Patrick lifted the shotgun, balancing it on the ledge of his collarbone. The hockey stick spun expertly in Alex’s hands. Patrick reached over, plucked his Stetson from Alex’s head, and seated it firmly on his own. With a baling hook, I gestured toward the door.
As we headed out, I could feel the eyes of everyone in the gym on us. We were the brave few. Or the soon-to-be-dead few.
We reached the double doors, pushed them open, and headed down the corridor. Cassius trotted at our side, his head raised, tongue lolling. He probably thought we were going for a stroll.
By the front of the school, Ben stood lookout, that stun gun shoved into the waist of his jeans. As we neared, he spun the keys around his finger like a cowboy showing off his revolver.
Patrick halted, studied him. “You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you?”
Ben considered for a moment. “I’m used to death, Patrick. I grew up around a slaughterhouse. It gave me an up-close look at, you know, the cycle of life. And I knew exactly how my life was gonna play out. How many hours I’d work when I was twenty or thirty or forty. How much overtime I’d pull on weekends during culling season. What kind of crappy place I’d live in when I got older and what bar I’d drink at.” He swallowed, and I could see in his face the same longing I sometimes felt, the dreams he didn’t allow himself to have. “I get to protect people now. Make choices that actually matter. I get to actually matter.”
His eyes glimmered wetly. Again I thought back to that car crash that had taken his brothers and wondered what he’d lost in the flames. Or found.
“So yeah…” Ben turned to slot the key into the lock. He opened the big door for us, the air billowing in, cold and unforgiving. “The end of the world is pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.”
ENTRY 18
The three of us crammed beneath a stand of oak, the velvety leaves tickling our necks and the backs of our arms. Cassius remained outside the tangle, lying flat on the dirt, his snout resting between his paws. We’d taken a high vantage on a hill, town square sprawling before us. It had quieted down a lot since we’d last seen it, the Mappers dispersing to scan new terrain. In fact, I couldn’t see a single Host on the vast lawn or the bordering streets. Aside from movement in the church windows and the glow of the forge from Bob n’ Bit Hardware, there was no sign of life at all. Jackhammered chunks of asphalt lay like boulders on the street. A power cable dangled from the roof of the One Cup Cafe, striking the sidewalk and sending up sprays of sparks. The pallet jack dragged into town by Afa Similai remained in the front courtyard of the church, but the dog crates were missing from it, as were the other trunks and cages I’d spotted there earlier.
We’d doglegged through the neighborhood by the school, drifting through wisps of fog, making painfully slow headway. We’d kept close to the houses, moving through yards, hiding behind trash cans and parked cars. More than once we’d had to hold our breath and keep our heads ducked as packs of Hosts drifted by. Cassius obeyed my hand gestures perfectly, all those cold morning hours of training paying off. Patrick and Alex debated grabbing a truck but decided the noise of an engine would be too risky here in town. If we drew a throng of Hosts, we’d be as stuck as a car in a herd of sheep.
The square now was as desolate as I’d ever seen it.
Alex leaned over, her hair brushing my face. “Where are they all?” she whispered.
I said, “Maybe once they’ve mapped an area, they move on.”
Cassius’s head lifted, his ears flattening against his skull.
The clack of a screen door drew our focus to the line of shops. A kid sprinted out of the One Cup Cafe and through the fountain of sparks. He looked tiny, dwarfed by the hugeness of the square. He sliced between two parked cars, zigzagging across the open grass. Even way up here, we could hear his panicked breaths. He hurdled a bench and ran for the road. Patches of fog blurred his outline.
Patrick said, “Is that…?”
“Andre Swisher,” I said.
Suddenly there were faces in the windows of the houses and storefronts. We watched, breathless. Various doors banged open all around the square, a haunted-house orchestration, Hosts filling doorways and the mouths of alleys. Way across in the hospital, a woman in an untied gown pried open the ER doors and halted in the threshold, her stance wide, her arms spread to hold the doors at bay. For an instant they all just stood there, watching with their non-eyes.
Then they flashed into motion.
Andre screamed, switching direction once and then again, but the Hosts bounded toward him, cinching the noose. They were female, moving fast enough to burst their muscles. Though there were only seven or eight of them, they shot at him from every direction, streaking across the square. Sam Miller’s grandma leapt over a car, landing on all fours, then rocketing forward.
Patrick tensed, bringing one knee under him like a sprinter at the starting line, but Alex put her hand on his back, firm, and said, “You go down there, you’ll die. We can’t help him right now.”
Cassius whined faintly, and I hushed him.
Andre tugged frantically at a car handle—locked. Hosts closed in. He ran to a pickup slant-parked behind the chunks of broken asphalt and vaulted in. His fist smashed down the lock. His hand darted below the dash, and his shoulder flexed—the keys must’ve been left in the ignition—but nothing happened. Either the Hosts had disabled the truck or when its owner transformed, he’d walked away, leaving the engine running until the gas ran out.
The female Hosts mobbed the pickup. Through a break between them, we caught a glimpse of Andre’s panicked face, his mouth stretched wide in a scream we couldn’t hear.
Sam Miller’s grandma drew back an arm, the flesh sagging beneath the bone, and drove her fist through the window. Hands crowded the jagged orifice as they pulled Andre out. They flung him violently chest-down on the road. A mother who worked as a volunteer at the library tore her blouse right off. Wearing nothing but a long skirt and a black bra, she used her shirt to bind him.
They hoisted him up and ran to the church, his muffled cries growing fainter and fainter. They disappeared inside, leaving the square as peaceful as it had been just a few minutes before.
None of us said anything. There was nothing to say. It was one of the most awful things I’d ever seen.
Our breath misted in the darkness, three puffs in a row.
“Even though the Mappers are scary,” Alex said, “at least you stand a chance if they don’t look up and see you. But the females, all they do is chase. They’re the worst.”
She was right. They were quick and fierce and terrible.
“We need to get a look inside that church,” Patrick said. “See if there’s any way we can help those kids.”
It was what I’d most dreaded he’d say.
We kept to the hillside, moving among the trees, Cassius a few feet ahead of us, a canine early-warning system. The backpack tugged at my shoulders, filled with our supplies, including extra shells for Patrick’s shotgun and my notebook. It took forever, but we finally worked our way down toward the back of the church and peered out from the edge of the parking lot. To one side the pews lay in a jumble like a giant stack of firewood. The Hosts had removed them all from the church. To make room for what?
A flatbed truck parked by the rear door blocked most of our view of the building, but we could still make out the stained-glass windows on either side of the altar, glowing with light from within. Over the breeze we heard moans and sobs, footfalls and dragging sounds.
My mouth went dry.
We waited for a while, watching and listening, but nothing changed. Then Patrick said, “Now or never, I guess,” and crept out from cover.
I looked across at Alex. I could read the fear in her eyes, but she tightened her grip on the hockey stick and stepped from the tree line. Cassius and I stayed at her heels.
We hurried across the parking lot, passing the flatbed and jumping over the boxwood hedges beneath the window. I put my hand o
n Cassius’s neck and pushed him down into the dirt with us. The whine of machinery vibrated the wall at my shoulders.
Cautiously, we rose and peered through the window. Due to the stained glass, everything looked murky, drenched in blues and reds, but then I found a white piece in the mosaic and the view inside became clear.
I wish it hadn’t.
In place of the pews were rows of cages, crates, and pens, stretching from wall to wall, filling the whole interior. Every last one filled with a kid.
Hundreds of them.
Inside a repurposed chicken coop, Lyssa Unger, one of the cheerleaders, lay curled in the fetal position. Now loaded into one of our dog crates, Andre Swisher sobbed hoarsely, his muscular arms trembling. Blake Dubois had been crammed into a flat battery cage used to house hens, his discarded wheelchair flipped over beside it, one tire spinning lazily in a draft.
Dozens of Hosts moved through the aisles like the guards in some awful death camp. Most of them distributed white plastic coffee mugs from the church kitchen. I sourced the whining noise to an industrial meat grinder at the edge of the altar. Wearing his smeared butcher’s apron, Ken Everston fed the grinder, grabbing items piled at his feet. Corncobs. Raw meat. Dog food. A whole turkey still in the plastic wrapper. A constant stream of beige sludge emerged from the machine, the other Hosts passing the white mugs beneath it, filling them for the children.
They were fattening them up? Or just keeping them alive? To what end?
My gorge reared up, pressing at the back of my throat.
What made it even more scary was how organized it all was. The Hosts—or whoever was controlling them—kept moving pieces around the chessboard, executing a grand plan we couldn’t keep up with. They’d temporarily abandoned their roles to carry out various tasks. They’d done this before, of course, like when they’d melted down the guns and taken out the power lines, but I hadn’t seen this many working with such machinelike precision in one place before. It was as though their programming had been rewritten all at once, putting them in service of a new goal. Seeing them in action was as awe-inspiring as it was fearsome.
There were way too many Hosts in the church for us to launch some kind of rescue mission. We’d be overpowered immediately.
Beside me Alex stiffened. In a tiny voice, she said, “Dad?”
There he was. Sheriff Blanton, patrolling the church like a foreman. The other Hosts stepped aside before him, falling into line, making clear who was in charge.
He walked over to the basement door and swung it open. A moment later Afa Similai emerged from below, his dreadlocks swaying around his empty eye sockets. His muscles protruded as if carved from granite; Afa lifted the battery cage holding Blake. Blake slid to one end of the cage, crying out. Afa thundered to the front of the church and exited, returning a moment later to grab another crated kid.
We watched this for a time, doing our best to remember to breathe. After Afa had retrieved five kids, he didn’t come back from the front of the church. We waited nervously for him to reappear, but that door stayed shut.
Alex’s gaze stayed locked on her father. Sheriff Blanton led several Hosts up to the meat grinder, each of them carrying food—a pineapple, dry pasta, a jar of pickles. It would all go into the gruel. He patrolled around the church, passing right in front of our window. As his boots thumped past us, Alex pressed her hand to her mouth, tears spilling over the bumps of her knuckles. His shadow rolled across her face and then was gone.
Cassius gave a low growl, fur standing up on his shoulders. He swung his head toward the side of the building.
“What?” I whispered. “What is it, boy?”
From around the corner came the rattling of wheels.
My muscles tensed. “Let’s go,” I said. “Now.”
We hurdled the boxwood hedge, making it to the far side of the flatbed truck just before Afa came into view. He was hauling the pallet jack. Shooting a look over my shoulder, I saw that it was stacked with cages. Fortunately, Afa was bent forward, straining against the weight of the pallet, so he didn’t see us as we vanished into the tree line.
Breathing hard, we watched him roll the pallet jack to the side of the big truck. Several more big male Hosts trailed behind him. They hoisted the crates up onto the flatbed. Seeing the kids loaded up like produce was almost too much to bear. Cheeks pressed into wire. Fingers curled around bars. Sobs and pleading.
When he was done, Afa grabbed the pallet jack and started back the way he’d come. One of the Hosts climbed into the truck and drove off, exhaust steaming from the tailpipe. The flatbed vanished, and a moment later another pulled in. They were running shifts, moving the kids somewhere.
The driver left the flatbed idling and walked into the church, probably to help with the next load. The other Hosts remained at the far end of the truck, staring at the church, waiting for Afa and the driver to reemerge.
Patrick drew back farther into the trees. “Let’s go,” he said.
Something stopped me in my tracks. I thought of Lyssa Unger curled in the fetal position. Blake crammed into that battery cage, his kicked-over wheelchair left behind. Wherever he was going, he’d be even more helpless than the others. Anger clawed its way up my throat.
I put Cassius on a sit-stay and broke from the tree line, sneaking up behind the truck. The male Hosts were right there on the far side, facing away, but any fear I had was overpowered by anger.
I swung one of the baling hooks into the rear tire. It punctured the rubber softly, giving off a hiss. The guards didn’t turn around. Keeping a careful eye on them, I walked silently backward into the woods.
Hands reached out, grabbing me from behind, and I almost yelled.
Patrick.
“That was dumb,” he said.
Annoyed, he nudged me along through the tree trunks.
He was right, of course. Taking out one tire wouldn’t solve anything, but maybe it would slow them down a little.
Right now it was the best I could do.
We carved through the woods, staying off the main roads until we were well outside town. I had an urge to whistle for my missing dogs, but I didn’t, worried what else might come crashing through the trees to answer my call. If we got anywhere near the other ridgebacks, I figured Cassius would let me know.
We crested a rise. Through a break in the pines, we could see Jack Kaner’s place below, the weathered barn thrusting up from the fields. Long tunnels of tarp covered some of his vegetable crops, insulating them from the cold. To the south, the highway snaked through the landscape, a dark strip splitting the darkness.
Alex gestured toward the barn. “Ever since he got rid of his horses, Mr. Kaner parks his truck in there by the stables. I came once with my dad when someone spray-painted graffiti on the side of the barn.”
“I heard that was Andre Swisher,” Patrick said.
I thought about Andre running around the square like a trapped rat as the women—the Chasers—closed in. How they’d circled the pickup and dragged him out through the shattered window.
“Do you think it’s safe to drive now?” I asked. “The noise and headlights might draw them.”
“It’s fifty miles just to Ponderosa Pass,” Patrick said. “Then up and over to Stark Peak. No way we make that on foot.” He scanned the highway ahead, the wide plain of the valley unfurled like a giant map. “More open space out here. Less chance we get penned in.”
We worked our way down the steep hillside toward the barn, our flashlights stabbing the dark. We stumbled over roots, sent pebbles and dirt cascading. We were as quiet as we could be, but probably not as quiet as we thought we were.
At last we came out onto level ground about a mile from the barn, walls of corn spreading before us. In the plots behind the corn, rows of curved tarp lay over beds of lettuce and other produce that Kaner sold in his market. The “caterpillar tunnels” were built by stretching tarp over arcs of bent PVC piping, so they were segmented like the bugs. Each one was as long as a football
field. A corner of tarp had pulled free from its rebar stake, snapping in the wind. The air smelled of rich soil, rot, and greens. A scarecrow jutted up, pitchfork in hand, and in the distance the Kaner house sat dark and quiet.
Cassius hesitated, his growl no longer a puppy growl but a rumble in his chest.
“It’s okay, boy,” I whispered. “Come on.”
As we eased out into the field, more scarecrows came into sight all around us. A whole patch of them. And then we realized.
They weren’t scarecrows.
ENTRY 19
First the heads moved, rotating to face us, moonlight streaming through the skulls. Then the shoulders pivoted. They turned as one, the bodies separate and yet coordinated, like a flock of birds changing direction.
A bunch of them in ragged crop-picker overalls and flannels. Weather-beaten cheeks, bronzed skin, lanky builds. Jack Kaner used migrant workers and paid them a decent wage, though he rotated them through like crops. Sometimes there were a dozen. Sometimes more.
From the corner of my eye, I caught more movement. Turning, I came aware of shadowed forms spread through the fields, ovals of countless faces hidden among the cornstalks.
They’d frozen at our approach, letting us creep right into their midst.
My chest jerked in breaths. Instinctively, we’d fallen into a fighting formation, facing outward, our backs nearly touching. Cassius barked and barked.
The Hosts exploded into motion, flying at us, stalks rustling. The nearest one leapt. I saw Patrick’s arms move, and then the boom of the shotgun thundered through the air. With a swipe of her hockey stick, Alex snapped a Chaser’s head to the side. Cassius launched himself at the next Host, locking his jaws around the throat. The Host fell back, arms grabbing to pry his jaws loose.
“Into the corn!” Patrick said. “Stick together!”
Cassius lifted his dark muzzle from the Host and led the charge. We ran right over the Host’s body, breath hissing through his torn throat as our boots trampled his chest.
We plunged into the field. Leaves tore at my cheeks. Ears of corn knocked against my shoulders, my chest. Stalks snapped underfoot. I kept Alex’s back in sight, but it was hard, the view chaotic and jumbled. Arms and leaves flew at us from all sides like brushes at a car wash. The panting breaths and flashes of limbs all around made the very field seem alive.
The Rains Page 13
