The Rains

ENTRY 12

We all headed down the long school hallway clustered together, Dr. Chatterjee moving at a decent pace despite his leg orthotics. I was still breathing hard, relieved that I hadn’t had my skull caved in by my favorite teacher.

“White matter!” Dr. Chatterjee announced excitedly. “It’s the key.”

“Like brain white matter?” I asked.

“Shouldn’t we keep our voices down?” Patrick said.

Dr. Chatterjee waved him off. “It’s safe in here. Now, look.” He unclipped an electronic unit swaying from his belt like a holstered gun. We all crowded around to see it in the dim hall.

“Wait,” Rocky said. “That’s the carbon monoxide detector thing, right?”

We looked at him, surprised.

“What?” he said. “I was emergency room captain in Mrs. Rauch’s class last year.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “It detects carbon monoxide, natural gas, other hazardous leaks. But check this out.” He clicked a button, backlighting the screen, which blinked code red. Beneath it two words flashed: UNIDENTIFIED PARTICULATE.

His face, shiny with sweat, held equal parts worry and excitement. “So my hypothesis is that this airborne particulate enters the human body-”

“Tell him about the spores,” Patrick said to me.

Dr. Chatterjee stiffened. “What spores?”

“Like the zombie ants,” I said.

His lips quivered a little. He scratched at the side of his face, the stubble giving off a rasping sound. It occurred to me that I’d never seen him not perfectly clean-shaven. “What do you mean, Chance?”

“Well, we saw Hank McCafferty-” I caught myself, feeling a surge of remorse. I glanced nervously at Rocky and JoJo.

Rocky’s eyes glimmered, but he kept his chin up. “It’s okay,” he said. “I want to know.”

I took a deep breath. Then I continued, filling in Dr. Chatterjee, starting with when Patrick had interrupted me in the barn. The acrid smell on the wind. The hammering noises and screams carrying over from the McCafferty place. When I got to the part about Mrs. McCafferty in the grain silo, JoJo buried her and Bunny’s faces in her brother’s chest. I described climbing to the top of the water tower and the sight waiting for us, Hank blown wide open, releasing spores to the wind.

Rocky held his sister tight. He didn’t sob, but tears spilled down his cheeks. Alex put her arms around him from behind, holding him even as he held JoJo. My face burned as I related details of Hank’s death-I knew as well as anyone that a child should never have to know too much about that-but I also realized that everything was different now.

We couldn’t lose track of our emotions, certainly, but we couldn’t give in to them the way we used to. Maybe Rocky and JoJo would need this information someday. Dr. Chatterjee certainly needed it now.

I finished telling him about the scene at the water tower and said, “Like those ants in that video you showed us. With the parasite?”

He took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his rumpled button-down shirt, though they did not look in need of polishing. “Ophiocordyceps unilateralis,” he said quietly. “The pieces are starting to fit together.”

“How?” Patrick said.

“Those adults out there”-Chatterjee pointed a trembling finger through the doorway of the nearest classroom to the windows and beyond-“have been infected.” He shook the detector, the words blinking out at us again: UNIDENTIFIED PARTICULATE. “This parasite attacked their white matter.”

“So why didn’t it attack ours?” Alex asked.

“You’re teenagers,” he said. “You have less.”

Patrick drew back his head. “We do?”

“Of course. Kids have a lesser-developed frontal cortex.”

“Rub it in,” Alex said.

“Look,” Chatterjee said. His hands shaped the air as they did when he was in teacher mode. He seemed to forget that one of them was gripping a clawhammer. “Every year from childhood on, white matter wraps around more and more of the nerve cells of the brain-that process is called myelination.”

“What is white matter?” Rocky asked.

As the sun inched up, squares of light from the windows stretched across the classroom floor opposite us. Some of the male Hosts had drawn closer to the school, spiraling their way around the front parking lot. One man in a scuffed denim jacket drew closer to the fence, his shoulder rat-a-tat-tatting along the chain-link, the sound sending electricity up my spine. Dr. Chatterjee took Rocky by the arm, drawing him out of sight past the doorway, the rest of us following. Sensing that something was wrong, Cassius leaned into my leg, his black-mask face pointed up, no doubt reading the stress coming off me.

“White matter transmits information from different parts of the body back to the cerebral cortex,” Chatterjee said, the hammer wagging by his face. “Which helps with executive function-decision making, attention, planning, motivation. Think of the myelination of axons as creating information pathways, connections that allow communication between all the parts of the brain. That’s what maturity is, really. Teenagers grow more white matter every year. But the last part of the brain to be myelinated is the frontal lobe.”

“So you’re basically saying we’re all stupid,” Alex said.

Chatterjee shook his head. “I’m saying that part of being a kid, a teenager, is that you literally don’t have the capacity yet to think fully about the consequences of your actions.”

Alex cut in: “Where have I heard that before?”

Patrick had leaned back around the doorjamb to spy on the Hosts outside. Chatterjee yanked him back, as if proving his point, while barely slowing down. “That’s why teenagers can be impulsive, angry, lovesick, higher in risk taking-”

“Well,” Patrick said. “We’ll need risk taking now.”

“That’s absolutely true. But if what Chance is saying is correct, then this airborne parasite invades its host and gains control by spreading through the white matter, seizing control of the frontal cortex.” He waved the clawhammer in a circle. “From there it takes over the brain and the nervous system, manipulating the host like a puppet. It can run the human body as if it’s a machine, operating the muscles without regard for pain or injury.”

I thought about Uncle Jim’s death shudder. All those men we’d seen out there, walking their mindless spirals. Coach Hanson scrabbling forward to get us, not even caring about the bone sticking out of her leg.

I suddenly understood. “So if the parasite is spread through white matter, the frontal cortex-the puppet master-has to be covered with white matter for it to become infected. Or else the spores have no pathways to get to our brain’s control centers.”

“That’s right!” Dr. Chatterjee said. “Which means the thing that makes it harder for teenagers to formulate mature decisions is the same thing that saved you. And saved me.”

Suddenly I felt much younger than my fifteen years. There it was, tightening around my spinal cord, that same sensation I’d felt as a six-year-old waking up to Sheriff Blanton standing on our porch, shifting awkwardly from boot to boot, hat in his hands, bad news on his face. That feeling of bone-deep aloneness, as if I’d been set adrift, a boat left to navigate across the rocky slate of the ocean. If what Dr. Chatterjee was saying was true, then the people least equipped to make good decisions were the only ones around Creek’s Cause left to make them.

Like me.

But Patrick was still focused on Chatterjee. “Why’d it save you?”

“Do you know what causes multiple sclerosis?” Chatterjee asked.

We all shook our heads.

“White-matter lesions.” He smiled. “I have enough holes in my brain that the parasite couldn’t take me over either.” Turning, he started back up the hallway, wobbling past the cracked-porcelain bank of water fountains. I hurried to keep up, Cassius scampering along at my side. With his big strides, Patrick had no problem regaining the lead.

“Your weakness is your strength,” Patrick said.

“That’s right, Patrick,” Chatterjee agreed. Then he looked at us all. “Just like your weakness is yours. As Alex said, you’re willing to take risks. Now you’ll have plenty of opportunity to do so.”

I thought of Eddie Lu out there wandering around the Dumpsters in his beanie and apron. “Wait,” I said. “But this means… as we get older…”

Chatterjee’s eyes moistened behind his round glasses. “If the spores are still in the air, yes.”

“What?” JoJo asked. “What’s that mean?”

“It means we’ll turn into them,” Rocky said angrily, waving a hand at the wall and the Hosts beyond.

It took a moment for the realization to work its way across JoJo’s face, and then her forehead furrowed and she started crying. I wanted to comfort her, but the shock was still ringing through me, too. Of all of us, she’d be safe the longest. I’d get there well before her, the white matter spreading through my brain until one day it hit a tipping point. One more cell would grow, bridging some microscopic connection-just enough to allow the parasite to reach its nasty little claws around my frontal cortex, encasing it and taking me over.

But first I’d lose Patrick.

And Alex.

It was like life had always been, I guess, but accelerated. Aging brings us closer to death-any idiot knows that. I’d just always thought I’d have a longer runway. I was fifteen, sure, but at times I still felt like I was just a kid. Even if the future laid out before me wasn’t glamorous or grand, it still always seemed to stretch out, decade after decade, farther than I could see. I didn’t want the end of the road to be visible. Not yet.

I pictured having to watch that death shudder hit Patrick. And alter him. My big brother, my rock, the most solid thing I’d ever known.

And that was only if we got lucky. If the Hosts didn’t take him first. Or me.

JoJo’s cries grew louder.

Patrick said, “We gotta be quiet. We don’t know who’s in here.”

JoJo crammed Bunny’s ear into her mouth and chewed on the ragged tip.

“Don’t worry,” Chatterjee said, ambling ahead of us past the glass trophy cabinet toward the gymnasium. “We’ve checked the entire school. It’s secure.”

“Who’s we?” Patrick said.

Dr. Chatterjee struck the double doors with the heels of his hands, and Alex gave a little gulp of shock. We froze at the threshold. Dozens of sets of eyes stared back at us.

Huddled in groups across the bleachers and the basketball court were about half the kids of Creek’s Cause.

The others who had made it.