Gregg Hurwitz - The Rains

The spaces where Patrick, Alex, and I had slept that night we’d made it to the top of the pass.

Though I’d taken a different route up the rock face, I’d wound up in the right place after all.

North and down to Stark Peak.

South and up to Lawrenceville.

I took a moment there at the fork, staring up the dirt road winding to the very top of the pass. I cast a glance at the two rectangles in the pine needles that Patrick and Alex had cleared.

If ever absence had been made visible, it was in those patches of dirt where my brother and his girlfriend had slept just last week.

Stepping from the ring of trees, I peeled south up the fork to Lawrenceville. As my legs carried me onward, a pulse beat in my temple. I realized the obvious: I was terrified of what I might find there.

It turns out I wasn’t terrified enough.

I moved cautiously up the south fork, weaving through the trees to the side of the road. As I neared Lawrenceville, I came aware of a suctioning noise.

First the smack of some sort of impact. Then a moist yielding.

I froze in my tracks and listened.

A moment later it came again.

Thump. Squelch.

The noise, arriving at regular intervals, drew me through the night like a beacon. It grew louder as I neared the outskirts of town, passing by occasional rickety cabins that had gone to seed when the cannery started busing in workers and the local economy collapsed. It grew louder yet as I came up behind the factory, threading through mud-caked backhoe undercutters and construction rigs parked in clearings among the trees.

Thump. Squelch.

An industrial wasteland nestled in a dip in the landscape, the Lawrenceville Cannery stood out from the surrounding trees even in the darkness, a vast cleared patch of shadow.

Moving from tree to tree, I crept into position above the little valley.

The sounds kept coming, but I could see nothing below.

Thump. Squelch.

Thump. Squelch.

Curiosity burned in me, but fear burned brighter. Whatever those noises were, they weren’t good.

The darkness lifted just enough for me to see the rough shapes of the buildings below. I sensed movement around the facility but couldn’t make out more than that. Dawn threatened at the eastern horizon, the black sky beginning to show blue.

Thump. Squelch.

I could make out only the shapes closest to me. The storage warehouse just below my perch. Beside it a yellow bulldozer bled through the gloom, parked by a roof-high pile of gravel. Rolls of fencing were stacked like Lincoln Logs. Rectangles of sheet metal rose at irregular intervals across the hillside. Construction must have been under way when the Dusting had hit.

Thump. Squelch.

The sky lightened another degree, the parking lot showing just barely through the haze. I sensed movement on it. Hosts on patrol?

Thump. Squelch.

The noise seemed to be coming from the factory itself. The giant building emerged slowly, like a mighty ship from the fog. The huge doors had been rolled back, venting heat from the factory floor. I could sense a bustle of activity inside, but what it was, I couldn’t say. I strained my eyes, trying to see what was going on in there.

Thump. Squelch.

The top of the sun finally broke the horizon, a pinprick of glowing yellow.

I saw through the open doors.

I really wish I hadn’t.

The Hosts moved in synchronicity, each bent to his or her task. Watching them work was like observing the insides of an intricate cuckoo clock. It might have been fascinating if what they were doing weren’t so gruesome.

Hosts crawled like worker bees over the equipment, reconfiguring the compound into a torture camp of sorts. Kids were strapped at intervals to the conveyer belt, bound at the ankles, thighs, chests, and foreheads so they could barely wiggle. Industrial-strength plier clips secured the straps to ridges on either side of the belt. The belt jerked along in lurches and pauses. It snaked around the expansive factory floor before exiting through a freshly sawed opening in the building’s side that allowed it to continue on. I guess they needed more room. Crates and cages rose in a giant wall lining an entire side of the cannery, each filled with a sobbing kid. Worming fingers, mashed faces, the glint of shattered eyeglasses-it was almost too terrible to look at. In front of this backdrop of bars and flesh, Afa Similai pulled kids squirming from their crates. With the help of several other Hosts, he bound them to the starting point of the belt.

Once a kid was secured, Sheriff Blanton hit a red button and the belt slid forward one stop before halting again. The lurching belt movement must have been calibrated for filling batches of cans or bottles.

I’d known most of these adults. Afa and Sheriff Blanton, Mr. Tomasi and Gene Durant. I remembered their faces when they held not just blank focus but human emotion. They’d been subverted and overridden, their brains hijacked. But that didn’t make any difference to me right now. Watching them do what they did made me hate them anyways.

Thump. Squelch.

I couldn’t see the end point of the assembly line, only where it disappeared into the hatch cut into the side of the building.

Thump. Squelch.

I had to walk around to see where that conveyer belt continued. Where it ended. And what was happening there.

Mindful of the Hosts patrolling the compound’s perimeter, I lowered into the scratchy brush and crawled down to the storage warehouse below me. I kept my head beneath the yellow weeds, pushing the Stetson in front of me, moving one cautious foot at a time. For all I knew, Chasers had spotted me and were hurtling up the hill already.

But I safely reached the big pile of gravel beside the bulldozer and leaned against it, catching my breath. A few pebbles trickled over my shoulders. From here I’d be able to see the outside of the building where that belt emerged. Shuffling off the backpack, I peered around the edge of the gravel.

I couldn’t take it all in at once; it was too overwhelming. I did my best to make sense of it, to assemble it in my mind piece by piece.

To the side of the cannery, several acres of forest had been cleared and a giant foundation poured for future construction. Before the Dusting the factory had evidently been in the process of a huge expansion. That explained all the supplies stashed around the area. The new foundation was enormous, three or four times the size of the original cannery.

Cratering the corner of the foundation was a massive meteor, cracked jaggedly open around the midpoint. But the inside didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen.

It was smooth and perfectly rounded, coated with transparent screens that seemed as if they were made of organic matter like the eye membranes of the Hosts. Various images flashed on the screens, though I could make out little more than shifting bluish lights.

It wasn’t just a meteor. It had been co-opted as a spaceship.

Thump. Squelch.

My attention was drawn to where the assembly belt emerged from that roughly cut hatch in the cannery wall. A twenty-foot length of the belt had been reassembled outside so the assembly line could continue to the edge of the new foundation.

Thump. Squelch.

My gaze landed at the spot where the belt ended.

A figure stood there at the receiving end like some kind of high priestess from ancient times. Something about her posture and contours suggested she was female. Everything about her was futuristic, from the sleek black suit to the polished helmet with its dark-tinted sheet of a face mask. No flesh was visible; she was completely sealed in seamless armor, which looked like an astronaut suit from another millennium.