The Rains (Untitled #1)(19)

“Oh, no,” JoJo said, scaling my legs, climbing into my arms. “Oh, no.”

Gene Durant trudged back over to the rattling jackhammer, picked it up, and sank it through the craggy hole in the road that he and his brother had created earlier. A pulse flickered across the streetlights, and then everything went dark.

The power—out.

Now we could discern only shadowy figures with holes for eyes. They were all around us.

Patrick moved first, breaking for the alley behind Bob n’ Bit Hardware, where the Hosts seemed to be sparsest. “Follow me!” he shouted.

We ran.

The hardware shop still blazed with the light of the forge. As we neared it, the Widow Latrell sprang out, but Patrick turned and kicked her, his boot pistoning into her frail chest. She flew back into the forge. Sparks exploded up, clinging to the other Hosts around the fire, their arms loaded with guns from the wheelbarrow. Latrell’s limbs rowed mechanically, trying to pull her free even as the orange flame engulfed her. JoJo buried her face in my shoulder, and we kept running, but not before I saw fire bubble the flesh of Latrell’s neck.

Carrying JoJo slowed me down. I fell farther behind the others. We cut up the alley, and Alex screamed and pointed overhead. I looked up. A woman took flight from the rooftop of the One Cup Cafe, her arms spread like a bat’s wings. I weaved at the last second and heard her hit the ground behind us. Rocky was breathing hard, half wheezes, half sobs. Cassius trotted at my side, but even at his size he was more puppy than dog. He managed a few snarls but couldn’t provide the kind of muscle Zeus or Tanner would have.

Patrick cleared a path for us through the tight alley, smashing Hosts with the butt of the shotgun, preserving ammo. Feet pounded across the rooftops on either side of us, Hosts stalking our movement overhead.

One leapt and struck Alex on the way down. She spilled, losing her grip on her hockey stick. The Host rose, looming over her. Even from behind I could tell that it was Mrs. Wolfgram. She held a length of rope coiled around both clawlike hands. I could see straight through the back of her head.

Mrs. Wolfgram pounced.

Before she could land, she was knocked violently to the side, hammering into a brick wall and crumpling to the ground. Patrick stood over Alex now, gripping the shotgun like a baseball bat.

He held out his hand for her.

Alex reached up and cupped her fingers around Patrick’s, and he lifted her to her feet as though she was weightless. Her momentum carried her forward into him so that both hands pressed to his chest, and then their faces were close and she was looking at him with her lips slightly parted.

Over by the wall, Mrs. Wolfgram jerked herself to her feet, her limbs broken and angled in all the wrong directions. Patrick swung the shotgun up past Alex and said, “Cover your ears.”

Her hands rose to the sides of her head. The barrel flared. Mrs. Wolfgram smacked back against the brick wall, a chalk outline gone vertical, then slid wetly to the ground and lay still.

Alex had kept her eyes on Patrick’s the entire time. I couldn’t blame her. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

The footfalls on the roofs overhead quickened. Shallow breaths reverberated down at us off the walls. We huddled a moment, our eyes flashing around, reading the shadows.

“We gotta get to the square,” Patrick said.

“But there are so many there,” Rocky said.

“At least we can see them. We’re gonna cut right through the center and head for the high school.”

“The school,” I said. “Why the—”

Dark forms flashed off the roofs, striking the ground behind us, bouncing low on their haunches, then rising.

We bolted.

Exploding out of the alley, I felt vulnerable all over again. The rising sun cast the square in an otherworldly light, everything washed in sepia tones like in an old photograph. Hosts everywhere paused from their work, then started for us.

We charted a path across the middle of the square, hurdling benches. I set JoJo down so I could use the baling hooks when I needed them. I swiped at Hosts as they neared. They were fast, pushing their muscles to their limits. Principal Delarusso pulled even with me, sprinting faster than a fifty-year-old body should allow, that string of pearls bouncing around her neck. A run in her stocking snaked up from her shin, widening as it rose, her protruding kneecap somehow obscene. She hurled herself at me, hitting me high before I could get a hook up to protect myself. The blow sent us into a rolling tumble. I glimpsed Patrick and the others ahead, their legs vanishing through the closing ranks of Hosts.

I was caught.

Delarusso flung me over, one bony knee poking me in the chest, tensed hands pinning my arms to either side. Her strength was incredible, and I had a fleeting thought of those possessed ants, their mandibles clamping with enough newfound strength to hold their entire bodies up in the air. Delarusso’s head pulled down over mine, and I found myself looking clear up through her eyes to the lightening sky above.

A streak flew overhead and wiped her from view. I rolled to my feet to see Alex finishing her follow-through, her torso twisted with the strength of her swing. She whipped the hockey stick in a full circle, staggering several Hosts back on their heels, then yelled, “Chance—c’mon!”

She cleared a route and I forged after her. We broke through the pack. Then we were dodging stragglers, knocking them over, cutting hard to fake others out. Hosts poured from the church. Most of the adults from the county had congregated there. I couldn’t even imagine what was happening inside.