The Rains

ENTRY 35

The Hosts moved in synchronicity, each bent to his or her task. Watching them work was like observing the insides of an intricate cuckoo clock. It might have been fascinating if what they were doing weren’t so gruesome.

Hosts crawled like worker bees over the equipment, reconfiguring the compound into a torture camp of sorts. Kids were strapped at intervals to the conveyer belt, bound at the ankles, thighs, chests, and foreheads so they could barely wiggle. Industrial-strength plier clips secured the straps to ridges on either side of the belt. The belt jerked along in lurches and pauses. It snaked around the expansive factory floor before exiting through a freshly sawed opening in the building’s side that allowed it to continue on. I guess they needed more room. Crates and cages rose in a giant wall lining an entire side of the cannery, each filled with a sobbing kid. Worming fingers, mashed faces, the glint of shattered eyeglasses-it was almost too terrible to look at. In front of this backdrop of bars and flesh, Afa Similai pulled kids squirming from their crates. With the help of several other Hosts, he bound them to the starting point of the belt.

Once a kid was secured, Sheriff Blanton hit a red button and the belt slid forward one stop before halting again. The lurching belt movement must have been calibrated for filling batches of cans or bottles.

I’d known most of these adults. Afa and Sheriff Blanton, Mr. Tomasi and Gene Durant. I remembered their faces when they held not just blank focus but human emotion. They’d been subverted and overridden, their brains hijacked. But that didn’t make any difference to me right now. Watching them do what they did made me hate them anyways.

Thump. Squelch.

I couldn’t see the end point of the assembly line, only where it disappeared into the hatch cut into the side of the building.

Thump. Squelch.

I had to walk around to see where that conveyer belt continued. Where it ended. And what was happening there.

Mindful of the Hosts patrolling the compound’s perimeter, I lowered into the scratchy brush and crawled down to the storage warehouse below me. I kept my head beneath the yellow weeds, pushing the Stetson in front of me, moving one cautious foot at a time. For all I knew, Chasers had spotted me and were hurtling up the hill already.

But I safely reached the big pile of gravel beside the bulldozer and leaned against it, catching my breath. A few pebbles trickled over my shoulders. From here I’d be able to see the outside of the building where that belt emerged. Shuffling off the backpack, I peered around the edge of the gravel.

I couldn’t take it all in at once; it was too overwhelming. I did my best to make sense of it, to assemble it in my mind piece by piece.

To the side of the cannery, several acres of forest had been cleared and a giant foundation poured for future construction. Before the Dusting the factory had evidently been in the process of a huge expansion. That explained all the supplies stashed around the area. The new foundation was enormous, three or four times the size of the original cannery.

Cratering the corner of the foundation was a massive meteor, cracked jaggedly open around the midpoint. But the inside didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen.

It was smooth and perfectly rounded, coated with transparent screens that seemed as if they were made of organic matter like the eye membranes of the Hosts. Various images flashed on the screens, though I could make out little more than shifting bluish lights.

It wasn’t just a meteor. It had been co-opted as a spaceship.

Thump. Squelch.

My attention was drawn to where the assembly belt emerged from that roughly cut hatch in the cannery wall. A twenty-foot length of the belt had been reassembled outside so the assembly line could continue to the edge of the new foundation.

Thump. Squelch.

My gaze landed at the spot where the belt ended.

A figure stood there at the receiving end like some kind of high priestess from ancient times. Something about her posture and contours suggested she was female. Everything about her was futuristic, from the sleek black suit to the polished helmet with its dark-tinted sheet of a face mask. No flesh was visible; she was completely sealed in seamless armor, which looked like an astronaut suit from another millennium.

I stared at the perfectly smooth protective suit, shaped like a human. It seemed to be airtight. No gaps between gloves and sleeves. No break at the neckline below the helmet. Just one flexible cover adhering to the shape as if poured on, unbroken from torso to waist to boots.

Was there a human beneath it? An eyeless Host? Or was this another creature altogether, shaped like one of us? Her movements inside the suit were oddly fluid and robotic at the same time. Like the eye membranes, the suit seemed to be formed from some sort of biological technology.

The next kid lurched into place before her, strapped to the belt, bared sacrificially. It was Andre Swisher, the track star we’d seen snatched by Chasers in the town square. Even from where I was, I could hear Andre’s weeping. The black sheet of the helmet’s face guard reflected back his terrified expression.

The figure smacked a sleek glove to Andre’s chest, pinning him in place.

Thump.

And she lifted the other arm.

Which didn’t look like an arm at all.

It looked like a giant stinger, tapering to a point rather than a hand. The end had numerous small bumps on it, and it squirmed around like a tentacle. Its sharp tip had a hole in it, like an enormous, living needle.

The stinger shot down as if of its own accord, burying itself in Andre’s belly and rooting around.

Squelch.

I watched Andre’s eyes go white. He rattled on the assembly belt, but the straps kept him from moving much. It looked like he was having a seizure.

Then he stilled.

Several Hosts released the straps from Andre’s body and tossed them into a big crate brimming with them. Another Host carried the crate back into the building to the beginning of the assembly belt so the straps could be recycled, used on a fresh lot of kids.

For a moment Andre lay atop the edge of the assembly belt.

The figure removed the stinger from his belly, the end squirming again, those sensory bumps wiggling.

Then something even more impossible happened.

The figure pulled over a rectangle of sheet metal to the edge of the assembly belt.

But it wasn’t connected to anything. It floated in the air like a blow-up raft in a swimming pool. With a faint touch, the figure guided it across, lining it up so it served as an extension of the belt. When the belt lurched forward again, the tread rolled Andre onto the floating slab of sheet metal, clearing the way for the next bound child to slide into place beneath the writhing stinger.

With her gloved hand, the figure gently pushed the slab away, and it glided across toward the far side of the foundation. I followed it into the last sheets of morning mist, and what I saw there made me cover my mouth so I wouldn’t gasp.

Andre’s slab joined an army of others arranged in neat rows. Hundreds of kids lying motionless on their backs, hovering above the ground on their slabs.

Most of them showed bulges in their stomachs. The closest ones looked bloated. But as I peered into the far reaches of the concrete plain, I saw that the farther away the kids were, the more pronounced the bulges were. At the far edge, the boys and girls showed humps protruding almost a foot, filling the space between their waists and their chests. I noticed now that these kids and the others strapped to the assembly line all looked older-at least twelve years old. Where were the younger kids? Being fed at some other center, aged up like cattle?

Making the rounds through this perverted harvest were several more figures wearing seamless space suits like the high priestess, but they were shorter and more muscle-bound. Males? Parading around on autopilot, bent to a single task, they reminded me of drone insects. Their suits were black as well, though less shiny than the female’s armor.

I had to remind myself to breathe. I was confronting odds so impossible I couldn’t even imagine a version of success. Even if Alex weren’t already lost and even if I could spot her, it would be impossible to sneak into the compound, dodge the Hosts and Drones, free her, and get out.

Thump. Squelch.

The sound made me wince. My cheeks were wet; I hadn’t even realized that my eyes were watering from the sight.

I forced myself to exhale. And then draw another breath.

Thump. Squelch.

The figure, she was impregnating them.

Using the children of Earth as pods to incubate… something. Probably her offspring, which would hatch up out of the kids.

The cannery resembled nothing so much as a beehive.

And the sleek, suited figure was the queen bee.

Or a queen bee.

Remembering all those asteroids raking through the night sky a week ago, I wondered how many scenes just like this one were being played out around the planet right now.

Again I told my mouth to draw air, forced my lungs to inhale.

A scream drew my attention back to the cannery. As Afa dragged the next girl from the cage, she thrashed and fought, a shimmer of blond hair flying up over her face. She twisted free and ran, but only got two steps before colliding with Sheriff Blanton’s chest. He seized her thin wrists, torquing them painfully, guiding her back into Afa’s arms.

Together they strapped her to the assembly belt’s starting point, bending over her, their broad flexed backs blocking her from view.

Thump. Squelch.

As the next victim drifted off across the foundation, the belt lurched forward, bringing the girl into view.

It was Alex.