My blood zings through my arteries looking for some escape but there isn’t one so the centripetal force of it makes me lightheaded and I feel that my throat might burst open in a gush.
Heavy thudding footfalls on the roof. A buzz-hum coming from outside. Maggie whines and shakes her head like it itches. I’m half blind with confusion and bloodrush. My breath seizes in hitches of panic.
A terse, louder roar precedes the hail that falls upon us.
Glass from every window in the house comes in at once. All we could do was duck. The drumming and pounding against the roof, the walls. It’s not only the windows. The entire house is bombarded. A tornadic din grows.
Such chaos follows that I cannot tell you the exact order of what happens next. We’re on the floor scrambling on broken glass but we don’t know where to. We shout at each other but there’s no hearing, no more than you could hear someone trying to tell you something amid a field of exploding landmines.
The world washed out. It broke apart all around me and I remember just waiting to be taken asunder too, in a way welcoming its inevitability because I didn’t want to be a part of a world where this happened. I didn’t want to save it, lead it, be in it. That’s when I almost gave up, right there.
One of the drawbacks to the house, Martin told us every spring, is that there isn’t a safe area to go to in case of a tornado. Best we could do was all get in the bathtub and pull a mattress over our heads. We actually drilled on this, Johnny thinking it was a riot, Mom thinking it was necessary, me thinking it was stupid because it’s something Martin wanted to do. In general, if Martin was excited about it, I wasn’t, no matter what it was. Typical shit-ass teenage step-kid. I miss him.
All we could do was stay down. Within seconds, Bass and Kodie are on top of me and covering me. Maggie barking. Interminable drumming and pounding. Goes on for so long that Kodie cries out, “Why won’t they stop?” I try to budge them off but Bass is too strong. I was lying on my front, struggling with them. Bass keeps yelling through gritted teeth to stay down. Glass bits tear at my shoulders and kneecaps. Sandy shards abrade my cheek.
This shower of stone and glass. Unceasing waves. The house coming apart in places, the actual wood and sheetrock and insulation spraying out in puffs. The holes become spaces and the spaces allow more to come through with their vicious aim, to connect with us, our tissue bruising now, and I wonder how long it can last.
This is when all the fear and wonder of these days went from nebulous gas to bright star in my mind, under the siege of stones. That bright star winked and shined and its message was they are trying to kill us.
How many are out there and how many stones can there be? Did they carry them here or have they been stockpiling clandestinely all along, lying in these supplies for days unseen?
My God. It must be.
I hear Bass take one to his body and he says oh. We’re covering our heads now. The barrage is so complete that we don’t dare stand to run elsewhere. There’s nowhere to run. It comes from all sides.
Maggie barks somewhere, whines in pain, continues.
Kodie covers my head with her body in fetal position and weeps. She’s hit in the back a couple of times and she cries out like I’ve heard mothers cry out giving birth, a shocked, bewildered cry.
They cover me and take this. For me.
I don’t understand it, yet I do.
I think of Mr. English, the thinking steeple he creates with his fingers, leaning back in his chair, looking at me in a manner both quizzical and fearful.
It’s so loud, violent, and malevolent that I just want it to end, for all of us. Enough, is what my mind flashed. Over and over it flashed enough of this, Johnny and let it end, Johnny.
A lull. Bass off of me and standing, I could now see him, a man in full, teeth bared, seething, bloodied in the face, his clothes tattered, drips of blood falling from a fingertip. All of this as shown in moonlight. A comic book scene. My mind put him in a square on a page and above the square in a caption block it reads in that handwritten small-caps script, Bastian’s Last Stand.
Fury fills his features. He looks out at the dark and says, “You’re gonna make it, Kev.” Outside, they roar in a burst. This time the roar is polyphonic, terrible, wholly belonging to the new world. I’d even say it’s inhuman if I didn’t know it was new-human.
Taking it as a battle cry, Bass jumps over us and dashes through the collapsed doorframe, yelling rebellious. Kodie and I turn away bracing against the next deluge and Bass voicing what it means to be pummeled. But all we hear are his footfalls on the wooden deck and then his yell falling into the distance like he’s pitched himself into a ravine.
Kodie and I lay on the floor. They were gone. You could feel that. Bass was gone, too. You could feel that.
Kodie and I pulled ourselves up. I kissed her and asked if she was okay. She sniffed and bobbed her head that she was but said she wasn’t sure about her back. “I’ll have some sexy yellow-and-purple bruises.” Then she said, “He’s gone, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s you and me now.”
I grabbed her hand. “Flashlights.”
We picked our way through stones in the dark, each one casting its own moonshadow on the floor. The windows gaped with treacherous blades of glass. We went out the hole in the dining room where the back door had been, stepping over the rent screen Bass had leapt through.
Middle-night still, the quiet immense. We aimed our beams around the yard, the trees, back at the house. The house looked shot-through. We searched the front and back yards. My beam fell on a large nest in the trees. A perch for them, I thought, a slapdash treehouse.
No Bass, no body, and no cairn either. We had to get out of the dark.
I heard Maggie whining somewhere outside. I called out to her which stopped her whining but she didn’t come and I didn’t want to wait.
The cold told us the house was no longer a house, but it took the predawn to show us. My home was bones now. The floor looked like the end zone of a landslide. Stones blanketed the wood. Drifts of them rose in the corners. You couldn’t take a step for kicking one. We didn’t touch them. The brown ones, the pumiced, the river rocks, the limestone, all the size throwable by small hands. The floor an anthology of earth tones now, Martin’s proud pine gouged and hiding.
The sky started to color. Kodie and I hunkered on my bed with our flashlights and waited for daylight before doing anything else. I had my high-powered beam pointed up so that the light radiated out on the remains of the ceiling. Kodie lay in my lap. I petted her forehead. What had been done to the walls and windows had not been done as much to the roof. Light rain came and with it wet breezes.
We shivered and listened to it come down so much louder now without windows and walls which looked like the cannon-shot hull of a wooden frigate. But we weren’t sinking, not yet, and that was good. We’d survived a battle and had suffered a dire casualty in Bastian, but they’d failed. We were still here, hangers-on of the old world.
My mind raced with the rainsounds. At first light, what would we do? The shock of the night wore off and the future had to be considered again. There was a future to consider. There were moments last night when that didn’t seem possible. That there still was a future buoyed me, as did Maggie trotting in all wet, panting like mad and shaking off all over my room. She jumped up onto the bed, peaceable thunder rolled in the firmament, and the three of us sat there and let sleep find us.