Kent Kelly - End of Days

Sophie gasped. It was old Pete Henniger, retired for years and with a bad back that would act up in a cold wind, let alone a driving April rain. What was he doing back in uniform?

Pete splayed his fingers out in front of the bartender’s face, actually tapped the palms of his hands down on the huge man’s arms and was saying his name over and over again like some dubious mantra of calm. Sophie could see Pete’s mouth working, although he was silenced by the H4’s closed windows and the screaming crowd: “Henry. Now, Henry.”

Finally, the huge man backed down. He squinted and shielded his eyes, then turned to throw out an offhand curse at the delivery truck that was disappearing up the pass.

As Sophie watched, Pete turned to rejoin the beleaguered police line. He didn’t quite make it.

A preteen girl, shivering in a Che Guevara T-shirt that was turning see-through in the rain, came up and intercepted him. The girl was absurdly tall, impossibly thin. Her damp and stringy hair shook off ringlets of water as she put both of her skinny hands on Pete’s shoulder and spun him around. The pain on Pete’s lined face flashed into anger as his back was twisted by the girl’s unexpected grip.

Raindrops bounced off the girl’s eyeglasses. Her teeth were bared, her braces showing, and Pete looked for all the world like he was about to belt her one.

Sophie’s H4 began to drift forward again as her foot slipped off the brake. Her hands, as if moving of their own accord, slipped off the wheel and shook up into her hair.

Can’t take this. I can’t.

A strange feeling tingled beneath her scalp as her manicured fingernails dug into the skin.

“This isn’t happening,” she heard herself say to no one. “This isn’t—”

One of the German Shepherd’s barking turned into a frenzied barrage of yaps, then a yelp of pain. A gunshot rang out.

The crowd split away like a pool divided by a falling stone, ripples of screams and cries of disbelief churning their limbs into action. People were crawling over wet pavement, others scrambling past the gutters. A woman carrying a plastic shopping basket overfilled with oranges tripped, spun around and rebounded off the hood of a car.

The street cleared, the car the woman bounced off of sped through the intersection and away. Three other cars followed. The policemen and -woman, left in a cloud of exhaust, were forming a ring around Pete, their leather-coated silhouettes bristling with Smith & Wesson pistols and riot shields. One policeman still clutched a baton and pepper spray, but a young lady officer to Pete’s right was pumping a shotgun.

Pete’s voice bellowed out — “Just cool it down!” The crowd was mostly out of the intersection by then, fleeing the site of the gunshot, the growing and smearing pool of blood. It was a dog.

One of the German Shepherds, now with its jaw hanging and pouring forth a slush of blood and gore, was twisting in violent circles on the asphalt. Old Mrs. Claverdale’s station wagon swerved around the dog as she hit the gas and flew up 119, her hands clutched on the wheel, her head hunkered down so that she could barely see over the dash.

Sophie let go of her hair. One of her hands covered her mouth, the other found its way back to the wheel. She edged forward as the Escalade inched up into the intersection. Pete waved it through, the driver gunned it and nearly hit a Hispanic woman who was struggling to keep her daughter from running out to the dying dog.

The man in the pickup truck yelled out to the Hispanic woman as he swerved around Sophie’s Hummer and flew up the road. “Lady, get your kid the fuck out of here!”

The girl was pointing at the dog with a jolting finger, reaching out, sobbing.

Brakes squealed. Another car bumped up against the Escalade, then both pulled off into the Ameristar parking lot at Pete’s furious insistence. He wheezed as he shouted. One man parted from the crowd and ran into the middle of the street. The policewoman with the shotgun was sighting down her barrel at the old man who was crouching by the dying German Shepherd. Her rain-slick hands shook as she braced the shotgun, ready to fire.

What the Hell, what the Hell…

Sophie had seen enough. She floored it.

Pete spun around to face the policewoman who was covering him, so he never saw Sophie that day, or any other thereafter. He slapped down the officer’s shotgun barrel and was shaking her as the crowd began to close in once more.

By the time Sophie was up the mountain highway and a mile out of town, passing the tanker truck and weaving around the other panicked drivers who were hunkered down in their compacts and sedans, she was pushing eighty, then ninety. Tires squealed dangerously as the H4 fought for traction in the splashing rain.

Her mind was buzzing, an insistent jingling of chimes and vibrating plastics.

No. Her phone was ringing.

She took a moment to ease off, to slow down to sixty and get in the right lane as she navigated the curve at the Pearsons’ driveway turnoff. Ponderosa pines and aspens slowed from a blur and back into actual shapes along the cliff-side. Staring out at the snow-fog that was gathering and wreathing the heights of Gray’s and Torrey Peaks off in the distance, striving to calm herself, she picked up the phone just as the call went dead.

The number on the display didn’t mean anything to her. What kind of an area code was that? A negative, -003? There was no such thing.

Having passed all the slower drivers, she eased into a rhythm as the gray and emerald world slurred by her in rain-spun streaks. The wipers slapped and slushed as the rain began to freeze against the windshield.

The phone rang again. Same area code, same mysterious number.

Suddenly eager for a release, for someone real and tangible to get angry at and to let her vent and forget the chaos of fear and violence churning back in the intersection far behind her, Sophie flicked the iPhone to speaker and snapped out before the caller could even begin to speak.

“This is a private number. So what do you think you’re selling?”

“Soph! Oh, God. ” It was Tom. Her husband’s voice so startled Sophie that she almost pulled off the road into a slick of icy puddles. She corrected her swerve, slowed some more and drove on.

“Tom?” She had never heard him sounding so distressed, so relieved. Not since his father had died. Had he been crying?

Tom’s voice broke. He took a moment with a shaky inhalation, eerily loud and palpable in the Hummer’s interior. Then: “Thank God you picked up.”

“Tom? What’s wrong?”

“No time. Sophie, listen to me.” He sobbed, it was unmistakable this time. A heavy breath, another. Tom had never called her while he was away for work with the NSA, especially when he was assigned to NORAD. “Sophie, pull over.”

“I’m up the slope on 119. I can’t pull over yet, it’s raining.” She winced, unable to focus. So what if it was raining? If someone had died, if there was some kind of emergency, what did Tom care? “Are you calling from Petersen?”

Whenever Sophie was nervous, she chattered. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I almost didn’t pick up.” Her teeth tugged softly at her upper lip as she went silent, looking on ahead for a pull-off.

“God damn it, Soph. Pull the fuck off and listen to me.”

Sophie blinked away disbelief. Tom never swore, to anyone, and especially not to her. She pulled off just past the tiny Athanasiou Valley Airport, an unlikely jewel of windswept field and wildflower, poised within the cradle of its gray-misted meadow.

She stopped the Hummer, leaving the engine running. She turned up the heater, shivering, willing herself not to speak. But still, she could not stop talking. Tom was frightening her with his labored breathing, his hushed yet urgent voice.