Must admit it felt good. First time in years anybody ever admitted I was right.
Paid back for the pain. Dull, heavy ache it was, spreading. Susan gives me a shot and a pill and has me bandaged up tight. Blood stopped easy, she says. I clot good.
We decided to get out of there, not stopping to look for Johnny's parents.
We got three blocks before the way was blocked.
It was a big metal cylinder, fractured on all sides. Glass glittering around it.
Right in the street. You can see where it hit the roof of a clothing store, Bedsole's, caved in the front of it and rolled into the street.
They all get out and have a look, me sitting in the cab. I see the Russian writing again on the end of it.
I don't know much, but I can make out at the top CeKPeT and a lot of words that look like warning, including?O'?eH, which is sick, and some more I didn't know, and then II O O?O'H, which is weather.
"What's it say?" Mr. Ackerman asks.
"That word at the top there's secret, and then something about biology and sickness and rain and weather."
"I thought you knew this writing," he says.
I shook my head. "I know enough."
"Enough to what?"
"To know this was some kind of targeted capsule. It fell right smack in the middle of Fairhope, biggest town this side of the bay."
"Like the other one?" Johnny says, which surprised me. The boy is smart.
"The one hit the causeway? Right."
"One what?" Mr. Ackerman asks.
I don't want to say it with the boy there and all, but it has to come out sometime. "Some disease. Biological warfare."
They stand there in the middle of Prospect Avenue with open, silent nothingness around us, and nobody says anything for the longest time. There won't be any prospects here for a long time. Johnny's parents we aren't going to find, nobody we'll find, because whatever came spurting out of this capsule when it busted open-up high, no doubt, so the wind could take it-had done its work.
Angel sees it right off. "Must've been time for them to get inside," is all she says, but she's thinking the same as me.
It got them into such a state that they went home and holed up to die, like an animal will. Maybe it would be different in the North or the West-people are funny out there, they might just as soon sprawl across the sidewalk-but down here people's first thought is home, the family, the only thing that might pull them through. So they went there and they didn't come out again.
Mr. Ackerman says, "But there's no smell," which was stupid because that made it all real to the boy, and he starts to cry. I pick him up.