Toward the front of the bus, the door lay open, pointing at the stars. My breath hitched in my chest. I clicked on my flashlight and shone it between my feet through the windows. This close, the beam penetrated the tinted glass, giving a murky view of the interior. Bags and purses lay jumbled against the far windows at the bottom, their contents strewn all over the place. Slowly, I walked across the panes, shining my light on the shattered glass and the trash below. A wallet. A baseball cap. A few coolers knocked open. Shoes and lipstick tubes. There’d been a lot of workers in there when the driver had transformed, tipping it over.
Which meant that now there were a lot of workers out here.
One of the windows fissured beneath my weight. I jumped to the next. That one spiderwebbed as well, so I hopscotched onto the metal beside the panes. I continued along, my flashlight stabbing across the empty rows of seats.
Finally I reached the end and slid off the bus. Alex joined me and Cassius as we headed back. Patrick was still leaning through the windshield of the station wagon, working on the kid’s belt.
The kid’s breaths came as panicked wheezes.
“What’s your name?” Patrick asked, using that voice he reserved for calming down sheep tangled in barbed wire.
The boy’s lips trembled. “Nick.”
With a snap the belt fell away. Patrick grabbed Nick’s hands and pulled him out carefully through the windshield. As he slid past the corpse of his father, the boy squeezed his eyes shut.
“It’s okay,” Patrick said. “Don’t look. I’ll tell you when you’re clear. Just keep talking to me.”
“Okay. Okay.” Nick’s side rubbed against his father’s body, the stiff hand trailing along his back. He stifled a cry.
“Hey,” Patrick said. “Hey. How old are you?”
“I’m thirteen,” Nick said, barely managing his words. “A freshman at Stark Peak High.”
“A Monarch?” Patrick said. “Monarchs suck.”
A tension breaker about the old rivalry.
Nick made a nervous laugh without smiling.
Patrick slid him down the hood. “You’re clear now.”
Nick opened his eyes and swung around, landing on the ground. A small kid for his age, with thoughtful eyes. He wore a hoodie up over his head, the sleeves too long for his arms. The back of the hoodie sported an image of an old king with a scepter and crown, a cartoon take on his school mascot.
As Alex jogged back over to us, Nick stomped his feet against the cold. “We have to go,” he said. “Now.”
“The Hosts,” I said.
It took him a moment to catch up to the name I used for them. “That’s right,” he said. “There are hordes of them roaming around here. It’s like they’re guarding the pass. We should—”
The faintest crackling sounds came from the edge of the forest beside the barricade. Twigs snapping. Feet squelching into mud. The cracking of joints.
We stood like a phalanx, breath cold in our lungs, watching. Cassius didn’t growl, but his upper lip wrinkled back from his teeth, showing his fangs.
The darkness took shape slowly, resolving into human forms. In the lead a woman wearing a tattered skirt crouched low to the ground. Her hair was still thick enough to cover the holes in the back of her head, so her eyes looked like black coasters.
The others gathered around her, a wall of not-humanity. More Hosts than we’d yet seen assembled in one place, all of them wearing uniforms from the cannery.
They charged.
ENTRY 21
“Over the barricade!” Patrick roared.
Our boots hammered on the hood, over Nick’s dead father, across the roof of the station wagon. One by one, we leapt onto the deadfall of pines, grabbing at branches, needles poking our hands. Cassius bounded up and over effortlessly. Nick slipped on the top of the car, and Patrick went back for him, grabbing his shirt collar and tugging him to his feet.
A skeletal claw closed over Nick’s sneaker, stripping it off as Patrick ripped him free. The shoe moved back across the throng, hand over hand, held high like some kind of relic. The sea of Hosts pooled at the base of the barricade. In the darkness I couldn’t see where they ended.
Nick’s sock dangled from the end of his foot. He stared at it in disbelief before Patrick hurled him around onto the stacked tree trunks of the barricade.
“Move it!” Alex screamed down.
I was high on the barricade, straddling the top log, my palms sticky with sap. On the far side, the open road of the pass waited, rising up, clear of Hosts and obstacles.
Patrick scrambled up the face of the logs, side by side with Nick, one arm around the younger boy’s waist, practically carrying him.
The Hosts surged over the station wagon, flaring up the jumble of trees like a flame. Fingernails scraped at Nick’s feet. Turning, Patrick pistoned a leg down into the face of the Chaser with the tattered skirt.
She plummeted, taking out several Hosts beneath her, but where they’d fallen, six more surged in their place, scrabbling up the trunks like spiders. Nick awkwardly climbed the fallen trees, his bare foot slipping on the wet bark. He nearly fell, but I lunged down and caught his arm.
Behind me Cassius barked and barked, and for once no one hushed him.
As I hauled Nick up, the log rolled between my legs. Patrick kicked and thrashed, freeing his legs from the upthrust hands. A big male Host seized my brother by the calf and started to drag him down.
Gritting his teeth, Patrick swung around, one-arming the shotgun and firing down into the Host’s face. I could see blood on his foot. The choke was set wide, and some pellets must have peppered through his boot. The guy rocketed down, taking a dozen other Hosts with him.
It wouldn’t be enough. More scaled the wall all around us. Alex swung her hockey stick, knocking a few back, but they kept on, scaling and lunging. It was like an old-fashioned battle from that movie, orcs trying to storm the castle wall.
Patrick shot up toward us, leaping like a rock climber scaling a cliff face.
I stood, the log wobbling beneath me. Unstable. “Step back!” I shouted at Alex.
She hopped away, sinking into a bramble between logs on the back side. Patrick flew up the wall at me, throwing his shotgun before him. It sailed over my head and landed somewhere behind me.
Below, the barricade creaked with the weight of countless bodies. Another few seconds and they’d swarm him. I leaned over the top of the log, praying it would hold, and lowered my hands, screaming, “Jump!”
Patrick bent to leap. For an awful moment, I thought he was too far below, that it wouldn’t be enough, that our fingertips would brush and he’d fall away into the living mass. Then I remembered the baling hooks that had been dangling from my wrists all this time.
As Patrick leapt, I shoved the hooks down at him, adding about a foot to my reach.
His hands rose to the metal curves, and I clamped down on the handles with everything I had. My chest and stomach ground painfully on the top log. My shoulders popped under Patrick’s weight, the ligaments screaming. I dragged him up and over. He tumbled down the back side of the barricade before grabbing hold of a bough heavy with pine needles.
The clamor of hands and feet pounded the barricade below us.
Next to me Nick stared down, his muscles locked up from terror.
“Nick!” I yelled. “Move!”
He pivoted to vault over the top log.
His bare foot slipped on the wet bark.
His arms rose up into the air to grab something that wasn’t there, and for a split second he floated right beside me, facing over the barricade at Patrick and Alex, his legs cycling.
Then he dropped.
I grabbed his hood as he fell, but the hands below caught him. There was an instant of resistance. Then they tore him away, screaming, down the canted face of the barricade.
His hoodie still swayed from my fist; they’d ripped him right out of it.
With shocking speed they moved him overhead toward t
he back of the throng. He was whisked away like a rock star surfing a crowd at a concert. His wild eyes found me for an instant. Then a gnarled hand gripped his chin and spun him around. Countless hands carried him across the swell until he faded into the darkness.
My throat had closed; I couldn’t even yell after him.
The Hosts resumed their upward race, clawing their way to the top of the barricade. Several had reached the apex, arms bent over the highest log, faces rising into view.
I stepped back, dug my heels into the branches behind me, and drove my chest into the wobbling topmost tree. It rocked once on its makeshift bed, aided by the Hosts tugging from the other side, then rolled back at me. When it rocked forward again, I hurled myself into it with all my might. It rose up, up, reaching a tipping point. And then it went.
The tree hammered down the front of the barricade, smashing Hosts, bulldozing everything in its way. It picked up speed, catching one Chaser square in the thighs and launching her so far that she smashed into the overturned bus. Once the tree hit level ground, it slowed until it rolled off the highway into a ditch.
I didn’t have time to be impressed with the damage. A number of Hosts still remained down below, picking themselves up, regrouping. I stared hard through the darkness, but there was no sign of Nick. He’d been carried off already. Some of the injured Hosts staggered toward the barricade again. A woman with a caved-in cheek and a missing lower jaw. A man with his collarbone spiking through his uniform shirt.
We couldn’t wait around.
When I turned, I saw Patrick and Alex looking up at me. I was still holding Nick’s Stark Peak Monarchs hoodie. I reached over the top of the barricade and let it go. It fluttered down out of sight.
Then I started hopping down the back side of the barricade. At the bottom we circled up. Cassius stuck his wet nose in my palm, and I stroked his soft head.
“I should’ve left him to hide in the car,” Patrick said, and walked away.
Alex shot me a frustrated look and then followed. The road up was empty. No abandoned cars we could take. We made the choice to stick to the woods beside the pass, hiding under cover as we started up. Sure enough, the few Hosts we saw came stumbling down the middle of the road. They were smart to do so; the terrain was brutal. We went from mud to boulders to brambles to granite faces that we had to help one another scale. Treetops blotted out the moonlight, making the climb even harder.
Through the trees we kept an eye on the road for vehicles but spotted nothing except a Subaru upended in a roadside gully. We hiked until I felt like my hamstrings might snap, until my hands were raw and my calves on fire. At last we broke free of the pines, standing in an open patch near the top of the pass. Looking back across the valley, we saw only darkness. Crisp air usually meant that from high on the pass we could spot the flare of lights marking Creek’s Cause, but not today. Not anymore.
We topped a cracked hump of stone, pulled ourselves to level ground, and lay panting on the cold dirt. Above us rose a solemn ring of Douglas firs. A stone’s throw away, the highway forked into two dirt roads, one winding up to dead-end at Lawrenceville, the other rising to a plateau on the north before starting its corkscrew descent into Stark Peak. At either side crevices fell away treacherously, sheer drops without bottom.
“Let’s rest here a bit,” Patrick said.
I about collapsed with relief. He and Alex started clearing pine needles to make a space to lie down. Taking the hint, I got Cassius, moved a brief ways off toward the road, and cleared my own makeshift camp.
Patrick with Alex.
Me with my dog.
I sat down, my muscles complaining, my lower back stiffening. It had been a grueling climb. I stared at the stars and breathed the air, as clean up here as it was anywhere on earth. Was it free of spores? This far away from Creek’s Cause, it had to be.
Cassius lay against me, the ridge on his back pressed to my side. As I scratched behind his ears, I noticed that he’d grown into some of the extra folds of fur. The shape of his face had changed, too, losing some of its puppy softness. Sometime over the past few days, he’d become a young dog.
I supposed whether we liked it or not, we were all growing up.
I took out my notebook and leaned against my backpack. Resting my flashlight on the ledge of my shoulder threw enough of a glow for me to write by.
From across the clearing, I could hear murmured voices.
“… have to send help back for the others,” Patrick was saying.
I had to strain to hear them.
“We will,” Alex said. “But we don’t have to worry about your birthday anymore. About your turning into one of them next week. We can let adults worry about fixing everything. That’s supposed to be their job anyways.”
“Then what?” Patrick asked.
“Then we can do whatever we want.”
I felt a gnawing at my stomach. It took a moment for me to recognize it for what it was. Loneliness.
Patrick and Alex were going to move off into a new life together, and I was going to be left behind.
I pictured those windshield pebbles spilling from Mom’s purse, red like rubies. How they’d bounced on the floorboards at my feet. How alone I’d felt downstairs with the purse and my dad’s cracked watch. How the smell of lilac had flowered all around, taunting me. The darkest despair I’d ever felt until Patrick had found me. I got it from here, little brother. He’d held me tight, so I knew that even if the world had come apart, he’d be there.
Would he be there now?
Falling asleep felt like an escape.
* * *
A hand clamped over my mouth.
My eyes flew open. Dead of night. Skeletal branches overhead.
I bucked, but the grip was too strong. Cassius lay at my side, not growling but watching silently. I put it together an instant before the whisper came in my ear.
“Quiet. It’s me.” Patrick reached past my head where the flashlight had rolled when I’d dozed off. His hand pulsed around it, the thin beam vanishing.
I’d tensed from my heels to my face, but I forced myself to relax and melt into the ground. Then I heard it.
Wails and cries.
Tires crackling over the dirt road.
Very slowly, I turned my head. We were mostly hidden by a net of leaves, but through the gaps we watched a procession of flatbed trucks roll by.
Each loaded high with cages.
Each cage filled with a kid.
The sounds were the worst part. Hacking and gagging and rent-open sobbing.
They looked like chicken trucks brimming with hens stuffed into little cubes. Except hens didn’t have fingers that clutched the bars. They didn’t plead and sob. They didn’t thrash violently, making the metal jangle.
The trucks kept on, the tires less than ten yards from where Patrick and I lay flat in the dirt, protected only by the mesh of branches. To avoid the barricade, they must’ve backtracked, then circled all the way around to Bristol, a six-hour detour through several towns in the low valley—too dangerous an option for us. Then they must’ve refilled their tanks somehow and driven up the southern shoulder.
Now we watched the trucks veer up toward Lawrenceville at the top of the pass. The turn was abrupt, the tread throwing up pebbles.
A cage slid free of the straps and plummeted down the sheer rock face, a girl’s scream growing fainter and fainter. The cage pinged once off the stone and vanished into the abyss. The other cages on the top level shifted around, a few more sliding off, bouncing against the lip, and plummeting into space.
I can’t describe the sounds those kids made as they fell.
Though I didn’t dare look over at Alex, I could hear her muffled sobs.
Finally the procession ended. As the last truck chugged upslope, I caught a glimpse of the crates in the very back. Crammed into a battery cage, Nick stared out at the kicked-up dust on the road, his face blank, his eyes as black and lifeless as those of a Host.
That la
st truck rumbled off into the darkness. We stayed perfectly still until the final vibration of the engine faded from the air. Then we dragged ourselves out of the clearing, raw from what we’d witnessed.
“They just kept going,” Alex said. “Those kids fell off … into the … and they just kept driving.”
Patrick put his arms around her.
“We gotta move,” I said.
On stiff legs I headed north, toward Stark Peak.
After a moment their footsteps pattered behind me. The incline steepened, my thigh muscles aching. I bent into the rise, cutting through a stand of pines to get us out of plain sight. Cassius trotted at my side.
“Good boy,” I said. “Good, good boy.” He grinned up at me, unconcerned. Taking his kid for a walk.
Crossing my arms in front of my face, I forged through pine needles. Something hard came underfoot, and I opened my eyes just in time to find myself on the brink of a granite ledge, staring at a drop that seemed to fall forever.
I halted sharply, the tips of my boots tapping a few pebbles that floated down and down. “Guys, wait—”
But Patrick collided with me from behind. My head and torso rocked over the edge, my boots holding on the lip, my arms pinwheeling through empty air as I tried to keep my balance.
Patrick’s hand shot out, steady as ever, and locked down my wrist. I was tilted over the edge, nothing around or beneath me. We stayed like that for a moment, too scared to move. Exhaling slowly, Patrick reeled me in over my boots. I took a few steps away from the edge, joining Alex back near the tree line. Then, finally, I let my muscles unclench.
She pointed past me. “Look.”
I turned. Spread way down below like a scattering of jewels were the lights of Stark Peak. Streetlamps and windows and the giant spire atop city hall, glowing orange and yellow for the coming fall festival. Life in ordinary motion.
I’d never seen such a welcoming sight.
A different weather system, like Alex had said, devoid of spores.
“We did it.” Alex smiled. “We did it. We’ll find a car on the way down. And even if we don’t, we’ll make it on foot in what—four, five hours?”
The Rains Page 15
