Gregg Hurwitz - The Rains

Would he be there now?

Falling asleep felt like an escape.

A hand clamped over my mouth.

My eyes flew open. Dead of night. Skeletal branches overhead.

I bucked, but the grip was too strong. Cassius lay at my side, not growling but watching silently. I put it together an instant before the whisper came in my ear.

“Quiet. It’s me.” Patrick reached past my head where the flashlight had rolled when I’d dozed off. His hand pulsed around it, the thin beam vanishing.

I’d tensed from my heels to my face, but I forced myself to relax and melt into the ground. Then I heard it.

Wails and cries.

Tires crackling over the dirt road.

Very slowly, I turned my head. We were mostly hidden by a net of leaves, but through the gaps we watched a procession of flatbed trucks roll by.

Each loaded high with cages.

Each cage filled with a kid.

The sounds were the worst part. Hacking and gagging and rent-open sobbing.

They looked like chicken trucks brimming with hens stuffed into little cubes. Except hens didn’t have fingers that clutched the bars. They didn’t plead and sob. They didn’t thrash violently, making the metal jangle.

The trucks kept on, the tires less than ten yards from where Patrick and I lay flat in the dirt, protected only by the mesh of branches. To avoid the barricade, they must’ve backtracked, then circled all the way around to Bristol, a six-hour detour through several towns in the low valley-too dangerous an option for us. Then they must’ve refilled their tanks somehow and driven up the southern shoulder.

Now we watched the trucks veer up toward Lawrenceville at the top of the pass. The turn was abrupt, the tread throwing up pebbles.

A cage slid free of the straps and plummeted down the sheer rock face, a girl’s scream growing fainter and fainter. The cage pinged once off the stone and vanished into the abyss. The other cages on the top level shifted around, a few more sliding off, bouncing against the lip, and plummeting into space.

I can’t describe the sounds those kids made as they fell.

Though I didn’t dare look over at Alex, I could hear her muffled sobs.

Finally the procession ended. As the last truck chugged upslope, I caught a glimpse of the crates in the very back. Crammed into a battery cage, Nick stared out at the kicked-up dust on the road, his face blank, his eyes as black and lifeless as those of a Host.

That last truck rumbled off into the darkness. We stayed perfectly still until the final vibration of the engine faded from the air. Then we dragged ourselves out of the clearing, raw from what we’d witnessed.

“They just kept going,” Alex said. “Those kids fell off… into the… and they just kept driving.”

Patrick put his arms around her.

“We gotta move,” I said.

On stiff legs I headed north, toward Stark Peak.

After a moment their footsteps pattered behind me. The incline steepened, my thigh muscles aching. I bent into the rise, cutting through a stand of pines to get us out of plain sight. Cassius trotted at my side.

“Good boy,” I said. “Good, good boy.” He grinned up at me, unconcerned. Taking his kid for a walk.

Crossing my arms in front of my face, I forged through pine needles. Something hard came underfoot, and I opened my eyes just in time to find myself on the brink of a granite ledge, staring at a drop that seemed to fall forever.

I halted sharply, the tips of my boots tapping a few pebbles that floated down and down. “Guys, wait-”

But Patrick collided with me from behind. My head and torso rocked over the edge, my boots holding on the lip, my arms pinwheeling through empty air as I tried to keep my balance.

Patrick’s hand shot out, steady as ever, and locked down my wrist. I was tilted over the edge, nothing around or beneath me. We stayed like that for a moment, too scared to move. Exhaling slowly, Patrick reeled me in over my boots. I took a few steps away from the edge, joining Alex back near the tree line. Then, finally, I let my muscles unclench.

She pointed past me. “Look.”

I turned. Spread way down below like a scattering of jewels were the lights of Stark Peak. Streetlamps and windows and the giant spire atop city hall, glowing orange and yellow for the coming fall festival. Life in ordinary motion.

I’d never seen such a welcoming sight.

A different weather system, like Alex had said, devoid of spores.

“We did it.” Alex smiled. “We did it. We’ll find a car on the way down. And even if we don’t, we’ll make it on foot in what-four, five hours?”

“Less,” Patrick said.

“We can send them to save the kids at Lawrenceville. And to our school. They can finally start putting the world back together.”

We came together in a victory huddle of sorts, arms around shoulders, a tiny hard-won celebration.

A boom rent the air, loud enough to vibrate my ribs. Pinecones dropped from the branches all around us, plopping on the ground. Cassius yelped and shot in reverse into the forest.

The granite ledge spiderwebbed. We leapt back as it went to pieces and crumbled away.

Another boom sounded. Then another. So loud I hunched and covered my ears.

“Oh, no,” Alex said. “Oh, God, no.”

I looked at her, but her gaze was elsewhere, fixed on the sky. Patrick’s was, too.

Rising slowly, I drew shoulder to shoulder with them.

Hundreds of asteroids streaked through the night air, rocketing for Earth. Alight with flames, they slanted toward Stark Peak, Lakewood, Springfield-more cities than I could name, more than I could even see . Too many to count, they filled the sky.

The asteroid over Creek’s Cause wasn’t the problem.

It was the prelude.

It wasn’t the grueling hike down that wrecked us, nor the half-day wait at the base of the pass for nightfall. It wasn’t the two hours we spent huddled behind the barricade for the horde to disperse so we could boost the Silverado, nor the long, silent drive across the valley. It wasn’t even the jarring off-road route we were forced to take as we neared Creek’s Cause, having to dodge the town that once belonged to us.

It was the weight of despair.

We hadn’t failed just in our mission; we were coming back to a far more chilling reality. It wasn’t just Creek’s Cause that was compromised-or the valley itself.

It was the whole state. Or even the continent.

And Patrick turned eighteen in four days.

After leaving the truck in the woods outside town, we circled the school and came in from the barren plain to the west, sneaking to the left-field fence of the baseball diamond. Patrick had switched the locks on the bullpen gate himself, and so after a few twists of the combination dial we drifted onto the outfield grass and crept toward the school just as dawn started to lift the cover of night.

Finally we came up on the back door near Dr. Chatterjee’s biology room. Before Patrick could give a tap with his knuckles, it swung open.

Ben Braaten’s wide, broken face peered out at us, chewing a Slim Jim, a lookout canteen looped around his neck.

He took our measure, then stepped back to let us in. “All hail the rescuing army,” he said.

We entered the dark gym, worn out and exhausted. Some kids were sleeping, but there was a surprising amount of activity. JoJo and Rocky tossed the Frisbee, the fluorescent green disk zipping back and forth. JoJo had set Bunny on the bottom bleacher so that those half-marble stuffed-animal eyes could watch them play. JoJo spotted us first, gave a shout of delight, and ran over, wrapping her arms around me. Her sweeping brown hair had been cut short, sticking out at jagged angles. I guess the two-minute showers had made it too hard to manage. It looked terrible and adorable at the same time.