American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,72

shriek of a terrified child, and Mona leaps out of bed.

She’s halfway up the stairs when she realizes she has her gun in her hand. Old habits die hard, she guesses, but she doesn’t have time to think about that because the person upstairs is screaming again. Mona wheels about when she reaches the second floor and homes in on the source.

She stops. The door to the lightning-struck bathroom is shut, but the light is on inside. She can see it through the cracks around and underneath the door. And someone on the other side is screaming.

She lowers her gun and slowly walks to the door. She places one hand on the knob, and remembers the image of her hollow reflection with carven-pumpkin eyes…

She braces herself, turns the knob, and throws the door open.

At first she can see nothing but smoke, but then a great gust of wind blows through the room and clears it out, and Mona sees there is someone in her tub, a child-size person looking away from her with its head bowed. But it is not a child, not anymore, for its scalp is black and smoking and its fingers are withered and Mona can see bone where its flesh has been burned away from its jaw. It hears Mona open the door and it turns to her and she sees it is a little girl, or it was once, but she sees its eyes have been burned out of its skull, leaving just gaping, blackened sockets, and it opens its mouth (its tongue singed and scarred) and takes a rattling breath and shrieks again, a cry of horrific pain and fear.

Initially Mona is too terrified to see anything more than the girl. But the little cop voice in her brain asks—Where did the wind come from?

And Mona lifts her eyes from the burned thing in the tub, and she sees that the wall is gone.

What is on the other side of the wall is the most awesome and horrifying sight she has ever witnessed.

It is a storm, but a storm like no other. Blue bashes of light erupt in the swirling dark clouds, and fires rage throughout Wink. One storm cloud shudders with lightning, and then the lightning slowly—not quickly, but slowly and gracefully—descends to touch the ground, like a soundless, blue-white finger of pure energy. And where it touches, flames sprout up and a pillar of smoke comes barreling up to join the dark sky.

So many buildings burn. There is so much smoke and so many dark clouds. Yet Mona feels there’s something else wrong, something larger, yet more subtle.

It takes her a bit to realize there’s been a change in the landscape on the horizon: the mesa is wrong. It’s not a mesa at all anymore, but a mountain. It no longer ends in a wide, flat top, but keeps ascending to a towering point. She can see the silhouette of it even from here, through the smoke and the fire and the clouds. It’s as if someone sneaked in and delivered a mountaintop while no one was watching.

The mountaintop trembles. What new catastrophe is this, Mona wonders? Is it an earthquake? Or an avalanche? Yet then the entire top shifts to one side, and while any glancing familiarity with physics would make one think the whole thing should come tumbling down now, it doesn’t. The mountaintop shifts back, swaying slightly, almost like a tree…

Then Mona spots some protrusions on the edge of the mountaintop. They are familiar. From this angle they appear to rise out of the slope and withdraw in an almost organic, reactive motion. And when she sees them, Mona’s mouth falls open.

Her mind staggers to understand it. It can’t be. That can’t have happened. Yet she knows what she saw. There was no mistaking the silhouette that rose up from the mountainside, then fell.

Fingers. Fingers from an enormous hand.

Mona stares at the fires and the mountain, dumbfounded. Then the girl in the tub howls again, jarring her from her fixation. “Jesus Christ,” Mona says, and she turns and bounds back downstairs to the phone, because she knows the limits of her first aid skills and that charred child is well beyond them.

The aquamarine phone is in the corner, as always, and she snatches it up and dials 911 on the rotary. There’s popping on the line, like the phone is trying to find a connection. Then it begins ringing, but no one answers.

“Come on, come on,” says Mona. She