The Rains

by Gregg Hurwitz

  The Hosts reached the base of the crisscrossed tree trunks and flew up at me.

  They were closing too fast.

  I wasn’t going to make it.

  If I drew the gun, I’d never get off all the shots in time. I dipped a shoulder, let the pack slide into a trough between the logs. I swung the baling hooks up on their nylon loops and seized the handles.

  I turned.

  One Host bounded onto the station wagon, denting the roof. Only a few yards away. There’d be no running from them or outsmarting them.

  Not this time.

  Curved steel hooks protruding from either fist, I turned and leapt into the mass.

  ENTRY 33

  I landed on the roof of the station wagon, the impact sending out a kettledrum rumble, the metal cratering beneath my boots.

  Hosts lunged up at me from all sides.

  I didn’t think.

  I just fought.

  A flurry of steel and blood, the baling hooks like a part of my body. I sank a tip in one Host’s throat, ripping it out even as I pivoted to cave in another’s skull at the temple. The first three fell away, knocking down the others trying to scale the sides of the station wagon.

  But I wasn’t done there.

  Rather than let the others come after me, I jumped down into their midst and waded in, both arms swinging. Blood spatter arced overhead. I was screaming not in fear but in rage. A battle cry.

  I hurled a hook up through the soft flesh beneath a Chaser’s chin, the tip curving through her skull and shoving through her eyehole, popping the front membrane.

  —red windshield glass skittering across the floor—

  I wrenched the hook free, and she toppled, shuddering.

  —Uncle Jim’s eyeless face—

  Another Host grabbed me from behind, but I spun, raking both hooks, embedding the points in the sides of his head.

  —Zeus licking my face, a puppy curled in my arms—

  He dropped back stiffly, his body like a plank, his weight yanking his head free of the steel points.

  —my brother hooked to tubes—jigsaw pendant in the grass—Cassius whimpering—Chet’s face transforming behind the chain-link—Bob Bitley staggering toward me—Patrick’s black cowboy hat lowering onto my head—my shadow looming large on the gym doors—

  I tumbled out of the storm of memories, coming back to myself, breathing hard. My arms ached at my sides. The Hosts lay sprawled around, twitching and gone. My face and shirt felt sticky with their blood, and my hooks were stained oil-black.

  For a moment the silence bathed me.

  Eight Hosts, dead at my hand.

  With each breath I seemed to inflate, my spine straightening one vertebra at a time, pulling me upright inch by inch.

  A familiar sound called my attention to the side of the highway. A few more Hosts trudged toward the barricade, their legs mired up to the ankles in the marshy reeds.

  I drew the revolver, waited until they reached the edge of the asphalt about ten yards away. Then I shot them through their foreheads, one after another.

  I thumbed the release and let the wheel click open, the hot brass falling away, bouncing at my feet. I climbed up the station wagon again and found my backpack where I’d dumped it on the fallen trees.

  After reloading the revolver, I was on my way.

  Though there was no sign of Hosts beyond the barricade, I cut off the main road and traveled through the terrain alongside it as we had before. Scaling the slope was treacherous, as was making headway through the underbrush. The heavy backpack tugged at my shoulders, and the hockey stick tangled in branches. My thighs and calves burned. But at a certain point, I fell into a rhythm.

  Everything hurt just as much, but I no longer cared. I was separate from the pain and exhaustion, just like the Hosts, observing it as if from some other place. Every time I got hit by thoughts of what might be waiting for me in Lawrenceville, I pushed them aside.

  My focus narrowed to a single aim: finding Alex.

  For a while I zoned out, drifting in time. It was a few years ago, a night when Alex had called to tell Patrick that her dad had to go out on patrol.

  We sneak over to her house and hide in the bushes, waiting for the sheriff’s car to pull out of the driveway. Finally Sheriff Blanton steps outside. He pauses on the porch, looking back at her in the doorway. “I don’t want those Rain boys over here,” he says. “Rain only—”

  “—goes one direction,” she says, cutting him off. “Down.” She shoves his shoulder playfully. “I got it. Now, go keep the peace already.”

  When Sheriff Blanton turns for his car, she casts a glance over at the bushes where she knows we’re hiding and shoots us a wink I feel in my spine.

  I know the wink isn’t for me. It’s for Patrick. But it doesn’t matter. I’m close enough to her, to them, that some of her glow touches me, too.

  As soon as the car’s taillights disappear, we sneak across the front lawn and Alex lets us in, giving Patrick a kiss I can hear even though I don’t look over. We make root beer floats and head outside. Like old times, we cram into the hammock together to peer up at the stars, slurping our drinks, swaying, and picking out the constellations.

  “I think I see Man Throwing Up,” Alex says, pointing at a spray of stars.

  “Is that Greek?” I ask, and she laughs.

  I’m nestled against her side, her bare arm pressed against mine, and it is warm and soft.

  “What do you see, Patrick?” she asks.

  “It’s just north of the Big Dipper,” Patrick says. “It’s called Your Dad Tossing My Butt in Jail.”

  “Ooh,” Alex says. “That’s an exciting one.”

  “Exciting?” Patrick says, and I can hear the grin in his voice. “I think it’s more scary than anything.”

  “Well”—Alex turns her face to Patrick, her hair drifting across my cheek—“I hope it’s worth it.”

  “It’s worth it,” Patrick says.

  The hammock rocks hard as my brother climbs out. “I need another root beer float,” he says, and pads into the house.

  Alex and I lie there for a moment alone. It feels like floating.

  “What do you see, Chance?” she asks.

  “The Little Bear,” I say.

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  “I thought that was the Little Dipper.”

  “It’s called that, too.”

  I hear her rustle on the hammock as she turns to me. “How do you remember all this stuff?”

  I can feel her breath. We’re that close. I don’t dare look over. I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  She turns back to face the night sky. “Is there a Big Bear?”

  “It’s called the Great Bear. It’s formed using the Big Dipper. See, there? The hindquarters. Then the rest of him.”

  She leans her cheek against my shoulder, peers up the length of my arm.

  “It’s much more obvious than the Little Dipper,” I say. “Higher in the sky and way huger. It dominates everything.”

  “Hmm,” she says. Her cheek stays against my shoulder, and I don’t want to lower my arm, not if it means she’ll move away. “But the Little Dipper has the North Star in it, doesn’t it?”

  I feel my blood quicken a bit at the playful note in her voice. “Uh-huh.”

  “Isn’t that the most important star? The one sailors navigate by? The one all the other stars rotate around?”

  I finally lower my arm and turn. Our faces are so close that our noses almost touch. Her green eyes are luminescent. It’s such a perfect moment I almost forget to be self-conscious.

  “Know what I think?” she says. “I think the Little Bear shouldn’t underestimate himself.”

  My breath catches in my throat.

  Before my whirling brain can fix on a reply, the hammock dips again and Patrick spills into the netting beside us. His arm slides beneath Alex’s neck, pulling her into him. He’s big enough that if he dangles one leg off the hammock, his foot ca
n touch the ground, and he rocks us, rocks us in the quiet of the night.

  Alex has turned her face back to him, sure, but she keeps her arm pressed alongside mine.

  We sway for a long, long time.

  A splash of bracing cold water brought me back into my body there in the wilds of Ponderosa Pass. A lip of dirt had crumbled away, sending me stumbling calf-deep into a river.

  The current was strong, pulling one of my legs out from under me, the weight of the backpack spinning me around.

  I lost my footing, found it again, my boots scraping across the mossy bed. Cold water rose to my thighs, but I kept my chest and head out of the water. I bulled my way to the far side and clawed at the clay of the opposite bank, dragging myself up out of the water. For a time I lay there panting and freezing.

  Alex’s voice came to me from afar: Would you cross raging rivers?

  I would.

  I forced myself to my feet and checked the backpack. It was still mostly dry, the plastic bags protecting the perishables and my notebook. Something tingled at my calf, and I tugged up my pant leg. A dark slippery oval clung to my flesh.

  A leech.

  I scraped it away, leaving a smudge of my blood. I found two more on my other leg and flicked them back into the river. If I wasn’t lost, I was certainly off course, which meant I’d have to find higher ground to regain my bearings. I continued upslope, damp pants clinging to my legs, the pass growing steeper and steeper until I had to lean forward and use my hands to pull myself up a rocky rise.

  Would you climb mountains?

  If they were between me and you, those mountains I would climb.

  At last I reached the top, tumbling over the lip, landing in a mud wallow. My muscles gave out under the burn, and I sprawled there panting in the soothing wet.

  It felt so pleasant lying here. It would be so easy to rest, to drift off, to give up.

  Would you crawl through mud for me?

  I shoved myself up to all fours, shook my head hard, drew in a deep breath.

  If mud needed crawling through to get to you, I would.

  I stood, sludge caking my hands and knees. Staggering with exhaustion, I drifted into the thickening pines. The branches drew denser and denser, needles crowding in on me from all sides until it felt like I’d be skewered alive. Finally I broke into a clearing, scratching at my aching arms.

  At first I didn’t register where I was. Then I saw the ring of Rocky Mountain Douglas firs around me, the forked road beyond, the three cleared spaces on the ground.

  The spaces where Patrick, Alex, and I had slept that night we’d made it to the top of the pass.

  Though I’d taken a different route up the rock face, I’d wound up in the right place after all.

  North and down to Stark Peak.

  South and up to Lawrenceville.

  I took a moment there at the fork, staring up the dirt road winding to the very top of the pass. I cast a glance at the two rectangles in the pine needles that Patrick and Alex had cleared.

  If ever absence had been made visible, it was in those patches of dirt where my brother and his girlfriend had slept just last week.

  Stepping from the ring of trees, I peeled south up the fork to Lawrenceville. As my legs carried me onward, a pulse beat in my temple. I realized the obvious: I was terrified of what I might find there.

  It turns out I wasn’t terrified enough.

  ENTRY 34

  I moved cautiously up the south fork, weaving through the trees to the side of the road. As I neared Lawrenceville, I came aware of a suctioning noise.

  First the smack of some sort of impact. Then a moist yielding.

  I froze in my tracks and listened.

  A moment later it came again.

  Thump. Squelch.

  The noise, arriving at regular intervals, drew me through the night like a beacon. It grew louder as I neared the outskirts of town, passing by occasional rickety cabins that had gone to seed when the cannery started busing in workers and the local economy collapsed. It grew louder yet as I came up behind the factory, threading through mud-caked backhoe undercutters and construction rigs parked in clearings among the trees.

  Thump. Squelch.

  An industrial wasteland nestled in a dip in the landscape, the Lawrenceville Cannery stood out from the surrounding trees even in the darkness, a vast cleared patch of shadow.

  Moving from tree to tree, I crept into position above the little valley.

  The sounds kept coming, but I could see nothing below.

  Thump. Squelch.

  Thump. Squelch.

  Curiosity burned in me, but fear burned brighter. Whatever those noises were, they weren’t good.

  The darkness lifted just enough for me to see the rough shapes of the buildings below. I sensed movement around the facility but couldn’t make out more than that. Dawn threatened at the eastern horizon, the black sky beginning to show blue.

  Thump. Squelch.

  I could make out only the shapes closest to me. The storage warehouse just below my perch. Beside it a yellow bulldozer bled through the gloom, parked by a roof-high pile of gravel. Rolls of fencing were stacked like Lincoln Logs. Rectangles of sheet metal rose at irregular intervals across the hillside. Construction must have been under way when the Dusting had hit.

  Thump. Squelch.

  The sky lightened another degree, the parking lot showing just barely through the haze. I sensed movement on it. Hosts on patrol?

  Thump. Squelch.

  The noise seemed to be coming from the factory itself. The giant building emerged slowly, like a mighty ship from the fog. The huge doors had been rolled back, venting heat from the factory floor. I could sense a bustle of activity inside, but what it was, I couldn’t say. I strained my eyes, trying to see what was going on in there.

  Thump. Squelch.

  The top of the sun finally broke the horizon, a pinprick of glowing yellow.

  I saw through the open doors.

  I really wish I hadn’t.

  ENTRY 35

  The Hosts moved in synchronicity, each bent to his or her task. Watching them work was like observing the insides of an intricate cuckoo clock. It might have been fascinating if what they were doing weren’t so gruesome.

  Hosts crawled like worker bees over the equipment, reconfiguring the compound into a torture camp of sorts. Kids were strapped at intervals to the conveyer belt, bound at the ankles, thighs, chests, and foreheads so they could barely wiggle. Industrial-strength plier clips secured the straps to ridges on either side of the belt. The belt jerked along in lurches and pauses. It snaked around the expansive factory floor before exiting through a freshly sawed opening in the building’s side that allowed it to continue on. I guess they needed more room. Crates and cages rose in a giant wall lining an entire side of the cannery, each filled with a sobbing kid. Worming fingers, mashed faces, the glint of shattered eyeglasses—it was almost too terrible to look at. In front of this backdrop of bars and flesh, Afa Similai pulled kids squirming from their crates. With the help of several other Hosts, he bound them to the starting point of the belt.

  Once a kid was secured, Sheriff Blanton hit a red button and the belt slid forward one stop before halting again. The lurching belt movement must have been calibrated for filling batches of cans or bottles.

  I’d known most of these adults. Afa and Sheriff Blanton, Mr. Tomasi and Gene Durant. I remembered their faces when they held not just blank focus but human emotion. They’d been subverted and overridden, their brains hijacked. But that didn’t make any difference to me right now. Watching them do what they did made me hate them anyways.

  Thump. Squelch.

  I couldn’t see the end point of the assembly line, only where it disappeared into the hatch cut into the side of the building.

  Thump. Squelch.

  I had to walk around to see where that conveyer belt continued. Where it ended. And what was happening there.

  Mindful of the Hosts patrolling the comp
ound’s perimeter, I lowered into the scratchy brush and crawled down to the storage warehouse below me. I kept my head beneath the yellow weeds, pushing the Stetson in front of me, moving one cautious foot at a time. For all I knew, Chasers had spotted me and were hurtling up the hill already.

  But I safely reached the big pile of gravel beside the bulldozer and leaned against it, catching my breath. A few pebbles trickled over my shoulders. From here I’d be able to see the outside of the building where that belt emerged. Shuffling off the backpack, I peered around the edge of the gravel.

  I couldn’t take it all in at once; it was too overwhelming. I did my best to make sense of it, to assemble it in my mind piece by piece.

  To the side of the cannery, several acres of forest had been cleared and a giant foundation poured for future construction. Before the Dusting the factory had evidently been in the process of a huge expansion. That explained all the supplies stashed around the area. The new foundation was enormous, three or four times the size of the original cannery.

  Cratering the corner of the foundation was a massive meteor, cracked jaggedly open around the midpoint. But the inside didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen.

  It was smooth and perfectly rounded, coated with transparent screens that seemed as if they were made of organic matter like the eye membranes of the Hosts. Various images flashed on the screens, though I could make out little more than shifting bluish lights.

  It wasn’t just a meteor. It had been co-opted as a spaceship.

  Thump. Squelch.

  My attention was drawn to where the assembly belt emerged from that roughly cut hatch in the cannery wall. A twenty-foot length of the belt had been reassembled outside so the assembly line could continue to the edge of the new foundation.

  Thump. Squelch.

  My gaze landed at the spot where the belt ended.

  A figure stood there at the receiving end like some kind of high priestess from ancient times. Something about her posture and contours suggested she was female. Everything about her was futuristic, from the sleek black suit to the polished helmet with its dark-tinted sheet of a face mask. No flesh was visible; she was completely sealed in seamless armor, which looked like an astronaut suit from another millennium.