The Rains

ENTRY 27

Blood rushed to my head, so intense I thought I might pass out. I wheeled around, searching for something, anything, to use as a weapon.

The EKG cart I’d kicked aside was a few steps away. I dashed for it and grabbed the edge, using all my might to swing it around toward the door.

I felt the impact shudder the cart before I saw what it had struck-the Host, already past the threshold. The metal edge had hit him in the gut, doubling him over the equipment. The doorway behind him was packed with reaching arms and blank faces. Though my thighs screamed, I put all my force into driving the cart forward, shoving him into the others, through that doorframe, and onto the stairs.

The momentum of the heavy cart packed him and the others back through the doorway. Roaring, I gave a final shove, the cart flying away from me, hurtling through the frame.

Then gravity took over.

The cart seemed to fill the walls of the stairway, blasting down the steps, smashing everything in its path. Meaty crunches and wet gasps.

I didn’t wait around to admire the damage.

Swinging the bulging bag up onto my shoulder, I sprinted for the rear stairwell. I didn’t have time to be cautious-I just threw open the door and staggered inside, pulled by the weight of the bag. If the Hosts had made it into the rear stairwell as well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. My breaths rang off the walls, loud panting that sounded like the breathing of a Host. In fact, the echoes made it sound like there were Hosts all around me.

At last I reached the ground floor and pushed the door open, barely keeping to my feet as I tumbled forward.

Patrick waited in front of the loaded gurney, his mask tube trailing back to the H tank, now stacked with the others. His shotgun was raised and aimed at my head.

“Chance,” he said calmly. “Hit the floor.”

I was too exhausted to argue or even ask. I let my muscles go slack, let the heavy bag tug me down until my chest slapped the tile.

The shotgun exploded overhead, and I rolled to my side to see three Hosts behind me fly back, ripped to pieces by the expanding spray.

Those breaths in the stairwell hadn’t been my own, echoing back at me. They’d been the Hosts right behind me, their outstretched hands inches from my back. Sprawled there on the cold tile, I shuddered.

For a moment we stayed perfectly still. The echo of the shotgun rang up the stairwell and through the building, making it-I hoped-impossible to source. We waited until it died away, then sprang back into motion.

Fighting to my feet, I slung the bag onto the gurney. The corridor still empty. The rear sliding doors just behind us.

With both hands I slammed into the gurney, getting it moving toward the rear exit. It was too slow, and I was too weak. It clipped a doorway, and one of the giant oxygen tanks bounced off, clanging on the floor, the loudest sound I’d ever heard.

Patrick and I halted. Our eyes met.

A moment of breath-held silence.

Then we heard the shuffling of dozens of feet. A moment later a wall of Hosts swept around the corner at the end of the hall. They’d reversed course from the blocked front stairwell, tracking the sound.

Patrick rushed back and pried open the doors to the rear alley. They parted. I propelled the gurney toward the opening, risking a look behind me.

They were almost on me. It was too late.

Patrick reached past my face, grabbed a fistful of my shirt at the rear collar, and hurled me up onto the stacked tanks. My momentum started the wheels turning. I rode the gurney out through the rear doors.

Inches from my face, the end of his tube popped off the H tank. I reached for it, but it flew away like a fly fishing line as I rolled clear of the building on the gurney.

Twisting, I stared back at Patrick in time to see the shotgun rise.

But he wasn’t aiming at the Hosts.

He was aiming at the floor.

I realized what he was doing an instant before it happened.

The shotgun roared, the shot striking the end of the oxygen tank. It rocketed forward, lifting off the floor and impaling the lead Host right through the stomach. The tank bore a massive dent but somehow it hadn’t exploded.

That was about to change.

Patrick shuck-shucked the shotgun and fired again. The tank exploded, wiping out the Chaser it was embedded in and the wall of Hosts behind it. The fireball filled the corridor. Patrick hopped back through the doors into the alley as flame blossomed out into the cold night. Heat billowed over us and then flowed up and away.

I slid off the gurney, groping on the cold ground, finally coming up with the tube. My hands chased it to the end. Patrick waited for me, his breath still held.

I shoved the tube back over the hissing nozzle. Patrick pulled his mask away from his face until the oxygen shot up the line, fluttering his hair. Then he snapped the mask into place, blew a big exhalation through the one-way valve, and started breathing again.

I started breathing, too.

We didn’t pause to celebrate.

He took one side of the gurney, and I took the other. Side by side we hurried up the alley, wheels rattling like crazy over the bumpy asphalt.

As we neared the edge of the alley, Patrick said, “Slow up, slow up.”

I shot a look behind us and willed my legs to slow down.

“Chance,” Patrick said, his voice a bit wonky from the oxygen and the mask. “They’re gonna hear us.”

I forced myself to slow even more. Finally we eased to a stop and peered around the corner. We had only a slice of a view past the pharmacy. The ambulance was still there in the middle of the town square, but there were no Hosts around it anymore. They’d rushed the hospital-or at least I hoped that was where they were.

The siren was still shrieking. Somehow I’d drowned out the sound in my head, turning down the volume on all background noise as we’d run the gauntlet of the hospital. I was glad to hear the wail piercing the night, shrill and steady. That would cover the sound of our movement through the neighborhood as we headed back toward school.

We set out down an unlit street, pushing the gurney across the sidewalk, one wheel squeaking intermittently. We stopped every few driveways, using parked cars for cover.

We heard movements inside some houses and on the nearby streets, but we chose our path well, weaving through the neighborhood one cautious block at a time.

We were halfway there when Patrick took a knee behind the special van that the Dubois family kept for Blake and his wheelchair. Breathing hard, he held up a finger to signal that he needed a second to catch his breath. Sweat trickled from his hairline, and his face looked washed of color.

“Sorry,” he said. “Oxygen. Fuzzy.”

I eased him down so he could lean against one big tire, then sat next to him. In the darkness the combination of the mask and his cowboy hat made him look pretty scary. For a time he tried to catch his breath. Then he made a fist around the tube trailing up to the H tank on the gurney. Was he so loopy that he was thinking of ripping it out?

“What do we do when the tanks run dry?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

I couldn’t take my eyes off his fingers tensed around that tube. “We go back to the hospital and fill them up again.”

“How ’bout when the IV food is gone?”

“Dr. Chatterjee said he thinks he can figure out some kind of system to make more.”

Patrick gave a slow nod, but his face didn’t hold much hope. “And what about when the next kid turns eighteen? Or Alex? Or you?”

“Let’s worry about that later,” I said.

His fist tightened around the tube. “It sucks living like this. A mask clamped over my face. Being fed through tubes and needles. Forever.”

I watched his fingers turn white as he squeezed the tube, then released it.

“Actually, not forever,” he added. A bitterness I didn’t recognize had crept into his voice. “Just till the mask slips some night when I’m sleeping. Or a tank malfunctions. Or I sneeze wrong and blow the tube out.”

“Look,” I said, “we just bought you more time. For the particulates to dissipate.”

“For a miracle,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “For that.”

He squeezed the tube again, kept it compressed. His eyes looked hazy, his gaze loose, though whether from the oxygen or not, I couldn’t tell.

I stood up and offered him a hand. “Alex is waiting for you.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he released the tube and took my hand.

I knew that would do it.

Our progress felt like torture, every rasp of our boots against asphalt amplified tenfold, every creak from a shadowed porch amplified a hundredfold. But even with that squeaky wheel, even pushing a gurney loaded with seven giant tanks and one portable one, we made it through undetected. At last we came up on the edge of the teachers’ parking lot, halting behind a row of hedges.

Leaving the gurney, I crawled through the hedges and signaled at the front gate with a blip of my flashlight. Then I waited for Alex’s signal that the coast was clear.

No signal came.

I waited and waited and then flickered my beam again and waited some more. Only darkness stared back through the bars of the gate.

I crawled out to where Patrick crouched by the gurney. “No signal,” I whispered. “Maybe Alex took a bathroom break.”

“No,” he said. “She’d be there. Something’s wrong.”

Carefully, he lifted his H tank off the gurney. “Let’s head for the gate. We’ll come back for the other tanks later.”

We slithered through the bushes to the other side, cast glances around us, then bolted across the parking lot. Panting, we reached the gate.

It was locked.

We looked around frantically, Patrick’s biceps bulging under the weight of the hundred-pound tank. Once again I clicked my flashlight through the bars toward the building.

Something glinted in the grass.

I lowered the beam.

It was Alex’s jigsaw pendant glittering among the blades.

Beside it, grooves gouged the grass, trailing out through the gate.

Finger marks.

The beam wobbled in my hand. I didn’t dare look over at Patrick, but I could sense him staring where I stared, seeing what I was seeing.

A voice from the darkness startled us. “Chance. Patrick.”

A girl ran up to the gate, fumbling with Ezekiel’s giant key ring.

It was Eve, not Alex.

Her hands were shaking even worse than mine.

“She’s gone.” Eve unlocked the gate and stepped back, letting it creak inward. “They got Alex.”