It’s been a slow twenty-four hours. Just Mason Miller cussing up a storm in church and me radioed in to give him a talking to – and hopefully scare the bejeebers out of him, so his preacher daddy implied. There was Paisley Walker too, 23 years old and turned to liquor and blowjobs out the back of Jimmie’s Bar. I did the right thing and pulled her in, got her to wash the stink off and down sour coffee. The devil kept his hold though; all night long, Paisley was fussing about how she’d a dead aunt for company. “Quit preachin’, Aunt Mary!” she’d hollered at the lock-up walls. “Give o’er singin’ them hymns. My head’s achin’ like a rotten peach about to split!”
Despite being troubled, neither Mason nor Paisley give me much in the way of paperwork. The fans whirring in the office against the June heat work harder. But then the clock ticks around to mid-afternoon and the phone on my desk starts ringing.
“Good afternoon, Sherriff Kline.”
I recognise the speaker. Mrs Alma. Her voice is cotton candy with a bite in it, like a piece of glass. It’s years since she bawled me out in kindergarten. All the same, I sit up straight.
“Afternoon, Mrs Alma. Hope you’re resting up in this weather, mam?”
“I might be if it weren’t for the man reading instruments on my front lawn.” The way Mrs Alma says ‘reading instruments’ makes it sound akin to Original Sin.
I ballpoint my pen against the notepad. “Go on.”
“He’s been out there since 7am. ‘Measuring moisture in the atmosphere’, so he tells it. Temperature too. Reckons he’s on a hunt for something called the Spike. Now, I’ve made the fella welcome. Let him use the bathroom, freshened his coffee. But his rods are beginning to tear up my lawn and he’s refusing to lay off!”
Again, the heavy hand of judgement hangs between us.
“This man on your lawn. He’s a stranger to you?”
“He is.”
“Have you asked him to leave?”
“Asked him every which way. And now I’ve threatened him with the law and am delivering on that threat, Sherriff Kline.”
I keep in a sigh; Mrs Alma isn’t the friendliest retiree. But Oakaville is one of those small Kansas towns where strangers are relatives here for the holidays or on the fast track to Elsewhere. Either way, they don’t set up camp on Mrs Alma’s lawn.
I fetch my boots out from under the desk. “I’ll be right over.”
I would’ve been too if I hadn’t come across nine-year-old Ruby Jackson in the parking lot. Front teeth missing. Black as molasses. Arms and legs patched pink where eczema rubs raw. It’s an unfortunate quirk that I view everyone in terms of future arrest warrants or victim descriptions.
“Ruby. Your daddy gone missing again?”
“I ain’t seen him. There’s a hole the size of Greensburg’s Big Well in my belly and I ain’t got a dollar.”
She blinks at me, eyes wide and wet. I get the familiar stab of regret that Ruby goes to waste on a deadbeat pa who’d rather sup his weight in whiskey than sing his daughter lullabies, and I think about the hole in my stomach where a baby failed to grow. Septic Abortion, the doctor named it, brought about by a rupturing of the foetal membrane. My abscessed womb was cut away, along with the last fragile threads of a life I couldn’t finish stitching. My husband, John, left six months later, moved out of state and got himself a new wife and a child that lived. It wasn’t his fault, any more than it was mine. Still, the whole affair left me sour.
“Here.” I root around in a pocket of my pants, hand over a fistful of taffy. The paper’s stuck good and fast, and Ruby has to suck the candy off its wrapper while keeping pace with me.
“Where’s that neighbour usually takes care of you? Mrs…Welch?” I open the door to my car and bat out a wasp that’s got in at an open window. No need to make the vehicle sweat like cheese in a can since it’d take a special kind of fool to steal a squad car. A fool like Ruby’s daddy.
“Mrs Welch stuck her head in the oven and sucked down a lungful of gas.” Ruby rips the candy clean off the paper and tucks it up inside a cheek. “She’s dead now.”
I hadn’t realised the Mrs Walsh who’d taken to ranting about her dead husband and committed suicide last week was Ruby’s Mrs Walsh. I’d called at the address after a neighbour reported her for antisocial behaviour. “He won’t say a word, no matter how much I holler!” Mrs Walsh had told me, jabbing a finger at an empty chair. “Just sits and stares, all the while sucking down hard cider like it’s meter gas.” The funny thing is, I almost believed the lady. Could’ve been the glare of the sun, but I thought I caught a sense of something sat inside that chair. A man-shaped shimmer.
It was a neighbour who found Mrs Walsh hanging by her dressing gown chord from the living room door. When I got there, the chair was still empty, but the coffee table was littered with cider bottles.
“I’m headed over to Mrs Al…”
Ruby doesn’t wait for me to finish. She’s already scrabbled across the driver seat to the passenger side.
“I’m doing up my seat belt,” she says, grinning at me with her gap-tooth smile.
The metal tongue clicks into place inside the buckle.
Today, I’m on pins and needles. Seems there’s omens everywhere I look – the line at the horizon, coneflowers and geraniums closing up in the daytime, birds chattering. I head down Main Street, hook a left onto 5th and 9th, and I try to forget the signs and concentrate on the road.
Pretty soon, we’re on Topeka Boulevard, where a weird haze reflects off the white mansions like sunlight off salt. I pull onto Mrs Alma’s drive, behind her prize Lincoln. On the road sits an SUV. Helluva thing. Steel plated, with skirts down to the ground. Shark’s mouth for a grill. Semi-circular blip of glass set into the roof like a third eye.
A minute later, Ruby and me are standing alongside it.
“That a tank?” She grabs hold of the side door handle and starts yanking on it as if she’s some natural entitlement to look inside.
“Leave off, Ruby. You’ll probably trigger an alarm, set the neighbourhood’s dogs jabbering.” I nod at the vehicle. “Tank seems about right though. The why and the wherefore, that’s gonna take a bit more detective work.”
“Alright.” Ruby folds her arms. She starts up the path when Mrs Alma’s front door opens and a stranger steps out. Mid-thirties. Hispanic. Cowlick at his forehead.
He comes towards us, holding a weather rod over one shoulder like a pickaxe, and I wonder if he’s about to start swinging.
“Mrs Alma told me to expect you, Sherriff Kline.” He reaches out a hand and our palms press.
I catch a scent - dark and syrupy, like the perfumed jasmine which used to grow over my grandmother’s porch.
“I’m Jesús,” he says, using the Spanish pronunciation. “Sugaar,” he appends. “After the serpent god of storms. I guess the names led me to my current occupations.” He smirks and parts his shirt at the neck to reveal a dog collar. “Part theologian, part storm-chaser.”
I understand the SUV now. You don’t get to be Kansas born and bred without seeing your fair share of scientists and frat boys going after twisters. I almost lose respect for the fella on the spot. But then he puts his back to Ruby and says real quiet, “The big one’s coming, Sherriff Kline. The storm of storms!”
Before I can reply, he turns to Ruby - “Hey there, plum sauce!”
He smirks and I think he might be handsome, if in a broken way. Like there’s scars on the inside.
I clear my throat. “I gotta tell you, Jesús, Mrs Alma ain’t keen on you sticking around and messing up her lawn. Reckon it could be time for you to move on.” I squeeze up my eyes against a rare burst of sunlight and, for a moment, Jesús is a golden silhouette.
He steps towards me, breaking the holy illusion. “I’ve got to take the readings where the oldest bodies are buried,” he says, so matter-of-fact that I feel my nerves pinch. “I’m sorry for Mrs Alma’s sake, but this is the ripest ground and, if I’m right, there’ll be no need for the old girl to worry about the quality of her lawn. Or for you to suffer the consequences of ignoring her.”
With that, he steps off the path, swings the weather rod down off his shoulder and stabs it hard into the lawn.
There used to be a cemetery where Oakaville now stands, got so packed the council who owned the land just went ahead and flattened it. Town Hall, the library, the single boulevard of stores on Main Street, and the homes spreading out - all were built on the bones of the dead after the dust bowl. Even before, the ‘wind people’, my people, had been decimated by smallpox, whiskey, and genocide, and likewise interred. Grandmother Littlewalker, or ‘Elisi’ Littlewalker as I called her, was one of the last full bloods of the Kaw Nation. As she told it, the blood of the Kaw soaked down into the dirt and turned it bad a while. The debt was paid eventually - when white folk suffered for the sins of their ancestors and the land came good again. The wind still swept across the plains though, swirling up dirt and trouble.
Ruby’s nattering at Jesús in case he tries to turn his back on her again. “Do them corpses below fix the weather? My daddy and me rode by a farm out at Northox once. Place had a big old barn with a metal rooster on the roof. I swear on the Almighty, that rooster, he spun around to point at us with one clawed foot.” Ruby rubs a finger under her nose and sniffs. “Is it like that here? The dead folk point the way?”
Jesús shows his teeth. “Closer to the truth than you might think, Miss..?”
“Ruby.” Ruby sticks out a hand; Jesús shakes it and I let him on account of the dog collar.
I’m about to get to the meat of our conversation when Mrs Alma hobbles out onto her porch and spies me.
“Sherriff Kline! About time you got around to calling in. I’ve a second circumstance requiring your attention, more urgent than the first.”
The old girl’s panting. I sit her down and tell Ruby to get on in and fetch a glass of pop. But Mrs Alma starts waving her arms, shouting, “You can’t send in the girl! Harvey never did abide children.”
Harvey? The name unearths a rusted chip of memory - of Mrs Alma living alone after her retirement, but for her pit bull, Harvey. Bred, like Mrs Alma, to bite back against the young.
“Harvey’s your dog?”
“Tadita Kline, you always were a plank short of a mailbox! Yes, Harvey’s my dog. Best friend I ever had. Only thing is, that dog’s been dead five years.”
As far as I’m concerned, this is the moment I wave Mrs Alma off on her one-way road trip to dementia. But just as I’m persuading the old dear into her creaking rocker on the porch, I catch a glimpse of Jesús disappearing through Mrs Alma’s front door.
It’s dark inside. I creep forward, hand on my holster just in case the dog’s rabid. At the end of the hall, I arrive at a set of frosted glass doors through which I make out a figure. Jesús. There’s no sign of the dog. All the same, I realise I’m gulping air as if I just ran track. What’s the big deal? I ask myself. It’s just some stray wandered in off the street. Or maybe a dream the old girl had. I can’t help it though. Something’s ratting my ribs.
“Sherriff Kline?” The figure beckons me. “Come on in. Harvey’s just glad to be home, aren’t you, boy?”
I push on the doors and walk into the dining room. Squatting at one end of the table, Jesús is easing his hand through the air, a foot or so off the ground. “Like your belly rubbed, don’t you, pal?” he says to the floor, and now I’m beginning to reckon that Jesús is as half-baked as Mrs Alma.
“I don’t know what you two have been smoking, but there ain’t a dog here,” I say evenly.
Jesús beckons me to kneel alongside him. “Try squinting your eyes,” he says. “Close your sight up around the shape of the thing. You got it now?”
I’m following instructions without even thinking about it when,
“Well, shit!”
If there ain’t a shimmer of something in the half-light, an outline that slowly comes into focus! Now I’m seeing the dog. Thing’s lying on its back, legs in the air, tongue lolling in ecstasy.
“That meant to be Harvey?” I wheel backwards on my hands and feet to put some distance between me and the creature.
Jesús looks back at me and winks. “Far as I can tell, no other beast on this green earth could abide Mrs Alma, or would chose to seek her out at the hour of its resurrection.”
It’s after four when I dip back out onto the porch. The sky’s lost every bit of blue. Clouds look low enough to swing off.
Ruby appears to be performing a rain dance for Mrs Alma. The girl stops when she sees me.
“Mrs Alma says her dead dog’ll bite me if I don’t dance.”
I eyeball the old witch, whose rheumy eyes are brim full of wicked.
“I ain’t got an explanation for it, Mrs Alma,” I tell her by way of distraction. “There’s a dog in there alright. If you say its Harvey, I’m guessing it must be.”
Jesús emerges from the house with the dog at heel. Despite Ruby putting up her fists, it appears Harvey is less dangerous than his owner. Panting in the heat, the animal drops to the ground at Mrs Alma’s feet. Jesús, meanwhile, gets back to churning up the lawn with his boots.
My eyes return to the sky. “You got a storm shelter, Mrs Alma?” I point to where the cloud’s spreading out in fat grey folds. “Clouds are curdling. Wind’s got a spit of ice in it too.”
Mrs Alma takes time getting up from her chair. She stares at me, a hard twist to her mouth. “I won’t abide your Indian hocus-pocus on this porch, Tadita. Get that fella on his way now, then you follow. Take the child too.” She shakes her head and tuts. “Girl can’t dance for shit.”
Leaning down to poke the sleeping dog, Mrs Alma shuffles her way inside with Harvey in tow. A few seconds later, I hear locks slide sharply into place and a safety chain rattling.
The lightning, when it hits, is a whip-crack of angelic light which churns the heart and makes the blood hurt. It’s the Thunderbird spreading its wings!
“Ruby!” I pull the kid to me. If the strike had landed just a few metres nearer, both of us would’ve been kicking up the daisies!
Jesús, though, is running around the lawn, swiping up weather rods and backing off when he comes to the one that’s still smoking.
“It’s confirmed!” he cries out. Rushing up to us, he’s wild-eyed and breathless. “The Spike will hit hereabouts and before the day’s out.” He swallows. “I need to go.”
Turing on his heel, he runs off in the direction of his SUV, leaving me unsure if it’s goodbye or if we’re meant to follow. Besides me, Ruby’s got her hand out, catching the first small pebbles of ice. The wind’s cold against my face and I realise the street is empty. Wiser folk have bedded down by now.
“We should be getting back to the car,” I say out loud while, in my head, I try to make sense of how the weather turned so fast. There weren’t any storm warnings on the tv or radio - only the knowhow Elisi Littlewalker taught me, and a way I have of feeling out the wind. But with all the talk of dead dogs and strangers, I’ve been left to the elements and Ruby alongside.
The hail’s hitting hard. I shake off my coat and stretch it over my head, holding it over Ruby too as we run for the squad car. We’re a few feet away when the hail starts to hurt. It spits and smashes against us. “Nearly there!” I shout down - just as a brick of ice strikes the windshield. We jump back as starbursts explode in the glass, jagged lumps punching through.
“The van, Ruby!” I drag the girl by the hand to the SUV where Jesús is standing with his hand on the side door, about to slam it shut. He looks unnerved as we run, like his plans have gone awry. But he helps Ruby up, slaps his hand around my forearm and hoists me on board.
The deluge takes my breath away. “I’ve never seen hail like this!” I pant, and it’s true. Balls of ice the size of a man’s fist are pummelling the sidewalk.
“Don’t worry!” Jesús shouts as me and Ruby crouch, hands over our heads, ready for the dome in the roof to shatter. “It’s bulletproof glass.”
We barely hear him, but then Jesús slams the door to and the roar dies back. “Gorilla hail.” He nods past the windshield to where giant stones are hammering the hood. “Exterior’s 16-gauge steel with a polyethylene deposit coating. To keep out projectiles.”
“There wasn’t any talk of a storm today,” I say, more to myself as I watch the boulders fall.
“There wouldn’t have been.” Jesús is lost to his thoughts a moment. But then he gestures to the passenger seat, swivelled around to face inside the cab, as is the driver’s seat. “Sit down.”
I ignore him. I’m drawn in by the server stack and bank of monitors. They remind me of the ultrasound equipment in the hospital and I want to yank the door open again and haul out the machines, watch their skin and guts split under the hail.
Instead, I rap a knuckle against a CCTV image of Mrs Alma’s lawn, white as snow now. “What you got here, Jesús? Anything for me to worry about?”
“I’ve got it all!” he says with excitement. “GPS data, to navigate when the dust’s too dense to see. Realtime radar for wind speed. Helps pinpoints mega cyclones when a twister’s setting in.”
I sense the wind letting loose outside the SUV. It’s getting strong and, despite its weight, the vehicle rocks slightly. Ruby gives a yelp.
Just as I’m trying to work out if it’s my place to hug her and whisper words of comfort, Jesús steps in. “Ruby, how’s about you climb up top and watch the lightning. Let me know when it’s on the move.” He lifts the grinning girl to the top of a set of metal rungs and she climbs into a bucket seat beneath the dome. There’s a soft hiss of pneumatics as she works a joystick that’s set into one arm, revolving the seat clockwise then anticlockwise.
While the kid’s entertained, Jesús beckons me to the back of the cab. I take in the camping stove, metal coffee pot hanging off a hook, and strong boxes, slotted into storage brackets and kept in place by chains. Jesús slides out a slim table, indicates a couple of fold out seats either side. This time I sit as he takes down a box and unseals the lid, a process that involves several lock codes. Reaching inside, he pulls out a weathered black leather book, leafs through and reads aloud:
“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, or the Son, but the Father only.” Jesús shuts the book. “This bible is six hundred years old. It used to be preserved behind smoked glass. You had to wear kid gloves to touch it.” He shrugs and drops the bible back into the box. “Likewise, this…” He scrabbles lower and pulls out the kind of ancient-looking scroll-tube Indian Jones might’ve unearthed. “Lower text of a palimpsest, taken from the Quran and carbon-dated to 632AD. It talks about a Day of Judgment. These…” He swaps the scroll for photographs showing a pair of large carved stones. “Medieval Sanskrit. Describes Kali Yuga – an age of discord – when Kaika, the final incarnation of Vishnu descends. You’re getting the idea..? Babylonian Tora from Cambridge University’s private collection, the word of the Buddha on a bamboo leaf manuscript predating the first century…From the Malayan calendar to the Viking’s end time of Ragnarök to teachings in the Christian ‘Book of Revelations’, the message comes through loud and clear. The dead shall rise, the storm shall rage in a final battle of good against evil, and the world will be ash in the wind.”
Jesús is leaning towards me. When he turns away, I feel a rush of cold settle in.
“Lightning’s moving downtown!” shouts Ruby. “The birds are flying away.” She peers down at me, a knot between her eyes. “All the birds.”
I look past her to the sky. Sure enough, there’s a flock of starlings overhead. But when I climb up a couple of the metal rungs and peer out the fishbowl, I realise the girl’s not lying. The sky is thick with birds, all straining to stay ahead of the storm.
At that moment, the SUV’s engine peps into life and I’m caught off balance as the vehicle starts to move. Spidering my hands over the roof, I spacewalk to the passenger seat and drop down. I hadn’t even noticed Jesús revolve the seats to face front, let alone thumb the ignition.
“Ruby. You wanna come down?” I call out. “I can strap you in here with me if you like.”
“She’s perfectly safe in the crow’s nest,” says Jesús.
Maybe, but I’m pissed at him. Even as Ruby shouts down that she’s okay, lightning kicks out across the street and fills my eyes with glare. Milliseconds later, there’s a noise, like an atomic bomb detonating, and a crack appears in the road up ahead, the asphalt steaming through the hail.
“So, this is meant to be some kind of biblical storm?” I yell at Jesús. “We should get ready for a plague of locusts? Water turned to blood?”
“If I were you, I’d get ready for anything,” Jesús shouts, steering against the buffeting winds and flying debris. There’s a toy tractor rolling over like tumbleweed, a STOP sign that’s blown horizontal, plastic chairs from outside Martha’s Coffee Shop. I’m glad to be strapped in.
“We’ve gotta get Ruby home…” I start, but Jesús cuts me off.
“She’s safer in here for the time being. I know there’s an argument that she should be with family when the end comes…”
“Stop saying that!” I’m at the end of my rope with this preacher who’s swung into town uninvited. “You’ve got a death wish and are seeing fit to take me and Ruby with you. Except I’m not in the mood. So, if I can get you to just swing by the Sherriff’s office and drop us off, I’ll be happy to let you set yourself a one-way course for Armageddon!”
I’m being facetious, and Jesús knows it. “There’s no time to take a detour!” he shouts. “The Spike needs to be witnessed.”
I un-holster my gun and point it at Jesús’s head, finger on the trigger. “The apocalypse will just have to wait.”
The parking lot is abandoned out front of the Sherriff’s office. There’s a single bar on my cell phone apparently because it starts ringing. Caller ID tells me it is Deputy Sherriff Phillips.
“Phillips?”
Phillips snorts down the phone, asthma playing up. I suspect the weather’s taking its toll.
“Sherriff? I’ve got through at last! Didn’t think I was going to manage it. Anyway, thought you should know there’s been a disturbance over at St Francis’s Church. Pastor Miller called just before the storm broke...” There’s a stretch of black static down the line I fill by shouting Phillips’s name. His voice cuts back in. “…knocking from inside the coffin. Can you believe it? I reckoned it had to be a racoon, climbed in before the coffin was nailed shut. But me and the pastor, we’ve crowbarred the lid off and, it’s the darndest thing…”
That’s all I get. The line’s dead.
“I need you to get out if you’re going to.” Jesús taps his fingers against the steering wheel, teeth chattering slightly so that I wonder if the fella’s fit to drive. Then I think, where’s the harm when the streets are abandoned and I’ve got better things to do than babysit.
But as I stand up, he grabs my wrist. His eyes are swimming. “I don’t think I’ll get to speak to another human being again. I’m sorry you’re angry. I expect that was always going to be the way of it, but I wish we’d shared a little kindness, you and me.”
It’s a strange thing to say; we’ve only just met, and on professional terms too. But something stings at the back of my throat. Another time, I’d slip him my card, or suggest a therapist. But today’s dancing at the frayed edge of sanity and Jesús Sugaar is fitting right in. It’s me who’s at odds with it all, carting around another woman’s child as if I’d a natural right to.
“Ruby! Let’s head on inside,” I call. “We’ll hunker down in the lock-up, wait out the storm.”
I expect some complaint at the idea of leaving her princess tower, but instead she climbs down.
“I don’t like looking out no more,” she says, her voice shaky. “Everything’s getting blown away or going up in flames.”
I’m thinking the girl’s gone simple until Jesús points out the windshield and I see it. The Sherriff’s Office appears to have had its windows smashed in and there’s fire shooting out and up the front of the building. Electricity poles have been ripped out by their roots; they’re leaning against the exterior wall, antlers sending up great froths of orange sparks.
I thumb 901 and listen for a ring tone that never comes.
Another time, another place, we might have been just another family setting off cross-country in our converted RV. Ruby’s sat alongside me, the seat belt strapped across both of us, my arm holding her in as an added measure. Out the corner of my eye, I see Jesús’s screens showing up an alien world; there’s a storm hunched over us and the cloud’s got rhythm to it.
“Steps in the sky. The land’s out of harmony,” I murmur. Elisi Littlewalker’s words on my lips.
Jesús eyes me. “In my family, we worship Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte - our Lady of the Holy Death. I’ve crawled on hands and knees to her shrine, blown smoke on an icon. My family are petty thieves. Santa Muerte does not judge.” He leans towards the windshield as the wipers struggle to clear the screen. “We light a white candle and say a prayer, the ‘Holy Death of Truth’, to request the longing of life.” He gathers up his breath and I see his chest rattle just a little. “Tonight, I come before thee,” he prays, voice clear and strong. “Ears in my eyes, my hopes crushed, my heart and soul in pieces. My mother, this world sometimes bewilders me and is beyond my understanding. I see poverty and disease, children be taken my predators, storms and earthquakes. I see many people whose hearts are bound by their egos, pride and fear. Please my queen, guide me to the truth about the problems I face. Guide me through these difficult times…”
He breaks off to scan the sidewalk either side of the road. Ruby sits forward, straining the seat belt. I follow their lead and can’t quite believe what I am seeing. We’re downtown, navigating Main Street with a storm broiling above us. But, far from being deserted, the boulevard is awash with people. Too many to count.
“Them folk don’t look right,” says Ruby. She nibbles a little finger.
“They’re looking for what’s familiar.” Jesús hunkers over the wheel; we’ve slowed right down. “I don’t suppose it’s easy for everyone to know where to go. Could be family’s all dead and they can’t even begin to find one another. Could be everything they once knew has been bulldozed and now they’re left wandering in a storm, without a hope of making sense of it.” He shrugs in a way that suggests he’s sorry for the fact, but any suffering is out of his hands.
It’s one of those awful moments when I despise being in the pay of the law. I get a jilt of regret and guilt in my stomach. “Ruby, I’m gonna have to step out and help these folk...”
Her small hands form a cage around my wrist. So many times, I would have given the earth, moon and stars to have a child dig their nails into my skin and refuse to let me leave. But I’ve gotta keep the peace. I’ve gotta serve the people.
“I have to, Ruby. Those folk need to be finding shelter. It’s dangerous out.” My free hand points off to the distance. “Sky’s gone green. Even in this tank, you can smell the shift coming. Stink of iodine, loamy dirt, and pine needles when we’re nowhere near woodland.” I avoid Ruby’s eyes. “Sky’s ripened for a tornado.”
“You can’t help those people,” says Jesús, real quiet like when he first spoke to me on Mrs Alma’s porch and told me to expect ‘the big one’. “Really look at them, Sherriff Kline. They’re all dead.”
Could be if I hadn’t been raised to see the spirit in the land, I would’ve sunk beneath the madness of it all, taken to screaming for the world to make sense again and for the dead to go back under. Instead, I see Ruby’s Mrs Welch, arm-in-arm with a fella, both straining to set one foot ahead the other. There’s a good number of old folk. They ain’t rotters like shown in grindhouse movies. More like they’re scarecrows, skin too big, bodies light as feathers as if they are about to be swept right off their feet.
“Where are they all going?” I say softly. I can’t help them, I realise.
“Just biding their time,” says Jesús. “Waiting for the Spike.”
“That being..?”
“The final chapter.” Jesús turns towards the highway. “When light conquers darkness.”
There are other vehicles outside of town, but most look abandoned, their doors left open, wheels lifting slightly in the wind. I wonder how much Ruby understands about what she is seeing? Staring at the shadowed prairie, it’s like looking out over the edge of the world.
A kilometre or so to the west, the cloud’s got weight to it. The base is starting to droop, lengthening down to the ground like sand through an hourglass.
“You’re driving us to our deaths,” I say under my breath.
But Jesús hears. “It was your choice to hitch a ride.” He side-eyes Ruby. “At least you are together,” he adds with the same sadness which has been threatening to surface ever since we first met.
“I take it this…” I nod towards the growing tail of cloud. “Is your destiny?” I’m bitter. I’ve a duty to protect Ruby and deliver her home. Right now, I can’t think of anywhere safer for us than an armoured vehicle. All the same, my hold on her is tightening by the minute.
“It’s what my family gave me up for.” Jesús shakes his head. “I was eight years old.” He nods at Ruby. “Just a kid. But there had to be a witness and only Mother Death and her disciples remain unbiased in the face of light and dark. I was rededicated to the World Council.”
I see Jesús visibly draw his reserve back around himself. “It hasn’t been a bad life, chasing storms and witnessing wonders.”
“Sometimes it’s worse to stay home,” says Ruby.
At that moment, an orchestra of signals trigger; a piercing alarm, tiny blips of light from a black box on the dashboard, and several pings as if a code were being relayed out from the SUV to spinning satellites in the ether.
Jesús brings the vehicle to a violent stop, two waves of water expelled by the wheels. We’re angled across the road, but I can’t find a reason why it matters. Reaching overhead, Jesús works a bank of switches in the roof. Next moment, the entire vehicle is shuddering and sinking down.
“We need to sit flush to the ground,” Jesús tells us as metal slats flood down the windshield, bolting us in behind an armoured screen. At the same time, I hear the noise of working hydraulics and the vehicle starts to shake.
“Spike drills burrowing in,” says Jesús, his face glistening with sweat. “To keep us grounded when the tornado hits.”
I want to see what’s going on outside. Its suffocating to be trapped behind the metal walls. I can tell that Ruby feels it too. She’s staring between Jesús and me as if we’re playing a trick and, any second now, we’ll shout “Surprise!”
“Turn your seat around, but stay strapped in.”
Jesús doesn’t take his own advice; I turn my chair to face inside the vehicle as he abandons his seat for the bank of screens. The SUV stops rocking and, for a moment, the only noise is Jesús tapping a keyboard and greenlighting every camera feed. There, in high definition, is what lies beyond – the wide-open space of the blackened prairie and a spiral of cloud about to meet the ground. Seconds later, it does and the wind itself takes shape.
“Heading straight for us. Hold on!” cries Jesús as a tremendous, gut-wrenching wail hits.
I’m reminded of standing too close to the line when a speeding freight train passes. Except, this sound doesn’t end; it goes on and on as if the devil himself has hitched a ride. Jesús’s monitors show the world’s in twilight, but it’s a dark of dust and debris. The screens still have a feed and I can make out electricity poles being churned up, cables rippling through the air like ribbons. They’re sparking too, lighting the storm like lights on a Christmas tree. I’ve never seen a twister up close and I’m trying to see my life flash before my eyes. Show me the good times! I’m screaming inside. But all I see are knives and the stapled slash across my belly where a baby ought to be.
I catch my breath and hold it. Tears make a mess of me. The hell-like roar doesn’t give up and I hear the buckle of steel as the frame of the SUV threatens to fold in. Seconds later, the scales across the windshield rip back and spin away. The glass bows, and I press Ruby’s face against my chest and tense in anticipation of the pain.
The silence is sudden and absolute. Ruby and me slam back down into our seat and I’m sobbing and shaking, and all I can say is, “I kept you belted up with me. I kept you belted up.”
It takes me a while to persuade my eyes to roam around; the screens are smashed, the strongboxes spread across the floor. Despite their lock codes, each one has burst open, all that religion shaken out into one messy pile. There’s no sign of Jesús.
“Come on, Ruby. Let’s try to stand up, hey? See if we can’t get ourselves out of this spot and somewhere safe.” I don’t know what I’m saying; it’s the cop in me switched to autopilot. But I undo the seatbelt hugging us in and as I stand up, I start to choke. I hadn’t realised my lungs were starved of oxygen. Now I double over, dredging in air as if vomiting backwards.
All the while, Ruby’s hand stays in mine. “Sherriff Kline,” she says, and gives my shoulder a tap, easy as if we were taking a stroll in the park and she wants to show me a bird’s nest. “Sheriff Kline. I think the twister’s staying still.”
“Come with me,” I say, and when the doors prove impossible to open, we climb through the frame where the windshield used to be, out onto the hood and down.
Under our feet, the grasses have been stripped back and the earth laid bare. Overhead, the sky is the blue of the Kansas Jayhawks jerseys. The horizon is gone though. In its place is the soaring wall of the tornado, circling around us.
“We’re inside the Eye.” It’s Jesús. Battered around the edges, but walking. “We made it, just ahead of the Spike.” He takes in the sight of me with new interest. “Sherriff Kline. Tadita. The predictions were right. Not one witness, but two.” He nods towards me then the maelstrom.
“Three,” I say. “With Ruby, there are three of us.”
“But only two are alive.”
Slowly, as if dragging my heels through mud, I turn my face to Ruby. She’s shimmering, the same raindrop-on-glass as Mrs Alma’s dead dog, or Mrs Welch’s dead husband, or all of the dead camped out on Main Street.
“I always told her to buckle up. She liked to ride with me whenever her pa set up camp in Jimmie’s bar,” I tell Jesús. Because he’s there to listen. “One night, Ruby’s pa decides he’s gonna take her for a joyride in my squad car. Man’s got a bellyful of whiskey and the sense of a jackass.” The crease aches where they stapled me back together; I want to fold Ruby up inside of me, keep what’s left of her safe. “Ruby didn’t get chance to put on her seatbelt before her pa drove blind into Mason Miller and Paisley Walker making out in the pastor’s pickup truck. Kid went through the windshield.” I glance down at Ruby’s sore arms and knees, patched pink where the eczema used to make her scratch, but left raw and blooded where the glass cut. She’s got her hand in mine still and it feels real. It feels real!
In that moment, I make sense of what’s mixed in with the debris and dirt swirling around us. There’s people, hundreds and thousands of people, all with their arms outstretched and faces upturned.
“The living and the dead. Both shall rise,” says Jesús.
I meet his gaze and see the mayhem reflected. Something else as well. Jesús goes slack-jawed and holds out his arms like every other soul waiting to be beautified, and he captures the rush of light and smoking darkness overhead.
“The Spike!” he whispers, enraptured.
And I see them now, emerging from the cathedral walls of the tornado. Light and Dark – two aspects of one whole. Charioted, on horseback, sword bearing, elemental.
But there are other spirits here, born of the land and bones and dust and lightning.
“I can hear drums beating,” says Ruby, and she does her crazy little rain-dance and shows her missing teeth.
“Shall we see what they are saying?” I squeeze Ruby’s hand and we began to walk away.
“Stay!” commands Jesús at my back, his voice rumbling with omnipotence. “You are a witness!”
But I’m holding tight to Ruby like the memory she is, like a tourniquet to stem a wound. “I’ve witnessed enough,” I say to death’s disciple. “You can keep your holy Rapture. I’d rather ride the skies.”
Ruby and me, we’ve always been wind people, swept together by hollowness and longing. As the final battle rages, I hear the cry of the Thunderbird break through between the darkness and the light.
“Let’s go,” I tell the ghost girl beside me. Hand in hand, we walk towards our end.