Winds of Change (6 page)

“Shut up, the both of you,” Jesse Weaver
roared. “Show your mother a little respect. She ain’t doing so
good, and the last thing she needs is to listen to you two
yammering on and on about nothing.”

Of course, the fact that Kenneth was hungry
brought up a whole new set of problems that nobody had considered
yet. The only source of food and water in the entire store was the
snack and beverage machines in the break room.

“But I’m hungry, Dad,” Kenneth whined.

“Get what you need if it will keep your trap
shut,” Jesse said. “Just smash the glass.”

Steven, Chuck, and I all looked at each
other. We knew that this approach would never work. The only
question was which one of us was going to speak up. Chuck didn't
seem nervous at all about confrontation.

"Hold on just a second," he said, running
over to Mr. Weaver. "We've got to be rational about this. Those
machines are the only source of food we've got. Who knows how long
we'll be trapped in here?"

Jesse Weaver spit on Chuck's shoes and
crossed his tattooed arms. "Are you telling me that my boy can't
have something to eat?"

I could tell that he was itching for a fight,
and I knew that Chuck wouldn't back down. That's why I stepped
between them.

"Nobody's telling you anything," I said, "but
Chuck's right. We've got to ration this food and plan for the
worst."

Jesse Weaver took a step forward. We were
close enough that our chests were touching.

"Ain't no need of that," Pete, the plumber,
said. "Your boy don't deserve to eat any more than the rest of
us."

I think everyone was a little surprised at
that, but I, for one, was relieved that Pete was on our side. He
was a big, burly plumber who did physical labor for a living. Jesse
Weaver knew that as well as I did and seemed in no mood to face him
in a physical confrontation.

"At least let me get a drink for Vera," he
said irritably. “She’s not doing too hot.”

Thankfully, the snack vendor had been in
earlier that day and filled up the machines. There were plenty of
sodas, sandwiches, chips, candy bars, and the like. Plenty, of
course, if we were going on a picnic or having an afternoon snack.
But each piece of food was like a grain of sand in an hourglass.
Eventually the food would run out and so would our time on earth.
Maybe it would have been easier for all of us to run outside and
surrender ourselves to the fury of the wind.

As I looked at the cooler I realized that
there were certain things that would spoil if allowed to sit there.
Granted, we needed to preserve our food supply. But the food would
do no one any good if it ruined. I borrowed Pete’s sledgehammer
long enough to smash the glass front of the machine.

“Go ahead and get a sandwich, Kenneth,” I
told the boy. “Everybody should go ahead and eat. This may be the
last time your stomachs are full for a while. Enjoy it. That stuff
won’t keep for long. We may as well go ahead and eat while it’s
still good.”

As any overweight person can attest, eating
is a comfort, a solace during troubled times. We were a group in
sore need of comfort. The majority of the sandwiches were gone
within the hour, leaving the candy bars, chips, and drinks for
later.

Typical of any kind of cafeteria we all sat
in our own subdivided groups. Chuck, Steven, Pete, and I sat
together. The Richards’ and Leland Kennedy sat together. And, of
course, the Weavers sat in a corner all by themselves.

“What are we going to do?” Steven asked
around a mouthful of ham sandwich. Even in the glow emitted by the
work lights, I could tell that Chuck was looking to me as well for
answers.

“How should I know?” I replied. “It’s not
like I’m skilled in crisis situations involving speaking in
tongues, chemical warfare, and end-of-the-world scenarios. They
left out that chapter in my training.”

“You usually think logically when there’s
trouble. You haven’t thought of any other explanations this
time?”

I sighed. The truth was I
had
been
thinking. “What if this is, in fact, some sort of judgment on
mankind?” I said. “Is this really any different than the Great
Flood or the rain of fire and brimstone that killed everyone in
Sodom and Gomorrah? Maybe this is God’s way of cleansing the world.
The fact that Vera Weaver spoke in tongues suggests that God may
have something to do with this.”

Steven, Chuck, and Pete looked at each other
but didn’t say anything.

Chuck finally broke the ensuing silence.
“Well, if God’s responsible, then there is no escaping. We’ll just
survive until we die. Game over. End of paragraph. Lights out.
There’s not a person here who can outlast the Almighty.”

“Maybe we’re in the group God intended to
live,” Steven suggested. “He saved certain people in the other two
cases you mentioned. Maybe we’re like Noah and his family.”

“You sure are a pretty Biblical guy all of a
sudden, Steven,” Chuck said sarcastically. “Maybe we should just
pray to you for our lives. You seem to have a direct pipeline to
God.”

“You think I was faking that?” Steven said
defensively.

“I didn’t say that,” Chuck replied. “It’s
just a little weird that I’ve gotten drunk with you more times than
I can count, I’ve watched skin flicks at your house, I’ve shot rats
at the dump with you, and now all of a sudden, you’re quoting Bible
verses, and God’s using you for a mouthpiece. You just don’t seem
like the most likely candidate for divine intervention.”

“You’re just jealous,” Steven said.

“Enough of this,” Chuck murmured as he left
the table. “I’m going to go and have another look at what’s going
on outside.”

“I’m coming with you,” Steven said, stuffing
the last of his sandwich into his mouth. “Maybe a little of my
holiness will rub off on you.”

With the two of them gone, that left just me
and Pete. Pete waited until Steven and Chuck were out of earshot
before speaking.

“I don’t know how this works but Jerry, my
partner, deserved to die,” Pete said solemnly. “He beat his little
girl, abused her. He didn’t think I knew but his wife told me. I
was trying to help them find a way out. If this is God’s way of
judging sins, then I think he hit the mark where Jerry was
concerned. He got exactly what was coming to him. Maybe your
friends have some secrets they’ve been hiding too. It’s something
to consider.”

Pete didn’t give me a chance to respond
before he got up and followed Chuck and Steven. Leland and the
Richards’ were close behind. Sighing, I got up too. The six of us
went to the front of the store, leaving the Weavers to themselves.
Jesse Weaver and his sons were still tending to Vera. From what I
could tell, she wasn’t doing well at all. One of the boys was
fanning her with one of our catalogs. The other was holding her
hand. Jesse Weaver kept kissing her on the forehead. Vera didn’t
move much in response to any of that.

I wasn’t sure how long she could last without
medical attention. For that matter, I wasn’t sure if there was
anyone left who could give her medical attention.

I tried to put it out of my mind as I stared
out the window. Aside from the two flaming cars that had met head
on and the one that had crashed into a tree, there wasn’t much of
note going on in the parking lot. The highway that passed in front
of the store was deserted. All of the businesses around us were
dark. We didn’t see anyone huddling at those windows, however, that
didn’t mean there weren’t people alive inside. But that didn’t mean
that they hadn’t been reduced to dust either.

Where the dust was concerned, the wind had
done a pretty efficient job of cleaning the mess up. In that
regard, Mother Nature was better equipped to handle the dead than
any undertaker.

Yet, the way it was starting to look for us,
she still had a pretty big job on her hands.

II.

None of us said anything for a while. We just
stood there waiting for something to happen. It was kind of strange
watching the dust clouds roll across the parking lot and realizing
that those used to be people. The asphalt was littered with
dentures, watches, wedding rings, a glass eye, belt buckles,
wallets, stainless steel pins that might have been used to hold
broken bones together, and a whole lot of other items that weren’t
readily identifiable through the glass.

I thought about what kinds of things I would
leave behind if the same fate befell me and realized that there
wouldn’t be much; a few cents in change, a few fillings, and a
pocket knife. In other words, there wouldn’t be anything to
distinguish my heap of dust from the others. I thought of that song
by Kansas,
Dust in the Wind
, and realized that those words
held more truth than anyone could have ever realized.

The generator we had set up coughed and
sputtered as its fuel supply ran low. The lights that were running
off of the generator flickered twice before stabilizing. Without a
word, Steven went to refill the gas tank. It reminded me that none
of us had ever gone to check on the store’s backup generator. Too
many things had happened all at once, and I, for one, had forgotten
about it in the midst of so much tragedy. I decided to quietly slip
away and have a look. Maybe it was something minor that I could
fix. Maybe a cable had simply gotten disconnected. Or maybe there
was a switch that I could flip to get the thing working. At this
point, getting that generator fixed would surely raise the group’s
morale, and I knew we needed all the help we could get.

I gripped my keys tightly in my hand and
tried to convince myself that I was brave for checking this out by
myself, but I wasn’t. I realized that when Pete met me at the door,
and I shrieked like a little girl.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare
you. I just thought you might want a little help with whatever it
is that you’re doing.”

“No problem,” I gasped, still trying to catch
my breath. “I was going to see if I could figure out what is wrong
with the store’s backup generator.”

“Well, then, let’s have a look,” Pete said.
“I’ve had a little experience with generators in the past.”
Although I would never admit it aloud, having him there with me
made me feel a little better, and it had absolutely nothing to do
with his generator experience. With all the things that had gone
wrong in the past few hours, I was glad to have another witness
there to convince me that I wasn’t going crazy.

I inserted my key to the maintenance room
door with a shaky hand. Fortunately for me, Pete had brought a
flashlight along.

He directed the beam of light into the dark
room as I opened the door. I think both of us immediately realized
why the generator hadn’t kicked in as it was built to do once the
light reflected back from the machine’s polished surface.

Something (and I use that word knowingly) had
demolished the generator. Deep gashes ripped through its metal
side. It reminded me of the marks that a bear’s massive claws will
leave on the bark of a tree.

“Definitely not a malfunction,” Pete
muttered, taking a hesitant step into the room. “This room been
locked the entire time?”

“Only the managers have a key.”

“It looks like Freddy Krueger got a hold of
that thing,” Pete said. “There’s no way we’re going to fix
that.”

I took the flashlight from him and knelt
closer to the machine to examine it further.

“Look at this,” I said, pulling a white
feather out of the ragged metal.

“So what?”

I shrugged my shoulders, unsure of what this
could possibly mean. It was strange enough that someone had gained
access to the locked maintenance room given that there were only
three of us with a key. It was even stranger still now that we saw
the kind of damage that had been done.

“Something supernatural did this,” I said,
not caring what Pete thought of me. “When you consider everything
else that’s going on around us, this has got to be the result of
supernatural intervention.”

“That gave me a thought,” Pete said. “I’m
just not sure if I want to say it aloud.”

“If you’ve got any idea what’s going on here,
I want to know.”

“I don’t have any concrete ideas about any of
this. It just seems weird that Vera Weaver was speaking in tongues,
the theoretical language of angels, and then we find a feather
stuck in the wreckage of the broken generator.”

“Are you trying to tell me that an angel is
responsible for this?” I exclaimed. “I’ve been able to accept a lot
of strange things thus far, but I’m not sure if I can swallow that
explanation. Can’t you come up with something else?”

“Sorry,” Pete sighed. “A fallen angel is the
best answer I can come up with.”

“Any other insights you care to share about
this whole thing? Any lessons from Sunday School that might seem
timely?”

Pete hesitated. It was clear that there was
something else on his mind, and he was uncertain whether or not to
say it aloud.

“Don’t hold back,” I said. “If you’ve got
other information, no matter how crazy it seems, you need to let me
know. At this point, none of us know what is going on. All we know
is that it’s becoming more and more likely that we won’t survive. I
want to know what you’re thinking.”

“It’s going to sound crazy,” Pete said, “but
I’ll tell you anyway. Most Sundays when I went to church with my
grandmother, I didn’t listen to anything the preacher said. There
was one time, though, when he started talking about the end of the
world and the Book of Revelations. That Sunday, I was riveted to my
seat. I don’t remember everything he said that day, but I do
remember one verse he read about seven angels pouring the wrath of
God out of seven vials. Maybe that’s what is happening now. Maybe
one of the seven angels poured out the contents of one of the
vials.”