Gregg Hurwitz - The Rains

The square now was as desolate as I’d ever seen it.

Alex leaned over, her hair brushing my face. “Where are they all?” she whispered.

I said, “Maybe once they’ve mapped an area, they move on.”

Cassius’s head lifted, his ears flattening against his skull.

The clack of a screen door drew our focus to the line of shops. A kid sprinted out of the One Cup Cafe and through the fountain of sparks. He looked tiny, dwarfed by the hugeness of the square. He sliced between two parked cars, zigzagging across the open grass. Even way up here, we could hear his panicked breaths. He hurdled a bench and ran for the road. Patches of fog blurred his outline.

Patrick said, “Is that…?”

“Andre Swisher,” I said.

Suddenly there were faces in the windows of the houses and storefronts. We watched, breathless. Various doors banged open all around the square, a haunted-house orchestration, Hosts filling doorways and the mouths of alleys. Way across in the hospital, a woman in an untied gown pried open the ER doors and halted in the threshold, her stance wide, her arms spread to hold the doors at bay. For an instant they all just stood there, watching with their non-eyes.

Then they flashed into motion.

Andre screamed, switching direction once and then again, but the Hosts bounded toward him, cinching the noose. They were female, moving fast enough to burst their muscles. Though there were only seven or eight of them, they shot at him from every direction, streaking across the square. Sam Miller’s grandma leapt over a car, landing on all fours, then rocketing forward.

Patrick tensed, bringing one knee under him like a sprinter at the starting line, but Alex put her hand on his back, firm, and said, “You go down there, you’ll die. We can’t help him right now.”

Cassius whined faintly, and I hushed him.

Andre tugged frantically at a car handle-locked. Hosts closed in. He ran to a pickup slant-parked behind the chunks of broken asphalt and vaulted in. His fist smashed down the lock. His hand darted below the dash, and his shoulder flexed-the keys must’ve been left in the ignition-but nothing happened. Either the Hosts had disabled the truck or when its owner transformed, he’d walked away, leaving the engine running until the gas ran out.

The female Hosts mobbed the pickup. Through a break between them, we caught a glimpse of Andre’s panicked face, his mouth stretched wide in a scream we couldn’t hear.

Sam Miller’s grandma drew back an arm, the flesh sagging beneath the bone, and drove her fist through the window. Hands crowded the jagged orifice as they pulled Andre out. They flung him violently chest-down on the road. A mother who worked as a volunteer at the library tore her blouse right off. Wearing nothing but a long skirt and a black bra, she used her shirt to bind him.

They hoisted him up and ran to the church, his muffled cries growing fainter and fainter. They disappeared inside, leaving the square as peaceful as it had been just a few minutes before.

None of us said anything. There was nothing to say. It was one of the most awful things I’d ever seen.

Our breath misted in the darkness, three puffs in a row.

“Even though the Mappers are scary,” Alex said, “at least you stand a chance if they don’t look up and see you. But the females, all they do is chase. They’re the worst.”

She was right. They were quick and fierce and terrible.

“We need to get a look inside that church,” Patrick said. “See if there’s any way we can help those kids.”

It was what I’d most dreaded he’d say.

We kept to the hillside, moving among the trees, Cassius a few feet ahead of us, a canine early-warning system. The backpack tugged at my shoulders, filled with our supplies, including extra shells for Patrick’s shotgun and my notebook. It took forever, but we finally worked our way down toward the back of the church and peered out from the edge of the parking lot. To one side the pews lay in a jumble like a giant stack of firewood. The Hosts had removed them all from the church. To make room for what?

A flatbed truck parked by the rear door blocked most of our view of the building, but we could still make out the stained-glass windows on either side of the altar, glowing with light from within. Over the breeze we heard moans and sobs, footfalls and dragging sounds.

My mouth went dry.

We waited for a while, watching and listening, but nothing changed. Then Patrick said, “Now or never, I guess,” and crept out from cover.

I looked across at Alex. I could read the fear in her eyes, but she tightened her grip on the hockey stick and stepped from the tree line. Cassius and I stayed at her heels.

We hurried across the parking lot, passing the flatbed and jumping over the boxwood hedges beneath the window. I put my hand on Cassius’s neck and pushed him down into the dirt with us. The whine of machinery vibrated the wall at my shoulders.

Cautiously, we rose and peered through the window. Due to the stained glass, everything looked murky, drenched in blues and reds, but then I found a white piece in the mosaic and the view inside became clear.

I wish it hadn’t.

In place of the pews were rows of cages, crates, and pens, stretching from wall to wall, filling the whole interior. Every last one filled with a kid.

Hundreds of them.

Inside a repurposed chicken coop, Lyssa Unger, one of the cheerleaders, lay curled in the fetal position. Now loaded into one of our dog crates, Andre Swisher sobbed hoarsely, his muscular arms trembling. Blake Dubois had been crammed into a flat battery cage used to house hens, his discarded wheelchair flipped over beside it, one tire spinning lazily in a draft.

Dozens of Hosts moved through the aisles like the guards in some awful death camp. Most of them distributed white plastic coffee mugs from the church kitchen. I sourced the whining noise to an industrial meat grinder at the edge of the altar. Wearing his smeared butcher’s apron, Ken Everston fed the grinder, grabbing items piled at his feet. Corncobs. Raw meat. Dog food. A whole turkey still in the plastic wrapper. A constant stream of beige sludge emerged from the machine, the other Hosts passing the white mugs beneath it, filling them for the children.

They were fattening them up? Or just keeping them alive? To what end?

My gorge reared up, pressing at the back of my throat.

What made it even more scary was how organized it all was. The Hosts-or whoever was controlling them-kept moving pieces around the chessboard, executing a grand plan we couldn’t keep up with. They’d temporarily abandoned their roles to carry out various tasks. They’d done this before, of course, like when they’d melted down the guns and taken out the power lines, but I hadn’t seen this many working with such machinelike precision in one place before. It was as though their programming had been rewritten all at once, putting them in service of a new goal. Seeing them in action was as awe-inspiring as it was fearsome.

There were way too many Hosts in the church for us to launch some kind of rescue mission. We’d be overpowered immediately.

Beside me Alex stiffened. In a tiny voice, she said, “Dad?”

There he was. Sheriff Blanton, patrolling the church like a foreman. The other Hosts stepped aside before him, falling into line, making clear who was in charge.

He walked over to the basement door and swung it open. A moment later Afa Similai emerged from below, his dreadlocks swaying around his empty eye sockets. His muscles protruded as if carved from granite; Afa lifted the battery cage holding Blake. Blake slid to one end of the cage, crying out. Afa thundered to the front of the church and exited, returning a moment later to grab another crated kid.