They Came With the Rain

by Christopher Coleman

  Ramon swallowed nervously as he attempted to process the boy’s words, to make sense of them in the context of all he had witnessed today.

  Evil. It was certainly a fitting word for the day.

  “And did you answer him? Did you respond?”

  Josh looked to his lap and nodded.

  “What did you say?”

  Josh lifted his chin and looked out his side window, gathering himself. After a few seconds, he turned back and fixed a cold stare on the sheriff. “I told it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Six months before the rain

  WINSTON BELL HEARD the sound of the approaching truck first, noting what an unusual time of day it was for anyone to be passing by his compound. The only consistent traffic he got up this way came from the mail truck and employees of the Grieg. But it was too early for the mail, and though it also seemed a strange time for anyone to be arriving for work—a little after 10 am—the rumble of the engine suggested it was one of the Grieg’s maintenance men coming out to check on a problem, probably to do with rodents in the control room, Winston concluded cynically.

  But when he gained a visual of the approaching vehicle, Winston got the sudden feeling that his day of peace and leisure was about to be disrupted. The looming truck wasn’t one of the khaki green maintenance ones that Winston was so used to seeing, but rather it was off-white and plain, carrying a lump of rusty gray metal which rose from its bed like a tumor.

  Winston caught his breath at the sight of the truck, more intrigued than anything else, wondering if he’d ever seen one of them so close to his estate. He knew about the audits, of course—he’d lived in Garmella for a decade now, after all—and he had seen the trucks on several occasions over the years, most often during one of his Sunday getaways when he simply couldn’t stay in Garmella another minute. On those mornings—which hadn’t occurred in over a year now—he usually took a drive down to Simonson for lunch, or even to Flagstaff when he was feeling especially ambitious, sometimes noting the monitor trucks cruising the side roads of the town like wolves outside a pen of goats.

  But the trucks had always kept their distance from his property, a fact that Winston assumed was to do with his home’s location, which was perhaps too far up 91 to make it worth their while to monitor. And though his house was the closest residence to the telescope, he lived in relative isolation compared to the rest of the town, and one home apparently didn’t warrant its own monitor truck, especially, he concluded, if there had been no major frequency interruptions to raise the eyebrows of the monitors.

  Winston sat rigid and still on his porch, in the same spot where he’d been now for over two hours already, enjoying the light bake of the sun and the cool air of the summer morning, the latter of which was already beginning to evaporate, threatening to unleash a typical blistering Arizona afternoon.

  He continued spying the truck as it moved with pace down the interstate, alone against the backdrop of the desert, appearing like a wild mustang atop a distant ridge, out of context on the landscape despite its valid reason for being there, its nondescript metal frame somehow making it more unusual.

  It was on its way to the telescope, Winston now reasoned, and though he had never seen one of the monitors ascend to the Grieg previously (though perhaps they had during his jaunts out of town), it made perfect sense, considering they were in Garmella every month for the sole purpose of keeping the airwaves clean.

  Still, the truck made Winston uneasy, and he was unable to take his eyes off the vehicle. He held his breath as it neared the stretch of road that ran perpendicular to his driveway, willing it to pass by, moving his lips in a series of whispery commands which ordered the truck to continue on up to the Grieg.

  “Keep going, keep going, keep going.”

  For the moment, it appeared Winston’s will was indeed that strong, so persuasive as to move men and machine, as the truck seemed destined to pass by without incident and continue up 91 to the radio telescope.

  But somewhere around twenty yards past the driveway to the Bell manor, when Winston was already in the middle of his exhalation of relief, releasing his grip of anxiety—a feeling which he couldn’t quite understand in the moment—the red brake lights of the pickup flashed to bright, reflecting the rays of the eastern sun toward the section of wraparound porch where Winston sat.

  The lights glowed for several seconds, a slow wink which registered like a beacon to Winston, and he felt the flush of blood swell to his face. He swallowed the lump in his throat and continued to sit motionless in his teak lounge chair, his eyes wide, anticipatory, one hand gripped tightly on the chair’s arm, the other holding his coffee like a frozen server.

  And then his eyes began to bloom as the red glow of the brakes suddenly deactivated and turned to white, and the truck began slowly to back up on the narrow highway. It reversed just ten feet or so past the driveway and then the front wheels pivoted to the right, and with that motion, Winston gasped.

  The old man stood now, slowly, setting the coffee cup on the glass top of the patio table lest he spill it all over his shaking hand, and as the truck began to roll slowly toward his home, he watched it with a combination of curiosity and dread, anxiety and defensiveness.

  What was the reason for this visit?

  He’d done little more than turn on his coffee maker that day, and he certainly hadn’t used any forbidden devices recently, not that he could think of anyway, nothing that would have warranted a warning or citation.

  They were there for something else. Something dire.

  A reasonable person would have assumed the visit was to offer some courtesy warning, a heads up about plans for increased monitoring or pending construction on the telescope. But within the last year, Winston’s life had been robbed of reason, and his first instincts now contained the qualities of distrust, the assumption of injustice.

  He sighed and cleared his mind, considering now that perhaps he was being cited. He didn’t own a cellular phone, but he did have a radio, and maybe he’d unknowingly turned it on and was transmitting the signal at that moment.

  But Winston was fairly certain any such citations would have come from the sheriff’s department and not the monitors themselves, and there was little chance he’d accidently switched on the radio that was on the top shelf of his clothes closet. And besides, he knew by the rumble in his belly and the clutch in his chest that this visit was to do with something else. He didn’t have much life left in him, but his intuition was strong, and he sensed that once the day ended, whatever was left of that life would be changed forever.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the truck to arrive, and in less than a minute, the knock on the door sounded.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Allie Nyler had clearly heard the fear in her sheriff’s voice, and she wondered now if it was for the first time ever. Not that Garmella saw much in the way of terrifying events—it didn’t—especially for her and her fellow officers, a force comprised of three men and two women, each of whom carried weapons amongst a civilian population that was overwhelmingly non-violent and law-abiding.

  But there had been moments, a time or two when Ramon Thomas had faced situations that were beyond typical small-town affairs and would have petrified most people, Allie included. And in those moments, he had held his calm like a statue. One of these instances, Allie had seen with her own eyes.

  Jennifer Gorman was eight years old when she was hit by a distracted driver as she crossed Drayton Ave, the impact causing her right femur to pop through the skin of her thigh like a chicken bone. Allie and Ramon had been first on the scene, not two minutes after, and before Allie could utter a single, useless question, something in the vein of ‘Oh my god, what happened?!!,’ Ramon had already ripped one of the shoulder straps from the girl’s backpack and was wrapping a tourniquet around her upper leg like an army medic.

  But what Allie remembered most about that day was Ramon’s voice and demeanor, the way he had spoken to the third grader like
he was telling her a bedtime story, ignoring her own screaming and the sickened shouts of the oglers around them. Later, Ramon had told Allie that it was the girl’s screaming, in fact, that had kept him calm; the shrieks letting him know she was alive and functioning properly, at least from the waist up, and that whatever damage had been done below could be fixed over time.

  And Ramon had been spot-on with that logic. Today, Jenny Gorman was alive and well and a three-sport star at Upper Apache Middle. It had taken several years of demanding PT to get her just right again, but right she was, happy and healthy and courting college coaches at the ripe age of thirteen. And Jenny had Ramon Thomas to thank for it.

  So, on that morning, when Allie heard the shake in Ramon’s voice over the radio, the distress and dread in his pitch, she felt more than just a wave of concern—it frightened her. The new guard at the Grieg was dead, that much she knew, and though she wasn’t yet privy to the details of the incident—whether it was an accident or something else—she knew it must have involved something disturbing or grotesque, a scene horrifying enough to send her boss to the brink of hysterics.

  Allie turned once more to the edge of the precipice where Derek Zamora’s truck had gone over, giving one last suspicious stare over the guardrail into the ravine below. She then shifted her eyes to the rail itself and to the ground at her feet, then behind her to the road leading to the cliff, suddenly noting the lack of skid marks on the pavement. She also took note of the tire tracks in the dirt and how they were parallel to the cliff—not perpendicular, which would have made more sense.

  She reexamined her theory now that Derek Zamora had been speeding—and possibly drunk—when he suddenly spotted the sinkhole, far too late, and then turned quickly to his left, crashing into the guardrail with enough speed to vault his Ranger over the barrier like Evel Knievel and down to the ravine below. The theory was sound, she supposed, but the pieces didn’t quite fit. There was damage to the guardrail, but not the kind that would have come from the impact she imagined in her mind. And, again, the tracks along the side of the road ran in the wrong direction. Plus, if Derek had come upon the hole so suddenly, he would have slammed his brakes at some point, which would have left thick black marks somewhere on the street.

  But Allie didn’t have time to investigate the scene properly now; her Sheriff needed her, and, as insignificant as it seemed in the moment, she was determined to atone for today’s late arrival—one of many indiscretions over the past few months—and to get back in her boss’ good graces.

  She jotted a couple of notes on her notepad, took a dozen pictures with her camera, and then returned to her cruiser, walking around to the rear of the car. From her trunk, she pulled out a yellow diamond sign that read ‘Dead End’ and a stack of orange cones which she set out in a tight row with the others across the width of the street, deciding that if these measures didn’t prevent any more disasters, the fault was on the driver.

  She stood in the road for a moment and surveyed the scene one last time and then let her stare drift up to the mountains in the distance. The sky was now as blue as sapphire, and a warm breeze rose from the valley and flowed across her face. Allie’s eyes drifted to the sinkhole now and she instinctively averted her gaze before glancing back to the cavity, mildly curious about her own reaction. She took a few steps toward it, and when she was about ten feet or so from the lip, she stopped and looked back to the cruiser, her stomach suddenly clenched tightly with anxiety.

  “What is wrong with me?” she mumbled.

  She shook her head, trying to jostle her nerves back into place, and then she edged closer to the chasm, stopping again just a pace and a half away. She stood tiptoed as she craned her neck, trying to peek into the damaged concrete, to judge just how far down the abyss went.

  She took one more step and was suddenly hit with a smell that was some combination of burnt flesh and ammonia; a nastier combination of odors she couldn’t imagine.

  “Jesus Christ. It’s like a goddamn volcano for suicidal animals.”

  It made sense to Allie that a porcupine or badger—or maybe even an elk or mule deer—could have been claimed by the gap in the road and then gotten stuck in the crevice and baked by the Arizona sun. As she considered it further, she couldn’t imagine a sadder thought.

  “Sorry, fellas,” she said, and then turned to head back toward the cruiser to leave for the Grieg.

  Whoosh!”

  The sound of whooshing air erupted from the hole behind Allie before she took her first step, and she pirouetted back to the crater and froze, her breath stuck high in her chest. She stared at the air above the hole like it contained the secrets of life, the noise blasting like a geyser of sound.

  “What in the fu—”

  And as quickly as the hiss emerged, it ceased, as if shut off by some valve deep in the earth, but before the mountain returned to the serenity of a minute earlier, a wailing noise called from the pit, low and distant, like a foghorn whose bell has been stuffed with mud. The howl faded in and out in a moment, but before the sounded dissolved into the mountain, Allie heard what sounded like her name being called on the wind.

  Allie felt a burn in her chest, the grip of fear again in her belly, but she fought it, shaking her head defiantly.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  She refused to spend another moment analyzing this event—not today. Her mental issues, if that was the right term, weren’t going to win this day. She turned her back to the hole and strode confidently back to the cruiser, slamming the driver’s door aggressively and peeling out in a screech of the tires. It was time to follow her boss’ orders and get on up to the Grieg.

  Except there was somewhere else she had to stop first.

  Halfway to the telescope, she spotted the POW/MIA flag that rose high above Luke and Randy’s house—an emblem that their father, a veteran of the Iraq War, flew proudly. Her orders were clear—no stops—yet despite the sheriff’s urgency, as well as her determination to turn over a new leaf, the decision to stop at the Carson house seemed the proper thing to do. The two minutes or so it would take to rouse and rally her partners would be worth it, especially if the scene at the Grieg was as bad as she suspected. Besides, the Carson brothers should have been on patrol by now, and if something had happened to them, this was the time to find out.

  As Allie neared the house, she noted Luke and Randy’s dirty black Tundra parked in the drive, as well as the Garmella Police Department cruiser, the fourth and last of the fleet, a car which Luke and Randy shared between them. The vehicle was also confirmation that the boys had not yet left the house for the day.

  “What the hell are you guys doing?” Allie said to herself, peering through the windshield as she pulled behind the Tundra in the driveway. “Can’t keep your damn radio on at least?”

  Allie exited the cruiser and walked to the front door of the small, ranch-style home, giving two brisk raps as she scanned the area around her, noting again the absence of a single person on the street. Her gaze caught the Suarez home two doors down, and she took note of the open front door, as well as the first-barrier screen door hanging lifelessly by its bottom hinge, leaving entry to the house wide open.

  “What the hell is going on today?”

  Allie knocked once more and then almost immediately gripped the knob and turned, receiving the resistance of the locked door. She scanned the layout of the grounds and then walked tentatively around toward to the back of the house, and as she cleared the right side of the small residence, she gasped at the sight of a straw hat rising above a cushioned chaise lounge. The chair was positioned on the stone patio so that it faced the risen sun, away from Allie.

  She assumed it was Terry Carson—Luke and Randy’s father.

  Allie took a breath, relieved to have eyes on someone at last. “Mr. Carson?” she called.

  Allie kept her voice low, not wanting to startle the man, quickly silencing her radio as well. The man had been diagnosed with PTSD upon his ret
urn from the Middle East and on disability since, and though he seemed a congenial enough man—Allie had only met him a couple of times—she considered he may not be too appreciative of being snuck up on from behind by a relative stranger.

  “It’s Allie Nyler, Mr. Carson. I work with Randy and Luke.”

  There was still no answer, and Allie quickly assumed the man was sleeping. She took a couple of steps toward him, continuing to scan the surroundings, suddenly feeling uneasy as she looked out to the border land of the sprawling Tanner Farm, the quiet serenity of the property somehow appearing troubling to her under the current circumstances.

  But everywhere felt troubling this morning, Allie thought. Nothing in Garmella was quite right today.

  “Mr. Carson?”

  Allie took another step and was now directly beside Terry Carson, but before she could reach down to give his shoulder a quick, rousing shake, from the corner of her eye, she saw a dark mask of black. Allie turned in full toward the man now, gasping as she met the burnt, shriveled face of Luke and Randy’s father. He was a white man racially, but his skin was now as black as a bat’s wing, the straw hat sitting atop his head like the adornment on some demented scarecrow.

  “Oh my god!” Allie shrieked, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, the sting of developing tears beginning a steady burn in their respective ducts. She reached for her sidearm, but it was only an instinct, and instead she left it holstered, her fingers barely tickling the grip as she stared in wonder at the figure below her.

  “What?” she asked breathlessly, staring up at the house now, her head swiveling in all directions trying to find an answer to the impossible scene that had just unfolded.