Storm

by Virginia Bergin

  The music got cranked back up, everyone carried on partying, and King Xar wandered off after Saskia.

  For a moment I just stood there, like a panda/idiot—then I spied… Oooh! There was a table piled high with food. Not the kind of trash I’d been eating, but properly made stuff. Stuff that looked deliciously good. I felt my stomach growl louder than the music.

  Come to Momma! my head whispered at it.

  I barged toward it.

  “Hi!” shouted this girl who was already at the table. Her costume was hilarious: a walrus in a furry brown onesie, her plate piled high with items that she stuffed into her mouth between the two enormous papier-mâché tusks on either side of her jaws.

  “You look brilliant,” I shouted, giving her huge belly a friendly poke. It was seriously hard and seriously…real.

  “I’m so sorry!” I shouted.

  It wasn’t just an apology for the pregnant belly poke; it was a sorry for…uh. Dressed up or not dressed up, I could see immediately that she couldn’t have been much older than me. Nah—it was worse than that. She was younger.

  “You do look brilliant though,” I told her.

  “You look awful,” she shouted but in a kind way. In the din, in the madness, I heard that kindness.

  “I feel awful!” I shouted.

  I did feel awful. I mean, it all looked great and stuff—the party, the food—but… Oh, my body! It hurt! And my head, which so often seemed to have a separate life from my body, it hurt too. It hurt a lot.

  “I think I might have been in a coma,” I shouted.

  And Grace—that’s what I was just about to find out her name was—said, “Oh my !” and stared at me, oozing big walrus sympathy.

  I could have cried right there and then, because that sympathy felt so gorgeous. I put down the plate I’d grabbed.

  I want to warn you about this. I want to warn you that if you know you should be hungry because you can’t remember the last time you ate but you no longer feel hungry—for whatever reason—YOU SHOULD STILL EAT. Just something. Eat something. Same way with drinking (water!). YOU SHOULD JUST DRINK. Just take some stuff in, so your body and your brain will at least stand a chance of making some sensible decisions about things.

  I gave neither of them a chance.

  “Do you wanna dress up?” she yelled. “We could get you an outfit and stuff.”

  “Yeah! Yeah, sure!”

  I mean…why not, eh? Why not?

  That’s how I ended up in a room with Grace, the party blasting on downstairs. In a plush, wood-paneled bedroom of the sort you’d normally have to stand behind a red “Keep back, you visitor” rope to look at—me and Grace and a bottle of champagne.

  “I know I shouldn’t drink,” she said, rubbing her walrus belly as she glugged a glass of bubbly, “but it’s hard not to. You know, under the circumstances.”

  “When’s it due?” I asked her. But “it” sounded so harsh. “The baby,” I said.

  That’s what people ask pregnant people, isn’t it? That’s what they’re supposed to ask.

  “The seventh of October,” said Grace. She rubbed her tummy. “But they do say a first baby usually comes early. Up to two weeks, the midwife said…”

  Guess that had been said to her in the time before the rain. Guess that had been said to her when there were still midwives, when there were still people around to help and there was no reason—or at least a lot fewer reasons—to be scared. Guess there was now.

  This girl, Grace, I felt so sorry for her. She ditched her glass and rummaged through the pile of costumes on the (four-poster) bed.

  I tried on stuff—because she was so happy, playing dress-up like that. I mean, most people like dressing up, don’t they? But Grace? Ah, she was loving it!

  “See?” said Grace as I looked at myself in the mirror.

  The costume…I guess you could call it Evil Fairy. Like, it had the puffy skirt and the glitter and the wings and stuff, but it was jet-black.

  I did, really, just want to go then—like, just dance myself stupid and forget about the whole thing—but she pulled the panda card on me.

  “I could do your face,” she said.

  “Could you?” I asked. I so just wanted to go. “Like how?”

  “Like,” she said, “just wait there!”

  I sat on the bed. In the moments that she was gone I did briefly think, What am I doing here? But then she came back, bubbling with excitement, and dumped out the world’s most massive makeup bag.

  And I smiled so hard it hurt. She had A LOT of products. A LOT of products.

  Grace rolled up her sleeves—her arms were covered in tattoos—and worked at my face so lightly I could hardly even feel it. And as she worked, we chatted—and drank!—and she told me all about how she’d gotten expelled from school (she hit a teacher who had said that she shouldn’t have hit a boy for calling her a slut) and had to lie to her mom about the whole thing because her mom didn’t know about the pregnancy, but Grace was going to tell her when…

  That’s the problem with any conversation these days, isn’t it? Sooner or later it blunders into the unbearable. She didn’t have to say it for me to know it: her mom had died when the rain fell.

  “She wouldn’t have been cross with you for long,” I told Grace. It seemed like the right thing to say.

  “She wouldn’t have been cross at all. She’d have gone ballistic.”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. Grace grinned. “Seriously, she would have gone crazy,” she said.

  “I guess my mom would too,” I said. Actually, I could only picture my mom crying. “She’d have gotten over it,” I said. “She’d just be glad you’re OK.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Hey!” I said softly. “You’re gonna be OK now, aren’t you?”

  “I guess…”

  “I mean, it seems pretty cool here,” I said, changing the subject for her, for both of us. Or at least, I thought I was.

  “It is pretty cool,” she said pretty coolly.

  What I noticed even then was how she didn’t exactly seem as wowed by it all as I was. “It’s a great house,” I said. That definitely had to be a change of subject, didn’t it?

  “Yeah—it’s Xar’s.”

  “He owns this?!”

  “It belonged to his parents, so…I guess it’s his now.”

  “Wow…”

  I thought about our little house in Dartbridge. Guess I owned that now.

  “But anyone can own anything now, can’t they?” she said.

  “S’pose…”

  “I could claim Buckingham Palace…”

  “We should do that!” I said. I was drunk. I’ll admit that. But still, I could just see it: me and Grace and the baby out on a balcony waving to…no one in particular, a few random dead people where a crowd should be, angry packs of dogs yapping at us.

  “He’s on a power trip, if you ask me,” she said, suddenly ultra-serious.

  “Who? What—Xar?”

  She nodded.

  I snapped out of my drunken daydream. “How d’you mean?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Grace?”

  “He sort of controls everyone a bit. A lot. I mean, people go along with what he wants because…” She stopped what she was doing and rubbed her belly. “There’s nowhere else to go, is there?”

  This felt like another treacherous swamp.

  “Is he horrible to you?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “It’s…more complicated than that. He…he thinks the rain is a good thing.”

  That’s what she said, and she stared at me. As if she was expecting an answer. Maybe some kind of answer other than—

  “What?!” I almost laughed.

  I almost did. HOW COULD ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND THINK THAT?!

  S
he didn’t even smile. “You know, because of the environment and stuff,” she said. “He’s very environmental.”

  “Grace?!”

  “He really loves the Earth,” she said.

  Massive stuff crowded up in my head—about polar bears and tigers and rain forests…but still. “That’s not environmental. That’s just…mental,” I said.

  It was not meant to be a joke. It was… Ah, the people I had seen die. The hurt. Ah . The hurt. We are all hurting. There can be no one alive who does not hurt.

  “I don’t think it’s that he hates people exactly. He just thinks the planet would be better off without them here,” said Grace, interrupting herself. She held up a little compact mirror.

  I caught a glimpse of something weird and terrifying, more shocking than the thing Grace had just said. I gasped. I stood up. Dizzy stars buzzed.

  I checked it in the big mirror.

  The thing Grace had done with my eyes? She’d delicately drawn in a mask. A black-and-gold, twirly, vine-like, complicated mask that made my panda eyes look like a thing of witchy beauty. Meet Evil Witch Fairy Ruby: the shadow girl from the mist.

  The only thing that let me down was my hair. It just looked so peculiar. A head full of long spikes that started in mousy brown and ended in tips of black. I ran my hand through it.

  “We could bleach it?” offered Grace.

  I shook my head. Stars spinning. “Not now,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I caught the look on Grace’s face: disappointment.

  “This is incredible though,” I said, tracing a finger over a winding curl of black.

  “Don’t touch! You’ll smudge it!” she cried, but she was so, so pleased. “I was training to be a tattoo artist,” she said. “Well, unofficially. Just at this salon, it belonged to…a bloke I knew. You know, after I got kicked out of school.”

  I’m guessing the bloke was her bloke. Or that she had feelings for him. Who knows? All gone. It’s all gone. “You would have been amazing,” I told her.

  Then I thought about how terrible that sounded. “You ARE amazing,” I said.

  “I could do the outline in ink if you really like it,” she offered.

  Ha! Know what?! A part of me felt like saying, “Oh, OK then.”

  “My mom would go ballistic,” I said.

  Grace laughed and I…HA! I smiled so hard it was almost a laugh. And I thought that neither of our moms would have gone ballistic in the least. About any of this.

  They would—they really would—have just been glad—so glad—we were alive.

  And that’s how it was for the rest of that night. I smiled so hard I almost laughed. And it was just such a shame I couldn’t laugh because, basically, it was the most brilliant party I had ever been to…or ever will, I suspect.

  I forgot to eat. I forgot to drink anything that wasn’t champagne.

  And everything stopped hurting, so I danced. I just danced.

  Partly because, after Saskia had finished having her intimate tête-à-tête with Xar (which was still going on when Grace and I trooped/waddled back down stairs), Sask kept trying to grab me, going “Ruby, I really need to talk to you” (in an increasingly slurred voice), and the only way I could shake her off was to just keep on dancing—because I tell you, I did not want to talk about ANYTHING.

  So I danced. I just danced.

  Like it was the end of the world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  And then I woke up.

  Ha! You are NOT going to believe how many times I wish I could say this in this story—MY story. The story of what happened to ME. I want this to be like the kind of story I would have written as a kid, when a ton of really awful, scary stuff happens—but then you go:

  AND THEN I WOKE UP.

  And everything’s OK.

  Anyway, I woke up.

  We hadn’t just danced till dawn. We had danced till… Uh, I don’t even know what time it had been, but it had been bright and sunny and warm, which is what the weather usually does in September. It realizes the holidays are over and turns lovely, but you can’t go and join it because you’re locked up in a classroom all day. Ah, the joyous start to a whole new school year.

  Only there was no more school, was there?

  It was late on a sunny afternoon; the veranda doors were open, fancy sheer curtains spray-painted a rainbow of colors, billowing in a gentle breeze. They looked kind of tacky in the light…but maybe that was just because the whole of the rest of the room looked trashed and sad.

  But that’s how a place is supposed to look after a really good party, isn’t it?

  Grace had gone. Everyone had gone…except me and a bunch of kids.

  I sat up. Dizzy. Very dizzy.

  The dinosaur kid—just a little girl—was sitting alone in a chair, making two plastic ponies fight.

  “I want my mommy and my daddy,” she said.

  I guess she was talking to me. She didn’t look at me; she just made the ponies fight.

  “I do too,” I whispered.

  My head hurt. I felt too hot. The room felt too hot. The log fire from last night was still smoldering. Two little kids I didn’t even remember seeing before (a ghost and a zombie) were right in front of it, playing “Let’s Chop Wood” with a massive ax.

  Whoa. NO.

  I got up—a ka-trillion dizzy stars spinning—and descended upon those kids.

  “You DO NOT play with that,” I said, removing the ax from hands that were too small to argue.

  I put it out of reach on the great stone mantelpiece.

  “And you DO NOT play in front of a fire,” I told them, even though the fire was hardly blazing… But, like, really? Hello?! Small children?! Fire?!

  The kids stared up at me. Uh. I remembered something. I wasn’t a friendly panda. I looked like a witch, didn’t I?

  “I’m a nice witch,” I told them.

  That zombie kid? Know what she did? She went, “Pah!”

  Those kids weren’t scared of me; they were angry about being told off.

  Too bad, I thought.

  I shook my head at them and at the room, and at… Above the fancy fireplace, shoved in front of a smashed gold-framed mirror, there was this massive TV screen on which all kinds of pretty pictures had been played at the party. Now there was a horrible—really horrible—film on, playing silently. Some wildlife thing, but an X-rated version: a baby wildebeest staggered around with its guts hanging out, while lions—young lions, just babies too, really—tried to snatch up a jaw full.

  I pawed at that screen. I jabbed and speed-swiped at the bottom of it in shocked, angry disgust until I got it to go off.

  “Hey,” said a lazy voice. “I was watching that.”

  Xar, whom I had not seen, sat lounging in an armchair behind me.

  That’s when the first gunshot happened.

  KA-POW!

  I dropped to the floor, searching for a hiding place. Sounded like the gunshot came from upstairs, from right above our heads.

  “GET DOWN!” I screeched at the kids.

  “I said,” Xar sighed, “I was watching that.”

  He flicked the TV back on with the remote.

  KA-POW!

  “For ’s sake,” he said. He leaned out of the chair and grabbed the ghost kid by the arm. “Go and tell them to use the gun with the silencer.”

  And the ghost kid, who wasn’t scared of Evil Witch Fairy Ruby, nodded in a scared-kid way at Xar and went running off.

  Little feet tread around me. I grabbed an ankle. The kid bent down to me.

  “They’re shooting the dogs,” the kid said…like that explained it all, like that was normal.

  In front of my eyes, another set of little feet padded up.

  “The dogs hurt my sister,” the other one said.

  I crawled t
o the garden doors; I parted the sheer curtains. Looked out. Saw: a huge garden that must have once been very fancy, the lawn still beautifully mown. An ice-cream van parked on the edge of it. And a long, ornamental pond—nearly as big as the Dartbridge swimming pool, water lilies flowering in it.

  Eyes flick back to the lawn. On things in the middle of it. Bloody ribs of a butchered something. Dead dog—pit bull?—next to it. Dead—shot dead?—pit bull dog, lying there.

  Eyes flick to back of garden. Eyes see movement in bushes. Eyes see—

  No. No. No. NO.

  Whitby.

  Sweet puppy! The dead-person’s-arm-munching, big, goofy dummy of a dog I liberated from the neighbors’ house—then was forced to ditch for his puddle-drinking activities. Whitby! Last seen howling, abandoned, on a highway in this very city! Huggable hound! Sweet puppy of my heart!

  That big, goofy, dummy of a dog blundering out of the bushes, ready to snatch the tasty ribs of the butchered something.

  Brain screeches: He’ll get shot!

  Heart acts. Big, goofy dummy of a girl races out.

  “Whitby! Whitby! Whi—”

  THUNK!

  • • •

  Silent bullet bites earth.

  Big, goofy dummy of a dog—he stops; he doesn’t quite get it, but he doesn’t like it.

  “Whitby!” cries girl.

  Big, goofy dummy of a dog sees girl running at him. Big, goofy dog snarls.

  “Whitby!” cries girl.

  It hurts, the confusion in his brain. Girl stops. Dog snarls; humans bad.

  “Whitby!” cries girl.

  Big, goofy dog remembers that is him. Smells girl he likes. Forgets his pack-food-guns-scary, forgets all that stuff: GIRL-I-LIKE!

  “Ruby!” someone shouts.

  Girl looks up at balcony. King Xar’s Court gazing down. Who shouted?

  Saskia! Saskia—pointing—

  Big, goofy dog launches himself, lickily, at girl.

  At last second, girl realizes she HAS TO STOP HIM. Puddle drinker. Lick of death.