Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

Someone shouts in the front of the pub. The two guys with bowl cuts in the back room have gotten up on one of the tables and are trying to climb the curtains. The little man with the corduroy suit clicks his tongue and tries to move between the tables, but he's dragged by a wave. On the table occupied by the Down With The Sun Society, Lorenzo Giraut, Koldo Cruz and Bocanegra are consulting a messy pile of maps and blueprints. With a conspiratorial air. The way they are consulting the maps and whispering to each other is not so much genuinely conspiratorial. It's more like the way someone whispers theatrically, giggling and rubbing their hands together, when they want to make abundantly clear to any spectator that they're conspiring. Giraut looks at his Lino Rossi suit with a devastated expression as the water rises above the level of the sofa and the tables. He finally decides to dive in and head to the stairs that lead to the upper floor. Toward which the rest of the pub's regulars are already swimming.

As Giraut swims under the murky water, he passes fish and aimlessly floating pieces of furniture. The figure wrapped in bloody bandages is the only figure that remains in its chair as if nothing was going on. Now it seems to be reading a Stephen King novel. With some sort of dark mist of blood oozing from its bandaged wounds beneath the water. Lucas Giraut looks around him, searching for his father. Lucas Giraut's cheeks are puffed out like the cheeks of people swimming underwater in movies and cartoons. With a small trail of tiny bubbles rising from his mouth. After a minute he appears on the surface.

“Hey!” he shouts to Bocanegra, who is connecting cables to a T-shaped detonator. “Has anyone seen my father?”

The detonator Bocanegra is connecting the cables to is one of those T-shaped detonators that have to be pushed down with both hands. Like those detonators that Wile E. Coyote always uses to try to finish off the Road Runner. The cables Bocanegra is connecting to the detonator are different colors. There is no trace of Lorenzo Giraut anywhere.

“I haven't seen Sir Intellectualoid.” Bocanegra speaks in a nasty tone. While still working on the detonator. “What makes you think I've seen Mister Tightass Bookworm? Mister I'm More Important Than Everybody Else Because I've Read A Lot Of Books And My Ass Is Shaped Like A Library Chair?”

Lucas Giraut's gaze follows the different-colored cables that come out of the detonator and go up one wall and continue along the ceiling to the far end of the room. And which then go down the opposite side until they reach the spot where Koldo Cruz is standing on top of the bar. Clinging to a large bottle rack to keep from being dragged down by the waves. The cables connected to the detonator end in a string of dynamite sticks that someone has tied around Cruz's waist with strips of black adhesive tape. The sticks of dynamite have the peace sign drawn on them.

“Mr. Cruz!” shouts Giraut, splashing around in the water. “Be careful…!” he starts to say.

But a tremendous explosion blows Koldo Cruz to bits. The entire wall collapses onto the spot where Koldo Cruz was just a second before. Creating a cloud of smoke. Creating a tsunami that instantly sweeps away Giraut and everything around Giraut.

WONDERFUL WORLD

By Stephen King

CHAPTER 42

Chuck Kimball woke up on his third day in Boston beneath a layer of cardboard boxes and lice-infested blankets in an alley without streetlights or lights of any kind. It was obvious that the cardboard boxes and blankets had belonged to someone else at some point, to one of the many bums and drunks that used to fill the streets of the historic Beacon Hill neighborhood. They had disappeared, too. A couple of bottles of cheap wine in brown paper bags marked that corner of the alley as the former property of one of those modern nomads. Chuck stretched and looked around him, slightly alarmed. The street at the end of the alley seemed calm. Since he had taken apart his wristwatch, his notion of time had almost completely disappeared. He slept for intervals of several minutes at a time, always waking up with a start and drifting back into nervous lethargy. His cravings for Dexedrine seemed to have completely disappeared.

After peeing in a corner, Chuck studied himself in a piece of broken mirror. There was no doubt his appearance would give him away if he dared to go out onto a busy street. Judging by the light, the sun should be coming up in less than an hour. His stomach sent him one of its irritated messages. A hungry grumbling mixed with a warning that diarrhea, and the danger of dehydration, could arrive at any moment.

First crawling and then dragging himself along the ground, Chuck got to the end of the alley and peeked out. He was about fifty yards from the corner, between Beacon and Dartmouth. The landscape was strangely familiar and at the same time ineffably disturbing. With its old gas streetlights and cobble-stoned streets and the rolling rows of elegant redbrick houses. There wasn't a soul out at that hour. Not a car. Not a bird. The desolation that had been following him for the last few weeks seemed to have taken on a decidedly different component.

Where were the groups of people chatting in front of the stores? The happy-looking pedestrians walking to their workplaces or exiting the T stations in an orderly fashion? In that moment he understood what was newly disturbing. It was the silence. First the animals had disappeared and now the people. When they began their transmissions, little more than a month ago, the populated areas had kept up the semblance of normality. Everyone had maintained that irritating farce of routines and jobs and family life. Something in the atmosphere of that deserted corner told him that things had changed. That they were entering a new phase of the colonization.

Chuck started walking along Beacon Street. At first he walked with hurried steps, plastered to the gates of buildings and to the redbrick walls. Looking over his shoulder for signs of Captors in the sky. They seemed to be hiding, too. There was no smoke coming from the chimneys of the houses, in spite of the cold. No movement could be seen at the window curtains. Chuck shivered and slowed his pace. There was a supermarket cart abandoned in the middle of the street. With bags inside. Something that They would undoubtedly never do.

He approached the cart, still studying the sky, and examined the bags' contents. He was so hungry that, for a few moments, he forgot to keep his guard up and monitor his surroundings. He found several bags of snacks, which he tore open and devoured like an animal. Bringing fistfuls of potato chips to his mouth and swallowing them without chewing. He drank sips of soda until he could feel the stimulating rush of sugar in his veins. He ate a piece of ham and took several bites of a still bleeding steak. And then he saw it. While he was still pulling on the piece of meat with his teeth, streams of blood sliding down his chin.

There They were. They were all there. He didn't need to see anything more than the black cloud to understand that. The black cloud that floated over the giant golden dome of the State House, at the peak of Beacon Hill, above the trees and avenues of Boston Common. It was blacker and denser than any cloud Chuck had seen before. There must have been dozens of Them flying in circles over the dome, maybe hundreds. Up until then Chuck had seen some of the Captors flying low above rooftops or floating in groups of three or four above their centers of control. It was their way of communicating, that he was sure of. Of creating focal points of transmission with whatever it was that They were transmitting. Places where their waves were concentrated and therefore dangerous places that not even someone immune like him could go near without running certain risks.