The Rains (Untitled #1)(41)
His eyes glimmered wetly. Again I thought back to that car crash that had taken his brothers and wondered what he’d lost in the flames. Or found.
“So yeah…” Ben turned to slot the key into the lock. He opened the big door for us, the air billowing in, cold and unforgiving. “The end of the world is pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.”
ENTRY 18
The three of us crammed beneath a stand of oak, the velvety leaves tickling our necks and the backs of our arms. Cassius remained outside the tangle, lying flat on the dirt, his snout resting between his paws. We’d taken a high vantage on a hill, town square sprawling before us. It had quieted down a lot since we’d last seen it, the Mappers dispersing to scan new terrain. In fact, I couldn’t see a single Host on the vast lawn or the bordering streets. Aside from movement in the church windows and the glow of the forge from Bob n’ Bit Hardware, there was no sign of life at all. Jackhammered chunks of asphalt lay like boulders on the street. A power cable dangled from the roof of the One Cup Cafe, striking the sidewalk and sending up sprays of sparks. The pallet jack dragged into town by Afa Similai remained in the front courtyard of the church, but the dog crates were missing from it, as were the other trunks and cages I’d spotted there earlier.
We’d doglegged through the neighborhood by the school, drifting through wisps of fog, making painfully slow headway. We’d kept close to the houses, moving through yards, hiding behind trash cans and parked cars. More than once we’d had to hold our breath and keep our heads ducked as packs of Hosts drifted by. Cassius obeyed my hand gestures perfectly, all those cold morning hours of training paying off. Patrick and Alex debated grabbing a truck but decided the noise of an engine would be too risky here in town. If we drew a throng of Hosts, we’d be as stuck as a car in a herd of sheep.
The square now was as desolate as I’d ever seen it.
Alex leaned over, her hair brushing my face. “Where are they all?” she whispered.
I said, “Maybe once they’ve mapped an area, they move on.”
Cassius’s head lifted, his ears flattening against his skull.
The clack of a screen door drew our focus to the line of shops. A kid sprinted out of the One Cup Cafe and through the fountain of sparks. He looked tiny, dwarfed by the hugeness of the square. He sliced between two parked cars, zigzagging across the open grass. Even way up here, we could hear his panicked breaths. He hurdled a bench and ran for the road. Patches of fog blurred his outline.
Patrick said, “Is that…?”
“Andre Swisher,” I said.
Suddenly there were faces in the windows of the houses and storefronts. We watched, breathless. Various doors banged open all around the square, a haunted-house orchestration, Hosts filling doorways and the mouths of alleys. Way across in the hospital, a woman in an untied gown pried open the ER doors and halted in the threshold, her stance wide, her arms spread to hold the doors at bay. For an instant they all just stood there, watching with their non-eyes.
Then they flashed into motion.
Andre screamed, switching direction once and then again, but the Hosts bounded toward him, cinching the noose. They were female, moving fast enough to burst their muscles. Though there were only seven or eight of them, they shot at him from every direction, streaking across the square. Sam Miller’s grandma leapt over a car, landing on all fours, then rocketing forward.
Patrick tensed, bringing one knee under him like a sprinter at the starting line, but Alex put her hand on his back, firm, and said, “You go down there, you’ll die. We can’t help him right now.”
Cassius whined faintly, and I hushed him.
Andre tugged frantically at a car handle—locked. Hosts closed in. He ran to a pickup slant-parked behind the chunks of broken asphalt and vaulted in. His fist smashed down the lock. His hand darted below the dash, and his shoulder flexed—the keys must’ve been left in the ignition—but nothing happened. Either the Hosts had disabled the truck or when its owner transformed, he’d walked away, leaving the engine running until the gas ran out.
The female Hosts mobbed the pickup. Through a break between them, we caught a glimpse of Andre’s panicked face, his mouth stretched wide in a scream we couldn’t hear.
Sam Miller’s grandma drew back an arm, the flesh sagging beneath the bone, and drove her fist through the window. Hands crowded the jagged orifice as they pulled Andre out. They flung him violently chest-down on the road. A mother who worked as a volunteer at the library tore her blouse right off. Wearing nothing but a long skirt and a black bra, she used her shirt to bind him.
They hoisted him up and ran to the church, his muffled cries growing fainter and fainter. They disappeared inside, leaving the square as peaceful as it had been just a few minutes before.
None of us said anything. There was nothing to say. It was one of the most awful things I’d ever seen.
Our breath misted in the darkness, three puffs in a row.
“Even though the Mappers are scary,” Alex said, “at least you stand a chance if they don’t look up and see you. But the females, all they do is chase. They’re the worst.”
She was right. They were quick and fierce and terrible.
“We need to get a look inside that church,” Patrick said. “See if there’s any way we can help those kids.”
It was what I’d most dreaded he’d say.