The Rains (Untitled #1)(35)
“And what does it want?”
“Where is it?”
“Are there more?”
“Did it see us?”
“I don’t know.”
The tense voices washed over my back. We were still right outside Mr. Tomasi’s classroom, but I was at my locker, twirling the combination dial.
“Does it know how to get here?”
“Well, it is a friggin’ Mapper, Ben.”
“But why would it think we’d stick around? Wouldn’t it think we’d be long gone?”
“That’s true,” Chatterjee said. “If it saw us, then it knows that we saw it see us.”
“Plus, the signal looked all weak and screwed up,” Patrick said. “Maybe it wasn’t transmitting clearly.”
“Either way,” Alex said, “we’ll have to watch out even more.”
“Meaning what?”
My combination lock clicked open, the battered metal door swinging on its rusty hinges.
Taped to the inside, a photo of me, Patrick, and Alex at the creek. We’d propped a camera on a rock and set the timer before huddling together, Patrick in the middle, one arm around each of our necks. Our only concern that day had been finding flat rocks to skip.
“Ezekiel used keys,” Alex said. “We saw him use keys.”
“Big deal,” Ben said. “They’re using all kinds of things.”
“The big deal is, lots of teachers have keys to the outside fences,” Alex said. “And it’s clear the Mappers want to record everything.”
“Ezekiel already got the school,” Ben said. “We just saw it.”
“But he didn’t finish. And we don’t know what he transmitted.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Patrick said. “They might come back to finish the job.”
“We need to switch the locks and post lookouts,” Alex said.
I flipped through various textbooks in my locker. A pencil box. An old apple, soft and brown. In the back I found what I was looking for: my composition notebook from English. I ran my hand over the battered black-and-white static design of the cover. The corners were worn, dog-eared, the pages nearly filled. I set it aside and reached for the one beneath it, still blank. The one I was gonna use when I ran out of room in the old one.
Behind me Dr. Chatterjee said, “We have a lot to keep track of.”
“Yeah, we do,” I said, elbowing my locker closed as I turned. At the clang, the others looked over at me. I gripped the new notebook. “We need to start writing all this down.”
*
In the quiet dark of the gym, surrounded by sleeping bodies, I stared down at my neat, slanted handwriting.
It was past midnight. I was still working in the barn when I heard the rolling door lurch open. I started and lost my grip on a block of hay. It tumbled off the baling hooks.
Once we’d gotten back to the gym, we’d circled up the kids and reported what we knew. Or at least what we thought we knew.
At the mention of the eyeball, terror rippled across the room, stiffening the spines of the kids. Now we weren’t just talking about parasites and altered adults. We were talking about aliens, advanced technologies, government conspiracies. The room buzzed with theories.
It quickly became clear that our questions would find no answers right now, so Dr. Chatterjee took charge, focusing our efforts. We’d sprung into action, setting schedules for lookouts, checking that all lights and appliances were in the off position, then getting the backup generator up and running. The generator was supposed to supply three weeks of power, but with everything turned off aside from the water heater, refrigerators, and freezers, we were hoping to stretch out that time frame much longer. Patrick and Ben ran sneak missions to the chained-shut perimeter gates, switching the school’s locks for thick padlocks from our PE lockers.
After my lookout shift watching the northeast quadrant from a perch atop Mr. Tomasi’s desk, I spent the afternoon and evening talking to as many kids as possible to start piecing together the story of what had happened—what was happening—to Creek’s Cause. Everyone seemed to have a different bit of information. Through bouts of tears, JoJo and Rocky bravely described the events of the last week around their house. Dr. Chatterjee and I sat down and figured out how a parasite like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis might have worked its way through Hank McCafferty’s distended gut into the frontal cortex of every adult in our county.
By the time midnight rolled around, my hand was cramped from writing and I had caught up to myself here, now, in the gym.
I clicked off the Maglite I’d checked out of the supply station that Eve Jenkins had been given the job of running out of the storage room. Then I leaned back on my cot, staring up at the high ceiling. Pennants overhead announced various sports titles. It had seemed so important last year when our baseball team won regionals.
I turned my head, looking at the cots lined neatly in rows. Most kids were sleeping, but a few were crying, some more quietly than others. Patrick was on lookout atop the bleachers, his big form barely visible against the casement window, watching over everything like a guardian angel. Less than a week until he turned eighteen. If we didn’t get help or if the spores didn’t magically dissipate, he’d turn into something unrecognizable. The thought stole the breath from my lungs.