Mary turned back to look outside.
“The dust is moving,” she gasped, terrified.
“Is it?” the man said, still sitting at his table, smiling.
Adam got up. He could not be sure, but it did look as though the wall of ash was closer, roiling up, looming larger.
“I don’t know—”
“We have to get out of here now!” Mary insisted.
She made a sudden movement toward the children, who began to cry. She thrust them into their coats.
She pushed the children toward the front door and opened it. Though it had abated, the dust storm was still fierce; the wind that met her nearly drove her back into the little bungalow.
“Mary, don’t!”
But she was outside, the two howling, frightened girls in tow.
Adam looked at the man, who hadn’t moved from his chair.
“You said it made no difference,” Adam said, making it a question.
The man, who looked older, browner, larger and at the same time less distinct, said, “Your wife fears it has to do with this valley. It’s much more than that. Read her Aunt Clara’s bible.” He added: “The G is for Genesis.”
His smile was gone, replaced by something truly unreadable.
At his wife’s sudden cry out in the storm, Adam turned toward her. Night had given way completely, the sky was filled with a sickly yellow cast, and he could see that she had fallen. The two girls were struggling to help her up.
“I have to go—”
When he looked back into the cabin it was empty.
He turned back into the storm, and soon reached Mary, who was back on her feet. Lucy had charged ahead, toward the fallen Windstar, whose headlights stabbed out of the swirling dust.
“My Harry doll!” she cried.
Mary gasped, “Catch up with her!”
Adam forged ahead, with Mary and Cindy close behind.
Lucy had mounted the van’s grill and was climbing up toward the open sliding door, which now faced the sky.
Adam grabbed her, but she wriggled away from him and dropped into the interior.
As Adam tried to hoist himself up after her, he felt Mary’s hands dig into him like claws.
“Oh, God, Adam! Look!”
Her voice held a note of terror he had never heard in a human voice before.
He turned toward the mountain, and gasped with disbelief. Nearly on top of them, moving like a tsunami, was a monstrous wall of dust. As it grew closer it grew higher, and there were things swirling in it that broke apart as they watched.
“Lord God Almighty…”
Mary was already pushing Cindy up and into the open door of the van, and now Adam helped Mary to follow. The ground began to tremble, and there was a sound like a freight train bearing down on them.
Adam pulled himself into the opening, and then struggled with the sliding door. The wall was right on top of them. Debris began to swirl in, dust and what looked to be bits of brittle bone, and just as Adam slammed the door shut the Windstar rocked as if a wave of water hit it. It nearly rolled over onto its roof, then slowly settled back into position on its side.
It became very dark in the van, and Adam switched on the interior lights.
Lucy was in the back seat, nestled next to the blanket chest they had bought for the hall, which was broken, holding her Harry doll, rocking it tightly against her, her eyes closed.
“Do you think—” Mary began.
“Find your Aunt Clara’s bible,” Adam said, leaving no room for discussion in his voice.
Mary looked at him for a moment, and then made her way into the back seat to rummage in the box of keepsakes they had taken from her Aunt’s home.
The radio was still on, low, though there was no longer light rock playing. A voice was droning, and Adam, his fingers shaking, turned up the volume.
“Can we go home soon?” Cindy asked, with a young child’s innocence bordering on incomprehension.
“…the entire planet,” the voice on the radio was saying in a monotone. It sounded very tired, or drunk. “Reports from every corner of the globe of massive dust storms…”
Mary held up the bible. “What—”
“Look up Genesis, chapter 2, verse 7,” Adam said. His voice was barely above a whisper, his eyes glued to the radio, it’s readout glowing green.
The car rocked, an underwater wave.
“…and this dust is not being whipped up by the wind—it is not dust from the earth or falling from the sky…”
Mary angled the bible closer to the van’s dome light, which was to her back.
“Here it is,” she said. “It says, ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living soul.” She looked up, perplexed. “Wha—”
Adam held up his hand; his eyes were on the radio with a fixed look.
“…humans. I repeat: the dust itself is composed of human bone and flesh. Every human on earth, apparently, one by one, is disintegrating into the dust from which we were made…”
The tired voice said: “I think…” and then there was a small gasp and then nothing but static from the radio.
Adam looked at Mary, whose eyes were impossibly wide with fright; she was clutching Cindy to her. She seemed to be fighting for breath.
“I—”
But already she was changed, turning to something brittle and dry before Adam’s eyes, and Cindy, and Lucy, who was hugging her Harry doll in the farthest reaches of the rear seat, the same.
And then they broke into dust and bone and more dust, and were gone.
Adam reached out, and gave a choked cry, and watched his arm fall into dust from the fingertips back.
“But—”
He felt the breath sucked back out of his lungs, which went hot and dry and collapsed.
And then, at the last, he heard a voice, filled not with rage, or spite, or even wrath, but with mortification—
“Go back.”
THE PUMPKIN BOY
1
Jody Wendt, five years old, saw the Pumpkin Boy through the window over the kitchen sink, outlined against the huge rising moon like a silhouette against a white screen. Jody had climbed up onto the counter next to the basin to reach the cereal in an overhead cabinet. Now he stood transfixed with a box of corn flakes in his hands, mouth agape.
The Pumpkin Boy had a bright orange pumpkin head with cold night steam puffing out of the eyes, nose and mouth cutouts, and a body consisting of a bright metal barrel chest and jointed legs and arms that looked like stainless steel rails. Even through the closed window Jody could hear the creaking noises he made. He moved stiffly, like he was unused to walking: his feet were two flat ovoid pads, slightly rounded and raised on top, made of shiny metal. As Jody watched, one of the feet stuck in place in the muddy ground; the Pumpkin Boy, oblivious, walked on, and then toppled over with a sound like rusting machinery. He lay on the ground like a turtle on its back, making a hollow chuffing noise like Saaaafe, saaaafe, saaaafe. Then he slowly righted himself, rising to a sitting position and then turned slowly to search for his lost foot. Finding it, he fell forward and clawed his way toward it. He closed his hands around it. His head fell forward and hit the ground, rolling away from the body, and the hands immediately let go of the foot and grabbed the head, realigning it on the stilt body with a ffffffmp.
Then the foot was reattached to the leg and the Pumpkin Boy stood up with a groaning, complaining metal sound.