Rocky peered up the hall behind us. “Where is she now?”
Patrick said, “You don’t have to worry about her anymore.”
Rocky nodded, clearly trying not to cry. “Good.”
JoJo’s face was hot where it touched my neck. She pulled back and looked at me. “Our daddy,” she said. “He wasn’t our daddy either. Not when he left.”
“When did he leave?” Patrick asked.
“Earlier tonight.”
“Where’d he go?” I asked.
JoJo lifted her arm and pointed through her bedroom window. Past the Franklins’ place, the water tower rose beneath the moonlight.
* * *
“He was hurt bad,” Rocky said as we headed downstairs. Black curls fringed his round face. Though he’d gone pale, circles flushed his cheeks. He looked even younger than his ten years.
Patrick chose his words carefully. “Like your stepmom?”
“No, not like her,” JoJo said. “His stomach was swole up, and he was all weird and stumbly.”
“And naked,” Rocky added.
Patrick looked like he wasn’t sure what to make of that, and I wasn’t either.
“Our stepmom, she went into shock after Dad left,” Rocky said. “She sat on the kitchen floor and couldn’t talk. She just cried and shivered. We didn’t know what to do. Then when night came on, she … she changed.”
As we passed through the kitchen, Patrick plucked the phone receiver from the wall and held it to his ear. Then he tapped the switch-hook a few times, gave me a little shake of his head, and hung the phone back up.
My stomach pulsed with alarm. Mrs. McCafferty must have cut the phone line, though it seemed crazy to me that she’d have thought to do something like that. By the time we saw her, it didn’t seem like she was thinking at all.
“We’re gonna head back to our place and rouse Jim and Sue-Anne,” Patrick said. “We’ve got to get some help.”
“I want him,” JoJo said. She still hadn’t come out of my arms. “I want my dad.”
“I understand that, Junebug,” I said, hoping her favorite nickname would calm her. “But we need to let the sheriff know what happened here.”
The sheriff happened to be Alex’s father, an added complication that neither Patrick nor I wanted to dwell on right now. Timothy Blanton had been a single father for five years, ever since his wife had driven off to the West Coast one crisp autumn morning, never to return. He was as strict as you’d imagine a single father/sheriff might be, and while Patrick was respectful to him, there wasn’t a lot of affection between them. There’d be even less once we told him about shooting Mrs. McCafferty in the gut, then shredding her in a sweep auger.
Shotgun in hand, Patrick stepped through the screen door onto the porch and scanned the darkness. The night wind gusted in our faces. JoJo sniffed the bitter air and wrinkled her nose.
“But he was hurt,” Rocky said. “What if he needs our help now? Your place is the opposite way. Can we help him first?”
JoJo started crying. “I want my dad,” she said again.
I looked at Patrick, and he nodded. “Okay. We’ll do a quick loop to look for him in case he’s in trouble, then head home and call the sheriff.”
I set JoJo down, careful not to snag her sweater on the baling hooks. “Keep behind us,” I said.
We headed off the porch and forged ahead into the crops. We came to that cleared field and noticed the little piles where the stalks had once been, the crumbled remains like ash.
I remembered the news frenzy following Asteroid 9918 Darwinia’s disintegration. All the statistics and gossip about what had landed where.
At the sight, Patrick made a noise deep in his throat, and then we continued on. Sweet corn rose on either side of us, the husks scraping our sleeves. On alert, we rasped through the darkness toward the Franklins’ land, Patrick and I keeping the lead.
“What was that in the silo?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” Patrick said. “But it wasn’t Mrs. McCafferty. Not anymore.”
“We killed her.”
“No,” he said. “You saw her. She was already dead.”
“Then what was she? And don’t say the Z-word.”
“I have no idea,” Patrick said. “It’s like she was sick with some crazy disease. Rabies or whatever.”
“Rabies doesn’t put tunnels through your head.”
“A new strain, then,” Patrick said. “Or some other killer virus.”
“But what disease does that?” I said. “It’s like something had … I don’t know, taken her over.”
Just saying it out loud made the back of my neck prickle. Our boots crunched the hard earth.
Patrick cleared his throat. “She was more like a … a … what’s the name for it? In biology? The opposite of a parasite?”
“A host,” I said.
We let the word hang there. Behind us we could hear JoJo sniffling and Rocky murmuring, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
We reached the edge of the field, breaking through the stalks onto open ground.
“What was she trying to do?” I whispered. “The … host? Ripping out her hair, pinning you down, tying your wrists? Was she gonna eat you?”
“No,” Patrick said. “She was trying to take me captive.”
“For what?”
Instead of answering, Patrick halted abruptly. Touched his hand to the earth. When he lifted it to the moonlight, his fingertips were smudged with something dark.
Blood.
The kids emerged from the corn, nearly stumbling into us from behind. Patrick stood quickly and lowered his hand so they wouldn’t see his stained fingertips.
“What?” Rocky said.
“Just catching my breath,” Patrick said.
The blood trail continued forward, nearly impossible to make out in the darkness. Patrick’s eyes traced the direction it went, his head slowly tilting up. I looked where he was looking. A stream of particles flowed above us, luminous in the moonlight, like the trail of a magic carpet.
We traced the stream across the starry sky to its source.
The top of the water tower.
* * *
The giant tower rose like a spider on stilts. We stood at the base of the metal ladder leading up and up. I realized that my knee was jittering and told it to stop. The stream of particles looked to be growing thinner, a fire burning itself out.
“What do you think it is?” Rocky asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe your dad went up there, started a fire or something?”
“Please help him,” JoJo said. “Please bring him home.”
Patrick set his hands on a rung, the shotgun making a clang against the side rail.
“Shouldn’t I come up and get your back?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I turned to the kids. “Stay here—right here. If you see anything or anyone, give a shout.”
Rocky nodded and drew his little sister in protectively.
Patrick was already twenty or so rungs above me, his progress punctuated by the steady knock of the shotgun against metal. I started up after him.
I will confess: I don’t love heights. This water tower was 150 feet high, which wasn’t so bad, except for the fact that the ladder rose in the space between the legs of the tower, unattached to anything else. It felt like scaling a magical beanstalk, the earth falling away, my fists and toes finding holds in thin air.
Patrick finally reached the tank itself, and he climbed the metal rungs welded to the side. I followed him, focusing on each handhold, not daring to look anywhere else.
I heard a final clank of the shotgun as Patrick got to the top, and then there was silence.
“Patrick?” I called up, panic finding its way into my voice. “Everything okay?”
His voice floated down from the darkness. “No,” he said.
I quickened my pace to the top and crawled onto the flat roof of the tank, still not risking a look up fro
m my feet until I was a few paces off the edge. My legs felt wobbly, though whether that was from the altitude or the sight before me, I didn’t know.
There on his back lay what was left of Hank McCafferty.
His torso and stomach were gone. In their place was a crater. He’d been hollowed out, the cage of his ribs thrusting up in the eroded space. Deep in the gleaming cavern, I could make out the line of his spinal cord. That strange pollen streamed forth from the hole, his remains turning to particles and paying out like a ribbon riding the wind.
It took me two tries to speak. My voice came out reedy. “What the hell is that stuff?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Patrick said. “We need help. We need to tell someone.”
I followed the pollen’s course to the distant lights of town and felt something inside me go cold.
That’s when we heard Rocky and JoJo screaming.
ENTRY 6
I was closest to the ladder, so I was the first man down. Patrick clanked down above me, urging me to move faster, his boots skimming my fingers as I pulled them off the rungs. My descent was so fast that it felt like falling. I couldn’t tell how far we’d come or how much farther we had to go.
Below, the kids’ screams grew louder, louder, and I risked a glance down. Forty or so feet below, Rocky and JoJo sprinted by, around the base of the water tower. A figure flashed past, chasing them, nightgown fluttering like a ghost in its wake.
Mrs. Franklin?
Patrick’s tread crunched my fingers. I yelped and whipped that hand free, holding on with the other. I reeled away from the ladder. The ground spun dizzyingly below. My sweaty grip nearly slipped, but I swung around and clamped back onto the rungs.
“Move!” Patrick was shouting. “Movemovemovemovemove!”
I did, not looking down again until my heel jammed into the dirt and I tumbled onto my back.
I blinked away the pain. A menacing silhouette leaned over me. It was Mr. Franklin, an outline of solid black against the blackness. Except I could see right through the holes where his eyes used to be, the stars shining through the tunnels in his head.
Quick breaths misted the air by his mouth. He leaned over, his head twitching, those large farmer’s hands reaching for me.
I opened my mouth to scream when he was wiped suddenly from view. Patrick had barreled off the ladder and knocked him over. Patrick rolled to his feet, planted a boot in the middle of Franklin’s chest, and unloaded the shotgun right into the man’s head.
The boom made me recoil there in the mud. It echoed off the hills of Ponderosa Pass.
Terror had left my skin clammy. I pulled myself to my feet.
Mr. Franklin’s body lay inert. His head was mostly gone.
After the experience with Mrs. McCafferty coming back to life after the gut shot, Patrick had taken no chances, going straight for the head.
A high-pitched scream snapped us out of our daze. Rocky and JoJo sprinted around one of the legs of the water tower, Mrs. Franklin right behind them, a streak of white.
Patrick chambered another shell and stepped into the path of the kids. Rocky split in one direction, JoJo the other. They brushed the outsides of Patrick’s legs as he fired a blast through Mrs. Franklin’s face.
She flew back and landed, her dress hiked up, exposing her pale, smooth thighs.
The kids cowered behind Patrick. Rocky sobbed. JoJo clutched Bunny and didn’t make a sound, just stared at the woman’s legs.
Patrick’s shoulders rose and fell. Sweat glossed his neck. Though I was standing, I felt like I was falling, my foundation tumbling away. Seeing Mrs. McCafferty get tangled in the auger had been horrifying. This was worse. Standing there beneath the water tower over the corpses of our neighbors was one of those nothing-will-ever-be-the-same moments. In the space of an hour, Patrick and I had killed three grown-ups. And the stream of pollen just kept pouring out of Hank McCafferty overhead. I couldn’t help but think it had something to do with what was going on.
That whatever we’d run into hadn’t even gotten started.
I walked over and straightened out Mrs. Franklin’s dress so it covered her legs. I don’t know why it mattered to me. But it did.
Then I leaned over and threw up. Patrick eased to my side, put a hand on my shoulder. I wiped my mouth.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”
I turned back to the kids. JoJo hugged Bunny to her chest, shivering violently despite her thick sweater. “Did you find our dad?”
Patrick nodded. He didn’t say anything, but it was enough. The kids’ eyes were glazed over with shock.
I thought about my mom’s clutch purse spilling bloodstained pebbles of windshield glass. How Patrick had slept on the floor next to my bed those first days after the car crash because I kept waking up screaming.
I crouched, bringing myself to eye level with JoJo, and rested my hands on her shoulders. “Why don’t you stay with us now?” I said.
This was no time to linger on loss. We had to get safely home and start figuring out just what in the hell was going on.
She managed a nod.
Bracing myself, I tightened my grip on the baling hooks and turned for the cornfields. Something caught my eye, a dark stream against the stars.
The river of pollen was blowing directly over our house.
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?”
The Rains Page 3