Blue World by Robert R McCammon

Author:Robert R McCammon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

Something Passed By

1

JOHNNY JAMES WAS SITTING on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came. Of course doomscreamers were nothing new; these days they were as common as blue moons. This one was of the usual variety: skinny-framed, with haunted dark eyes and a long black beard full of dust and filth. He wore dirty khaki trousers and a faded green Izod shirt, and on his feet were sandals made from tires with the emblem still showing: Michelin. Johnny sipped his Exxon Super Unleaded and pondered that the doomscreamer’s outfit must be the yuppie version of sackcloth and ashes.

“Prepare for the end! Prepare to meet your Maker!” The doomscreamer had a loud, booming voice that echoed in the stillness over the town that stood on the edge of Nebraskan cornfields. It floated over Grant Street, where the statues of town fathers stood, past the Victorian houses at the end of King’s Lane that had burned with such beautiful flames, past the empty playground at the silent Bloch school, over Bradbury park where paint flaked off the grinning carousel horses, down Koontz Street where the businesses used to thrive, over Ellison Field where no bat would ever smack another softball. The doomscreamer’s voice filled the town, and ignited the ears of all who remained: “No refuge for the wicked! Prepare for the end! Prepare! Prepare!”

Johnny heard a screen door slam. His neighbor in the white house across the way stood on his own porch loading a rifle. Johnny called, “Hey! Gordon! What’re you doin’, man?”

Gordon Mayfield continued to push bullets into his rifle. Between Johnny and Gordon, the air shimmered with hazy heat. “Target practice!” Gordon shouted; his voice cracked, and his hands were shaking. He was a big fleshy man with a shaved head, and he wore only blue jeans, his bare chest and shoulders glistening with sweat. “Gonna do me some target practice!” he said as he pushed the last shell into the rifle’s magazine and clicked the safety off.

Johnny swallowed gasoline and rocked in his chair. “Prepare! Prepare!” the doomscreamer hollered as he approached his end. The man was standing in front of the empty house next to Gordon’s, where the Carmichael family had lived before they fled with a wandering evangelist and his flock on his way to California. “Prepare!” The doomscreamer lifted his arms, sweat stains on his Izod, and shouted to the sky, “O ye sinners, prepare to—”

His voice faltered. He looked down at his Michelins, which had begun to sink into the street.

The doomscreamer made a small terrified squeak. He was not prepared. His ankles had sunk into the gray concrete, which sparkled like quicksilver in a circle around him. Swiftly he sank to his waist in the mire, his mouth open in a righteous O.

Gordon had lifted the rifle to put a bullet through the doomscreamer’s skull. Now he realized a pull of the trigger would be wasted energy, and might even increase his own risk of spontaneous combustion.

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