Storm

by Virginia Bergin

  I’ve not seen cats or dogs lurking around here, but I want to go now. I just want to go while it all looks kind of hopeful, and while there is at least one slice of parkin left in Grandma’s cookie tin. I snap the lid shut.

  “It was my fault,” she whispers.

  Her voice is a little, raspy squeak. It is the first time I have heard it. Months, it has taken, for her to speak. The sound of it makes me furious. Not with her. With this. With all of this.

  “No,” I whisper back.

  “I got scared and I ran outside,” she says—so quietly I can hardly even hear it. It doesn’t matter. I know it already. I can just see those kids alone in that house, scared stiff. Desperate.

  “And Dan followed, huh?”

  She nods. I punch the steering wheel. I have to apologize again. IMMEDIATELY. No—I have to do more than that.

  “Listen to me,” I tell her. “He would not have known the rain was still bad. He would not have realized. This was NOT your fault. It is NOT your fault. I will never, ever think that. No one would ever think that. Dan wouldn’t think that. He’s my brother and I know him and you have to trust me: he would NEVER think that.”

  Ugh. I can hardly breathe. My dad. My dad. WHY WASN’T HE THERE?!

  Why wasn’t he there?! Why wasn’t I there?

  It’s like the snap of the cookie tin, the flash of the explosion, the single killer splip! of a drop of water…

  I went out…and I didn’t come back when I said I would.

  I cannot bear to hear the answer to this question:

  “Did my dad go looking for me?” I ask her.

  She cannot bear to answer it.

  “Did he?” I ask super-gently. For both our sakes.

  The kid nods.

  I don’t know what happened. Whether my dad is alive or dead. (He’s alive! He must be!). He went out looking for me…and what? The car broke down? He got trapped by the rain? He decided to snuggle up someplace with Tilly and lost track of time?

  It…doesn’t really matter what the answer is, does it?

  He is not here…

  And me?

  I think I am pretty much entirely destroyed.

  The most hideous thing outside my own head is that I am going to have to dump the Princess for sure this time. I cannot—I will not—take her with me. I gotta talk to the kid, haven’t I? I’ve got to tell her that this is it; I’m dumping her. Like, really, she should be OK about it. She’ll probably be happy about it. I mean, we haven’t exactly been the best of friends, have we? And I don’t suppose what happened last night has improved things.

  It’s just I can’t think how to say it. I can’t bring myself to say it. Kind of literally, since in my mind I’m already driving back down that highway, with this part over and done with. So I don’t say it. Until, in the end, I’m going to run out of road to say it in.

  Just around the corner from the Lancaster people, I stop the car. I clear my throat. I look out of the window. I clear my throat again. I turn and I look at her, and she’s looking at me like she knows what’s coming. Maximum Princess glare is in effect.

  “Look, kid,” I start. She doesn’t like it already. “Princess,” I start over. Her nose twitches like the first time I called her that, but her scowl tells me I may have mistaken what that nose twitch meant. With the Danster, it always meant he secretly liked something. With this kid, it is possible it means the opposite. Not got time for this, can’t get into this. “I’ve got to leave you here.”

  ! Could she make this any more difficult?! I can’t look at her. I look out through the windshield.

  “I feel pretty awful about a whole load of stuff right now, but I’m going to go and get Darius, you see.”

  Why does this sound like a bad fairy tale?

  “And it’s too dangerous for you to come too.”

  I cannot imagine specifics. I truly feel like this is the abyss. It’s possible he’s dead already. And if he’s not, I cannot imagine what might happen—like, what? I’m going to rock up at the army place, tell them, “I’ve come to get my friend,” and they’re going to say, “Oh, OK, then. Would you like to come in for a cup of tea first?” and I’ll say, “Oh, no thanks,” and they’ll say, “All right, then. We’ll just get him,” and shout “Darius! Your friend’s here!” and that’ll be that?

  So I just stick to what I want to believe will be true.

  “So I’m going to go and get him, and then we’ll come straight back.”

  It sounds like the worst kind of bull anyone ever told a kid. (It sounds like the worst kind of bull I’ve ever told myself.)

  “But I’ve got to leave you here while I do that…just in case it is dangerous. Which it probably won’t be. But just in case it is.”

  There. Said it. I look at the kid.

  Don’t do that, kid. Don’t go teary on me.

  But she does, and I see her tears…and in them I see the rain, and the trouble it has brought me. So I say it: “And don’t tell anyone…how you are. Don’t let anyone see that you’re different. Don’t tell or show anyone the rain doesn’t hurt you.”

  Still, her tears won’t stop.

  I can’t handle it. I start up and drive to the house.

  I’m not sure whether it’s the whole mud-woman look—I’m still covered in it—that freaks the Lancaster people out, or whether it’s just the sight of trouble. They are all outside, packing up to leave. Their welcome isn’t exactly warm; it has been chilled by fear. But they are kind people, and I guess it takes a lot for kind people to stop being kind, so although people mutter and hang back, no one runs away. Only the children are discreetly bundled inside; their little faces pop up at the windows.

  “Hello, Ruby,” says Bridget.

  No one is smiling. They do not want us here.

  “About last night…” I start out. I hear the gunshots in my head. I see pain on faces. Oh no…please don’t say…

  “They killed Chrissie,” spits an angry woman.

  I don’t even know which one Chrissie was.

  “They murdered her,” says the angry woman—one of the ones who bundled kids indoors. She is so angry with me right now, I can’t even look at her. I bow my head.

  “They didn’t mean to,” Bridget says quietly. “They just got scared.”

  “Got scared?!” snarls the angry woman. “They’re the army.”

  “We shot first,” says Bridget. “We did shoot first.”

  Whoa. This ripple of tension spreads through the group and breaks, swirling around this rock of a man—the man who greeted me, glaring over a shotgun. Barry’s glaring now too, but in the way anyone would do when, if they didn’t glare, they’d cry.

  “It was a warning shot,” another guy says; he puts his hand on the glaring man’s shoulder and squeezes it, which causes a tear to roll from the glaring man’s eye.

  Bridget nods, but other people don’t. The tension, it’s really choppy now.

  “Who are you?” the angry woman starts on at me. “Who are you to bring this here to us?”

  “All right, calm down, Catherine. You can see she had nothing to do with it.”

  That’s what Bridget says, but when I look up, I can see Bridget’s not convinced I had nothing to do with it. I look around. I have to speak.

  I have to speak.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say. That sounds pathetic. It is pathetic, but it is true. “I am really, truly sorry. It’s…I didn’t think…”

  “Oh, I can’t listen to this!” says Angry Catherine. “Just go away, will you?”

  “I’m going!” I snap—and catch myself. I know that this angry woman—these kind, angry, frightened people—must be feeling really terrible right now. Everyone around me is feeling really terrible. I am feeling really terrible. It is so unfair that I am feeling really terrible. But I must not yee-haa.
/>   “This is all your fault, isn’t it?” spits Angry Catherine.

  I look down at my mud-caked shoes again. Nope, I cannot stop myself—I yee-haa.

  “IT’S NOT MY FAULT!” I shout.

  So there’s this water barrel at the side of the house. A water barrel to catch the runoff from the roof, the kind of thing that would have been brilliant thinking in the days before the rain went poisonous but is now a cauldron of death; probably they worry about it every day, telling the kids NEVER to go near it. I march up to it. I plunge my hand into the water.

  I could never have imagined what a group screech of horror would sound like until I heard one.

  I’ve done it now. I cannot undo it. I take advantage of the washing opportunity and have a quick splosh all over my still-muddy face. Ever seen someone have an angry wash? I wash furiously.

  “So that’s why they came, right?” I tell my audience, wiping my face dry with a sleeve that is so caked in mud I can feel I’m just smearing mud all over my face again.

  I stand before them; no one will touch me now—no one wants to come close.

  “How…?” a woman asks. That’s as far as she can get with the question.

  “I don’t know how come I’m like this,” I tell them all—loudly but not quite shouting again, not yet. “But I am. That’s why the army wants me. That’s why they came here.”

  But they’ve got the Spratt, they’ve got the Spratt, they’ve got the Spratt.

  “Oh my ,” people are muttering. “Oh my .”

  “You’re immune?” Bridget says.

  “I guess. They don’t call it that. There’s a thing on my skin, this thing called a phage and—”

  “They could get a vaccine from you,” some woman speaks up.

  In a corner now, aren’t I? How much more should I blab?

  “Yes, yes,” Miss Vaccine is explaining to someone. “An antibody. She must be carrying an antibody.”

  “So she could cure us?” someone asks her.

  “Not cure: prevent. If she’s immune…”

  People glance at me. At the freak. This really is—in every way—a huge and unwanted step backward. Telling people IS a nightmare.

  “…a vaccine could be made from her blood,” Miss Vaccine declares.

  Miss Vaccine is really starting to get on my nerves.

  “It’s not IN my blood; it’s ON my skin,” I scathe.

  People mutter nastily at my rudeness.

  “What is?” someone asks.

  “A PHAGE,” I yell.

  “A what?”

  “I DON’T REALLY KNOW,” I yell, because I truly can’t be bothered trying to explain it. “IT’S A ROCKETY THING. IT LIVES IN MY NOSE—AND I DON’T KNOW HOW I GOT IT EITHER, SO DON’T START ON ME.”

  “Oh, wait a minute,” says Miss Vaccine. “That rings a bell. Phage therapy! It’s a Russian thing—”

  “Oh, please,” I super-scathe. “What do you know?”

  She’s one of the useless, isn’t she? She has to be, or else why would she be here with these people instead of scarfing luxury nosh in comfort at an army base?

  They really don’t like my rudeness. Too bad.

  “I mean, what? So you’re some kind of scientist, are you?”

  Yup, I’m scathing out. People gasp at my rudeness. They actually gasp.

  “I am a keen amateur historian,” she says.

  Under normal circumstances, before the rain, someone saying something like that would force me to crack up laughing. Like, really, I wouldn’t be able to help myself. Under the current circumstances, the fact that she is a “keen amateur historian” is somehow supposed to be some kind of explanation. I roll my eyes to demonstrate that it is no kind of explanation.

  “If you knew your twentieth-century history you’d know what phage therapy was…” she starts up.

  Oh, lady, I know my history.

  Didn’t Simon, my stepdad, test me on it when we were trapped in a car in a parking lot with hundreds of people dying? It’s just that…

  “It wasn’t on our syllabus.”

  She smiles a lemony smile. “In any case, it’s basic biology,” she goes on. She’s not even speaking to me; she’s speaking to all of them. “Everyone knows about vaccines.”

  People nod. Honestly. What are they like?!

  There is no point even trying to tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about. This is all going hideously wrong, isn’t it?

  “You could help people,” says Bridget, but in a vague sort of way, like she’s thinking out loud. I wish she wouldn’t. There are mutterings of agreement. The Princess edges closer to me; I do a microscopic head shake at her: stay back.

  “I already did. There’s a cure.”

  That’s shut them up. Even the keen amateur historian.

  “Yeah—that’s right. They made a cure and—hey—guess what? They don’t want anyone to have it. So if you want to discuss this further, you’re just going to have to go to Salisbury and ask the army about it…but I wouldn’t recommend it. They are not nice people. They kill kids.”

  The silence deepens.

  “They’ve been experimenting on people. They were gonna experiment on her.”

  Hn. Telling Darius was easy in comparison to this, because he’d already worked out the whole Sunnyside thing, hadn’t he? Telling Xar was easy because he’s a psycho and so he enjoyed every minute of it. Telling the soldier and the driver was easy because Beardy was on hand to explain. Telling these people…is dreadful.

  “I cannot help you. Do you understand? I can’t help. So I’m going now, all right? I don’t want to stay here anyway. But I want you to take care of her. She’s just a kid on her own, and she has had nothing to do with any of this.”

  I gotta get out of here.

  “I’m going to go and get Darius now,” I tell the Princess.

  I head straight for the car—going as fast as I can without it looking like I am running.

  The Princess follows me.

  “You can’t come,” I tell her, opening the car door. “You have to stay here.”

  I suppose this is how things were in olden times—before email, before phones, before there was even mail. You’d say good-bye to someone not knowing if and when and how you’d see them again. I reckon people must have kept it brief, or you’d be blubbering all the time.

  She nods her head—but quickly, like she gets this already—and then…and then, she lurches forward and hugs me, tight, her face pressed into my tummy.

  “You’ll be OK,” I tell her. I am looking all around—no one must see this, her touching me. I peel her arms off me. I crouch down to speed-whisper to her. “See? Don’t tell anyone. No one must know about you; don’t let anyone see the rain doesn’t hurt you. Just act like the other kids. Promise?”

  Her eyes have tears in them. Mine do too.

  “Promise me, Princess?”

  She nods.

  It’s bawl or drive. I get in the car. Slam the door shut. Start up. She knocks on the window. I do not have time for this. I can’t do this. I hit the button and lower the window.

  “Priti,” she says. “My name is Priti. P-R-I-T-I.”

  “Priti,” I say.

  Oh, and she smiles.

  Bawl or drive. I drive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Here’s how I would like the rest of this story to go:

  I go and get Darius. (Like I said I would.) Somehow we manage to find the Princess—Priti—and the Lancaster people. And the Lancaster people are delighted to see me, welcomed me with open arms, etc. (Bit of a flaw here already, huh? They’re leaving, and I’ve forgotten to ask where they are going.) And somehow my dad has also found them (and Tilly: she’s allowed to be properly in the story now too).

  And…we all muddle along—i.e., no one else
dies and life is OK.

  I would probably have to turn into some kind of slave-gopher for everyone, dashing out into the rain to get stuff, but I’d be prepared to put up with that just as long as they were really nice to me and didn’t boss me around too much.

  Oh, and I get to live in my own place, done up just how I please with absolutely everything I want. Not that far away from my dad and everyone, but just out of immediate nagging range.

  And if, for some reason, I don’t manage to get Darius (like I stand no chance)…well…maybe, in time, there’ll be a new boy—and we can console each other because he, like me, will also have experienced utter appallingness and heartbreaking loss.

  The End.

  It might not be the happiest of stories, this story of my life, but at least it is not totally, gut-wrenchingly miserable and bleak. It is OK. And OK is the new spectacularly good.

  The only trouble is…I cannot see him. I cannot see what this new boy will look like.

  But, yeah. That’s how it should go.

  What happens in reality is:

  As I drive off down the road, I feel like my heart is about to burst with hurt and fear and rage. It is too awful; every single bit of this is too awful. Like, really, I think my heart is going to—

  BA-THAM!

  FTHHHHH!

  My tire bursts instead of my heart. I don’t even know that’s what’s happened. All I know is I suddenly can’t steer. The car careens into the hedge.

  Careens, that is an excellent word. I read it in a book and now—right here, right now—I feel for myself what it means.

  I have no control over this vehicle. It careens.

  I brake. I stop. I glance in my rearview and see Angry Catherine being relieved of the shotgun. (Yeah… See the picture: People are tearing it out of her hands.) Still I don’t get it. All I think is: crazy lady wants to kill me. I don’t understand what has happened. I put the car into gear; I have to slam on the accelerator to make it move. It feels like the car is all crooked, limping, flopping about all over the place, and when I try to go on, it doesn’t want to do it. I bump up and down, up and down before something bites the road, and I churn about—going nowhere—until suddenly the car decides to go somewhere and I sail—smash!—straight into the hedge on the other side of the lane.