Gregg Hurwitz - The Rains

He looked at me for a long time. Then he released the tube and took my hand.

I knew that would do it.

Our progress felt like torture, every rasp of our boots against asphalt amplified tenfold, every creak from a shadowed porch amplified a hundredfold. But even with that squeaky wheel, even pushing a gurney loaded with seven giant tanks and one portable one, we made it through undetected. At last we came up on the edge of the teachers’ parking lot, halting behind a row of hedges.

Leaving the gurney, I crawled through the hedges and signaled at the front gate with a blip of my flashlight. Then I waited for Alex’s signal that the coast was clear.

No signal came.

I waited and waited and then flickered my beam again and waited some more. Only darkness stared back through the bars of the gate.

I crawled out to where Patrick crouched by the gurney. “No signal,” I whispered. “Maybe Alex took a bathroom break.”

“No,” he said. “She’d be there. Something’s wrong.”

Carefully, he lifted his H tank off the gurney. “Let’s head for the gate. We’ll come back for the other tanks later.”

We slithered through the bushes to the other side, cast glances around us, then bolted across the parking lot. Panting, we reached the gate.

It was locked.

We looked around frantically, Patrick’s biceps bulging under the weight of the hundred-pound tank. Once again I clicked my flashlight through the bars toward the building.

Something glinted in the grass.

I lowered the beam.

It was Alex’s jigsaw pendant glittering among the blades.

Beside it, grooves gouged the grass, trailing out through the gate.

Finger marks.

The beam wobbled in my hand. I didn’t dare look over at Patrick, but I could sense him staring where I stared, seeing what I was seeing.

A voice from the darkness startled us. “Chance. Patrick.”

A girl ran up to the gate, fumbling with Ezekiel’s giant key ring.

It was Eve, not Alex.

Her hands were shaking even worse than mine.

“She’s gone.” Eve unlocked the gate and stepped back, letting it creak inward. “They got Alex.”

As Patrick and I staggered into the gym, the others rose to their feet as one. I couldn’t tell if it was a show of respect for Patrick since his girlfriend had been taken or if it was some kind of perverse curiosity, that they wanted to see our reactions.

Cassius ran up, put his front paws on my chest, and licked my face. The display of affection felt out of place considering the news we’d just received.

Ben regarded us with something like awe. “You made it,” he said. “You actually made it.”

Setting down his tank, Patrick collapsed against the nearest wall. Dr. Chatterjee ran over to him.

“The oxygen levels are playing games with him,” I said.

Chatterjee checked Patrick’s eyes, then began adjusting the dials. “Please talk to JoJo,” he said to me over his shoulder. “Behind the bleachers.”

JoJo’s stuffed animal had been left over by the base of the wall. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her without Bunny.

Rocky appeared at my side. “She won’t even talk to me,” he said.

I rested a hand on his black curls. They were matted and dirty. No one around to tell him to wash his hair, behind his ears.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

I scooped up Bunny and squeezed behind the bleachers. JoJo had wedged herself into the darkest, tiniest corner, and she was clutching something with all her might. I headed toward her, ducking, then crawling, until finally one of the benches crowded down on me so I could go no farther.

“JoJo, I can’t get to you,” I said. “I can’t help you from here.”

Her tear-streaked face tilted toward me. “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t deserve to be helped. It’s my fault.”

“What do you mean? What happened?”

“I got scared after you left. And I wanted my Frisbee. It’s the only thing that makes me think about other stuff besides… everything . So I snuck outside, and… and…” She trailed off, crying some more. “I squeezed under the fence by the oak tree.”

“You went out there alone?” I felt my body temperature rising.

Guilt. I thought about my broken promises to get that Frisbee for JoJo. How I’d dismissed her before we’d left.

And so she’d gone to retrieve it herself.

She nodded. “And I ran over to get it when…” A few quick breaths. “When he started to come for me. Alex yelled out, ’cuz she was on watch for you. I tried to run away. I tried. But she came out and hit him. With this.”

She shifted, and I saw that the shadowy item she was clutching was Alex’s hockey stick.

“Where was Cassius?”

“The gate swung back after Alex ran out to get me, and he was stuck behind it. He ran up along the fence away from the gate to bark at us all. And then Ben dragged him inside so he wouldn’t make more noise.”

“So Ben just left you and Alex out there?”

“Yeah. Alex grabbed me and ran back to the gate. But we’d just gotten inside when…” JoJo sucked air a few times, her bottom lip trembling. Her rough-cut hair was all blunt edges and stray shoots. “He grabbed her. And she fell. And dropped me. And her hockey stick. Even while he was carrying her away, she was screaming at me to lock the gate. To lock her out. So I did. I did.”

Fresh tears rolled down JoJo’s cheeks. “And it was him .” She looked up at me, and I could see the horror on her face. “It was her daddy.”

Squashed beneath the bleachers, breathing dust, I took a moment with that one.

It had been awful being there when Patrick killed Uncle Jim and Sue-Anne. But I couldn’t image how much more awful it would have been getting snatched by them. Dragged off. And caged.

“It’s not your fault,” I said when I could find my voice. “Any more than it’s Ben’s fault for throwing the Frisbee out the window. Or mine for not getting it for you like I promised.”

But it is your fault, Chance , a voice in my head said. It is.

“Now will you please come to me?”

She shook her head.

I thought for a moment, and then I said, “I’ve got Bunny here, and we’re stuck. I’m too big to be under here, and I need your help. Will you help us?”

She stared at me for a while. Then, slowly, she crawled over, Alex’s hockey stick clacking on the floorboards. She gave me a shove, and I pretended to roll free. We squirmed through the space beneath the bleachers, brushing dust from our knees. I held out Bunny. “Trade you for the hockey stick?”

JoJo took the deal.

I walked over to where Dr. Chatterjee was still working on Patrick. My brother lay on his back, weak and pale. His shirt was peeled open, and one of the big needles I’d grabbed from the nurses’ station was rammed in the crook of his arm and secured with white medical tape.

Chatterjee looked up and said, “You did great, Chance.”

Patrick lifted his head and blinked drowsily. “But saving me cost us Alex.” He sagged back against the floor, his Stetson falling off to the side.

“We have to get fluids in him.” Chatterjee nosed through the organ-donor bag. “Since we don’t have a central line, we’re limited in what we can give him. It’s good you grabbed the bags with ten-percent dextrose, because anything much higher than this will wreck his veins.” He gestured at the needle jammed into Patrick’s arm. “This is the access port for the peripheral IV. Give me a minute to get him online here. With the oxygen adjusted, once we push some nutrients, he’ll come around.”

I wasn’t used to seeing Patrick vulnerable like that. I backed away, then headed out to retrieve the tanks. Though running to and from the gurney in the night would be scary, it felt less scary than seeing Patrick so feeble.