Risen (2 page)

"I take it Ma's cooking isn't exactly Cordon Bleu."

"If that's French for 'edible,' I'd say no," Peg said. The stranger's eyes were a lovely chestnut brown.

"Recommend the meat loaf?" he asked.

"Were you going to eat it or poison a gopher?"

"I'll take the chicken fry."

Peg had spent the next thirty minutes in a state of grace. Her feet stopped burning and she lost that persistent ache in the small of her back. Even the lousy twenty-five cent tip at table number one didn't bother her.

And for thirty minutes she didn't think about Annie.

***

Eight months ago:

Rodney Culler chipped at the ice on the Ford's windshield with the corner of his ice scraper. The snow was no big deal, just a two-inch layer of fluff you could brush off in a moment. But the ice beneath the snow was a quarter inch thick, and breaking it out was a pain in the ass.

Inside the car, the defroster exhaled air only slightly warmer than that outside, which was two degrees Fahrenheit. With the wind chill, it was cold enough to freeze the nipples off a mastodon.

Normally Rod would've just started the car and let it run with the heater on for twenty minutes if that's what it took to loosen the ice without all this damn chipping, but he was late getting Annie back to Peg's and she'd give him hell for making her worry. He could call and let her know they'd be late, but then he'd have to talk to her and he was still too pissed off about the divorce to want to do that.

Annie waited impatiently inside the front door. All bundled up in her down parka and wool muffler and snow boots she looked like a stuffed doll, arms practically perpendicular, legs all but immobile. Rod didn't know why Peg made her wear all that crap, like she was going on a damn polar expedition or something, when all she had to do was dash from the front door to the car, then from the car to Peg's. He'd said as much when he'd picked Annie up, and Peg had stubbornly kept adding layers to Annie's outfit.

"What if the car breaks down and she has to walk?" Peg had asked.

"Jesus, Peg, I just live in Isaac. It's thirty fucking miles, not halfway across the Arctic continent."

"You never know. It pays to be prepared."

"Whatever." In the end it was easier to just give in. That was his problem with Peg. He'd always just given in. It made him feel like a pussy just thinking about it. Maybe if he'd slapped her around a little....

Ah, the hell with it.

Chip chip chip. The heater was starting to loosen the ice from underneath. A big chunk broke away, clearing a space big enough to see through. Good enough. Rodney Culler beckoned to his daughter to come on. She did, and of course she left the door open.

"She's only five." Rod could hear Peg's voice in his head as he ran carefully up the frozen walk to close the front door.

"Old enough to know how to close a damn door," he muttered.

Annie had stopped halfway down the walk, waiting for him to catch up.

"What're you waiting for?" he said, giving her a nudge. "Come on. We're late." He ushered her into the car and slammed the door, hurried around and jumped in behind the steering wheel, thinking that he should get some thermal underwear, he was freezing his goddamn nuts off.

He'd moved out of their house in Anderson before the divorce, as soon as Peg informed him, after seventeen years of marriage, that "it wasn't working out." Rental housing was at a premium since work began on the nuke plant and hundreds of construction workers had moved into the area. He'd been lucky to find a spare bedroom to rent in Isaac, upstairs in the house of an elderly widow. It had been her husband's "snoring room" where he'd been banished for the last twenty-two years of their marriage. The husband had died of pneumonia, which Rod could well believe considering the gale force wind that whipped through the room on these winter nights.

The highway to Anderson was black and slick in spots. The county did a pretty good job of keeping it clear of snow, but now and again Rod would hit an icy patch that spun his wheels for an instant. No big deal, but it made him long for the 4x4 he'd had his eye on before the divorce.

Annie sat silently beside him. She stared out the window at the piles of snow heaped along the roadside by the plows. They were dirty and ugly now with exhaust. Beyond them stretched pure country black.

She seemed to be handling the divorce well, but with a kid this young, who knew what was going on in her head? At Annie's age it was all pony-this and dolly-that. Rod couldn't relate to any of it and, truthfully, would've been happier with another son.

Tom had turned out good, at least so far. The trouble he'd gotten into was minor. God knows Rod was no angel himself at that age, and he'd turned out okay. At least, in his own opinion he had. Peg obviously disagreed.

These thoughts and more were churning around inside Rod's head as he closed on the bridge that spanned the drainage canal. It looked dry and clear and Rod hit it at sixty.

Sheet ice was a fucker, that's for sure. You don't see it, it just sits there invisible on the road, waiting for you, and the instant your wheels hit it you know you're fucked.

Annie's eyes went wide as the Ford lost traction and the rear end slid around and Rod was suddenly cursing as he spun the wheel and pumped the useless brakes. Annie clutched the arm rest and stuck her feet out to brace herself against the dashboard as the car spun around like a carnival ride. The bridge railing flew past the front window and she looked briefly down the road they'd just traveled as the car continued spinning and flying and then there was the railing again and she had to shut her eyes to keep from getting sick.

Rod spun the wheel one way and then the other. It was as if the whole mechanism had come loose and he flashed on spinning the steering wheel of the kiddie cars at the amusement park when he was small and how frustrating it was that it didn't make any damn difference what he did, the cars just kept circling. He felt small again and just as helpless as the Ford spun around once more, spinning and hurtling unchecked across the ice. Annie was screaming and Rod couldn't remember if he'd made her buckle up.

Suddenly the bridge railing shot toward them and there was the impact of metal on metal and a post broke and the car was in the air and Annie was screaming and there was a loud crunch and a shattering of glass and the next thing he knew he was opening his eyes and it was quiet and Annie wasn't moving and something in his chest felt really, really fucked.

And God help him, his last thought as darkness closed in was that Peg was going to kill him.

***

Peg saw Brant heading toward the diner from the newspaper office. She stole a peppermint from the basket by the cash register and popped it into her mouth. She looked away so that she could turn and smile at him when the bell on the door announced his arrival.

"Hi, stranger," she said. "What'll it be?"

"Something to rot my gut and make me forget my troubles," Brant replied.

"One lunch special, coming up. Cuppa decaf?"

"If that's the best you can do."

Brant gazed at Peg while she poured the coffee. She was pretty enough, getting a little full in the hips but that was okay. His own figure would never land him a role in a Hanes commercial. Peg was bright and made him laugh, which wasn't that easy these days. All in all, he'd be quite delighted to spend his declining years—and he hoped to have seventy or eighty of them—with this woman.

"Hey, when are we going out again?" he asked. "How about Saturday? We'll drive out to Junction City, take in a movie...."

"Can't. I'll be—"

Brant finished her sentence with her: "—at the hospital."

She smiled at him. Any man in his right mind would've quit asking her out after hearing the same refusal so many times, but not Brant. Not yet. The day would come, though. She wouldn't notice it at first, but then, in the middle of filling a sugar dispenser or washing her hair, she'd realize that Brant hadn't asked her out in a long time, and she'd have to acknowledge that some invisible marker had been passed in her and Brant's lives, and that the days of courtship were over.

She'd gone out with him once, while the giddy feeling was still in her head and the butterflies fluttered in her stomach, and it had gone well. She sensed a kind heart behind his cynicism and a strength of character that needed only true adversity to bring out. Unfortunately Brant had never been tested, only aggravated, worn down like a pair of shoes. So he ended up in Anderson, where life didn't walk so fast because there wasn't much of anyplace to go.

She'd only realized all this later, as she'd gotten to know him better a few minutes at a time. Her son Tom had seemed mightily impressed by Brant for awhile—he told her once, "There's more to him than you know," but when she pressed him for details he'd clammed up. Then there was that trouble over the "My Town" column and Brant's stock bottomed out in Tom's eyes. It was all or nothing with Tom, as with most teenagers.

Peg was willing to accept Brant's apparent lack of ambition, especially in Anderson where ambitions ran along the lines of big fish and bumper crops and where pulling a weekly newspaper out of thin air was something of a miracle. And she felt confident that, in a time of crisis, he'd rise to the occasion and get them through.

But Peg's crisis point was in the past. Her husband was dead, her daughter in a coma, on life support. All that was left was getting through the daily grind of battles with hospital staff and insurance companies and the slow erosion of hope, and she wasn't sure that Brant was up to that particular task.

Besides, it made her feel guilty to be out and having fun with a man while her daughter lay in a stark hospital room, oxygen being pumped into her lungs, nutrition dripped into her veins from a tube. Could Annie hear? Did she think? Did she know when Peg was there and when she wasn't? On the chance that she did, it was Peg's duty to be there. Every day, every hour she could spare.

So she and Brant carried on in a kind of Moëbius strip of flirtation that went nowhere but back around to where it began. Outwardly he seemed to accept this pattern as well as she did, but Peg knew that it would wear thin in time. He'd stop making eyes at her and then it would be just friendship between them. Maybe he'd find a younger woman and they'd move away, and that would be that. Sad and bittersweet.

"How is Annie?" Brant asked.

"The same."

In the kitchen, a crusty Asian man named Ma plopped the hamburger and a scoop of cold french fries on a plate, set the plate on the warming shelf and called to Peg through the service window.

"Order up!" Ma said.

Peg gave Brant a smile as she turned away.

As he watched Peg deliver the hamburger, Brant ruminated on how much he'd like to feel his hands on her buttocks, which he imagined as cool and white and smooth as silk. Then he considered what beasts men were, himself in particular.

***

Brant was digging a fork suspiciously through his chopped sirloin, thinking he'd just felt something in his mouth that was shaped oddly like an insect leg, when the shift occurred. So he didn't notice.

Peg was wiping the crumbs and water rings off the booth in the corner when it happened, and she didn't notice, either.

Doc Milford was checking Annie Culler's feeding tube and Deputy Haws was sleeping late to prepare for the night shift and the five boys who'd gypped school were passing a joint around and pooling their money for a twelve-pack when it happened, and none of them noticed.

In fact, no one in the entire town of Anderson noticed.

But there were artifacts:

Ants in a colony out by the reservoir began to feast on their eggs.

A flock of crows descended on a mockingbird and pecked it until nothing recognizable remained.

Merle Tippert's stubborn old dog that everyone said was too mean to die lay its chin on its paws and quietly gave up the ghost.

A young boy on his first hunt found the courage to pull the head off a wounded quail, something his father didn't think he could do.

And Madge Duffy, her face still swollen from last night's blows, put a kitchen knife to the neck of her sleeping husband and sliced his neck from ear to ear.

Artifacts.

Ripples.

Seth had begun.

The sun was going down as Franz Klempner drove his old John Deere back to the house. A jaunty mutt named "Elmer" ran barking alongside.

When Elmer was still living with city folk, confined to a two-bedroom apartment, he had expressed his exuberant personality by devouring anything he could get his jaws around. He began with the sofa cushions. Once those were reduced to shreds he attacked the sofa itself. Soon it looked like a showroom display of innerspring construction. He also munched on remote controls, compact discs, table legs, books, shoes, rugs, fireplace logs, laundry from the hamper, and one afternoon he swallowed the owners' prized cassette of jazz tunes recorded from old 78s that hadn't survived the last move. It may have been while they were unspooling magnetic tape through Elmer's rear orifice that the owners decided Elmer might be better off as a farm dog.