Gregg Hurwitz - The Rains

“How ’bout you, Chet?” Patrick asked.

“No way,” Chet said. “No way I’m going out there.”

“You have even less time than I do.”

“I know. But if you saw what my dad did to my little brother…” He started wheezing a bit and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Patrick. Not with them out there. I just can’t do it. I’ll take my chances that the air’ll get better.”

“No one else?” Patrick’s voice echoed around the hard walls of the gym.

He turned and looked at Alex and me. I felt my stomach lurch as if I’d walked off a ledge and was endlessly plummeting.

His eyes met mine. He said, “We leave at nightfall.”

The day passed in a crawl, sunlight inching across the gym floor until it hit the far wall and started to climb. At last dusk textured the air, and Dr. Chatterjee ordered the high casement windows cinched shut against the cold.

Alex sat on her cot wearing Patrick’s black cowboy hat, her face tilted down. Her hair fell like a curtain across her cheek, blocking her eyes from view. She was taping her fingers carefully, like she did before hockey games, neat protective strips between the knuckles, biting each piece off the roll. Her hockey stick lay across her thighs.

She looked pretty bad-ass.

I was watching her while pretending not to watch her at the same time, so when Patrick spoke right behind me, I nearly jumped off my cot. I set down my composition notebook and said, “What?”

He laid his shotgun across one shoulder. “I said, ‘Get what you need from the supply station.’”

I headed over to where Eve Jenkins sat at a desk she’d pulled over in front of the open door to the storage room. She’d done a great job organizing everything inside, bats and crowbars lining one wall, knives stashed against the others. Bins held flashlights and compasses and pocketknives. Most of the food remained in the cafeteria, but she kept energy bars, granola mix, and apples in a crate for the lookouts.

When she saw me coming, she smiled and straightened up a bit. I looked past her into the room. “Wow, this is pretty cool.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just organizing stuff. I’m sure anyone could’ve done it.”

“You know, you are allowed to just say thanks.”

She blushed a little. “Thanks. What do you need, Chance?”

My baling hooks, hung on a peg in the back, gleamed as if calling to me. I nodded at them.

She said, “I figured you were gonna ask for a hunting rifle, but we just have the one from Leonora Rose, and there’s no ammo.”

“Too big anyways,” I said.

“I heard you were a crack shot with a rifle.”

I shrugged. “I have okay aim,” I said. “But I need something for up close.”

She blanched slightly, then lifted the baling hooks from the peg and brought them over.

I gripped them again, the wood firm and comforting in my hands. “Guess I’m gonna need a flashlight, a folding knife, some matches, and a couple of energy bars. Everything else we’ll figure out along the way.”

She shifted her weight uncomfortably. “Ben says you can only take what you brought. He said we gotta preserve supplies and weapons for the lookouts.”

Ben had decided he was running security, and no one had un decided it for him since.

Her lips pressed together, that pretty dimple making a tiny crescent in her right cheek. “But…,” she continued, “I think Ben’s sort of a jerk. And Dr. Chatterjee never agreed to the rule. So.” She gave a quick look at the double doors where Ben’s chair sat empty, then grabbed the supplies and slid them across the desk to me. “Here you go.”

“Thanks, Eve.”

When I turned away, she said my name. I looked at her over my shoulder.

“Make sure you come back,” she said. A wisp of glossy dark hair drifted down over her face, and she blew it away.

I realized she was prettier than I’d thought.

“Do my best,” I said.

JoJo ran over and clamped onto my side, hugging me. She was crying. “Don’t leave, Chance. Please don’t.”

I bent over and kissed her head. “I have to,” I said.

She pried herself from me, ran off, and hid beneath the bleachers. Rocky sat on one of the middle benches. I caught his eye, gestured to the space where JoJo had disappeared: Take care of your sister. He nodded, but I could tell he was scared, too.

I turned away. Over in the middle of the cots, Patrick and Alex were sitting together. He held his hands over hers and they were leaning in, his hat cocked back on her head so their foreheads could touch. He must’ve felt me looking at him because he stood up, and then Alex saw me, too, and rose to her feet. A moment later Cassius’s head reared into view beside them.

Patrick lifted the shotgun, balancing it on the ledge of his collarbone. The hockey stick spun expertly in Alex’s hands. Patrick reached over, plucked his Stetson from Alex’s head, and seated it firmly on his own. With a baling hook, I gestured toward the door.

As we headed out, I could feel the eyes of everyone in the gym on us. We were the brave few. Or the soon-to-be-dead few.

We reached the double doors, pushed them open, and headed down the corridor. Cassius trotted at our side, his head raised, tongue lolling. He probably thought we were going for a stroll.

By the front of the school, Ben stood lookout, that stun gun shoved into the waist of his jeans. As we neared, he spun the keys around his finger like a cowboy showing off his revolver.

Patrick halted, studied him. “You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you?”

Ben considered for a moment. “I’m used to death, Patrick. I grew up around a slaughterhouse. It gave me an up-close look at, you know, the cycle of life. And I knew exactly how my life was gonna play out. How many hours I’d work when I was twenty or thirty or forty. How much overtime I’d pull on weekends during culling season. What kind of crappy place I’d live in when I got older and what bar I’d drink at.” He swallowed, and I could see in his face the same longing I sometimes felt, the dreams he didn’t allow himself to have. “I get to protect people now. Make choices that actually matter. I get to actually matter.”

His eyes glimmered wetly. Again I thought back to that car crash that had taken his brothers and wondered what he’d lost in the flames. Or found.

“So yeah…” Ben turned to slot the key into the lock. He opened the big door for us, the air billowing in, cold and unforgiving. “The end of the world is pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The three of us crammed beneath a stand of oak, the velvety leaves tickling our necks and the backs of our arms. Cassius remained outside the tangle, lying flat on the dirt, his snout resting between his paws. We’d taken a high vantage on a hill, town square sprawling before us. It had quieted down a lot since we’d last seen it, the Mappers dispersing to scan new terrain. In fact, I couldn’t see a single Host on the vast lawn or the bordering streets. Aside from movement in the church windows and the glow of the forge from Bob n’ Bit Hardware, there was no sign of life at all. Jackhammered chunks of asphalt lay like boulders on the street. A power cable dangled from the roof of the One Cup Cafe, striking the sidewalk and sending up sprays of sparks. The pallet jack dragged into town by Afa Similai remained in the front courtyard of the church, but the dog crates were missing from it, as were the other trunks and cages I’d spotted there earlier.

We’d doglegged through the neighborhood by the school, drifting through wisps of fog, making painfully slow headway. We’d kept close to the houses, moving through yards, hiding behind trash cans and parked cars. More than once we’d had to hold our breath and keep our heads ducked as packs of Hosts drifted by. Cassius obeyed my hand gestures perfectly, all those cold morning hours of training paying off. Patrick and Alex debated grabbing a truck but decided the noise of an engine would be too risky here in town. If we drew a throng of Hosts, we’d be as stuck as a car in a herd of sheep.