Doll Face

27

It was raining ash.

Ramona had the wipers working madly on the windshield of the van, but still she could not clear it. It was like being lost in a black snowstorm. The ash flew thick and heavy, filling the headlights and then simply covering the windshield until she was forced to bring the van to a stop where it promptly died.

There was nothing she could do but wait it out.

She sat there, pulling her shirt up over her face so she did not breathe any of it in. Even inside the van, the ash was everywhere. It drifted in a haze, covering the seats and dashboard and steering wheel, settling over the floor like deep sea silt. Within ten minutes, Ramona was coated in it, too. But even so, it was still much better within the van than without where it flew like a black blizzard.

She waited.

And waited.

What if it was to go on for hours? For days? You’d be buried alive in the stuff, she thought.

True, but she knew it wouldn’t last too long. It couldn’t. The Controller was expending a great deal of energy to create this illusion. Oh, it was real enough—you could touch the ash, feel it, breathe it in and asphyxiate on it, but it was still an illusion. A physical illusion. It would play itself out given time. She wondered if her theoretical Controller was even doing this on purpose or it was sort of a subconscious thing, if that even made any sense.

She huddled there on her seat, breathing through her shirt, wearing her sunglasses so the stuff wouldn’t get in her eyes. The temperature in the van had risen at least twenty degrees in the last fifteen minutes and already she was beginning to perspire, her clothes clinging to her like damp rags. She wiped sweat from her face and it left a greasy residue of ash and moisture that she could feel.

It was disgusting.

If this ever ended, she would need to soak in a bath for hours.

She waited there, listening to the ash brushing against the outside of the van like sand. It seemed to go on and on and she felt increasingly claustrophobic, the van feeling more and more like a coffin she was slowly being buried alive in, a crate sinking into the black depths of quicksand. Even when it ended and she was not sure that it ever would, she would be interred beneath many feet of black ash and if she got the sliding door of the van open, she would drown in a moving and shifting mountain of it.

But that was imagination and she could not afford it.

Even now, it was ceasing. She could barely hear it brushing up against the van now. She waited another ten minutes or so until it was deathly silent out there, knowing it could only mean one of two things: either the van was indeed buried or the ash storm had finally ended.

She unrolled her window an inch and ash fell in, covering her in black soot.

She unrolled it a few inches more.

She was not buried.

Good then. She opened the door and stepped out into a world painted black. The ashes came up to her calves. She moved through them, casting clouds of soot with each step as she moved away from the van into a weird, blackened world. Stokes lay gutted and burned around her. It looked like a plastic model a boy had gotten bored with, doused in lighter fluid and set aflame. This was the aftermath.

Gone was the Mayberry RFD illusion of Stokes.

What she was seeing was the town after the fire that had destroyed it.

The sky seemed to be dark with soot, the moonlight filled with smoke and blowing ash. The neighborhoods were burned out, houses reduced to foundations or black hulks. In some cases there was nothing but a standing sooty chimney or two, limbless trees like black stakes that witches had been roasted upon. She saw the remains of incinerated cars in the streets that looked like the dried-out, mangled carapaces of insects you might find on the windowsills of deserted houses. There were heaps of smoldering bricks and burning boards rising from the ash, telephone poles that had fallen over, and stands of bushes that had not caught fire but merely withered in the blazing heat.

It was a terrible mess.

The thing that caught her eye and held it was what appeared to be the collapsing wreck of a factory or mill on a hilltop that overlooked the town itself. From her vantage point, it looked much like the aftermath of a funeral pyre or a bonfire that had burned down—a collection of blackened sticks and stumps.

Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.

Stokes was pristine and pure again, not violated and broken. The streets were clean, the windows gleaming with moonlight, the air fresh and the walks swept.

The only evidence that anything had happened at all was Ramona herself, who was black from head to foot, her hair full of ashes. She breathed in the clean air, neither shocked nor surprised at the transformation of the town.

She plodded on.

Light.

She saw flickering blue light.

It was from down the street. The TVs in the window of a shop were all operating. Again, it was like something from an old movie. She half-expected to see a crowd gathered on the walks, staring through the glass. She went down there because obviously it was for her benefit. She stood before the window. Six or seven archaic TVs were showing the same program—a black-and-white newscast that was grainy, the picture rolling from time to time. The news anchor with his austere suit and bow tie, hair shiny with Brylcream, was holding a sheaf of papers, a bulky chrome-plated Unidyne microphone set on the desk before him.

The picture changed. Now it was showing footage of a horrendous fire, houses and buildings engulfed in flame, black smoke churning into the sky. The anchor came back on, commenting on it. Then the picture changed again. Block letters on the screen read:

AMONG THE MISSING

This was followed by blurry black-and-white photos that she could tell were herself and Chazz, Creep and Danielle, Lex and Soo-Lee. The images kept repeating. It was designed, she knew, to fill her with terror and it was doing a pretty good job at it. The most disturbing part was that they were not photos taken in life, but in death. Each of them was laid out naked on slabs like Old West gunfighters that had been cut down. Their faces looked flaccid, their eyes sunken.

Ramona turned away.

The fear inside her ran dark until it became a poison that made her hate, made her lust for revenge. She was angry, really angry, and she knew damn well that when she got like this, she was not only irrational but relentless in her need for payback.

She heard the siren begin to shrill, which meant things were going to start heating up again. Tensed, standing out in the middle of the street, she waited for it.

She didn’t honestly think, bring it on, but in every fiber of her being, she was almost daring the Controller to do just that.