Winds of Change (2 page)

“Because our registers run off of
electricity, and as you can see we have no electricity at the
moment.”

“I’m paying with cash,” Jesse responded. “I
can just leave the money with you, take our stove, and be on our
way. You can put the money in the drawer when the lights come back
on.”

I sighed. “You have to understand where I’m
coming from. I’ve got the entire store to consider. If you walk
around in here and get hurt, it would be our responsibility. You
could trip over something in one of the aisles and sprain an
ankle.”

“That ain’t what you’re worried about, and
you and I both know that,” Jesse Weaver growled. “You think I might
just decide to stick a little something in my pocket and walk out
with it. Well, despite what you’ve heard about me, I’m not a thief.
I’m a lot of other things that might land me some time in the
penitentiary, but a thief ain’t one of ‘em.”

“I’m not concerned about that,” I said,
trying to sound convincing, “but I’m in charge of the store, and
I‘m shutting things down for now, like it or not.”

“Don’t worry about the store,” Jesse said
with a heavy Southern drawl. “It ain’t going nowhere. But I am.
I’ve got a stove to load up.”

“Jesse, I can wait on the stove,” Vera Weaver
spoke up. “Let this poor man do his job, and don’t give him a hard
time.”

Vera Weaver’s voice was a whisper in the
middle of a hurricane.

“No, ma’am, you can’t wait,” Jesse growled.
“I told you we were doing this tonight, and I’m not going to let
this little pissant keep us from it. I’ll call Jack if I have
to.”

“Mr. Weaver, I don’t want to get ugly about
this...” I knew it wasn’t much of a threat, but then again I wasn’t
much of a threat maker.

I heard a wet smacking that was probably the
sound of Jesse switching his wad of tobacco from one cheek to
another. “Don’t make me get Jack involved in this,” he grumbled.
“Me and your boss go way back, and I have plenty of reasons to
believe that he’d take my side in this. He asks me for way too many
favors to have one of his errand boys throw me out of his store.
Call him on his cell phone if you’ve got any doubts about what you
should do. Of course, I’m sure that would put a lot of doubts in
his mind about your ability to do this job. Am I right?”

I scowled in the dark, irritated that I had
been backed into this kind of corner. “Whatever, Jesse,” I said.
“We’ll get your stove. Just bear with me for a few minutes and let
me round everybody else up. I don’t want a whole store full of
people stumbling around in the dark. Fair enough?”

I heard Jesse spit in the dark and shuddered
to think about where it might have landed. “I guess I can go along
with that,” he said.

Hoping to avoid any further conflict, I was
just about to suggest that the Weavers wait at the service desk
when I heard someone screaming at one of the doors. It wasn’t the
kind of screaming you hear at an amusement park or in a horror
movie. Rather, it more closely resembled the sound someone might
make if they were being skinned alive. To make matters worse, the
lights were still out so I couldn’t see what was going on. It was
enough to give me chills and make me want to run for cover, but I
knew I couldn’t do that, especially not in front of Jesse Weaver. I
was supposed to be in charge of things. If I showed any sign of
fear at this point, I knew he would take advantage of that and do
whatever he wanted for as long as he wanted. I couldn’t let that
happen.

Trying hard not to panic, I left the Weavers
standing where they were. Steven, one of the other managers, met me
at front entrance. Even in the dark, I could tell that he was pale.
He had obviously heard the screaming too.

“Don’t go out there,” he said, checking the
sliding glass doors to make sure they were shut. “I don’t know
what’s going on, but the world is falling apart all around us.
Things are happening to the people who have already left.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, immediately
thinking of the potential lawsuits that might erupt from this.
Steven sat down on one of the benches in the vestibule. His hands
trembled, and he crossed his arms to hide the fact that he was
shaken.

“It’s hard to explain," he said at last, "but
people are changing the moment they leave the building.”

“Changing? Into what?”

“You form your own opinion,” Steven said.
"Tell me what you see."

I had never seen Steven so scared before, and
I knew that whatever he had seen must have been bad.

"Just stay away from the exits," Steven
added, almost as an afterthought. "There's something in the air out
there, and it's nasty stuff. It’s changing people."

I thought back to what Chuck had said about
terrorists and wondered if this might really be the beginning of
the end. I imagined clandestine missions involving the release of
sarin gas, biologically-engineered anthrax, and vials of bubonic
plague. The screaming outside the store reinforced the images in my
head, giving them color and texture and dimension. I didn’t want to
live in Technicolor though. I wanted black-and-white. That would
have made everything so much easier to bear.

The screaming went on for several seconds.
You could have almost mistaken it for the wailing of emergency
sirens had there not been a few words mixed in as well. The words
were mostly curses. Whoever was uttering them was definitely
suffering.

“Come here,” Steven said above the painful
ululations. Reluctantly, I joined him in front of one of the large
storefront windows.

He pointed at a foot-high hillock of what
looked like wet sand piled up outside the door. The maroon
moonlight revealed a few more scattered about the parking lot like
the errant homes of wayward ants. I saw a few glints of metal
shining atop the mounds and realized what they were - rings,
bracelets, necklaces, watches, and even a few gold and silver
teeth.

"Look at the prosthetic," Steven whispered.
"That's all that's left of the guy who was screaming. I saw him
through the window a minute ago. Now he's gone."

The fake leg lay in a pile of what looked
like beach sand. The wind rocked it back and forth in the dust like
a rolling pin in flour.

It took me a few seconds to realize that the
screaming had stopped. It took me even longer to process what
Steven was suggesting. If that hillock of dust and the one
prosthetic leg was all that remained of Steven's customer, that
meant that all of the piles of sand represented people.

I pressed my nose to the glass, straining to
see anything that might prove this was all some elaborate hoax.
That was when the first bird flew into the glass, making a smack
like a wife’s open palm against the side of her philandering
husband’s cheek. Startled, I fell back from the window, gasping for
breath. The sky chose that moment to start raining birds.

I wasn’t sure if most of them were already
dead, but they all ended up that way. Some of them broke their
necks after flying into the unyielding brick front of the store.
Others just dropped out of the sky, landing here and there like
strange hailstones. I had heard about the unexplained phenomenon of
frogs falling from the sky and supposed that this was along the
same line. The fact that something like this had happened elsewhere
didn’t reassure me in the least.

“We’re a modern day Egypt,” Steven said. I
was too shocked at that point to question him about what he meant.
I was too busy watching glassy-eyed cardinals, crows, robins,
finches, hawks, vultures, cranes, and a hundred other types of
birds drop from the clouds and crash against the pavement.
Strangely enough, the birds didn’t turn to dust like the people
had. They just lay there, quiet and unmoving.

Eventually, the downpour of feathers and
beaks slowed to a trickle and then died out altogether. The parking
lot was littered with birds of every variety. With the sky finally
emptied of anything aviary, my mind quickly returned to the
hillocks of salt. What had happened to those birds was terrible.
But it wasn’t anything like what had happened to all of those
unsuspecting people, what could potentially happen to me.

"What is going on here?" I asked, feeling
numb. “My God, what happened to all of them?”

“It’s the curse of Lot’s wife,” Steven said,
squeezing the gold crucifix that hung around his neck. “Everyone’s
turning into piles of salt. You remember the story, don’t you? This
is the exact same thing.”

I nodded and tried to swallow. It felt like
all of the spit in my mouth had dried up. “I know the story. But
these really aren’t the same sorts of circumstances. For one thing,
God hasn’t given us a direct command which we, in turn, have
broken.”

“But it’s the same type of thing,” Steven
said. “It may not be that particular curse. But this is a plague of
Biblical proportions. Think about what happened to the Egyptians.
They got more plagues than they knew what to do with. Locusts,
famine, death of the firstborn, water to blood - all that stuff.
Who knows? These might be the first of many. We’ve got a blood
moon, people turning to salt, a rain of birds. Think about it,
Matt.”

“Plague would imply that this is widespread,”
I reminded him. “So far we don’t know that this has affected more
than a few people. Maybe these incidents are isolated to this
area.”

“But we don’t know that it hasn’t affected
any place else,” Steven said, stroking his red goatee.

“There’s a logical explanation for all of
this,” I maintained, “I’m sure of it.”

“You’re right,” Steven retorted, “there is.
The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood
before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. It’s a verse
in the book of Joel.”

“This is strange, I’ll be the first to admit
that. But you act like this is the end of the world.”

“Maybe it is,” Steven said. “You can’t prove
that it isn’t. I’m sure you might be able to find some scientific
excuse to explain away the birds and the moon. But I think you’d be
hard pressed to find an explanation for all of those people turning
into salt. Of course, if you’ve got something on your mind, I’d
like to hear it.”

I shook my head, unwilling to say what I
believed. Maybe that was because I wasn’t even really sure I knew
what I believed.

The idea of a biblical curse seemed
preposterous. The idea of a chemical agent introduced into the
atmosphere by terrorists, however, seemed more and more possible.
That could potentially explain what had happened to the birds and
what was happening to the people that ventured out. The moon could
have just been a naturally occurring phenomenon that coincidentally
fell on the same night that the world fell apart. It wasn’t likely,
I realized, but I was grasping at straws for sanity’s sake at that
point.

“The phones are out,” Chuck said, running up
from the opposite direction. “I can’t get any service on my cell
either. We desperately need to call someone for help. People are
dying out there. I told you we were under attack. What’s happening
outside proves it.”

“Slow down,” I told him. “Just slow
down.”

“We need to turn on a radio or t.v. fast,”
Chuck said. “People are turning to salt. Whatever those terrorists
released, it’s eating people alive and turning them to dust.”

“Terrorists?” Steven said, a little confused.
“This has nothing to do with terrorists. This is a Biblical curse
that God is sending down to punish us.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Chuck said to
Steven. “Something bad happens and you are always ready to get God
involved in it.”

“Maybe that’s your problem,” Steven said,
raising his voice. “You aren’t ready to involve God at all.”

“Stop it,” I said. “Both of you. We don’t
have time for this. Whatever is going on will kill us regardless of
who’s responsible. What we need to try and do now is to guard
ourselves against the threat.”

“Maybe I should start saying Bible verses,”
Chuck said. “I just hope He understands the words through my air
mask. We need to arm ourselves immediately and get some protection
over our mouths and noses.”

“Maybe you should pray instead if you know
how,” Steven said through clenched teeth. “Of course, if it’s God’s
will for us to die, it won’t really matter any way.”

“Maybe I should just throw both of you out
and see what happens,” I yelled. “Maybe you two would get along
better if you were both little piles of salt. No mouths to argue
with then, no viewpoints to debate. Just nice, tidy quiet heaps of
salt. Or dirt. Or whatever that stuff is out there. How about that?
Huh? Do you guys think you can shut your mouths for two seconds and
let me think? Is that so much to ask?”

“You made your point,” Chuck grumbled.

“Steve?” I said.

“I’m fine,” Steven said. “We need to work
together on this. I get that. I guess we’re just all a little
uptight is all.”

“Great. Then we’re all on the same page.”

What was supposed to be our own private
little pep rally was quickly interrupted by the screeching sound of
another car wreck. I couldn’t help wondering if there was a pile of
salt sitting there in the driver’s seat. It kind of put all of our
bickering into perspective. At this point, the explanation of what
was killing so many people didn’t matter as much as the fact that
people were walking to their deaths like lemmings off of the edge
of a cliff.

It bothered me to think that we had
unwittingly pushed dozens of people to their deaths in our haste to
empty the store. It bothered me even more to think that we had
wasted a lot of time that could have been spent saving lives. But
how could we have known? We weren’t even really sure of anything
now, least of all that we could save ourselves.

What was the cause? Who was responsible? What
could we do to protect ourselves and those around us? Chuck was
right. We needed to find some news and see what was going on. Maybe
somebody else had the answers to our questions.