The Rains

ENTRY 15

We halted in the corridor of the humanities wing, bumping into one another. I tried to swallow, but my throat gave only a dry click. The sight before us had brought us up short.

A pale arm thrust across the threshold of Mr. Tomasi’s classroom. Limp fingers touched the floor as if reaching for something.

And they were twitching.

“Wait,” Patrick said. “He’s still alive?”

“If you can call it that,” Ben said.

A dark snake of blood streamed parallel to the arm, polished and gleaming, mirroring back the pinhole ceiling tiles above. The duffel bag containing Britney had been dumped by the lockers; Ben had probably dropped it there when he’d run into Ezekiel.

Alex’s voice cut through my shock. “This whole time we’ve been in the gym? You left a Host out here still alive?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Ben said. “He ain’t going nowhere. You’ll see.” He strode forward, but none of us moved.

We’d seen a lot, but that didn’t mean we were used to it.

Aside from Ben, who led the way with a big-game hunter’s delight. “C’mon, then,” he said. “He’s not gonna get you. Not anymore.”

Patrick broke us out of our statue formation. Alex, Chatterjee, and I followed. I’d had Cassius stay back with JoJo, who’d started crying at the thought of being left without me and Patrick. The big pup had tucked up to her side, and she’d rested her face on his tan fur, her head rising and falling as he breathed. Seventy pounds of Rhodesian ridgeback was a pretty good comfort.

I could have used some comfort myself. Though it was day, the hall was surprisingly dim, and I realized I’d never been inside the school with the lights off. Another first.

As we neared the doorway, Ezekiel drew slowly into view. Arm. Shoulder. Then the head nodded to the side, facing away, those two tunnels bored through the back of the skull, framed by mouse-brown hair.

We confronted the body, that twitching hand.

The palm slid a few inches on the tile, making a squeaking sound, and Chatterjee gave a little yelp. Ezekiel repeated the motion, as if he were trying to paddle.

“So check it out,” Ben said, stepping across the body. He grabbed the legs, rotated Ezekiel around, and pulled him out into the hall like a rolled-up carpet.

Ezekiel’s head knocked the doorjamb, his arms drifting up over his head as if he’d jumped off a cliff. A deep indentation cratered the flesh above his left eyehole where the stun gun had caved in his skull and penetrated his brain. A black slick showed beneath, a smear of infected white matter. One cheek twitched. His Adam’s apple lurched, and clicking sounds emerged, as if something were trying to talk through his voice box but had no idea how to operate it.

I thought about Dr. Chatterjee’s description of the parasite wrapped around the frontal cortex-how it had its figurative hands on the control levers of the human body-and I shuddered. I heard Alex gasp. Chatterjee’s hand was up, covering his mouth. Patrick alone didn’t flinch as he stared down at the thing that used to be Ezekiel.

Ben kept pulling him by the ankles, the body shushing across the tile, the head leaving behind a six-inch swath of blood. Once Ezekiel was well into the hall, Ben dropped his legs with a thump. Then he kicked the limbs wide, posing the guy so it looked like he was doing a jumping jack.

Patrick stood back a few feet with the rest of us. Watching Ben drag Ezekiel around like a sack of trash, I felt something clench in my stomach. I was intimidated by Ben, and that feeling was made worse when I glanced over at Patrick and could tell that he was, too. It wasn’t just Ben’s ruthlessness that was scary. It was the fact that he actually seemed in his element.

He looked up at us, the scar tissue pulling into different arrangements on his face. “You’re not gonna see from back there.”

We eased forward. Alex hesitated a moment over by the duffel bag containing what remained of her best friend. Patrick rested a hand on her lower back, steering her with us.

We ringed the twitching body.

I’d not yet seen a Host up close. The eyeholes were bizarrely clean, the insides rimmed with vessels and brain matter but not dripping or bleeding at all. It was almost as if they’d been bored by a laser that cauterized as it went.

Setting his feet on either side of the flung-wide arm, Ben crouched by Ezekiel’s face and beckoned us to come in even closer. I’d seen too many horror movies to not be freaked out. But I wasn’t willing to let Ben see me scared, so I bit the inside of my cheek and bent in a little more.

Ben took a slender Maglite out of his pocket and clicked it on. He tilted the flashlight’s beam across Ezekiel’s face, and what I saw made my nerves jump.

The eyeholes weren’t holes at all. Each had a transparent membrane stretched across the surface like Saran Wrap. It looked like the liquid sheet covering the little plastic ring on a bubble wand after you dip it in the soapy solution.

Ben grabbed a handful of Ezekiel’s hair and tugged his head up off the floor so we could see through to the second membranes stretched across the backs of the tunnels.

“God in heaven,” Chatterjee said. “What in the world is that?”

“Dunno,” Ben said, breathing heavily from all his exertion. “But watch this.”

He let the head clunk back to the floor. Then he tapped the membrane with a forefinger. The membrane turned on like a computer screen but stayed transparent at the same time, so we were looking through an image and at it at the same time.

It showed the gray early-morning sky broken by a few clouds, their shapes rendered with lines, sort of like you see on a blueprint. The picture-if you could call it that-twitched a few times, fuzzed with static like the TV back in the gym. Somewhere beneath my shock, it occurred to me that this interference might be because of the damage to the brain caused by the stun gun. Were the clouds in the image drifting? Before I could process any of this, the angle shifted, scanning across the sky.

It wasn’t a still picture. It was footage.

As the view tilted downward, the football stadium’s bleachers scrolled into sight, marked with those same odd structural outlines. It was as though some software program were tracing every edge and contour of the visual field. The point of view rose higher, about six feet off the field, and then the angle tilted forward severely so we were looking at the grass.

“What are we seeing?” Patrick asked.

The footage continued at a rapid clip, the line of the end zone coming into sight. A ninety-degree right turn spun the field on its axis, and the point of view moved forward, turf sweeping by, each blade of grass delineated by those digital-looking lines. Every now and then, the toe of a boot poked into range at the bottom.

My burning lungs told me I’d been holding my breath. I only realized that I knew the answer as I heard myself say it out loud: “We’re seeing what Ezekiel saw after he turned into a Host. This is the inside view.” My heartbeat made itself known against my ribs. “He’s being played like an avatar in a video game.”

Chatterjee blew out a breath. “It’s as though the virus was… engineered.”

For the first time, I noticed that the footage also played on the rear membrane, but upside down and reversed. Ms. Yee had taught us how pinhole cameras used to work, and it looked like a version of that.

I refocused on the front membrane. Ezekiel’s path continued in jerky fast-forward. Another turn and the ten-yard line flew by. The footage zipped forward at a dizzyingly swift rate, made even more dizzying by the close-up sight of the ground underfoot. Once the field had been covered by the gradually widening spiral, the point of view entered the bleachers, scanning them, then reversing back to solid ground. Like the male Hosts we’d seen in town, it seemed Ezekiel broke from the spiral pattern only when he encountered an obstacle or a redundancy. Then he straightened out, headed for new terrain, and started over from a different center position.

“They’re not just walking in patterns,” Ben said. “They’re covering all the ground. Searching strategically.”

“For what?” Alex asked.

“For us,” Ben said.

“Wouldn’t it be more effective to keep their heads up and scan for movement?” Alex said. “I mean, if you’re on the lookout for kids, it seems pretty dumb to keep your eyes glued to the ground-or your non-eyes or whatever.”

I hadn’t looked away from the membrane. Slowly, it dawned on me what Ezekiel had been doing. The realization made my throat go so dry that I had to swallow before I could talk. “They’re Mappers,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

“What do you mean?” Ben asked.

Ezekiel’s lips fluttered as if he were about to say something, but all that came out was an odd vowel sound. The fast-forward stream kept zipping across the membrane covering his eyehole.

“They’re mapping the terrain,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

Ben’s laugh was high-pitched, nervous. “For what?”

I pried my eyes off the sight beneath me, looking at Patrick. “Do you remember Sheriff Blanton?”

Alex spoke before Patrick could reply. “What about my dad?”

I said, “When we came in, he was in your closet with his head tilted back toward the ceiling.”

“Like he was catching a signal,” Patrick said.

“What if he wasn’t receiving?” I said. “What if he was transmitting? Sending data.”

“Data?” Ben said. “What data?”

“This,” I said, pointing at the miniature feed playing in Ezekiel’s eye membrane.

We watched all that terrain continue to be vacuumed up and outlined as Ezekiel chewed up turf. It was hard to tell where he was heading until he bumped into a wall. The angle crept along the wall, coming to a locked door. Ezekiel’s hand rose into range, clutching his massive janitor’s ring of keys. He tried maybe fifteen keys in the lock, though considering the sped-up view, this took only a few seconds to watch. And then a key fit, the door swung wide, and the scene scrolled through a classroom. It moved through various floors and classrooms, the school’s interior being mapped like the football field.

The whole time Ezekiel’s cheek twitched, his Adam’s apple undulating. Aside from that, his face stayed expressionless.

“Wait a minute,” Ben said. “So you think this thing’s turning people into computers?”

Dr. Chatterjee said, “As organisms we’re not unlike computers to begin with. I mean to say they’re not unlike us. Maybe that’s why the eyeholes go all the way through. Maybe they need to access-or plug into-all parts of the brain.”

I could feel the heat of Ben’s gaze fixed on me, but I couldn’t look away from the footage fast-forwarding across Ezekiel’s eye membrane. It flew into the humanities wing, entering various classrooms and spiraling through them. I felt a chill as the point of view neared Mr. Tomasi’s room, passing the very spot where we stood. It zipped through Tomasi’s room, spiraling out to the perimeter in seconds. As it zipped toward the door, a familiar meaty hand swung into the frame holding a stun gun, the gleaming barrel filling up the screen. A bolt of lightning fizzled across the membrane, the spark so bright it made us jump. The next view was straight up at the ceiling, each tile delineated with those weird blueprint lines, though they were now even more scrambled and staticky than before. Soon enough the ceiling slid into a blur, passing through the doorway into the hall, and then we were looking up at ourselves looking down at us.

Live footage.

“I asked you a question, Chance,” Ben was saying.

“Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t lift my eyes. I could barely even speak. “What?”

Ben’s image, even fuzzily captured in the bubble membrane, looked annoyed. “I said, ‘Transmitting to who?’”

Before I could answer, a sudden movement in Ezekiel’s eye startled me so badly I jerked back onto my heels.

A virtual eyeball rolled into the membrane, replacing the view of us. Squirming and veiny, it stared up from the space where a real eyeball was supposed to be.

Alex screamed. I might have as well.

Not Ben, though.

Ben had his stun gun out in a flash. He fired it directly through Ezekiel’s forehead into the brain. All light vanished from the membrane, taking that horrific eyeball with it.