The Weather (2 page)

Lolly doesn't like looking at Granny Ma's wedding picture, but then she doesn't like looking at any of the family pictures. They're full of weird objects and gestures and clothing, and only ever feature people who are dead or three-quarters of the way there.

Lolly finds her mother on the front deck, wearing her vaulting stallion graphic tee, which already has sweat stains at the back and armpits. There are two rusted nails sticking out of her lips like she's some kind of bucktoothed vampire. Spotting Lolly, she pauses in hammering and tilts her head to the other end of the board she's nailing over the porch window. Taking the cue, Lolly goes to hold up the board as her mother plucks out a fang.

They've got half the front of the house boarded up before Lolly's mother says, “No school today, huh?”

“Storm tomorrow,” Lolly replies, and her mother just nods. A half hour later, when the only working school bus in town trundles past Lolly's house, she and her mother both ignore it.

“No calls today?” Lolly asks as they grab their gear and head around back.

“Plenty. Couldn't take 'em all. Had to get this done. Folks getting out of town, y'know?”

“No point in that,” Lolly mutters.

“Plenty o' point. With a storm coming—”

“How many calls didya take?”

Lolly's mother drops the toolbox on the back porch with a rattle and a bang. Inside, Granny Ma shrieks, “Keep it down! This doesn't have subtitles and the accents are heavy!”

Lolly and her mother go to the shed for more boards. They carry two apiece, one under each arm, and Lolly can feel the splinters planting in her flesh. She starts to count them, then starts to count the number of hammer swings it takes to get in a nail, then starts to count the more violent
bzzzts
of the zapper. Anything but counting the numbers of boards and windows.

“Macy's gone,” Lolly's mother says. “Left early this morning, 'fore Burgers was supposed to open. Angry line of folk who didn't know. Saw 'em on my way back from my second job. Macy packed up, left town, gonna give it a go somewhere else. Somewhere more
lucrative
.”

“Sounds like a Macy word. You talked to her?”

“She had me look at her truck this morning. Early call, first one. She couldn't hide it, what she was doing, with a truck that size. She told me, matter-of-fact-like. She told me, ‘You should leave too, before the escape window closes. Take that nice daughter of yours and get out.'”

“Macy didn't call me ‘nice.'”

Lolly's mother steps back to assess the house, pursing her lips as she eyes the windows and boards. When they return to work, they start spacing out the boards a bit more, using one fewer for each window, though Lolly's mother never says that's what they're doing, and Lolly doesn't ask.

“Tucker's gone too,” Lolly's mother says. “Dropped by his farm to get the other half I'm due for the tire. He cleared out. Left half the animals. Didn't feed them or nothing. Took most of the food, or maybe someone else did. Wouldn't be surprised that the looting's started. He and Macy, they probably went together, I was thinking. I thought, maybe there really weren't any cows in that truck. Maybe he was takin' Macy's stuff for her, gettin' ready to clear out. Wouldn't be surprised. Bet Macy hooked him into it. Tucker's always been a soft one for a savvy business lady, and no one 'round here was ever much savvier than that Macy. Oh boy, that Macy.”

“That Macy,” Lolly agrees.

*   *   *

That night, Lolly tucks Granny Ma into bed and gets a claw around the wrist for her troubles.

“I lost four followers today,” Granny Ma hisses, eyes round as the cap of her ointment jar.

“You'll find 'em.”

“But I just posted the regular stuff. Unless … could it be the giraffe I reblogged? But Froggie told me that was funny.”

“It's funny.” Lolly makes the motion of patting Granny Ma's head reassuringly, but doesn't actually do it. She's already rinsed her hands and she doesn't want to get them all flaky again.

Granny Ma's still mumbling into the darkness when Lolly crawls into her own bed. She falls asleep to whispers of “Maybe I shouldn't put her on my Follow Forever list.”

*   *   *

The next morning the wind whips the sand and grit about more than normal. Lolly puts on a pair of red-rimmed sunglasses to keep the flying bits from getting in her eyes.

The screen door snaps open behind her and her mother hollers, “What're you doing?!”

“Going to work,” Lolly calls back. “Boss'll dock me if I don't.”

“There's a storm! Store'll be closed!”

Lolly keeps on walking down the drive. She hears her mother running, rubber sandals slapping on the packed dirt. “Lolly!”

“Forecast's usually wrong anyway. Haven't had a storm for years. Boss'll expect me to be there.”

“Just stay home today, Lolly. Please. If the storm does come, if it does you won't want to be out in it. I don't want you out in it. Couldn't bear that.”

Lolly doesn't feel anxious, for herself or her mother or the storm. She knows staying home will give her a stomachache, because she'll sit around smelling Granny Ma's rotting flesh and rotting ointment and the house will creak and squeak with every breath of air. But when her mother's face and shoulders are covered in smears of burn cream that haven't been rubbed in properly, Lolly knows she'll cave to the smallest request, because her mother doesn't even take the time to check and see if the cream's rubbed in, and Lolly won't bother to tell her it isn't.

*   *   *

The storm hits while they're upstairs, watching from the window. It comes in bits first, stragglers, slogging in sloppy strides down the road. Then the wave hits, and Lolly's mother's back goes rigid and she steps away from the window, prompting Lolly to do the same.

The storm is of hundreds this time around, all dressed in ragged, ripped clothing, crusted with dirt and mud and soot and blood and Lolly doesn't know what else. Their skin isn't the right color and it's falling off, like most of them, like every part of them if you look too closely. But even if they were at her doorstep, Lolly wouldn't look too closely. She wouldn't look at all.

“The storm spreads the disease,” Lolly's kindergarten teacher told them, five eager, chubby faces who'd never seen a storm. “They spread the disease sometimes just by breathing the same air. And when you catch it, all you'll want to do is spread the disease too, and you'll become a part of the storm.”

Lolly's grade three teacher told those same five faces, starting to grow leaner, but not an ounce meaner, “There was a cure for the disease, a long, long time ago. But what it did, it cured some, and it made others all the more sick, and it made them into a part of the storm. It was the cure of the old scientists who created the storm.”

“Some, not many, are immune,” Lolly's grade six teacher told two haunted faces, eight months after the first storm in a decade. “The storm doesn't like the immune, and if you don't catch the disease fast enough, something in their dead brains will click to life long enough to say ‘this one isn't getting sick' and then the storm will overtake you, because if it can't have you, it won't leave you breathing.”

The storm continues, wave after wave, trudging down the road, never the drive. The day fades, and for a while the sky is bloody and the road is quiet. Then, as night falls, another wave hits and Granny Ma announces: “I forgot my notebook.”

Lolly and her mother try to ignore her, but she persists: “I need it. I need to check and see if Froggie's unfollowed me after I deleted her comment on my post.”

“Not now, Ma.”

“I need to check. I need to know. I need to talk to Froggie!”

“The wifi's down,” Lolly says, attempting to dissuade Granny Ma. But the old woman ignores her, talks over her, voice going shrill.

“Just go get it then, Ma. Go get it.”

Granny Ma clamps her mouth shut and shuffles into the hall. Lolly stares at her mother, who won't look away from the window.

“It's safer,” her mother says. “They might hear her if she stayed shouting. They won't smell her. She smells too much like them. Safer.”

Five minutes pass. Ten minutes. Granny Ma doesn't come back up and Lolly starts scratching at her peeling sunburn. She's watching over her mother's shoulder when a part of the storm turns down their drive.

Immediately, Lolly's mother opens the window.

“What're you doing?” Lolly whispers.

“The roof. We're getting on the roof.”

“But the boards—”

“You first.”

“But Granny Ma—”

“C'mon, Lolly.”

Lolly eases herself onto the sill, then over it until she finds purchase on the overhang above their porch. The roof slopes to her left, so that she can climb to the flat top of the roof. There's not room to walk over, so she carefully slides one foot along the overhang, then the other, still gripping the sill.

When she's cleared the sill and her mother doesn't follow, Lolly glances back at her.

“You get up,” her mother says, “and I'll get Ma.”

Lolly's mother's gone in an instant, and Lolly continues easing along the overhang, because below her the storm is getting closer and she can already smell them. If the scent gets too strong, she's afraid she'll look, and she doesn't want to look.

On the top of the roof, Lolly lies on her back, staring up at the night sky. The stars aren't shooting like Granny Ma wanted. They never are. But they're there, and they're more than blackened husks on the ground.

Lolly wonders if her boss had someone fill her shift. If it was the woman, or the boy, or maybe both of them. She wonders if her boss was ever going to actually marry the woman, and if so, if she would have had Lolly fired. Lolly's pretty confident that's what would have happened, unless the boy and his adolescent crush got a say in the matter. Lolly thinks maybe that could have saved her job for a little while, but she doesn't care either way, not because she's up on a roof with a storm underneath her, but because it was a really shitty job. She'd sometimes daydream about going to work for Macy instead, because then she might be able to slip a few free hamburgers or smoothies.

That wouldn't happen now, or maybe ever. Maybe they'd never have a burger joint again, all thanks to Macy. That Macy.

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Copyright