THE RED WAKE

Chapter 25

     This morning, she’d made his favorite; meatloaf with a side of mashed potatoes and her best cherry pie. She hadn’t been able to keep the ice cream he’d scrounged from the shop. It had been all she could do to keep the stoves running on juice from the emergency generator out back. This meal had used up the last of their stores. They both knew that they were too old to run around looking for food, especially if they had to hide from monsters while they were doing it.  

      Nope, she thought. 

     Old Mother Earth, it seemed, had performed a perfect cartwheel straight into the latrine. 

    As they stopped for lunch at the side of the highway, surrounded by fields of gently waving wheat, Jenny thought of the home they’d left behind them, back in St. Michael. Jimmy had always been fond of telling their customers that they were dining in the ‘Birthplace of Wyatt Earp,” though that was really a couple of towns over in Cameron. But their customers didn’t seem to mind.

     The waving sea of grain all around them reminded her of the day they’d made their decision. The “Heartland” hadn’t been hit by as concentrated an assault as say Chicago or New York. By comparison, relatively few of the obsidian spheres had fallen across America’s Breadbasket. 

     But the Changes had come just the same. 

*

    A week earlier, Jenny was wiping down the kitchen counters while Jimmy was up at the restaurant trying to restart the old generator. Suddenly the kitchen had seemed to go dark as a shadow fell across the house. 

     “Jenny! Come out here, real quick!”

     The excitement in his voice brought Jenny’s heart into her throat. She dropped her rag and made her way outside, ignoring the nagging pain in her bad hip. They had converted the old barn in the spring of 1989, after the government had shut down the farm. Jimmy was a decent fry cook and Jenny had always known her way around the kitchen. She’d always wanted to open up a restaurant. So they’d used up a chunk of their savings to make the changes.  J&J’s had gone into business exactly one year later. People from all over the region had walked through the converted doors of the old barn when word had gotten out about Jenny’s cherry pie. And even Jimmy had developed a reputation as a more than serviceable short- order man. Western Illinois University was only a few minutes to the south. And they got a lot of traffic from the students. The locals all loved the place, and, on Friday nights they even had dancing, although in the last few years, Jenny hadn’t much cared for the music the college kids played on the jukebox that Jimmy had put in himself.  But the business thrived, and they’d never looked back. 

     As Jenny rounded the southeast corner of the diner, she saw Jimmy standing there with his hat in his hand. He pointed into the distance, out over one of the neighboring fields. But she’d had no need for him to show her what was happening out there. At first she thought she was seeing a mushroom cloud, like photos of the one that blossomed after they dropped the bomb on those poor folks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the only thing that her mind could compare to what she was seeing. 

     It was huge, miles across in diameter. A massive distortion, like a hole in space, rotating above the plains just to the south. The distortion was luminous; brightly lit by lurid green and red flashes of light which emanated from somewhere within in its interior. The sky surrounding the distortion was black as midnight in Hell. Living on the plains of the rural Midwest, Jimmy and Jenny Montague had seen plenty of tornadoes. Jenny had once seen a twister lift a tractor and fling it one hundred yards into a neighbor’s cornfield. But the huge disruption in the air pulsed with the force of a million tornadoes. Jenny could sense its raw, malefic power even from where she stood. She reached out and clutched Jimmy’s callused brown hand in hers, marveling at how her skin tingled at the contact. It felt as if she were receiving mild electric shocks all over her body. It wasn’t a painful sensation, only disquieting.