The Rains

ENTRY 7

We moved silently through the stalks and across pastures until the distant lights of our porch were yellow blurs in the darkness. Again Patrick and I were leading the way ahead of the kids. We followed the particles floating overhead.

They looked almost like fireflies in the moonlight. I felt something twist inside my chest.

“That pollen stuff,” Patrick said. “What do you think it is?”

“Some kind of airborne… blood mist?” I shook my head. “It all sounds friggin’ nuts.”

“Maybe we’re overthinking it,” Patrick said. “It could just be how people decompose when they’re infected with whatever it is. Instead of rotting away, I mean.”

“But the wind carried it right to where we found Mrs. McCafferty.” I couldn’t bring myself to mention that it was headed for our house, too, and town beyond. “That seems like a pretty big coincidence.”

“So you’re saying people are breathing it in, getting infected by it?”

I shrugged.

“What does that?” Patrick asked. “You’re the one who pays attention in science.”

I racked my brain. “Viruses, bacteria-” I cut off abruptly, heat rushing to my face.

“What?”

“Spores,” I said.

“Spores?”

“Remember what you said about parasites and hosts?” I asked. “Well, there’s this movie that Dr. Chatterjee showed in biology. About this kind of fungus. It’s like a parasite.”

I remembered the class: Dr. Chatterjee, walking his wobbly walk up and down the aisles with his leg braces, lecturing us in his singsong accent. He’d been our family doctor for years, treating Patrick and me since we were in diapers. Eventually his multiple sclerosis made it too hard for him to hold a syringe steady, so he’d retired to teach high-school science. He had to have a helper-usually me-write for him on the dry-erase board and input grades into the computer, but he needed no assistance when it came to being a great teacher. He also worked as the town coroner. I guess his hand tremors were less of a concern when it came to dealing with dead people.

“Okay,” Patrick said. “And what does this fungus do?”

I glanced back, made sure we were out of earshot of the kids. “It attacks ants,” I said.

“Ants?”

“It infects their brains, makes them fall out of trees. Then the infected ant-”

“The host.”

“Yeah. The host climbs the stem of the tallest plant nearby and clamps down its mandibles on the top of it. Know what it’s called? The death grip. The fungus eats the ant and then releases spores that drift all over the place and infect more ants.”

There was a pause, and I suddenly felt self-conscious for remembering this stuff. I was mostly in advanced classes, one or two grades ahead. Patrick had once told me that I seemed more at home in books than outside of them. He hadn’t meant it as an insult-he’d intended it as a compliment after I’d brought home another solid report card-but it had burned like one. I guess I still felt a touch of embarrassment talking about school stuff with him. Patrick, who was most in his element atop a horse at full gallop.

I glanced over and saw that his face wasn’t judgmental but thoughtful.

“So it makes them march to their death,” he said. “Like Mr. McCafferty.”

It struck me then that maybe some of the odd bits I remembered from stories and textbooks and documentaries might actually be useful out here in the real world. Which meant that maybe at some point I might be as useful as Patrick out here, too.

“That’s right,” I said.

“If this stuff is like that fungus, then why didn’t Mrs. McCafferty do the same thing as her husband? And the Franklins? If they were infected by some human version of that parasite or whatever, why didn’t they climb up to the highest spot they could find and… explode?”

“I don’t know. It makes no sense.” Picturing that dark shadow looming over me at the base of the water tower, I shuddered. “What was Mr. Franklin gonna do to me?”

“It was weird,” Patrick said. “He was just walking calmly, not trying to run you down. Different from his wife or Mrs. McCafferty. I saw him from the ladder. He was walking with his head angled down, like he was looking for something.”

“Without any eyes,” I said.

“That’s right. But if he did have eyes, they would’ve been pointed at the ground. You happened to land right in his path. That’s the only reason he noticed you and started to come after you. At least that’s what it looked like.”

“So the spores, maybe they affect men and women differently,” I said.

“The women try to catch people and the men walk around and look at stuff? What for?”

I shrugged. JoJo ambled forward and hugged my side, even as we kept walking. I laid an arm across her back, careful not to hurt her with the baling hook. She was murmuring to herself, what sounded like a nursery rhyme. After a few steps, she let go and drifted back with her brother.

We walked in silence for a time. The only sound was our boots crunching against the dirt. We emerged from the corn into the scrubby, tree-studded land between our place and the McCaffertys’. As we edged through a row of Gambel oak, the lights of our porch started to resolve.

“Even if they weren’t human anymore,” I said quietly to Patrick, “it still feels like we’ve killed people, you know?”

“If you were like that, would you want to keep living?” Patrick asked. “Would you want to know your body was still running around, terrorizing other people?”

I pictured myself doing awful things without knowing I was doing them. “No,” I said. “No way.”

“These spores float over everything,” Patrick said. “Like a crop dusting.”

“That’s right,” I said. “A dusting.”

“Then why aren’t we Hosts?” Patrick gestured back to Rocky and JoJo. “Or them? We breathed the same air as Mrs. McCafferty and the Franklins. If the spores turn people, why hasn’t it turned us?”

“Maybe we’re immune.”

“Or maybe,” Patrick said, “we’re already infected and it’s just a matter of time.”

I looked down at the backs of my hands, fish-white in the darkness. Was something already creeping beneath my skin, transforming me? I felt each breath, cool in my throat, filling my lungs.

The changing wind brought the barking of the dogs. An angry ruckus, full of snaps and snarls. As we drew nearer, the lights clicked on in our house, our living room lighting up as clear as day, a beacon in the darkness. Relief spread through me, a warmth in my chest. We were about a hundred yards away from home and safety.

Uncle Jim came into view inside, heading for the front door.

“Thank God,” I said.

Uncle Jim opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. I started to jog forward, but Patrick grabbed my arm. “Hang on,” he whispered.

Something in his voice scared me into stillness.

We stopped behind the big old ash tree with the rope swing. I rested my hand on the trunk, feeling beneath my palm the carving that Alex had made last year with Patrick’s folding knife: A.B.+P.R. in a heart. I remembered watching her work the blade into the bark, her brow furrowed with concentration, her teeth pinching that full lower lip. As usual I was the third wheel, grinding a stick into an anthill and doing my best not to notice the way Alex’s shirt rode up when she leaned forward, revealing a strip of tan skin at her lower back.

After all the things that had happened, the memory seemed like a glimpse into another world.

I felt JoJo clutching my side again, but I couldn’t move to comfort her. I was rooted to the ground, my eyes fixed on Uncle Jim.

He stood perfectly still in the middle of the porch, lit from the glow of the house.

“What’s he doing?” Rocky whispered, and Patrick hushed him.

We watched Uncle Jim do nothing.

And then he shuddered.

Not a shiver from the cold but a full-body shudder as if an electric current had passed through him. Then he was still once again.

A few seconds went by.

Fear clawed up my throat, and I swallowed it down.

“I’m gonna go to him,” I whispered to Patrick. “He’s fine.”

I started forward, but Patrick’s hand clamped down on my arm. I shook him loose and stepped into the open.

My brother’s voice came at me quietly from behind. “Chance,” he said. “Wait. Just wait.”

The grief in his voice made my denial melt away, and I halted. The wind blew through my jacket. The bitterness was still in the air, riding the back of my tongue. I felt a pressure behind my face. I didn’t keep on, but I didn’t retreat behind the tree either.

Uncle Jim had no way to see me in the darkness.

He was just standing there, frozen.

Then a blackness crept across his eyes until they looked like two giant pupils filling the space between the lids.

And then the blackness crumbled away like ash. The breeze lifted the bits of residue out of his head.

The lights of the house behind him showed in those two spots.

I tried to swallow, but my throat felt like sand. We watched as he stepped off the porch. He walked about fifty feet from the house, then halted. His head lowered, a smooth motion like a security camera autoswiveling. Then he walked a few steps, made a right-angle turn, walked a few more, and did it again. He walked a little bit longer each time, though the turns remained crisp. He seemed to be charting a rectangular grid, spiraling out from the center point. It made no sense at all, and yet there was some terrible cold logic to it, a logic I could not grasp.

Seeing him like that, all stiff as if under a hex, felt worse than if we’d come home and found him split open like Mr. Franklin. I realized I’d cupped my hand over my mouth, maybe to keep from crying out.

Uncle Jim, who’d played marbles with me when I was a kid. Uncle Jim, who made the best paper airplanes and taught me how to sail them across the barn from the hayloft. Uncle Jim, who’d helped me with my algebra homework, puzzling through the equations at my side.

He continued charting his course over the land in front of our house, his vacant eyes lowered. I remembered what Patrick had said about Mr. Franklin, how it seemed he’d been looking for something on the ground. Uncle Jim stumbled over a rock but then righted himself and kept on course.

I turned around and saw that Patrick was breathing hard, his grip firm on the shotgun. JoJo and Rocky had drawn back into the brush behind us, ready to run.

“We have to go to him,” I said to Patrick. “We can’t leave him like that.”

“I know,” Patrick said.

I stepped out and jogged for Uncle Jim, ignoring Patrick’s shouts for me to wait up. As I neared, I sprinted even faster. I had to see up close, to know it was true, because part of me wouldn’t believe it.

I got within talking distance, and Uncle Jim finally halted. His head tilted up, and then I was looking at his face and through it at the same time. Everything else seemed the same-the scuffed cowboy boots, his faded Wranglers, that worn Carhartt jacket. I felt an impulse to run to him and hug him-to shut my eyes and pretend he was okay.

But then his hands went to his buckle. He yanked his belt free of the loops on his jeans and came at me. At first I thought he was going to whip me. Then I remembered Mrs. McCafferty and her hank of long hair, and I realized he was going to restrain me.

And then do what?

My hands whitened around the baling hooks. The curved metal spikes stuck out from between the knuckles of my fists.

“Please don’t,” I said. “Uncle Jim? Please don’t. Don’t make me.”

His face lost to shadow, he kept on, readying the leather strap with his hands.

I raised my weaponed fists. “Please don’t.”

I could hear Patrick running to catch up. He wouldn’t be here in time.

Uncle Jim’s boots kept on, tramping across the mud, closer and closer.

I was crying. “Don’t.”

And then he was on me.

I sidestepped him and swung the baling hook. It embedded itself in his throat. He made a terrible gurgling sound and sank to his knees. I shook the spike free of his neck as Patrick finally arrived, his face flushed from his sprint.

Uncle Jim got one boot under him, then another. He stood, blood streaming from his neck, soaking the front of his jacket. As Patrick raised the shotgun, I turned my head, not wanting to see.

I heard the boom.

I heard the sound of a body hitting the dirt.

Then I heard the creak of our screen door, way over by the house.

I turned back in time to see Sue-Anne glide onto the porch. She halted beneath the light, a swirl of moths wreathing her head. For a moment she remained there, peaceful and still.

Then that full-body shudder racked her body.

I’d been waiting for it. That made it even worse.

Her chest jerked a few times.

We watched her eyes turn black and disintegrate. We watched those tunnels swivel across the landscape and lock onto us. Her spine curled, and she leapt from the porch, landing on all fours, then springing up onto her bare feet. She sprinted at us faster than she should have been able to, her muscles strained to the breaking point. She was thirty feet away. I blinked, and then it was twenty.

Her hair flew about her face, her lips stretched thin with effort. She had tugged the sash free from her bathrobe, and it flapped wildly behind her.

Patrick chambered another shell.