Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 30, No. 13, Mid-December 1985

Since the Sky Blew Off by G. Wayne Miller

He was only a kid, seven, maybe eight years old. We never did get his name.

He arrived at dusk, and when no one answered his cries, he finally fell into a restless sleep in the dust and half-dead weeds along the front perimeter. Well before the sun was up, I shot him through the head. His body quivered a bit and then his mouth became a fountain of blood, but it didn’t last long. In less than three minutes, long enough for a smoke, his nerves stopped firing and he was still.

Under brilliant starlight, Tony and I buried his body. You might wonder why we bothered, but those were Mather’s orders. Mather was obsessed with germs, and he had every reason to be. We knew about other parts of the country, where whole camps had been wiped out by typhus, diphtheria, all the diseases that had gone completely out of control since the sky blew off. To be honest, we were scared shitless about germs, and we had every reason to be.

The kid was light and bony, more skeleton than meat. Underfed, I guess, like most roamers. Wearing gloves and masks, we carried him downhill, away from the hatchery, and put him ten feet under, as deep as we could dig in the two hours we had before the sun came up. Then we burned our clothes and bathed in rubbing alcohol and Lysol we’d come across on our last trip to the A&P warehouse. When we were done, we walked naked back inside the compound, pulling the razor wire tight behind us.

Right off, Mather had been uneasy about the kid. Not that we hadn’t seen our share of roamers since coming north to Vermont a year ago, after the Great Fire leveled Boston and half of eastern Massachusetts. We’d seen them, all right, and mostly we’d let them pass on by. The only ones we’d disposed of were the ones that got too close or started acting too weird or hung around too long, like stray dogs begging for handouts. Creepy behavior like that set off alarm bells inside Mather’s head.

I especially remember one old guy, batty as hell, his face covered with pus, his bald scalp peeling, his tongue swollen and hanging out of his mouth like a steer at an old-time Kansas City slaughterhouse. Howled at the gate like something out of a nightmare until we took care of him. I remember a teenage girl, too. She’d probably been pretty once, but the sun had left her skin runny and raw and made her hair fall out. She was delirious, talking nonsense about salvation, redemption, apocalypse, all that other Bible crap, like so many of the roamers we’d seen since New York.

The kid was different. I didn’t see it right away, but Mather did, thank heavens. That sixth sense of his is what’s kept us alive so long.

The kid arrived as the sun was going down. Since the sky blew off, every sunset has been spectacular, nothing any artist or photographer could ever hope to capture. This one was no exception. Pinks layered over blues and oranges and yellows, some soft strokes, some bold ones splashed up there with a powerful hand. Back when I was in parochial school, I remember thinking the walls of heaven must look that beautiful.

I was pulling guard duty and I spotted him when he was a half mile down the hill that leads up to the compound. He was all bundled up in canvas, canvas that was ripped and tattered like a sail that’d spent a week in a hurricane. It didn’t occur to me then, but somebody must have told him that canvas was about the best protection you could have when you were outside. Somebody older, wiser.

“He’s reason to be alarmed,” Mather announced after watching him through binoculars he’d customized with a pair of Polaroid sunglasses we’d looted from a Manhattan drugstore back in the beginning.

“We’ll dispose of him,” I answered. It was an automatic response by then, as natural and routine as guard duty or sleeping during the day.

“Naturally. But I’m not confident that will be the end of it.”

“I don’t get it.”

Mather’s face tightened, the way it always does when one of us is acting thick. “Look at him,” he ordered.

I took his binoculars and got a good fix on the kid. He was on his ass, resting, looking our way and trying to figure if it was worth the effort to make the climb. Maybe trying to decide if he was going to get shot at.

“I’m looking.”

“Zero in on his face.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me how old he is.”

“Seven, eight,” I said. “Somewhere in there. You never know with roamers.”

“No, but one can determine outside limits. Will you accept twelve as his?”

“Certainly.”

“Very good. Now when was the last time we saw a twelve-year-old kid? A twelve-year-old kid alone, to be precise.”

I thought for a moment. I honestly couldn’t remember.

“You can’t remember, can you?”

“No, can’t say as I do.”

“Of course not. To my recollection, there never has been a twelve-year-old kid scouting our camp. Not alone. There have been twelve-year-old kids. Always in the company of grownups. And grownups—”

“—are something we can’t take chances on.”

“Precisely. Whoever he’s with, they can’t be far away.”

“You want a disposal operation.”

“I don’t think we have a choice.”

“You don’t think they’ll come looking for him?”

“Precisely what I’d like to prevent. We don’t need another typhus scare.”

“Or the rot.”

“Or the rot.”

“Or anything that’s going to jeopardize these pregnancies.”

“Jesus, no.”

My eyes were still trained on the kid. He was on his feet again, stumbling our way. Apparently, he’d decided to take the risk coming up the hill. Maybe he was hungry. Or sick. Or sent to spy.

With roamers, you never knew.

“He’s in pretty tough shape,” I said as I watched him stumble, fall, and get on his feet again, like a drunk at closing hour at one of those midtown Manhattan bars we used to frequent in the old days. Except booze wasn’t this kid’s problem. It was the sun — one hundred thirty scorching, cloudless, breezeless degrees of it.

“I suggest,” Mather said, “that we dispose of him tonight. Tomorrow night, you and Pete will take care of his family.”

“Precisely,” I said. Mather grinned. He always got a big kick out of it, any time one of us used one of his words like that.

At noon the day we buried the kid, we saw smoke, a single pencil-thin curl that rose into the sky like jet exhaust, except there weren’t any jets any more. It was coming from the rubble that used to be Bradford Village, one of the suburbs of Burlington.

Mather called a huddle.

“They’re cooking,” he said. “Lord knows what.”

“Maybe they caught some fish,” said Tony. Since Robbie and Sloane got ambushed — it happened when we were escaping the Great Fire — Tony, Pete, Charles, Mather, and I were the only males in our camp.

“Assuming there are any left,” Mather said. “And except for our hatchery, I doubt there are.”

“How big do you figure their camp is?” Pete asked.

“Could be three or three hundred,” Mather said. “Smoke’s no clue.”

“Better be closer to three,” I said, and I meant it.

“I have every confidence in you,” Mather replied, “whatever it is.”

“We’ll go well armed,” I said.

Pete suddenly had that mongrel look on his face, a strange cross between outrage and guilt, but he didn’t say anything. Pete was our resident tech whiz — he’d designed the hatchery, come up with the ventilation scheme that kept the temps down inside, even managed to hook up running water and plumbing. A smart guy, but soft around the edges. He’d told me more than once that killing still turned his stomach, no matter how many times he saw it or did it. It was a peculiar attitude to have after all the crap we’d been through.

“Remember, we can’t afford any unnecessary expenditure of ammunition,” Mather reminded us.

“We’ll be careful,” I said.

“Single shots if we can.”

“We can.”

“Now I think you boys ought to get some sleep,” Mather said. “You’ve got a busy night ahead of you.”

We left at dusk, Pete and I.

Those gorgeous pinks and yellows were draining from the sky, leaving behind a cold, inky night loaded with stars. Night was always the best time to be on the move, whether it was a disposal operation or a raid on one of the few warehouses or stores that had anything left worth raiding. At night, you didn’t have to worry about whether the ultraviolet was going to burn the skin off your back or make you go blind or cook your brains or fry your sperm. Didn’t have to take your chances bundled in a hundred layers of clothes and sunscreen coating your body like axle grease.

I was packing a .357 Magnum and a pocket full of hollow-nosed bullets. There was a funny story behind that gun. Found it beneath a crucifix on the altar of a burned-out Catholic church in Manchester, New Hampshire, when we were making our way north from Boston. What it was doing there, who had left it, we never did figure out. Perhaps the good father gave his final sermon, then put it to his head and squeezed off a round. We didn’t find a body, but maybe one of his parishioners had dragged it away for burial when that Mass was over.

Pete was carrying a shotgun, one of the pumper-action Ted Williams models we’d scavenged out of a Sears Roebuck store somewhere along the line.

We had only about a hundred shells of buckshot left, but Mather had insisted we take every last one of them. He’d been trying to soft-pedal his gut feelings, but you could see he was deeply concerned. The fact that he ordered us to take those shells was proof enough of that. Truth was, his feelings were telling him that these roamers were going to be unusual. That disposing of them might be a greater logistical problem than we’d had to deal with in a long, long time, maybe ever.

That night, Tony and Mather stayed behind with the women and Eric, eleven months old, our only offspring. We had five women at the time, and three of them were with child. Mather was very stubborn when it came to the women, what they could do and not do. We’d had half a dozen pregnancies already, and all but one had ended in miscarriage. Mather said we couldn’t afford to take any more chances. We had to have more children if his grand scheme was ever to be realized. That was this year’s motto, More Children. He was ready to do anything it took to make sure he got them.

Mather was correct on the offspring issue, of course. He’d been correct on every issue since he took charge two years ago when the sky blew off, the crops started wilting, and the world’s population started dying by the hundreds of millions.

It was summer, the summer of my twenty-seventh year, and it had been the most glorious summer of my life.

We were living in New York, then, all of us, living in style and with more than our fair share of creature comforts in an upper West Side neighborhood that only recently had been gentrified. We were the brie-chablis crowd, the folks with the MBA’s and the designer bathrooms who spent weekends on Cape Cod and February vacations in Aspen. There wasn’t a one of us who wasn’t making fifty grand then, minimum, not a one of us who wasn’t employed with one of Wall Street’s or Madison Avenue’s most reputable firms.

Was it the Soviets, us, or some third party?

I don’t know if anyone anywhere ever really learned the answer to that question, not at the beginning, when the only effects were those amazing technicolor sunsets and that crazy shift in the jet-stream, or, later on, when political institutions and economies were disintegrating faster than global temperatures and the seas were rising.

In the early days, when the presses still ran and the six o’clock news was still being broadcast, there was all sorts of talk that it had been the test of some new thermonuclear weapon — more frightening and more secret than the Bomb, which had every true-blooded Yuppie doing flips back then.

I have to believe the guy upstairs has a pretty mean streak of irony because that wasn’t it by a long shot. There was no big bang, no escalation of crisis, no state of alert, no Warsaw Pact troops marching across Germany, no Colonel Khadafy dropping a surprise on Israel — just a sky the color of fresh blood the evening of July twenty-sixth.

Maybe it was the test of a new killer technology related to the so-called Star Wars program that the late President Reagan had announced a decade before. Maybe it was the test of something the Soviets had up their sleeves that our intelligence never picked up.

Maybe the Martians landed in a Kansas cornfield and decided to zap ninety-five percent of the human race, just for kicks.

Whatever it was, it silently and quickly burned off half the upper atmosphere, leaving plants to die, food chains to be disrupted and destroyed.

We didn’t know how bad it had really been until it turned winter, and winter brought no dirty snow on Fifth Avenue, no frost on Macy’s windows, no skating in Central Park, no temperatures lower than the sixties, not even in January or February.

By spring, the hospitals and doctors were overloaded with skin cancer cases and people whose vision was fading away to darkness.

By summer, the effects of the failed wheat and corn crops were filtering down, and grocery stores experienced their first shortages.

By fall, there was rioting and looting, and the cities began to burn. Police and the National Guard controlled some of it, at first, but then the panic set in. When it did, the authorities put down their weapons and ran.

By the next winter, starvation was coast-to-coast and the typhus had gone wild.

It was, of course, Mather’s idea to leave New York. Right from the start, everything had been Mather’s idea. We got out of the city in June, before the real panic hit, and we headed up the Connecticut coast. There was still gas left, although there were shortages and growing lines at the stations, so we drove, charging up a storm on our American Express and Visa cards as we went.

Mostly, we traveled by night, holing up during the daylight hours in cheap motels. When we did have to go outside, no matter how briefly, Mather made sure we wore sunglasses and painted ourselves with sunscreen, protection factor fifteen. Eventually there was a run on sunscreen and finally supplies dried up, but Mather had been smart enough to buy cases of it before John Q. Public fully realized what was going on. He’d done the same thing with penicillin and guns, so we were okay on those fronts, too.

We were in Boston when the fabric of American society began to dissolve, slowly but completely, like a cube of sugar in water. It was September, the hottest September ever recorded by the National Weather Service, and no one any longer had any doubt what was happening.

Mather had decided to put down roots, at least until we could figure out what the long-term plan would be. After disposing of a gang of winos, we’d made our home in an abandoned subway tunnel near Park Street Station, which is almost directly under City Hall. From a defensive perspective, the tunnel was a dream — only one entrance, which we kept clear with occasional firefights. From the survival point of view, it gave us decent access to stores and warehouses, particularly those mammoth ones along the waterfront, which were still stocked weeks after everything else ran out. The day the looting began in earnest, we grabbed enough canned juices and beef stew and hams for at least a year, according to Mather’s calculations.

It was a sickening scene we found when the Great Fire finally forced us to the surface. Bodies strewn everywhere, smoldering or just plain rotting, every one of them guaranteed to be harboring enough disease to wipe us out a thousand times over. Immediately Mather decided to head north, where, he said, we would have the best chance of establishing a camp. We passed other bands as we walked, and we had some skirmishes, losing two of our original group in the process.

Now the big threat was roamers.

Why they didn’t establish camps like the rest of us was a mystery not even Mather pretended to be able to solve. His best guess was that it had something to do with intelligence, or lack thereof, and I imagine he was right. You needed brains to build a camp, defend it, find a way to eat — in our case, a small but successful fish hatchery, supplemented by freeze-dried and canned stuff we’d managed to hoard. It took brains to beat the sun, escape the heat, and it took brains to keep the germs at bay.

From where roamers stood, it was plain easier to loot, pillage, whatever it took.

Which made every camp a target.

Pete followed me down the hill.

Neither of us spoke — I guess there wasn’t much of anything to say. The moon was three-quarters full and between that and the usual stunning array of stars we had no trouble keeping up a good clip. I wanted to get in and out quickly; I had some business back with Lisa, who’d been my girlfriend in the West Side days, and who Mather had decided was still an acceptable mate for me. He hadn’t assigned Pete a woman, but he had occasional privileges, which he was always pleased to exercise.

They were eerie, the nights since the sky blew off.

Sound seemed to carry twenty times farther than it had before. Noises were louder, exaggerated. A few nocturnal animals still survived, owls and raccoons among them, and their voices seemed to come from a hundred directions at once, or no direction at all. It was like Mother Nature had gone ventriloquist. Crickets, which had done quite well, put out sound like steady radio static.

But it wasn’t only noise that made the nights strange — temperatures had been thrown all out of whack, too. Most nights, like tonight, you were lucky if the mercury dipped into the nineties. The only relief was an occasional evening breeze.

A mile from our camp, we entered the outskirts of Bradford Village. If you closed your eyes, you could picture it as it might have been before the sky blew off: a charmed little blue-collar village, where neighbor knew neighbor and treated him with proper Yankee respect, a place where the machinery of life hummed quietly along in a more or less well-greased fashion. You could imagine being born in that village, growing up there, raising a family, walking your children down the aisle, bouncing your grandchildren on your knee, going to your grave a reasonably satisfied man.

Some had been torched and some had self-combusted, but most of the houses still stood — a curious mixture of white Colonials and shingled Capes and ticko-tacko pre-fab ranches that had been all the rage during the prosperous, inflationless fifties. There was no glass in any of the windows now. And the paint was peeling, the front walks and sidewalks cracked and crumbling. And the cars that were parked in the driveways were beginning to rust. Every tire was flat, and roamers had busted the windshields. The trees that once had shaded back yard barbecues now were blighted, their leafless branches waving in the wind like the thin fingers of a skeleton.

You could go on and on, but it only made you sick.

On the other side of Bradford, we smelled it: the unmistakable aroma of a campfire. It was coming from across the Quannapowitt River, and as we got closer, we could see flickering shapes. They were just beyond the bank of the river, roughly three hundred yards away, a band of people huddled in a circle on flat ground next to a burned out but still standing barn. We couldn’t make out the faces, but it looked as if there were a dozen of them, no more.

I was relieved. Unless some of their number were off somewhere in the shadows, this was going to be a milk run. It looked as if Mather’s fears might turn out to be pointless.

I pulled Pete close to me and whispered: “Piece of cake.”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Because of that barn.”

“What good’s the barn?”

“Barn’s got a loft.”

“What good’s the loft?”

“Gives us a clear view of the entire camp. We ought to be able to finish the operation from a sitting position.”

Pete started to say something, but I motioned him quiet. From there on in, stealth was going to be important. Spook them now, and they might attack — or worse, scatter. We’d have a devil of a time tracking them down, and some would probably slip away, and then there’d be hell to pay with Mather. I didn’t need that just then, and I imagined Pete didn’t, either.

You didn’t need a historian to see that the Quannapowitt in the old days had been a healthy, full-fledged river — upstream a mile you could see the remains of a dozen mills. Since the sky blew off, the Quannapowitt had shrunk to a trickle, six inches deep at its deepest with no more power to drive a loom than water from a faucet. We waded across. The river wasn’t cool, no rivers were any more, but it still felt refreshing around the ankles.

Getting to the barn was easy: Crouching low, we simply followed a waist-high stone wall that ran up to it from the river. We let ourselves in a back door, then climbed on cat’s feet into the loft.

I wasn’t prepared for what we saw when we looked down.

What I was prepared for, I suppose, was the usual band of roamers: a group of men and women, middle-aged or younger, with one kid, possibly two. That was the description of all the bands we’d seen, and it made sense they were like that. Sun and disease had taken their toll, a toll few of the very young or very old were able to pay.

There were no grown men in this group — no able-bodied grown men, that is, only a wizened old character who looked to be eighty or more sitting closest to the fire. Close to him were the women: six in number, twenties and thirties in age. They were sitting, too. Huddled at their feet in the dirt were a half dozen children, most younger than the kid who’d made it to our perimeter.

If the empty cans were any clue, they’d recently finished dinner, but there hadn’t been much to eat. Now not much was happening. When they spoke, it was in low voices we couldn’t catch. I could make out only two faces from the shadows — the old man’s and one of the women’s. Except for the wrinkles, they wore identical expressions: that peculiar hybrid of fright and exhaustion and malnutrition I’d seen on roamers before.

Something else, too, a look I’d never seen on roamers. I hesitate to call it innocence.

Mather later theorized that they had been in hiding somewhere, and had recently been forced out somehow — maybe when their food ran low, maybe at the hands of some belligerent roamers. He was pretty sure there had been more men with them originally. He imagined they’d been killed, but there was no way of knowing.

At the moment, the origin of the roamers wasn’t the issue. The point was Pete’s reaction.

“I can’t do it, Russ,” he whispered. “There’s been too much already.”

I looked at him, his profile expanding and shrinking in the campfire’s glow. I looked at him long and hard, but I can’t say that I was surprised. Mather and I had had a private talk about him just before leaving.

“Don’t stare at me like that,” he said, “like I’m a criminal. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. Mather’s crazy on this. Paranoid. Can’t you see it? There’s no need for this, Russ. No need.”

“What do you suggest then?” I said calmly. Below us, an infant started to cry. The night took that cry, twisted and deformed it, made it ghost-like and disembodied. Both of us were silent for a moment.

“What’s your idea?” I repeated.

“That we button up and go back home. Forget them.”

“And what about when Mather sees smoke tomorrow morning?”

“There wouldn’t have to be any smoke,” he said after a moment. “We could tell them to move on. They could be over the border in New York State by daybreak. It can be our little secret, Russ. You and me. Mather need never know.”

It went on like that for maybe ten minutes, back and forth, back and forth.

Finally, I gave in.

“You win,” I said.

“You don’t mean it.”

“I do,” I whispered. “Now, listen. It’s your idea. Why don’t you be the one to tell them.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Really, thanks. And, listen: Mather will never know.”

Pete started for the stairs. “Don’t you think you ought to leave your shotgun here?” I asked. “Wouldn’t want to create the wrong impression.”

“Sure. Right.” He handed his weapon to me and headed down the loft.

“Any hesitation,” Mather had said during our private chat, “and you have my full and complete authorization.”

I waited until Pete had reached the campfire. Then I shot him through the back. The noise was startling, but before anyone down there could react much, I emptied the shotgun in their direction eight times. In fifteen seconds, it was over. On my way out of the barn, I was lucky — I found a five-gallon can of gas, and it was full. I poured the gas over the bodies, stepped back, and tossed a coal from the campfire. It went up with a roar.

Standing at a safe distance, I lit up a cigarette. We were running low on tobacco, but this was one of those times that called for a smoke. I suddenly had an old fashioned thirst for an ice-cold beer, but there wasn’t any beer any more. What there was hooch, which Mather had discovered you could make from canned peaches, dandelions, anything that had sugar in it, even bark from certain trees. It wasn’t the smoothest stuff, but you could still get a decent buzz from it. I’d have a glass when I got home.

Whistling some old top-forty tune, I headed back. Mather would be pleased with the outcome of the operation. In the distance, the fire lit up the night. It would die down when it reached the river. A gentle late-night breeze was blowing up. As I walked, it began to dry the thin sweat that was covering my forehead.