Gregg Hurwitz - The Rains

It wouldn’t be enough. More scaled the wall all around us. Alex swung her hockey stick, knocking a few back, but they kept on, scaling and lunging. It was like an old-fashioned battle from that movie, orcs trying to storm the castle wall.

Patrick shot up toward us, leaping like a rock climber scaling a cliff face.

I stood, the log wobbling beneath me. Unstable. “Step back!” I shouted at Alex.

She hopped away, sinking into a bramble between logs on the back side. Patrick flew up the wall at me, throwing his shotgun before him. It sailed over my head and landed somewhere behind me.

Below, the barricade creaked with the weight of countless bodies. Another few seconds and they’d swarm him. I leaned over the top of the log, praying it would hold, and lowered my hands, screaming, “Jump!”

Patrick bent to leap. For an awful moment, I thought he was too far below, that it wouldn’t be enough, that our fingertips would brush and he’d fall away into the living mass. Then I remembered the baling hooks that had been dangling from my wrists all this time.

As Patrick leapt, I shoved the hooks down at him, adding about a foot to my reach.

His hands rose to the metal curves, and I clamped down on the handles with everything I had. My chest and stomach ground painfully on the top log. My shoulders popped under Patrick’s weight, the ligaments screaming. I dragged him up and over. He tumbled down the back side of the barricade before grabbing hold of a bough heavy with pine needles.

The clamor of hands and feet pounded the barricade below us.

Next to me Nick stared down, his muscles locked up from terror.

“Nick!” I yelled. “Move!”

He pivoted to vault over the top log.

His bare foot slipped on the wet bark.

His arms rose up into the air to grab something that wasn’t there, and for a split second he floated right beside me, facing over the barricade at Patrick and Alex, his legs cycling.

Then he dropped.

I grabbed his hood as he fell, but the hands below caught him. There was an instant of resistance. Then they tore him away, screaming, down the canted face of the barricade.

His hoodie still swayed from my fist; they’d ripped him right out of it.

With shocking speed they moved him overhead toward the back of the throng. He was whisked away like a rock star surfing a crowd at a concert. His wild eyes found me for an instant. Then a gnarled hand gripped his chin and spun him around. Countless hands carried him across the swell until he faded into the darkness.

My throat had closed; I couldn’t even yell after him.

The Hosts resumed their upward race, clawing their way to the top of the barricade. Several had reached the apex, arms bent over the highest log, faces rising into view.

I stepped back, dug my heels into the branches behind me, and drove my chest into the wobbling topmost tree. It rocked once on its makeshift bed, aided by the Hosts tugging from the other side, then rolled back at me. When it rocked forward again, I hurled myself into it with all my might. It rose up, up, reaching a tipping point. And then it went.

The tree hammered down the front of the barricade, smashing Hosts, bulldozing everything in its way. It picked up speed, catching one Chaser square in the thighs and launching her so far that she smashed into the overturned bus. Once the tree hit level ground, it slowed until it rolled off the highway into a ditch.

I didn’t have time to be impressed with the damage. A number of Hosts still remained down below, picking themselves up, regrouping. I stared hard through the darkness, but there was no sign of Nick. He’d been carried off already. Some of the injured Hosts staggered toward the barricade again. A woman with a caved-in cheek and a missing lower jaw. A man with his collarbone spiking through his uniform shirt.

We couldn’t wait around.

When I turned, I saw Patrick and Alex looking up at me. I was still holding Nick’s Stark Peak Monarchs hoodie. I reached over the top of the barricade and let it go. It fluttered down out of sight.

Then I started hopping down the back side of the barricade. At the bottom we circled up. Cassius stuck his wet nose in my palm, and I stroked his soft head.

“I should’ve left him to hide in the car,” Patrick said, and walked away.

Alex shot me a frustrated look and then followed. The road up was empty. No abandoned cars we could take. We made the choice to stick to the woods beside the pass, hiding under cover as we started up. Sure enough, the few Hosts we saw came stumbling down the middle of the road. They were smart to do so; the terrain was brutal. We went from mud to boulders to brambles to granite faces that we had to help one another scale. Treetops blotted out the moonlight, making the climb even harder.

Through the trees we kept an eye on the road for vehicles but spotted nothing except a Subaru upended in a roadside gully. We hiked until I felt like my hamstrings might snap, until my hands were raw and my calves on fire. At last we broke free of the pines, standing in an open patch near the top of the pass. Looking back across the valley, we saw only darkness. Crisp air usually meant that from high on the pass we could spot the flare of lights marking Creek’s Cause, but not today. Not anymore.

We topped a cracked hump of stone, pulled ourselves to level ground, and lay panting on the cold dirt. Above us rose a solemn ring of Douglas firs. A stone’s throw away, the highway forked into two dirt roads, one winding up to dead-end at Lawrenceville, the other rising to a plateau on the north before starting its corkscrew descent into Stark Peak. At either side crevices fell away treacherously, sheer drops without bottom.

“Let’s rest here a bit,” Patrick said.

I about collapsed with relief. He and Alex started clearing pine needles to make a space to lie down. Taking the hint, I got Cassius, moved a brief ways off toward the road, and cleared my own makeshift camp.

Patrick with Alex.

Me with my dog.

I sat down, my muscles complaining, my lower back stiffening. It had been a grueling climb. I stared at the stars and breathed the air, as clean up here as it was anywhere on earth. Was it free of spores? This far away from Creek’s Cause, it had to be.

Cassius lay against me, the ridge on his back pressed to my side. As I scratched behind his ears, I noticed that he’d grown into some of the extra folds of fur. The shape of his face had changed, too, losing some of its puppy softness. Sometime over the past few days, he’d become a young dog.

I supposed whether we liked it or not, we were all growing up.

I took out my notebook and leaned against my backpack. Resting my flashlight on the ledge of my shoulder threw enough of a glow for me to write by.

From across the clearing, I could hear murmured voices.

“… have to send help back for the others,” Patrick was saying.

I had to strain to hear them.

“We will,” Alex said. “But we don’t have to worry about your birthday anymore. About your turning into one of them next week. We can let adults worry about fixing everything. That’s supposed to be their job anyways.”

“Then what?” Patrick asked.

“Then we can do whatever we want.”

I felt a gnawing at my stomach. It took a moment for me to recognize it for what it was. Loneliness.

Patrick and Alex were going to move off into a new life together, and I was going to be left behind.

I pictured those windshield pebbles spilling from Mom’s purse, red like rubies. How they’d bounced on the floorboards at my feet. How alone I’d felt downstairs with the purse and my dad’s cracked watch. How the smell of lilac had flowered all around, taunting me. The darkest despair I’d ever felt until Patrick had found me. I got it from here, little brother. He’d held me tight, so I knew that even if the world had come apart, he’d be there.