And it was crazy.
A woman had called in to his office, claiming that the sheets that had been drying on her clothesline were flying around the outside of her house, trying to find a way in. A girl had called saying that her younger brother had tried to stab her and she’d had to lock the boy in a closet. Two kids had run down to the police station afraid that a giant lizard was chasing them.
There were reports of rat armies and cat attacks, and throughout the canyons came the almost constant echoes of gunfire.
Roland hoped to God it was animals that were being shot.
It was chaos out there. There was so much going on that it was impossible to know what was happening. Even with all of the shifts called in, the sheriff’s office was severely undermanned, and that was why, against the strong feelings of his gut, the instinct he usually trusted above all others, he’d agreed to throw in with the cops.
Someone somewhere screamed in the darkness, and a moment later the police car finally pulled up. Two officers got out, clutching flashlights, and Roland ushered them quickly inside the building. “About time,” was all he said.
The emergency generator was on, but that meant that only the backup lights were lit, and the office was still dark and gloomy.
All of the phones were ringing, but there were only two receptionists, and they were answering the calls as fast as they could.
He led the policemen into his office, closing the door behind them.
“No, Mrs. Kennedy,” Alice was saying as the door closed. “There’s been no reports of any spacecraft landing anywhere in Arizona.… No, I don’t know anything about little alien men.”
Semyon Konyov sat at the picnic table in the yard next to the church while he waited for the others. Peter and Nikolai had driven out into the desert to get the prophet, and the others had gone in search of Russian Bibles, since theirs were still inside the church and could not be retrieved.
Agafia was waiting at his house. The rest of them had not wanted to hear from her, still blamed her for this, still thought she was tainted and corrupt, her information lies, but he had lied himself and pulled a Vera, saying that he’d seen the answer in a dream. He told them everything Agafia had said to him, pretending the words were his own.
And Peter and Nikolai had gone to get the prophet.
Semyon looked toward the street. Where were the others? His candle was burning low, and his flashlight batteries were almost dead; he’d turned the light off some time ago in order to conserve them.
It occurred to him that they had been killed, that something had gotten them, but he pushed that thought out of his mind. He turned around, looked back toward the church, saw the dark hair waving slightly in the almost nonexistent breeze. Quickly, he looked away.
The night had been noisy, the town alive with fights and screaming, gunshots and sirens, but most of it seemed to have been coming from elsewhere in the canyons.
Until now.
There was the sound of an engine drawing closer, bringing with it angry voices, and he was embarrassed to discover that he was afraid. He closed his eyes and offered up a quick prayer, asking the Lord for strength.
He opened his eyes and saw headlights. A pickup was pulling up, coming to a stop in the church’s small parking lot. The truck’s bed was filled with cowboy-hatted, overalled men carrying shotguns.
He had a quick flashback to a similar scene, in another time, a time he had not thought of for decades.
Flashlights played across the hairy front of the church. Several of the men leaped out of the truck onto the ground, and one of them screamed at him. “This is the last straw, man. The last fuckin’ straw. You milk drinkers think you can just come to our town and do whatever the hell you want? Well, we’re not going to put up with that shit no more!”
Semyon stood, scared, flustered. He walked toward the men. “No—” he began.
A shot rang out.
He stopped in his tracks, and one of the men laughed. Had they shot at him? He didn’t know and he was afraid to find out. His first instinct was to run, try to find help, but he knew there would be no help this night, and though he was trembling with fear, he remained in place. “Go!” he said. “Go home now!”
“Go home now!” Someone made fun of his accent, and the others started laughing.
They started shooting up the church, aiming their guns at the front of the building, taking turns, some focusing flashlights while their companions shot. The bullets sank into the hair at first, but after several minutes and several rounds, chunks of hair-covered wall began to be blasted away, pieces falling, flying off. Semyon turned on his own flashlight, and he saw something completely unexpected, something he never would have believed.
The building was bleeding.
What was under that hair now? he wondered. He could not imagine. It was obviously not a building. The voices of the shooters became at once angrier and more frightened as they, too, saw the dark liquid spreading out across the dirt.
Semyon gathered up his courage once again. “This our church!” he said. “Leave us!”
“Shut up, old man!”
He felt the bullet pierce his chest, felt it rip through his body, shattering bone and organ, stopping somewhere deep inside him. He staggered to the right, clutching the burning, bleeding section of his torso where the bullet had ripped into him. He fell against the wall of the church and was immediately engulfed in a forest of hair that clutched at him and pulled him into itself.
It felt soothing, was the last thing he thought. It felt good.
The lights led Wynona down into the mine, her feet slipping on the gravel of the extant road that wound down to the bottom of the pit. The lights were beautiful, appearing and then disappearing, forming patterns, and she thought that she had never seen anything like them.
They’d come to her bedroom window, tapping musically on the glass, and they’d drawn her outside, leading her down Ore Road all the way to the realty office before flying into the air above the pit and dispersing with a whirling flourish that no fireworks could ever hope to match.
The lights had floated down, settled and winked up at her from their various locations throughout the massive pit, beckoning to her. She’d found a hole in the chain-link fence, climbed through, and started down the old truck trail to meet them.
The gravel was slippery, and several times she nearly fell, but she always managed to keep her footing.
She finally did fall twenty minutes later, when she was halfway down, her right foot flying out, throwing her off balance, and she landed on her back on the road, the hard ground knocking the wind out of her.
She tried to get up, but she could not, her left arm wouldn’t work right, and she prayed that it was only sprained and not broken.
Throughout the pit, the lights flew up again, coming together, swirling, dancing, then flitting over to where she lay. If she could not come to them, they would come to her, and for a brief second Wynona was delighted, filled with an exuberant sense of joy.