The Rains

ENTRY 3

It began with a hard, slanting rain. And soon there was fire, too, but it wasn’t fire. Not really. It was the pieces of Asteroid 9918 Darwinia breaking up above Earth, flaming as they entered the atmosphere.

It exploded twenty-four kilometers up, a bright flash that turned night into day. There was a boom above Creek’s Cause and a wave of heat that evaporated the drops right out of the air. Jack Kaner’s garret window blew out, and the rickety shed behind Grandpa Donovan’s house fell over. The surge of warmth dried the pastures and the irrigated soil.

Fist-size fragments kicked up the powdered dirt in the field lying fallow behind Hank McCafferty’s place, embedding themselves deep below the earth. A late winter had pushed back harvest, and so the fields were still full. McCafferty had been working sweet corn and barley through the fall, but this one empty plot, depleted by a recent planting, had been layered with manure to set up a double crop of alfalfa and oats for the next summer.

The soil was rich, primed for roots to take hold.

Or something else.

One of the meteorites struck Pollywog Lake at the base of the rocky ridge and burned off a foot of water. Another rocketed straight through Grandpa Donovan’s cow, leaving a Frisbee-width channel through the meat as clean as a drill. The cow staggered halfway across the marshy back meadow before realizing it was dead and falling over. The coyotes ate well that night.

We came out of our farmhouses and ranch homes, stared at the sky in puzzlement, then went back inside, finishing the dinner dishes, watching TV, getting ready for bed. Living in a land of tornadoes and deadly storms, we were used to Mother Earth’s moods.

We’d learn soon enough that Mother Earth had nothing to do with this.

Creek’s Cause was originally called Craik’s Cause, after James Craik, George Washington’s personal physician. Sometime in the early 1800s, someone screwed up transcribing a map, and the wrong name took hold. But to this day we shared a pride in the purpose for which our town was named. After all, Craik had kept Washington healthy through the Revolutionary War and the following years, remaining at the first president’s side until he finally died on that damp December night.

Standing there in the sudden heat of the night air, blinking against the afterimpressions of those bursts of flame in the sky, we couldn’t have known that more than two hundred years later the opening salvo of a new revolutionary war had been fired.

And that my brother and I would find ourselves on the front lines.

The rains continued through the night, pounding the earth, turning our roofs into waterfalls. At the edge of town, Hogan’s Creek overflowed its banks, drowning the Widow Latrell’s snow peas until minnows swam shimmering figure eights through the vines.

Since McCafferty’s farm was on higher ground, his crops weren’t deluged. Narrow, bright green shoots poked up from the moist soil of his fallow field, thickening into stalks by the third day. At the top of each was a small bud encased in a leafy sheath. McCafferty lifted his trucker’s cap to scratch his head at them, vowing to borrow Charles Franklin’s undercutter to tear those strange-looking weeds from his land, but Franklin was not a generous man, and besides, there was corn to harvest, and so it waited another day and then another.

The rains finally stopped, but the stalks kept growing. The townsfolk went to check out the crazy growths rising from the soil where the meteorites had blazed deep into the ground. Patrick and I even stopped by one day after school to join the gawkers. By the end of the workweek, the stalks were taller than Hank himself. On the seventh day they towered over ten feet.

And then they died.

Just like that, they turned brittle and brown. The pods, which had grown to the size of corncobs, seemed to wither.

Some of the neighbors stood around, spitting tobacco into the dirt and saying it was indeed the damnedest thing, but there was nothing to do until McCafferty finished his harvest and tamped down his pride enough to ask Franklin for the loan of that undercutter.

McCafferty was at the bottle that night again after dinner. I can picture the scene like I was there-him in his rickety rocker on his rickety porch, the cool night filled with the sweet-rot smell of old wood. He had put his true love in the ground three summers ago, and you could see the grief in the creases of his face. His newer, younger wife fought like hell with his two kids, turning his house into a battleground, and he hid in the fields by day and in the bars by night. On this night he was rocking and sipping, letting a sweet bourbon burn away memories of his dear departed Lucille, when over the sound of the nightly bedtime squabble upstairs he heard a faint popping noise.

At first he probably thought it was a clearing of his ears or the drink playing tricks on him. Then it came again, riding the breeze from the fields, a gentle popping like feather pillows ripping open.

A moment later he tasted a bitter dust coating his mouth. He spit a gob over the railing, reached through his screen door, grabbed his shotgun, and lumbered down the steps toward the fields. From an upstairs window, his son watched the powerful beam of a flashlight zigzag across the ground, carving up the darkness.

The bitter taste grew stronger in McCafferty’s mouth, as if a waft of pollen had thickened the air. He reached the brink of his fallow field, and what he saw brought him up short, his mouth gaping, his boots sinking in the soft mud.

A dried-out pod imploded, releasing a puff of tiny particles into the air. And then the seven-foot stalk beneath it collapsed, disintegrating into a heap of dust above the soil. He watched as the neighboring pod burst, its stalk crumbling into nothingness. And then the next. And the next. It was like a haunted-house trick-a ghost vanishing, leaving only a sheet fluttering to the ground. The weeds collapsed, row after row, sinking down into the earth they’d mysteriously appeared from.

At last the pollen grew too strong, and he coughed into a fist and headed back to his bottle, hoping the bourbon would clear his throat.

Early the next morning, McCafferty awoke and threw off the sheets. His belly was distended. Not ribs-and-coleslaw-at-a-Fourth-of-July-party swollen, but bulging like a pregnant woman five months in. His wife stirred at his side, pulling the pillow over her head. Ignoring the cramps, he trudged to the closet and dressed as he did every morning. The overalls stretched across his bulging gut, but he managed to wiggle them up and snap the straps into place. He had work to do, and the hired hands weren’t gonna pay themselves.

As the sun climbed the sky, the pain in his stomach worsened. He sat on the motionless tractor, mopping his forehead. He could still taste that bitter pollen, feel it in the lining of his gut, even sense it creeping up the back of his throat into his head.

He knocked off early, a luxury he had not indulged in since his wedding day, and dragged himself upstairs and into a cold shower. His bloated stomach pushed out so far that his arms could barely encircle it. Streaks fissured the skin on his sides just like the stretch marks that had appeared at Lucille’s hips during her pregnancies. The cramping came constantly now, throbbing knots of pain.

The water beat at him, and he felt himself grow foggy. He leaned against the wall of the shower stall, his vision smearing the tiles, and he sensed that pollen in his skull, burrowing into his brain.

He remembered nothing else.

He did not remember stepping from the shower.

Or his wife calling up to him that dinner was on the table.

Or the screams of his children as he descended naked to the first floor, the added weight of his belly creaking each stair.

He couldn’t hear his wife shouting, asking what was wrong, was he in pain, that they had to get him to a doctor.

He was unaware as he stumbled out into the night and scanned the dusk-dimmed horizon, searching out the highest point.

The water tower at the edge of Franklin’s land.

Without thought or sensation, McCafferty ambled across the fields, walking straight over crops, husks cutting at his legs and arms, sticks stabbing his bare feet. By the time he reached the tower, his ribboned skin was leaving a trail of blood in his wake.

With nicked-up limbs, he pulled himself off the ground and onto the ladder. He made his painstaking ascent. From time to time, a blood-slick hand or a tattered foot slipped from a rung, but he kept on until he reached the top.

He crawled to the middle of the giant tank’s roof, his elbows and knees knocking the metal, sending out deep echoes. And then he rolled onto his back, pointing that giant belly at the moon. His eyes remained dark, unseeing.

His chest heaved and heaved and then was still.

For a long time, he lay there, motionless.

There came a churning sound from deep within his gut. It grew louder and louder.

And then his body split open.

The massive pod of his gut simply erupted, sending up a cloud of fine, red-tinted particles. They rose into the wind, scattering through the air, riding the current toward his house and the town beyond.

What happened to Hank McCafferty was terrible.

What was coming for us was far, far worse.