All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham Jones

      The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

      19 May 1982, Nazareth, Texas

      He was moving along the edge of town. The boots were too big for him, the jacket bulky, heavier than he would have guessed, and the helmet kept tipping over his eyes. His heart was slapping the inside of his chest. He wasn’t even sure he was going to do it, yet. Maybe he would just look at them, at one of them. Or maybe they’d be already dead. Everywhere there was rain, and water, the sky spent. Power lines waved overhead like tree branches, and trees lay on their sides like fallen people, still reaching up for something. The root pans were gnarled and black and terrible. He held the back of his hand over his mouth, to not have to smell them.

      The fireman he’d taken the jacket and boots and helmet from had been stuck in a barbed wire fence. He’d looked up at the rock coming down for him, then just taken it, as he had to. The human skull was like a dried gourd. He’d half-expected flies to mass up out of it, each one with a fraction of intelligence, emotion. Scattering. He would have chased them and eaten them and saved them inside.

      But it was just the usual grey, the usual red.

      He put the boots on, and the jacket, and the gloves, over the cotton ones he was already wearing. His fingers were thick and protected now. He flexed them as he moved from tilted cornice to tilted cornice, telephone pole to telephone pole. Nazareth was gone. Things were still falling from the sky, even. The first dead people he’d found had been three women in an upside-down car. They still had their seat belts on, were staring straight ahead, their ponytails hanging down, brushing the roof liner.

      He’d wanted to take a picture, but the gloves were so thick, and the flash: somebody would see it.

      He was supposed to be helping.

      He laughed, ran.

      He wasn’t going to do it. He knew now. Because it could never work. How would he get them back to his car? No. The thing to do was walk back to that fireman in the fence, dress him, maybe leaving the jacket inside out or something, just because it would get blamed on the tornado. Everything would get blamed on the tornado, even him, maybe, if he got caught.

      He ran, and laughed, and the cotton in his ear made the laughter sound foreign.

      The fireproof jacket billowed around him, the air still charged blue.

      People weren’t even emerging from their homes yet, or their fallout shelters, or the mattresses they’d pulled over their bathtubs, the down jackets they’d wrapped themselves in, in the cedar closet, their grandmother’s scent all around them.

      After a few hundred feet, he just stood, listening, and finally a female cat broke from a tumbled wall, raced across what was left of the street. He knew she was female because they were all female. He’d heard it like that in a joke once. He looked behind an untouched car, for the idea of a dog, because dogs and cats went together. He had an axe in his hand, though, while he was looking. Which made it different. He looked down at the axe head as if just realizing it was there. Yes. He looked to the cat, nodded, smiling, and said it: “Here, kitty kitty kitty.”

      The cat just watched him, its ears slicked back.

      They stared at each other like that until the woman stood from under her couch. She was bleeding. She stumbled through her open-air living room, leaned in the doorframe. It was the only thing left.

      The fireman with the axe waved at her.

      Her head wobbled to the side, like maybe a neck ligament had had some trauma.

      “You okay?” he called out, cupping his mouth with his thick glove.

      She looked around, her chest shuddering.

      He walked to her at right angles.

      “Are you hurt, ma’am?” he asked.

      His facemask was down now, already, but it didn’t matter. She was looking at his axe.

      He looked at it too.

      There were still pieces of the other fireman on it.

      “It’s not what you think,” he told her.

      “What do I think?” she said.

      Her pupils were blown wide. There was blood trailing down from her right ear. He traced it with a gloved finger and she shivered, hugged herself.

      “Are you going to save me?” she said.

      He smiled, let his palm rest on her shoulder.

      “Not all of you,” he said.

      This was like the old days, God.

      But no. Not anymore. Just this once.

      After her, he found a dog, maybe the dog the cat had been remembering to make it run, even, and he let it go with a broken pelvis, and then, for long, boring minutes, nothing. He was shrugging out of the yellow jacket—this was stupid stupid stupid—when the girl stood from the broken boards and gritty shingles. The children, yes. He’d nearly forgotten about them somehow. And she was so dark.

      “Where’s your brother?” the nice fireman asked.

      A boy stood up beside her then, as dark as her and almost as tall.

      Yes.

      The fireman put the middle finger of his glove into his mouth, bit the empty part at the tip, pulled his hand away, then did it again with the cotton underneath, until it was just bare skin.

      He held his hand out to the girl.

      Later he would learn that it was always the girl who reached up first. Because he was the perfect father—the hero, saving her.

      “Hello,” he said to her.

      She had wet sheetrock dust over one side of her face.

      She told him her name. He told her yes, he knew, it was a beautiful name too, and then she took her brother’s hand and they picked their way out through the rubble, and he had no idea then where he was going to take them, what he was going to do. Just that they were holding his hand, that they were alive, warm, and that they would be enough.

      ONE21 March 1999, Nazareth, Texas

      She was walking in the ditch, along the road that went away from the high school. It was two-thirty. She was wearing a skirt that hugged her legs. It came down to the tops of her boots. Jim Doe smiled, closed his eyes, opened them. She was still there, against the backdrop of the baseball field. He coasted alongside, the gravel dancing behind him. Past her and all around her to the north was a dryline. It had been building for four hours now. Jim Doe had been watching it even before he came on shift.

      He