Rainwalkers

by Matt Ritter

  “Yes, then upvalley.” He strained to get the words out.

  “Where upvalley?” Ben was now holding the boy’s head up, staring into his frightened eyes.

  “I don’t know.” The boy’s eyes rolled wildly, and beads of sweat were forming on his green forehead. “What’s happening to me?” The boy cringed in pain. “I’m not wet,” he cried. “I’m not wet.”

  “Lie down.” Ben helped the boy off the chair onto the floor as he began to convulse.

  “Can you smell that?” the boy screamed. “I can’t breathe. What is that?” Foam was forming on the edges of his mouth. Ben held him as he continued to shake violently. The boy’s eyes rolled back into his head, the shaking stopped, and he collapsed onto Ben’s lap, no longer breathing.

  “Help!” Ben yelled down the long hallway to a group of soldiers running by. “Help.” None of them stopped.

  Ben rolled the boy onto his back and leaned over, pressing his ear to the boy’s mouth. No breath came forth. He pumped on the boy’s chest, occasionally breathing air into his open mouth for several minutes, but he remained unresponsive. Ben quickly surveyed the empty hallway. Sweat was dripping from his brow. Black smoke had entered the narrow stretch and was moving along the ceiling in his direction.

  He rose, took one last look at the dead boy at his feet, and ran down the corridor to the back of the building.

  The stink of rotting garlic and burnt plastic intensified in waves as he approached the opening torn in the building’s rear wall. Twisted rebar, bricks, and dust lay everywhere. Severed electrical cables hissed and sparked above him.

  Ben covered his mouth with his sleeve as he leaped through a wall of smoke and came out the back of the building. A group of panicked looking soldiers made a semicircle under the covered parkway around a boy who laid twisted and unconscious on the ground between them.

  “Where’s your commanding officer?” Ben shouted as he approached them.

  “Don’t know, sir. All the officers are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “They were called away on a special mission this morning. What do we do?”

  “Anyone who has passed out needs to be brought back inside away from the rain. Everyone else should get out of the building.” They all looked at him, stunned. “If you can breathe okay, help others. Find as many masks as possible and put them on people who are having a hard time breathing.”

  Ben nodded to one of the soldiers. “Will you lend me that?” Ben asked, pointing to the gas mask hanging on one of the soldier’s belts.

  The young man unclipped the mask and proudly handed it to Ben, who pulled it over his head, knocking his glasses onto the ground. A soldier bent to retrieve them and handed them back.

  “Are you okay, sir?” the soldier asked.

  “I’m fine. Now get this man inside and help the others,” Ben said, pushing his glasses back on top of the gas mask.

  Moments later, Ben was in the driver’s seat of a jeep, panting through his mask, realizing he was a young soldier the last time he was behind the wheel of a vehicle. Before starting the ignition, he pushed and released the clutch, moving the gearshift between positions. The rain was letting up as he lurched past the guard station on his way out of the Valley Administration complex. A wake of septic mist swirled about the vehicle as he sped through the deserted streets of Salinas City.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Will held his breath, perfectly still, pushing Zach against the mud-stained tree trunk. They were less than five feet off the path.

  The soldiers were talking loudly and laughing.

  “How many girls were there? Tell me there were two.” Both soldiers laughed.

  “I guess we’ll see when we get back home.”

  Will considered stepping out and shooting them both but thought it best to stay still. Maybe the soldiers wouldn’t see them.

  “I hope one of them is tall,” one of the soldiers said as they passed by.

  “But not too tall,” the other soldier said, and they both laughed, low and muffled, through their masks.

  “This must be the perimeter patrol path,” Will whispered when the soldiers were out of sight. “We need to get off this path immediately and move down to that shed. Keep an eye out. There’ll be more of them.”

  They watched the camp below from the edge of the woodland. A twisting spire of white smoke rose from the end of the mess hall and the generators hummed away. A soldier emerged from a low barrack and laid his blue jacket on the railing. Will impatiently studied the buildings for any sign of activity. Any sign of Helen.

  From one end of the building a door swung open, and someone stepped out on the walkway. The slow pulsating of Will’s mask stopped as he realized that the dark figure was Millard Fillmore. Will stiffened and involuntarily bore his teeth under his mask. One of Millard’s hands was in his coat, and he rubbed the side of his head with the other as he looked up at the hills around the camp. He paused when he was facing their direction.

  Will froze, and the hairs rose on the back of his neck. Even though Millard was too far away, and the mist made the visibility poor, Will was afraid he could see them. Millard continued his survey, turning slowly, looking at all the edges of the camp, then went back inside.

  “Was that?” Zach began to ask.

  “Yes, it was,” Will said, cutting him off. “He must have been in the jeep that passed us on the road.”

  “I hoped the explosion had got him.”

  “Obviously not,” Will said, his fists still clenched.

  They moved downhill until they came to the edge of the camp. The shed was a short distance into the camp and dark on the inside of its three walls.

  “I’ll go first. Don’t come down unless you see my signal,” Will said.

  Will was about to head for the shed when a soldier walked out from behind a nearby building, crossed under a covered pathway, and disappeared into the camp. Will and Zach stood motionless on the edge of the bank they had just descended. The soldier hadn’t noticed them.

  Will moved cautiously into the exposed clearing of the camp, jogging toward the shed with the handgun held down. He came upon the shed and ducked under the low roof on the open side. His eyes adjusted to the low light, and he could see it was empty. He looked back at Zach, who was crouched awkwardly against the bank waiting for his signal. Zach’s straw-colored hair contrasted with everything dark and drab in the camp. Will leaned out of the open side of the shed and waved at Zach, who came running.

  They crouched under the shelter, panting. A fine dust floated up from the dry dirt floor, and the shed was empty except for a tall stack of burlap sacks along one of the corrugated steel walls. Will went to the stack and felt the contents of one of the swollen sacks.

  “Wheat,” he said to Zach. He untied the end of one of the bags and wheat berries flowed out onto the ground. He lifted the gas mask to his forehead and bit down on one of the small grains between his front teeth. The air stunk in the shed with a mixture of sour rain, mildew, and old diesel fuel. The wheat berry crushed easily into a sweet, earthy powder.

  Will scooped the golden pellets into the cup Zach formed with his outstretched hands.

  “Let’s move these sacks onto the ground in front of the others so we can sit,” Will said.

  After they had stacked several of the heavy brown sacks, they settled down onto the soft material. Will kept his gas mask on while he continued to chew.

  Zach handed Will his canteen, and he took a long drink, then another.

  “Reminds me of home.”

  Zach turned to him.

  “That’s probably where all these sacks came from,” Will continued. “Gonzales, King City, Greenfield. Upvalley. All the food that’s eaten in this camp. Harvested by hand at upvalley farms, loaded on the longvalley highway and trucked down to this hellhole.” Will shook his head and was momentarily distracted by a memory. “I loaded so much of it myself.”

  “What a waste.”

  “Have you ever me
t someone from San Benito.”

  “No. I’ve heard stories, though.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but almost everything I heard was lies. I’ve been in their territory, seen Hollister City. We hid out there for weeks. I saw San Benicians with my own eyes. Saw the way they live. I’ve talked to a San Benito soldier captured by my unit.”

  “Talked to him about what?” Zach asked, shocked.

  “Doesn’t matter. The point is, they’re the same. The same type of people. They come from us and us from them. They have less land than we do. Maybe less food, but they’re the same, suffering in the same way.”

  Zach’s mouth dropped open while Will spoke.

  “What’s all this about then? Why are the soldiers here? The wall?”

  “I’m not sure anymore.”

  “My whole life I was told about the San Benicians,” Zach said. “About how dangerous they were.”

  Will sat in silence, breathing slowly through his mask. Finally, he said, “None of that matters now. You and I can’t fix anything. We can get Helen and get out of here. That’s all.”

  Will leaned back on the soft sacks and listened to the hum of the generator in the distance. He watched Zach, rubbing his leg. In the dappled late afternoon light in the dusty shed, Zach seemed tired and older.

  Will twirled a wheat berry between his fingers. “What happened to your leg?” he asked.

  Zach turned to him, seemingly surprised by the question. He looked back down at his leg and didn’t respond. Will knew he’d heard his question but had no interest in pushing Zach to answer if he didn’t want to.

  Finally, Zach said, “It wasn’t that long after my brother died.” He peered down on his thigh again as if he was waiting for it to agree to his story. “I was supposed to be cleaning in the barn, but I was out in the dry creek that ran along my grandparents’ property. I was hoping to see another animal or anything, anything moving, anything like me that could survive in the rain. It was cloudy, but I thought I had time. Then the sky just opened up. I suppose I should have been more careful, but at that point, I just didn’t care. I ran along the boulders in the creek, looking for anything moving in the rain. I slipped, and my leg caught between rocks, but my body kept moving.”

  Zach winced as if the pain was coming back to him. His face turned dark. “The bone came right out of my thigh. I remember the blood soaking my pant leg and dripping onto my shoe.”

  Will shook his head. “Oh, man.”

  “I was so afraid that they would find out that I could survive in the rain, that I was responsible for my brother dying. I thought they’d ship me away or something worse. I crawled back to the barn. Laid there for hours, trying to get dry. I was so cold and losing blood. I remember thinking I was going to die that afternoon.”

  Zach flicked a wheat berry across the shed, and it pinged off the inside of the tin siding. “Eventually they found me, hours later. I don’t remember that part all that well.”

  “Your grandparents never found out where you were when it happened?”

  “No. I’d dried out by then, and they thought I’d fallen from the barn’s mezzanine.”

  “I’m sorry, Zach.”

  “It never healed right. I’m not sure it would have even if I hadn’t laid there all those hours. I’ll never know. Sometimes I feel like being unaffected by the rain is a curse.”

  Will got up, went to the edge of the shed, and peered out. The clouds hung heavy, their bellies dark with liquifying water.

  “One of us should rest while the other stands watch. I’ll start,” Will said, turning to Zach. “You lie down for a bit. It’ll be a few hours until it’s dark enough for us to move again.”

  “Alright. I feel like I haven’t closed my eyes in days. I was up all last night in the rain.”

  “You rest. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

  Zach leaned over against the soft sacks and was asleep within minutes, breathing hard with his mouth open. Will stood next to the door in the shadows of the shed and watched the woodland slopes at the edge of the camp. From where he stood, he could see the unchanging, bleak sky above. Somewhere far away there was a faint rumble of thunder barely perceptible over the diesel generators.

  He stood next to the door watching the sky for an hour, maybe longer, occasionally looking back at Zach, who was fast asleep. Soon he would leave this hellhole with his daughter or die trying. Millard would be waiting for him and who knew what else.

  Kneeling beside the open door, Will could sense no change in the sky for the entire time he watched it. He could see by the movement of trees at the camp’s edge that the wind was picking up. He lifted his mask to his forehead to smell the air. It stunk, but not as bad as it had earlier. He waited for the first spits of rain to come, but they never did.

  The wind increased, and the air changed in an unfamiliar way, ceasing to stink altogether, then something happened that Will didn’t expect, something he'd never seen during his time in the camp as a soldier.

  Not only did the typical afternoon rain never come, but the clouds thinned and pull apart. Beyond their wispy edges, sweeping across the sky above him, Will saw what looked like late afternoon blue sky. He blinked and cleared his eyes to make sure what he was seeing was real.

  The clouds morphed and rolled in the wind as the sun continued to sink over the downvalley hills to the west. A new light came over the camp showing golden and yellow on the woodland embankment. The trees swayed in the warm wind.

  “Zach,” Will whispered loudly, gently nudging him awake. “You have to see this.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Zach asked, getting up quickly, confused about where he was.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Look at the sky.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a sunset.”

  “A what?”

  Zach stood shoulder to shoulder with Will at the door of the shed and looked out at the sky. The clouds had broken apart, and their lower edges were fringed with orange. At first, the change was incremental and subtle, almost imperceptible. Red eruptions faded to gold, and a white arch ran through it. The clouds, whose edges were now on fire, grew purple and the sky beyond a deep midnight blue. Will looked at Zach. He was smiling with his mouth open in amazement at the colors.

  “Wow,” Zach said after a long time of silence, more to himself than to Will. “I never saw anything like that before.”

  “Very strange. I’ve never seen it not rain in the afternoon at this camp.”

  “Well, that’s good for us.”

  “Maybe.”

  As they sat and watched, somewhere out of sight the sun dipped below the hills, and the magenta and orange of the clouds faded back to dark brown and finally black. Nothing of that electric sky was left, except what was burned into their memories. The winds increased and changed direction rattling the tin of the shed, and the clouds closed in around them.

  “You smell that?” Will asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Here it comes,” Will said, pulling the mask down onto his face.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Ben Harrison stopped at the curb down the block from a complex of dilapidated one-story buildings in northern Salinas City. He turned the engine off and wiped the inside of the windshield so he could get a better view. He was breathing hard through his mask. The Administration holding facility was a converted school from a long-ago era of Valley peace. He’d been there once before, many years earlier during his training, and it hadn’t noticeably changed. He saw the van that had carried Mary and the children in front of the building. What did the Valley Manager have planned for them?

  He cranked down his window and looked around nervously. Except for the distant hum of activity in the city, the afternoon was calm, no sign of anyone. He lifted the mask from his face and took a cautious breath. As the rain had died down, the stench of the air had mostly passed, leaving only the unpleasant but bearable scent of sulfur. He checked his watch.

  H
e was about to open his door when the rear window exploded open in a loud crash. Tiny cubes of glass rained down on the back seat. He froze, eyes wide and darting around, trying to determine the direction of the danger. He felt the blood drain from his face as he turned to see a wide hole shattered in the center of the rear window. He ducked down in his seat just as a second shot rang out with a deafening crack, and the back window on the passenger side exploded. He bent over in the seat, not breathing, his chest pushed into his thighs. No further shots came. He wanted to look up but feared to make any movements. He waited. Silence.

  A rumbling baritone voice came over a bullhorn from the direction of the holding facility. “Exit the vehicle.” After a moment, the voice came again, “Exit the vehicle. Now.”

  He rose, hands shaking, opened the door, then stepped out onto the street. He still couldn’t see anyone. He felt vulnerable, frozen in terror, adrenaline spiking in his blood, and assumed he would soon be shot. He slowly raised his empty hands, fighting the urge to run.

  Again, the voice came over the loudspeaker, “Put your hands on the hood of the vehicle.”

  Ben complied. The palms of his hand felt numb on the droplets of water beaded on the warm surface of the hood. There was a rush of footsteps behind him.

  “Put your head down.”

  He was grabbed from behind, his arms zip-tied at the wrists, and a black hood was forcefully slid over his head. When the darkness of the hood came over him, Ben began to panic. Had he been betrayed? Why hadn’t they been there to meet him? The plan was ruined.

  Ben was pulled from behind and, when he resisted, twisting away from the grip of his captors, he was flipped around and punched hard in the stomach. The blow doubled him over and he went down on his knees, unable to catch his breath.

  “Stand up,” commanded a muffled voice.

  Ben stayed on his knees. His eyes were open on the inside of the dark hood. He could see nothing but the black material, which smelled of burlap and rotten eggs. A second blow came from a boot to the side of his head. His neck wrenched backward, and bright pops of light danced across his field of vision. He felt the cold wet pavement below him, the distant and vague sensation of being lifted, then blackness.