Hallelujah!

The screaming was the first thing we noticed.

It was one of those grey days that me and my brother Mike used to like. The kind where the sky is dark with angry looking clouds and the wind is high enough that it makes your shirt cling to your skin.

It wasn't wet though. Those days only got wet when we went in.

Mike and I were out with a set of little plastic golf clubs, ignoring Ma as she hollered at us to knock off our mock sword fight, and it was only her cuz Dad was at work. It was at this point that we heard the screaming.

At first, none of knew what to do. The neighborhood, what little of it there was on a workday, was silent aside from it, and even then, it was far away sounding. I had a look around and caught sight of Josh across the street. He was an older kid who sold his NERF guns to Mike and me for a couple of toonies, so I've got nothing but nice things to say about him. He was at his barbell bench, mid lift. He was frozen up. I couldn't wonder long about that because the screaming, clearly not him, was getting louder, and Mike was still battering me with his red mini golf club. That's the point where I really started to get that feeling. The one where your heart is going too fast. Where it feels like the thing is pumping inside of a vice. I shoved Mikes club away and looked at Ma, and she's just got a pinched look on her face; forehead full of worry lines and lips set in a hard line as she leaned on the porch railing, trying to get a look around.

The screaming was the loudest it could have gotten now, and it was hoarse too. Hoarse like it'd been going for ages.

When Ma's eyes went up, so did mine.

They didn't stare there long, cuz they found themselves following a big, flailing man as he found himself driven into our old, cracked up driveway. The mess that made. I still see it as clear as the day it happened.

He landed headfirst, and that cut the screaming off with a wet crunch. The weight of it made the skull burst out in fat chunks of red and red splattered white. The rest of him followed suit. I could see his spine compress through his naked back, the vertebrae mashing into each other and out of the open hole of a neck. The arms slammed hard too, though that seemed to me like it was a dryer snapping noise that betrayed the useless swinging that followed it. The lower body, I don't know how to describe that. It looked like all that pressure, all that injury, all of that worked to help split him vertically at the pelvis, a fount of blood spewing from between leg that seemed to drive themselves down into the asphalt.

The bastard was a pile on impact.

I couldn't hear much screaming after that. Not mine. Not Mikes. Not Ma's. Certainly not from any of the people I saw falling after that.

God, did they fall.

It was slow at first, two or three in small bursts. By the time Ma started hauling our little asses to the house those bursts got bigger. By the time we were inside it was a downpour.

They hit the ground hard. Some of them burst on impact. Some of them bounced up a bit before settling in a broken heap. Then those ones had other bodies land on them, building up into small piles of dead. I saw a couple get skewered on tree branches; their intestines wrapping around them. Ma shut the blinds after that.

She shut all of the cuz it was happening all over. You could see the primary school across the train tracks behind our house and they were bouncing off the roof. Our roof too. Dull thud after dull thud while Ma had the two of us huddled in the corner, sitting in the dark for it all to pass.

It did not pass for two hours.

When it was finished, we still sat in our dark corner, Ma's arms wrapped tight around us. I don't blame her. What would you be doing after all that? Still, we waited so long to do anything that Mike fell asleep, like he wasn't nearly stuck out in a rain of screaming people.

After a while, I got myself loose and headed for the front door. It was a bad idea, but I was about seven when this happened, and I wanted my golf clubs. I got the door opened before Ma could grab me and what I saw was... confusing.

I saw piles of bodies stacked on top of each other, amid loose organs and limbs strewn every which way. There was some dangling off the roof of Josh's house, Josh himself nowhere in sight. They were stuck in the trees, and one of the heavier looking ones came tumbling down when the branch stuck through his back snapped off. Across the street, I saw no sign of Josh among the gore, but I did see someone I knew. Someone draped over Josh's bench press, limbs snapped backwards, and his head twisted around that the bumps of spine were visible even from the distance I was at.

I saw my dad there. That was the last thing I saw of it before Ma closed the door.

It took them a week to clean everyone up. Took months to go through all the funerals. They were attended though. All six thousand, four hundred and seventy-three of them. Every one of the bodies belonged to someone from our town, or who had been to our town at some point in the past, and that's about all the cops figured out about it.

No one ever found out how this happened, why it happened, or if it'll happen again. All I know is this one thing:

I miss my Dad.