that’s happening.”

“You’re wrong,” she says. “I’m telling you, this is straight out of the Bible.”

Tommy shakes his head.
She’s just being irrational.
“Look, you go to church, right?”

She looks at him and nods. “Yeah, so?”

“So you’re not a bad person and you’re still here, so it can’t
be just the bad people left here. Anyway, what you’re saying is crazy. It’s obviously not the biblical end of the world.”

Skylar doesn’t seem to like Tommy’s answer. “Yes it is. I know it is.”

Jack stops for a moment and curses. “Stop with the make-believe religious mumbo jumbo, okay? It’s happened. It’s done. We all survived. The world isn’t ending.”

Skylar breathes in, then swallows. She brushes back strands of her hair and looks at her friends.

“We need to find safety,” she says in a calm voice. “If I’m right, this is gonna get
really
bad.”

“If it’s going to
get
really bad, then what do you call this?” Jack shouts back.

Skylar doesn’t reply. There aren’t words to sum this up. There are curses and profanities and screams, but that’s about it. Mere words would seem too normal and kind compared to what’s all around them.

A few moments later, Tommy feels something change. The temperature, the wind, the light around them . . . Something is different. Something is strange. Something is bad.

They are at an intersection where a cop is waving a crowd on. Where they’re supposed to go, or what’s supposed to happen once they move past, Tommy has no idea. There’s a stalled bus in the middle of the road.

Wonder how many people are dead in that bus?

They’re about ready to pass the bus when Tommy sees the look in the cop’s eyes. He’s not even trying to disguise
it. The round, chubby face is a road sign for terror, his eyes seemingly blinking in warning.

“Hey, what’s happening?” Tommy asks.

They move around the bus and now have a perfect view of the sky and the horizon between the buildings. What they’re suddenly looking at, just like all the speechless spectators around them, is unlike anything Tommy has ever seen.

“Look at that,” Jack calls out as the brilliant collage changes before them.

The yellow glow of the sky has turned into a menacing canvas of dark red. The clouds stand out and seem to be moving and alive. Not like pretty little powder puffs but like poisonous plumes.

Second by second, the sky grows darker.

As it does, Tommy grows more fearful.

For a second he’s about to say something to Dan and Skylar, who are right behind them, but then the gunfire starts going off.

Wait
 
—not gunfire. More like . . .

He sees something scattering in front of him. Spilling . . . no, blasting all around him.

Something explodes right on the street next to his feet. Tommy now reaches down and touches melting ice.

“What is that?” Dan asks. “Hail?”

Tommy shakes his head. “There’s no way. Can’t be.”

It was the size of a basketball before it blew up. Maybe even bigger.

Another explosion of ice.

“It
is
hail,” Tommy shouts.

Someone screams. Then the crowd starts to disperse in a flurry of noise and movement and images.

Something hits Tommy hard on the shoulder, then digs into his skull.

“Oh my
 
—” Jack starts to say but then breaks off and screams for them to run.

The next few moments are like trying to evacuate from some kind of theme park that’s suddenly gone out of control. The hailstorm is crazy. Tommy runs up next to the building as his legs and arms and head all get beaten and battered by hailstones the size of baseballs. Larger ones just miss him. A store entrance is closed so he keeps running down the street. Jack is in front of him and surely somewhere behind him are Dan and Skylar.

A woman is crying.
Is it Skylar?

Tommy’s right ear is nicked as if it just got shot. He’s still running, searching, looking for somewhere or something or
 
—

A car in front of them explodes with glass and metal as something out of a Superman movie crushes the vehicle.

That’s a meteor not a piece of hail.

The immense thing would have killed somebody if it had landed in a different place.

“Come on!” Tommy keeps running, dropping his camera for a moment, then picking it up again and sprinting as he is pelted by another round of hail.

We gotta get off the street into one of these buildings, any of them.

Jack’s got the same idea when he finally comes to a door that opens for all of them.

Who knows what they’ll find inside.

Allison stares out the window, thinking of an image that now haunts her.

A small, black-and-white booklet of twenty or thirty pages. Such a simple way to show how the world’s going to end.

She can remember finding it that one day when she was just a kid.

Left in our mailbox from one of those people coming around. Somebody from a nearby church. Maybe one of those who knocked on our door not long ago.

It showed the dark clouds and the lightning.

And people cowering on the street corner in fear.

And people on their knees praying and crying out.

Angry figures straight out of the movie
Gladiator
hovering in the heavens while sickly, angry-looking men slip through their shadows.

Reading it back then didn’t make sense to her. But even now, as an adult, the words don’t seem logical or practical or reasonable in the least.

They’re all about God’s judgment and righteousness but nothing about his love and grace and hope.

Nothing but anger and wrath.

Nothing but condemnation.

This warning had only made Allison more resistant to whatever those people wanted her to know.

So many years ago and yet I can still see my hands trembling while I held the tract.

A voice snaps her out of her reverie. “It can’t be happening. Not now. Not like this.”

It’s not the words that scare Allison but rather Beverly’s tone. She doesn’t sound surprised that they’re watching some freak-show hailstorm outside producing massive ice balls coming down from the sky. Beverly just sounds surprised that it’s happening today, as if she had it penciled on her calendar for next Friday.

“What do you mean?” Allison asks, looking away from the window and back into the darkened room.

“All this time I thought I was prepared.”

“You’ve been preparing? For this?”

Beverly is still looking outside with a hypnotic fascination. “Unfortunately . . . yes.”

“But I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying . . .” The older woman moves and faces Allison. “I’m saying I should be home. That’s where I planned to be when the end came. We have a basement that has a shelter in it.”

“Oh.”

“Now, don’t give me that.”

“What?” Allison asks.

“One of them
oh
s like I’m some kinda crazy woman or something. I’m not. You see what’s happening. Earthquakes. Trumpet sounds blasting from the sky. Hail the size of human heads. I knew that sooner or later the end was gonna come. I just expected to be home to help my family when it did.”

“And I thought I was having a bad day,” Allison says, then lets out a nervous laugh that feels good.

“Why are you here, anyway? You runnin’ from something?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Allison thinks about finding that tract in their mailbox when she was just a young girl. She never showed her parents but hid it. Every now and then she’d pull it out and see the comic-book characters all terrified with no hope in sight. The words on the tract talked about wars and people disappearing and Israel and quoted lots of Bible verses too.

Why am I thinking about that?

“Wanna tell me?” Beverly asks.

“Boys.”

That’s enough of an answer. Beverly just nods and says, “Uh-huh.” She pauses a moment. “You know, I’d normally say most things are the fault of men. But this here
 
—I’m not sure.”

“I need to get outside,” Allison says.

“What? Didn’t you see that sky? It turned the color of blood.”

That’s very comforting. Thank you for sharing.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon,” Beverly continues.

Allison wants to put some jeans and flat shoes on. To wash the makeup off her face. To find herself closing her eyes under a showerhead and feeling the hot water against her face.

She wonders if the shower she took this morning was the last shower she’ll ever take.

Stop it, Allie.

“So, your friends. . . . Tell me about them.” Beverly is sitting on a cushioned bench in the foyer of the church.

Allison sighs and sits down next to her. “We’re all college buddies. My best friend, Skylar, married a guy named Dan. They’re so sweet together, so perfect.”

It stings a bit saying their names. Allison knows they might be like some of the people she has seen, suddenly dropping dead for no reason.

“I was the maid of honor,” Allison continues.

“And you escaped to a church. I’m assuming during the reception?”

She nods. “My boyfriend
 
—Jack
 
—he doesn’t quite have the same romantic view of marriage that people like Skylar and Dan do. We’ve been dating for
 
—for a long time.”

“My husband was the same way. He didn’t have a particularly fond view of marriage. Of course, I didn’t know it until it was too late.”

“Did he . . . Did you lose him?”

Beverly notices her serious tone. “Oh, yes, but not today. Not now. He left me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too. He went to bed my husband and then woke up someone else. Like a light switch was turned off. It took me years to realize there was no light switch there to begin with.”

“That’s awful.”

“That’s life,” the woman tells her. “Maybe it’s better that you know about your boyfriend’s reluctance now before it’s too late.”

They hear something crash outside. Allison keeps breathing steadily but feels like she’s at a higher altitude, like she can’t quite catch her breath. “It sorta seems like we’ve gotten to the too-late stage already, you know?”

“We need to keep saying our prayers,” Beverly says. “That’s all we can do.”

All we can do.

Maybe I can finally start to do it.

Maybe.

Suddenly another trumpet sound interrupts any thought she might have, either in her head or spoken out loud.

The sound is accompanied by more rumbling. It’s not just the hail hitting the ground. It’s everything around them. The ground and the church and the walls and everything.

Once again, the earthquake almost seems to be coming from the sound itself.

A piercing, deafening, haunting trumpet sound from heaven.