You just can’t sleep the same after belting an intruder with a frying pan, and by the time the sun came up, I was ready to go. I left through the garage, my backpack slung over one shoulder, loaded up with fresh bottles of water and a light picnic lunch. It would be dramatically satisfying to tell you I heard Gumby kicking and wailing to get out when I left, but there wasn’t a sound coming from the trunk. He might’ve been dead. I can’t swear he wasn’t.
The evening rain had scrubbed the sky bright and blue, and the day twinkled. So did the fresh downpour of nails in the road.
Gumby’s daughter was at the bottom of her driveway, staring at me with wide, frightened eyes. She was wearing the same black tracksuit with purple piping and the same silver bangle that had been around her wrist the day before. I wasn’t going to speak to her—it seemed important to avoid acknowledging her, for her safety as much as mine—but then she took a nervous step toward me and called out.
“Have you seen my father?” she asked.
I stopped in the road, nails crunching under my feet. “I did,” I told her. “But he didn’t see me. Bad luck for him.”
She withdrew a step, the fingers of one hand curling to her chest. I stalked a few more yards down the road, then couldn’t help myself and went back. The girl stiffened. I could tell she wanted to run but was stuck in place with fright. An artery beat in her slender throat.
I grabbed the bangle around her wrist and yanked it off: a silver bracelet with crescent moons stamped on it. I hung it on my own arm.
“That’s not yours,” I said. “I don’t know how you can wear it.”
“He . . . he said . . .” she gasped. Her voice was small, and her breath was rapid and shallow. “He said he paid Yolanda a thousand dollars to b-babysit over the years, and her p-parents should’ve g-given it back. That they never should’ve let s-someone l-like Yolanda—like you—watch children!” Her face twisted in an ugly sort of way when she said that last bit. “He said they owed us.”
“Your father was owed something. And I gave it to him,” I said, and I left her there.
I WENT AROUND THE PARK this time. I didn’t want to see a pile of dead penguins or smell them either.
Seventeenth Avenue borders the southern edge of City Park, and a squad from the National Guard had been deployed there to do some cleanup. A couple guys used a Humvee to drag wrecks out of the road. A few others plied push brooms across the blacktop to sweep aside the latest shimmering carpet of nails. But all of them worked in a despondent, desultory way, the way folks will when they know they’ve been assigned a pointless chore. It was like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teacup. Denver was sunk, and they knew it.
The road crew were the lucky ones, though. Some of the other soldiers had been assigned the job of bagging corpses and lining them along the curb, same as Parks & Rec used to leave bagged trash for garbage collection.
Just past where Seventeenth crosses Fillmore, there’s a handsome entrance to the park: a wall of glossy pink stone in a welcoming crescent that opens on an expanse of green as smooth as the surface of a billiard table. A couple of park benches, fashioned from steel wire, had been placed artfully to either side of the park entrance. An elderly couple had tried to squeeze in underneath one of those benches together for shelter from last night’s drizzle, but it hadn’t done them any good. The nails had gone right through the wire.
A crow had found them and was in under the bench plucking at the old lady’s face. A soldier in camo approached and bent down and yelled at the bird and clapped his hands. The crow jumped in fright and hopped out from under the bench with something in his mouth. From a few yards away, it looked like a quivering, soft-boiled egg, but as I approached, I could see it was an eyeball. The bird walked up the sidewalk with its fat, pearly prize, leaving bloody footprints behind. The soldier took three brisk steps to the curb and vomited in front of me, a hard cough followed by a wet spatter, a mess that smelled of bile and eggs.
I came up short to keep from getting any of the spray on me. The soldier, a black guy, average height, downy little mustache, heaved again, and coughed and spit. I offered him a bottle of water. He took it and swigged and spit once more. Drank again, long, slow swallows.
“Thanks,” he said. “Did you see where that bird went?”
“Why?”
“Because I think I’m going to shoot him for being a pig instead of a crow. His eyes are bigger than his stomach.”
“You mean her eyes are bigger than his stomach.”
“Ha,” he said, and shivered weakly. “I’d like to shoot something. You can’t imagine how badly I want to put a bullet somewhere it would do some good. I wish I was in with the real soldiers. There’s a fifty-fifty chance we’ll have boots on the ground in Georgia by sunup tomorrow. Shit about to go down.”
“Georgia?” I asked. “They think Charlie Daniels might’ve had something to do with all this?”
He gave me a sad smile and said, “I thought something similar when I heard. Not that Georgia. This one is in that puddle of crap between Iraq and Russia, where everything is Al-frig-i-stan and El-douche-i-stan.”
“Next to Russia, you said?”
He nodded. “I think Georgia used to be part of it. The chemists who dreamed this shit up—clouds raining nails—work for a company out there. A former U.S. company, if you can believe it. The Joint Chiefs want to strike with a dozen battalions. Biggest ground operation since D-Day.”
“You said it’s only a fifty-fifty chance?”
“The president has been on the phone with Russia to see if they’d be okay with him dropping a couple tactical warheads on the Caucasus. His stubby little fingers are itching to stab the button.”
After all I’d seen in the last forty-eight hours, the idea of thumping our enemies with a few hundred megatons of hurt should’ve given me a rush of satisfaction—but it only made me antsy. I had the nervous, fidgety sensation that there was somewhere I needed to be, something I needed to be doing; it was the way a person feels when she’s away from home and suddenly begins to worry she left a burner running on the stove. But I couldn’t for the life of me identify what it was I needed to do to ease my anxiety.
“You want a bad guy to whup, you don’t have to fly halfway around the world. I can point you to one right here in Denver.”
He gave me a weary look and said, “I can’t help you with looters. Maybe the Denver PD can take a complaint.”
“How about a murderer?” I asked. “You got time to deal with one of them?”
Some of the exhaustion left his face, and his posture improved just slightly. “What murderer?”
“I walked down from Boulder yesterday to check in on my girlfriend’s father, Dr. James Rusted. I found him dead in his front hallway. He took a tumble down the stairs and broke his neck.”