The Rains

ENTRY 13

Our friends and schoolmates were in terrible shape. Both of the Mendez twins, JoJo’s closest friends, were missing patches of their hair. Little Jenny White wore a torn and bloody dress, and one of her shoes was gone. I couldn’t remember her age, but she couldn’t have been older than ten. A few seniors were there, including Ben Braaten, his face sporting that jigsaw scar from the car crash that had killed his two brothers. I saw several of my classmates. Eve Jenkins, who sat next to me in American history, had claw marks across her face. It looked like they’d been caused by fingernails.

A bunch of the emergency cots had been rolled out from the storage room, just like after last year’s flood, when two dozen families had taken up residence here for the better part of a month while their houses were repaired. The retractable bleachers, pulled out now like they were for pep rallies and basketball games, served as a base camp for some of the kids. The benches were covered with sleeping bags, backpacks, first-aid kits, and a few scattered pillows for those lucky enough to have grabbed them before they fled. A row of makeshift weapons-knives, fire axes, baseball bats-lined the lowest bench. Now I understood Chatterjee’s foraging among hammers and wrenches in the shop class. High casement windows atop the bleachers let in weak shafts of dusty light. A freestanding dry-erase board had been wheeled to the front of the polished court, facing the cots. Coach McGill’s zone defense diagrams had been mostly erased and written over them was a list of hundreds of names.

A roll call of all the kids of Creek’s Cause.

The survivors must have made a list of their team members and classmates, young neighbors and relatives. About a hundred of the names on the unofficial census had been crossed off.

While we’d been scrambling from horror to horror, they’d been hard at work organizing here tonight. Almost as hard at work as the Hosts had been.

Dr. Chatterjee walked to the board, his steps echoing through the gym. He picked up the marker and crossed out Patrick Rain, Chance Rain, Alexandra Blanton, Rocky McCafferty, JoJo McCafferty. The tip made a squeak with each line.

None of us had spoken. We were too stunned. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hundreds of names that weren’t crossed off. All those kids missing, taken by Hosts. Andre Swisher from track. Talia Randall, the picture-perfect cheer captain. Blake Dubois, one of the special-needs kids. I pictured Blake with his warm smile, his stick-thin legs propped on the footrests of his wheelchair. He wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“We weren’t sure we’d find any more kids,” Chatterjee said. “The town is pretty much locked down by the Hosts. You live the farthest out, so I suppose it makes sense that it took you longer to get here.”

Alex peered out through her tangled bangs. “Plus, we had a few detours on the way.”

Patrick finally broke our silence, turning to face the others. “We got work to do,” he said. “More of us could still be locked up or hiding in houses.” His shadow against the floorboard was well defined, right down to the Stetson. “Why aren’t we out there helping them?”

A number of the older kids averted their eyes.

“Dick and Jaydon went out,” Ben Braaten said. “And never came back.”

Patrick stared at him. He and Ben had never gotten along, not since the fistfight behind Jack Kaner’s barn in their freshman year. This was a while before the car crash, and Ben and his brothers thought it would be funny to empty my backpack into Hogan’s Creek. I hadn’t thought it was very funny, and Patrick hadn’t either. The brawl went twenty minutes and wound up a draw-the only fight I’d known Patrick not to win. Both of them were bigger now, and every time they were near each other, it seemed like they were itching to go at it again and answer the question left hanging by the last round.

“The Hosts are taking the kids to the church.” Patrick raised the shotgun, laid it over his shoulder. “We should scout it, see if we can free them.”

Ben waved a hand. A line of scar tissue twisted his upper lip, so you could never tell whether he was smirking or not. “You want to kill yourself, have at it.”

Britney Durant, Gene’s daughter and Alex’s best friend, cocked her head, her jaw shifting from side to side. A rainbow ribbon took up her chestnut hair in a ponytail. She said, “Ben, don’t be such a-”

“We need a plan,” Dr. Chatterjee said, cutting her off. “But first we need to regroup, think everything through carefully.”

I remembered what he’d said in the hall about impulsiveness and decision making and put a hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Let’s take a second, Patrick,” I said quietly.

He looked over at me, gave a little nod. At times I was the only person Patrick would listen to.

“Check in your weapons, please,” Chatterjee said, gesturing to the lowest bench. We stepped into the gym, Cassius staying next to me like he’d been trained. As Patrick, Alex, and I laid down our weapons, JoJo ran to the Mendez girls, and they did a three-way huddle-embrace. The rest of our little band spread out, greeting our friends, bumping knuckles and waving. It was comforting, but I also felt a weird embarrassment. One of the McGraw boys from my PE class was balled up in a corner sobbing. Leonora Rose, who I’d known since forever, squeezed me in a tight hug. Others crowded in on me with a million questions.

Chubby Chet Rogers leaned toward me, his cheeks flushed with concern. “Did you see my little brother?”

Someone else said, “My mom-was my mom in the square?”

All those dread-filled faces, hands grabbing at me, trying to get my attention. Fighting through claustrophobia, I shook my head. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t. I don’t know.” The kids finally eased off and left me alone, going back to their groups. Gossip swirled all around, bitter with desperation.

“I heard Tommy’s dad put him in a duffel bag.”

“Sheila saw Patrice slung over her mommy’s shoulder in a burlap sack. She said she could see her in there squirming.”

Through the press of bodies, I saw Alex resting her hands on Britney’s shoulders, talking to her. Britney was crying. I figured Alex had told her about seeing her dad and uncle in the square, working the jackhammers, taking down the power grid. They were Hosts like everyone else’s parents. For the first time in my life, I was grateful that my mom and dad weren’t around. Seeing Uncle Jim and Aunt Sue-Anne had been painful enough. At least I never had to see this happen to my parents.

I reached the bleachers and realized I was standing next to Eve Jenkins. She said hi quietly and turned her right cheek away from me, the one with the scrapes.

Patrick had always thought that she had a crush on me, though I wasn’t sure. She’d do things like borrow my science textbook, then stop by our house later with it, apologizing that she’d forgotten to give it back. Patrick said it was an excuse to see me, but I wondered if she was just absentminded. She was pretty in a simple kind of way-dark hair with straight bangs, round face, a dimple in one cheek when she smiled. Even though she was also older than me, next to Alex she still looked like a kid.

Then again, I supposed I still looked like a kid, too.

Up in the bleachers, JoJo and Rocky were sitting behind the Mendez twins, helping them put their hair up in pigtails to cover the patches that had been yanked out.

Eve’s eyes were still lowered, her face turned slightly away. I figured maybe I should take a page from JoJo and Rocky’s book.

“Hey,” I said to her. “You okay?”

Her eyes were watering. “It’s nothing.”

“Fingernails?”

She nodded, maybe because she knew she’d start crying if she spoke.

“Can I clean it for you?” I asked.

She firmed her trembling lips. Then she turned her face fully to me for the first time. Her brown eyes held tiny flecks of yellow. “My mom,” she said. And that was all she could get out.

I took some Neosporin from one of the first-aid kits on the bleachers and put it on a soft gauze pad. I rested one hand on her warm cheek, and she closed her eyes. When the pad dabbed her cuts, she flinched, squeezing the wrist of my hand on her cheek. I didn’t pause, and she didn’t stop me. Cassius walked over and nudged her, and she lowered her other hand. He licked her palm. Once I’d finished, Eve took a shuddering breath and opened her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

We were interrupted by a loud rapping sound. We turned to see Alex tapping the dry-erase board with her hockey stick to get everyone’s attention. Patrick was up front with her, Dr. Chatterjee to the side. The gym fell silent.

Britney stood beside Alex, her face red from crying. They were holding hands, but now Alex let go and stepped in front of the board.

“Okay, guys,” Alex said. “Let’s talk about where we are with everything. Have you tried a phone?”

“Of course we tried a phone,” Ben Braaten said. He wasn’t as tall as Patrick, but he was thicker, with beefy biceps and big square wrists. His flannel shirt tugged up in the front, snared around something shoved in the waistband of his jeans. As he swaggered closer, I saw that it was a bolt gun used to stun cattle before the kill. It made sense, since his dad worked at a slaughterhouse. An image from earlier came to me-Don Braaten in his bloodstained overalls, pinning Janie Woodrow to the road.

Cassius gave a low growl, and a moment later Ben breezed by me, bumping my shoulder. He ran a hand over his bristling crew cut. The rippled flesh from a skin graft at his hairline never ceased to fascinate me, not because it was ugly-it wasn’t-but because it always looked to me like some otherworldly mark. When his drunken older brothers had crashed the Camaro, Ben alone had emerged from the fiery hull, and the scar on his forehead seemed like the thumbprint of an angel or a devil branded into his flesh, marking him to survive.

He crossed his arms, confronting Alex and Patrick. “Phone lines are cut. Internet’s out. Power’s out. We got the emergency generator, but we figure it’s best to use it as little as possible, keep the lights off so we don’t draw the-What’d you call ’em? Hosts? We gotta go through the entire school before we power on the generator, make sure all the light switches and fans are off, anything that’ll alert them. We were just about to get started. So thanks for the quick thinking, Alexandra, but we got it covered.”

“Oh, yeah,” Patrick said, gesturing around. “Looks like you’ve got everything solved, Ben. No need for any new ideas.”

“We’ve managed just fine so far without big bad Patrick Rain. We got a system in place, and that’s the only reason you’re looking at a hundred survivors. We don’t need some blonde waltzing in here giving orders.”

Patrick’s mouth tensed. “I didn’t hear her give any orders.”

“What? She can’t speak up for herself? She needs you to look out for her like you’ve looked out for your kid brother since your parents croaked?”

Patrick set down the shotgun and took a step forward. Ben smiled that twisted smile and raised his fists. “Okay, then.”

Dr. Chatterjee tried to get between Patrick and Ben, but he was too slow; Patrick had already breezed by. “Hang on,” Chatterjee said. “This is the last thing we need right now.”

Patrick and Ben had almost closed in on each other when a scream from outside lofted in through the high windows. The two of them froze. JoJo covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut. It came again, a child’s cry.

And then suddenly it cut off.

Marina Mendez scampered up the bleachers to the top bench and put her face to the window. “They got Angie B.,” she said.

The silence that followed was broken by a few of the younger kids sobbing. Slowly, I became aware of Patrick and Ben close to me, still locked in their standoff. Patrick stepped back from Ben, holding his hands to the sides. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he turned to Dr. Chatterjee and the other kids. “I was being stupid.”

Alex glared at Ben. “Have you tried the TV?” she asked.

“Cable lines are cut,” Ben said.

“How ’bout the crappy old one with the rabbit ears in the teachers’ lounge?” Alex said. “You think of that?”

Ben reddened a little. “Who cares about the TV?”

“I do. Because with a TV we can see how far this thing’s spread.” Alex reached over her shoulder, grabbing the handle of her hockey stick and whipping it free of the backpack. It looked like she was unsheathing a sword. “I’ll go get it,” she said. “You stay here and act important.”

She turned and pushed out through the swinging doors. Patrick started after her, but Britney wiped her face and said, “It’s okay, Patrick. You stay and help figure things out here. I’ll go with her.”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded. Britney grabbed a baseball bat and jogged out after her best friend, her ponytail bouncing from side to side, the bright ribbon flashing into view.

“Okay,” Chatterjee said. “Chance, will you come up here and explain to everyone what you explained to me?”

I walked to the front, sensing all those sets of eyes on me, a familiar self-consciousness welling in my chest. I felt better when Cassius padded over and sat next to me. I cleared my throat. “Look, I’m not sure about this, but there’s some stuff I thought might be right, maybe.”

“Chance,” Patrick said. “Just tell them.”

So I did. I went through what we’d managed to work out about the spores and the Hosts. Saying it out loud again, I realized just how much we still didn’t know. I felt like an impostor standing up there acting like I was some kind of expert. It didn’t help that Ben stood in the front, arms crossed. A few times Patrick urged me to speak louder so the kids in the back could hear, too. It was hard, but I got through it.

As soon as I was done, the questions started pouring in.

Eve asked, “Why do some of them swell up and explode and others chase kids around and look at the ground and stuff?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“In some species it’s not uncommon to see differentiated roles,” Dr. Chatterjee said, stepping in to help me. “Like ants and bees have drones, workers, and queens. Or it could be that the first-generation Hosts serve to spread the infection and the second-generation Hosts…” He paused. “Act differently.”

Little Jenny White raised her hand next. “I stabbed Mrs. Johnson through the stomach. And she lived.”

Her cheeks were flushed, and her chin trembled. Nine years old or so, standing there in a bloody dress, talking about putting a knife through her neighbor’s gut. A week ago it would have been unthinkable. A day ago it would have been unthinkable.

When Jenny spoke again, her voice was hoarse. “So how do you kill them?”

“We think it’s their brains that are effected,” I said. “So you gotta shoot them in the head.”

Marina Mendez piped up from her post by the window atop the bleachers. “Just like z-”

“Don’t say it,” Rocky cut in.

Dezi Siegler, one of Ben’s buddies, called out from the back, “But we don’t have any guns. Except your brother. And you.”

“Yeah,” Leonora Rose said. “Does other stuff work? Like if you bash them in the skull?”

Ben tugged the bolt gun from his jeans and held it up over his head. He tugged the trigger. Compressed air hissed, and there came the thunderous smack of the steel rod firing. “This worked just fine,” he said.

The raised gun caught a beam of light from the high window. The end was coated in blood.

“But I thought that was just a stun gun,” Eve said.

“For cattle.” Ben thumbed another air cartridge into place. “But compared to a cow skull, a human’s is like an eggshell. It’ll put a Host on the ground in seconds flat.” A smile blossomed on his face. “Trust me.”

The doors boomed open behind us, making me jump. Alex entered with the small TV tucked under one arm, hockey stick clenched in her other hand. Her hair fell across her face, and she jerked her head, clearing it from her eyes. “Look what the blonde found,” she said.

Britney came in at her heels. I had to say, seeing them up there with their makeshift weapons, they looked pretty tough. Britney might not have been an athlete like Alex, but she was on the cheer team, her muscles shaped from being a base, propping up the pyramids and throwing the fliers. These were Creek’s Cause girls, not the willowy types you saw on TV who looked like they needed a cheeseburger.

Alex walked over, set down the unit on the lowest bleacher bench, and let her bag slip off her shoulder and thud on the floor.

“That’s all well and good,” Ben said. “But what are you gonna plug it into? Like I said, we can’t turn on the generator until-”

From her bag Alex pulled a twelve-volt battery with an outlet plug, the one Mrs. Yee used in physics when she talked about circuits and joules and made a lightbulb glow. Alex plugged in the TV, looked across her shoulder, and gave Ben a smirk.

He sucked his teeth and glanced away.

All the kids gathered in the court, sitting cross-legged, staring hopefully at the screen. Marina alone stayed in her perch high on the bleachers, staring out the window, as if she still couldn’t believe the world she was looking at. Taking a deep breath, Alex pushed the button. The TV went on with a popping sound. The little screen filled with static.

As Alex fussed with the rabbit ears, I stared across the rows of stressed-out faces. In the dimness of the gym, I could see the TV’s glow flickering in all those sets of eyes like a pilot light. Like hope.

Everyone sat there as if it were some kind of movie night.

A signal caught on the screen, a blurry image scrolling vertically like the self-dumping hoppers in a grain lift machine. Another tweak of the rabbit ears and the image stilled. It was some dumb talk show, the host overseeing a competition between housewives who’d done their own makeovers. Alex started clicking the plastic knob, changing the channels. An ad for a new kind of car wax. A close-up of a weeping woman in soap-opera-soft lighting. A newscaster giving a live early-morning traffic report, the sound fuzzed by the bad signal.

Everything looked to be normal.

When Alex turned off the TV, you could sense the relief in the room, the first stirrings of optimism.

“Okay,” Patrick said. “So we can assume that the spores from McCafferty haven’t spread out of the valley.”

“Not yet,” Eve said.

That sent a ripple of concern across the basketball court.

“Let’s focus first,” Chatterjee said, “on what we know to be true.” He ticked off the first point on his slender forefinger. “The adults are affected, but not the kids. Can we zero in on an age?”

A silence as we all regarded one another. Marina called down from the bleachers, “I see Stevie Saunders and Hanna Everston across the street. How old are they?”

Answers rang out.

“Stevie’s twenty-three,”

“I think Hanna is, too.”

“No, she’s just twenty.”

“Twenty, then,” Dr. Chatterjee said, his voice heavy with dread.

My insides felt heavy, too. I pictured that hipster beanie, the Piggly Wiggly apron. When I spoke, my voice sounded thin against the gym walls. “We saw Eddie Lu. I think he’s just nineteen.”

“He is.” A younger kid raised his hand as if he were in class. Chatterjee nodded at him. “He’s my cousin. His birthday was this summer. We had a pool party.”

“Oh, my God,” Marina said. She covered her mouth, turning away from the window so fast that her pigtails whipped her cheeks.

“What?” Patrick said.

Marina said, “Talia Randall’s out there.”

Britney stiffened at the mention of her cheer captain. “She is? Is she…?”

Marina’s face looked down at us all. She didn’t say anything.

“Oh, my God,” Britney said.

Alex said, “Wasn’t her birthday just last month?”

Britney nodded. Her lips parted in shock. Her face, suddenly wan. Sweat sparkled across her temple. I didn’t understand what was going on.

“How old did she turn?” I asked, trying to catch up.

“Eighteen,” Alex said, keeping her gaze pegged on Britney.

Britney’s trembling hand rose to the back of her head. She tugged the rainbow ribbon free, and her hair fell about her face, crowding her cheeks, her eyes. Her pale, sweaty face stared out from beneath the straggly locks.

“We did a thing in class yesterday,” Britney said faintly. “But today…”

Her fingers loosened, the ribbon unfurling from her fist. The colorful letters running down its length became visible. Even though they were sideways, I could read them clear as day.

PARTY ON, BIRTHDAY PRINCESS!

“Today’s my actual…” Britney’s voice faded away.

Alex stepped forward and took her hand. “It’s gonna be okay. There’s no way it works that precisely. You’re gonna be-”

“Do you know,” Dr. Chatterjee spoke slowly, shaping each word, “what time of day you were born?”

Britney opened her mouth to answer. Her glossy lips stayed like that, wobbling in an oval.

And then she shuddered.

Alex took an unsteady step back. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

Patrick came up behind Alex, and she stepped back again, bumping into him. He hugged her with one arm from behind but I noticed he kept his other hand free.

The one holding the shotgun.

Blackness stole across Britney’s eyes, darkening the whites until they looked like giant pupils.

The faintest crackling sound came, like the sound of insects feasting, as Britney’s eyeballs turned to dried bits of ash.

Alex was sobbing, bent forward, her shoulders shaking. She was screaming, but I couldn’t hear her.

The ash fell away, leaving two tunnels through Britney’s head.