The Rains

ENTRY 14

Britney seemed to hang forward, her weight shifted onto the balls of her feet, hair dangling across her features, an electronic doll waiting to animate.

The kids were all standing now, backing away. A few broke for the doors. Cassius barked once, and I hushed him firmly. Up on the bleachers, Marina screamed. Alex clutched Patrick’s arm, shaking her head, her eyes rimmed red. They were about five feet away from Britney. Sprinting kids strobed across my field of vision, turning the scene into a stop-action-Alex’s hand lurching to cover her mouth, the shotgun jerkily rising in Patrick’s grip. It seemed we were the only four still points in the gym, the kids swarming all around like bees.

“We have to be quiet!” Dr. Chatterjee said. It was the first time I’d ever heard his voice raised. He was staggering away from Alex, nearly tripping over his orthotics. “If we’re too loud, we’ll bring more of them here!”

A ripple coursed beneath the skin of Britney’s face. Nothing moved, but there was a change in the substance of her flesh, as if some invisible spark had been struck. She tilted back more fully onto her feet. She lifted her head.

Those blank tunnels aimed directly at Alex. Best friend facing best friend.

Patrick remained behind Alex, his chest to her back, one arm slung protectively across her. Alex’s head was just in front of his, their bodies aligned so they were both peering down the length of the shotgun at Britney.

Thank God Patrick had thought quickly and grabbed the Winchester off the bleachers at the first sign of trouble.

Alex’s hand pressed over her mouth, holding in a scream. She was still shaking her head-no, no, no.

Britney’s shoulders drew back, her spine straightening. Then her head pulled back, too, twitching. Her body tensed to lunge.

Still Patrick hadn’t fired. Was he afraid the shotgun boom would alert the Hosts?

A loud smack of metal on metal reverberated through the gym. Britney corkscrewed up onto her toes, her spine twisting. She fell away and revealed Ben Braaten standing behind her, stun gun raised, sleek metal rod dripping fresh blood.

Britney crumpled onto the floor.

Only when I heard her limbs hit the shiny floorboards did I realize that the gym had gone completely quiet.

Alex doubled over, clutching her stomach. Her cries came soft and low, as if something had broken open inside her. Patrick held her tighter as she sank to the floor.

A puddle spread beneath Britney’s head.

Ben finally lowered the stun gun, wiped it back and forth on his thigh, and shoved it into the front of his jeans. Remorse flickered across his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But someone had to.”

“Chance,” Dr. Chatterjee said in a voice strained with stress. “Go see if any Hosts are heading toward us.”

I darted up the bleacher steps as quietly as possible and put my face to the window. In the neighborhood across the parking lot, a bunch of male Hosts had stopped, frozen, their heads oriented toward the gym.

I jerked away, my heart pounding. The other kids stared up at me. I put my finger to my lips, and they got even quieter. Cassius put his front paws on the bottom bench of the bleachers, trying to figure out if he could climb up to me. I snapped my fingers, and he hopped down and gave me a hangdog pout.

We all stayed like that for a minute or two. A sneaker chirped on the floor. Someone stifled a cough. It felt weird to be staring down at all those scared faces. From up here that dark puddle beneath Britney’s head looked like a shiny halo.

I turned again and eased my eyes up over the sill. The men were still looking this way, wolves on alert. All at once, they lowered their heads and continued along, walking their patterns. A breath hissed out through my teeth.

“We’re okay,” I said as I made my way back down.

“I have to clean up Britney,” Alex said. “I have to take her somewhere.”

A clatter of falling objects sounded from the storage room. Ben emerged, carrying an empty duffel bag. I recognized it as the bag that stored the soccer goal nets and spikes during the winter. With his other hand, Ben steered a mop in a yellow bucket on wheels.

He dropped the duffel next to Britney and flopped her limp body into it. Then he rose, lifted the dripping mop from the bucket, and tossed it at Patrick. Patrick caught the handle in front of his chest.

Crouching, Ben hoisted the hefty duffel bag and headed out, muscles straining beneath his shirt. Already the bag had started to spot.

Ben disappeared, and Patrick mopped up. Alex stayed on the floor, her face slack, staring at nothing. Patrick finished, squeezing pink water from the mop. When he wheeled the bucket across to the storage closet, one of the wheels gave off the faintest squeak.

Everyone stayed silent, out of either respect or shock.

A moment later Ben returned, the front of his shirt covered in blood. More blood than made sense. What had he done with Britney’s body? As everyone stared at him, he cuffed his flannel sleeves back from his thick forearms, twice each. “So,” he said. “I guess we figured out the age cutoff.”

I glanced over at Patrick and saw him swallow. Hard. He caught my eye, then looked away fast.

His eighteenth birthday was next week.

Dr. Chatterjee worked his way back across the court. He paused behind Alex and rested a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. Continuing on, he flipped over the dry-erase board to reveal the blank back side.

Then he regarded the rest of us. “Everyone line up by age,” he said. “Youngest in the front. I’m gonna write all your names and birthdays in order here. So we know.”

After some jostling and confusion, we formed a single row. Everything proceeded in orderly fashion, pretty amazing given what was going on. Maybe we were just happy to have something easy to do. Marina took her spot ahead of Maria, having been born a few minutes before her. Dr. Chatterjee listened to everyone, then jotted his or her information up on the board in his neat hand. The line moved slowly forward. I tried to choke down my fear, to keep my gaze ahead at Rocky’s black curls, at JoJo and the Mendez twins, but every step of the way I sensed Patrick back there toward the end of the line. I didn’t want to know how near the end he was.

Finally I couldn’t fight the urge anymore, and I turned and looked back along the long line of kids, past Ben and Alex and Eve.

Patrick was the second kid from the end.

The last in line was Chet Rogers, his big ruddy face downcast. His arms trembled, and his left knee jackhammered. He twisted one sweaty hand in the other.

Whereas Patrick was trying to fight off his fear and doing a pretty good job of it. I don’t think anyone except me could tell how rattled he was, but I knew him the way only brothers know each other. The way he knew me.

His jaw looked tight. His mouth thin and firm. For a moment I thought he was holding it together for me like he always did. But then I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Alex.

And she was looking back at him. I didn’t think it was possible for her to seem more upset than she had when Britney died, but she held herself now as if her body were hollow, as if her insides had crumbled away.

I knew she felt that way because I felt that way myself.

Eve traced where I was looking and stepped forward in line. “I’m so sorry, Chance,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I said, and turned back around quickly so she couldn’t see me bite my lip. I reached down, and sure enough, Cassius was there, his black muzzle pointed up at me. I scratched at his scruff beneath the collar the way he always loved, and he tilted into me. “Good boy,” I said. “Good, good boy.” It was all I could do to hold myself together.

Finally I arrived at the front of the line. I had to fight to keep my voice from cracking when I spoke to Dr. Chatterjee. “July fourth,” I said. “Not sure what time.”

“Thank you, Chance,” he said. “I seem to recall you were born in the morning.”

I went and took my seat on the bleachers with the others. After a while Alex came and sat next to me.

“Hey, Blanton,” I said.

“Hey, Little Rain.”

It made me smile, which I’m sure was her intent. “I hate when you call me that,” I said.

She leaned over, gave me a playful bump with her shoulder. “Yup.” But it was sad, too. There was nothing more to say, really. It was just a way of reaching out, of connecting. We were united in that moment as the two people who cared the most about Patrick. And about what was gonna happen to him.

A while later-though we tried not to notice how much later-my brother joined us on the bleachers. Together we listened to Chet give his birthday in a trembling voice.

Ben hopped up onto one of the middle bleachers and started pacing across it. The front of his shirt was stiff with dried blood from where he’d wiped his hands. “Look,” he said, “the first thing to figure out is who’s in charge. And I think it’s pretty clear who’s protected us the best so far.” The heel of his hand rested on the stun gun tucked in his waistband.

“Dr. Chatterjee’s in charge,” I said.

Ben cast his broken gaze over at me. “Dr. Chatterjee,” he said, “can’t hold a gun. Not with that grip.”

A lot of the kids looked taken aback. We’d heard students be rude to teachers before, but we’d never seen one be so dismissive before.

Ben’s mood had changed since he’d returned from taking care of Britney’s body. He seemed more cocky, his eyes gleaming with some secret confidence.

Dr. Chatterjee took off his glasses again, calmly polishing them. “Is that what you think leadership is about, Mr. Braaten?” he asked.

“Not generally,” Ben said. “But now more than ever.”

“How about wisdom? Experience?”

“You may have noticed that age ain’t exactly being rewarded in the new order.” Ben scanned the kids’ faces. “Like I said, I’m willing to do what has to be done to keep you guys safe.”

“You wouldn’t send help for Dick and Jaydon,” Eve said, “when they went to help the others. So which of us are you keeping safe?”

“The majority of you.”

“Which is fine,” Patrick said. “Until you’re not part of the majority.”

Rocky spoke up. “I think our leader should be Dr. Chatterjee,” he said. “And whoever’s oldest.”

We looked up at that board, Chet Rogers’s name at the very bottom. His birthday four days from now.

And Patrick’s name written right above.

Chet made a nervous noise. I thought maybe he was going to say something, but he drew into himself. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he were hugging himself. His eyes stayed lowered as he tried to smooth out his breathing, but he was wheezing pretty good. I remembered how his mother and the school nurse always seemed to hover nearby, fearful of an attack. A kid with asthma in farm country was at no small risk. If he had an episode now, I’d have to run to the nurse’s office to fetch his oxygen mask.

But Ben paid Chet little mind. “If we’re going for stability,” Ben said to Eve, “why would we choose leaders who are next in line to die?”

Patrick stood up abruptly. “Let’s cut to it. Do we agree that everyone gets a vote?”

Most everybody nodded.

“Okay. How many vote that Dr. Chatterjee’s in charge?”

About three-fourths of the hands went up.

“That’s settled, then,” Patrick said, with a glance at Ben. “Now let’s get back to figuring out just what the hell to do.”

“Fine,” Ben said. He cast a look across the faces of the kids. “But think about it. When the next Host shows up, who do you want between you and it? Me or Chatterjee?”

“For now, Mr. Braaten, we will let that remain a rhetorical question,” Dr. Chatterjee said, “and get back to the facts as we’re learning them. Eighteen appears to be the age at which people… transform.” His forehead furrowed as he puzzled this out. “Once that chronological point is crossed, it’s as if a switch is thrown, making the person susceptible to spores in the air.”

“How do you know the spores aren’t already inside us all?” Eve asked. “Just hanging out, waiting to spread?”

Dr. Chatterjee blinked a few times. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I don’t.”

“No,” Chet said, still rocking himself. “You’re right.”

“How do you know?” Chatterjee asked. “Chet? How do you know?”

“I… um, I saw my neighbor-Mr. Gaeta? Right after it happened. He was chasing a kid down the middle of our street, and a car…” Chet gasped a few times. “I saw his brains when they… spilled out. And they were black. Like covered with oil. And then next…” His breathing quickened, and for a moment I thought he might hyperventilate. “The car plowed into the kid he’d been chasing.” He took in a gulp of air. “Luis Millan.”

At this a wail went up from the back of the gym. Probably one of Luis’s cousins. We were all shocked.

“His head was…” Chet’s hand hovered by his forehead. “And his… brain… I could see… it looked normal. It wasn’t all black and oily. Not yet. So no, I don’t think the stuff was in there. I think it waits in the air until the second we turn eighteen. Your brain’s ready, and then that next breath costs you… everything.” He stared at his trembling hands. “Like Britney.”

Alex pulled the cuffs of her sweater down over her fists. She jackknifed over, her feet up on the bleacher bench in front of her, her arms pressed between her thighs and her chest. Patrick sat beside her, rubbing her back.

Again I looked across at my brother’s name and birthday written up on the board. Then down at the wet smudge from the mop where Britney had fallen.

I didn’t mean to speak, at least not that loudly, but there was my voice, carrying across the gym. “How could they know?”

“How do they know any of it?” Ben said. “They know to burn the guns. They know to cut the power. And the phone lines. The grown-ups-it’s like they’re still in there somewhere, but just the bad parts.”

Beside me, Alex shook off a shudder.

I said, “What I mean is, how could the parasite know exactly when Britney turned eighteen?”

Rocky said, “Well, Dr. C. said the white matter-”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But everyone develops at different rates. I mean, we’re humans. It’s not like we’re trees and you can just cut us open and count the rings inside. I know that doctors can make guesses based on teeth and bone development and stuff, but it’s not like we have some internal meter or something. Besides, nothing can tell when we actually enter the world. I mean, as opposed to conception or being in the womb or whatever.”

“If there is a meter of some kind,” Eve said, “maybe it starts the instant air first hits the lungs?”

“But there isn’t one.” I looked over at Dr. Chatterjee. “Isn’t that right?”

“Not a meter, exactly,” he said. “But there is something. Structures on the tips of chromosomes called telomeres. They’re repetitive nucleotide sequences that get shortened every time DNA duplicates. Recently there’s been some research indicating that these provide estimates for how long an organism has been alive and how long it has until it dies. They’ve been doing promising work with warblers on Cousin Island-”

“But those are estimates,” I said.

“As our technology advances,” Chatterjee said, “we are finding them to be alarmingly accurate as indicators of life expectancy.”

“Fine,” I said. “But we can’t tell how old a person is to the day. To the minute.”

“Well…” Ben stood up, his weight creaking the bleacher. “We can’t.”

I felt a tingling under my scalp. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re dealing with more than spores and parasites,” Ben said. He hopped down the benches, one after another, then stood at the bottom and looked up at me, Alex, and Patrick. “When I was out there taking care of Britney’s body, guess who I bumped into? Ezekiel. Looks like our ol’ janitor was sleeping off a hangover in the football stadium again, woke up with the commotion.” Ben took a moment to wipe his hands across the front of his shirt, mimicking the gesture that had left those bloody streaks. “So I handled him, too.” With a glance at Chatterjee, he added, “Maybe not as well as our elected leader here could’ve.”

“Why on earth didn’t you say something?” Chatterjee asked.

“Didn’t want to overstep my bounds. But seeing as our leadership is casting about for answers, I figure I’d better speak up now.” Ben started for the doors, waving at us to follow. “You three and the good doctor better come with me.” He turned back to look at us, the crimped skin of his forehead shiny even in the diffuse light of the high windows. “You’re gonna wanna see this.”