The Rains (Untitled #1)(51)

Ben Braaten’s wide, broken face peered out at us, chewing a Slim Jim, a lookout canteen looped around his neck.

He took our measure, then stepped back to let us in. “All hail the rescuing army,” he said.

*

We entered the dark gym, worn out and exhausted. Some kids were sleeping, but there was a surprising amount of activity. JoJo and Rocky tossed the Frisbee, the fluorescent green disk zipping back and forth. JoJo had set Bunny on the bottom bleacher so that those half-marble stuffed-animal eyes could watch them play. JoJo spotted us first, gave a shout of delight, and ran over, wrapping her arms around me. Her sweeping brown hair had been cut short, sticking out at jagged angles. I guess the two-minute showers had made it too hard to manage. It looked terrible and adorable at the same time.

We walked over to the storage room to turn in our supplies and weapons. Eve had fallen asleep at her desk, her cheek resting on her arms. I shook her gently.

She lifted her sleepy head. At the sight of me, a smile seemed to catch her by surprise. “Chance. I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”

“Uh, we’re here, too,” Alex said with a knowing grin.

“Right.” Eve looked embarrassed as she took our stuff. “Glad you’re okay.”

Most of the others had noticed us by now, the kids on the cots rousing as news of our return rippled through the gym. Over on the bleachers, Dr. Chatterjee was frowning down at the carbon monoxide detector. He looked up and threw a salute in our direction.

“What happened?” he asked, the others quieting down at his voice.

“You guys really don’t know?” Patrick said. “You didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?” Ben asked.

“The booms in the sky?” Alex said.

A hundred blank faces looked back at us.

Then Marina Mendez bolted upright. “The explosions we heard,” she said, prodding her twin sister.

“Yeah,” Maria added. “We thought the Hosts were blowing up gas lines in town or something.”

Dr. Chatterjee found his feet and stood shakily, his face blanched with concern. “What were they?”

“Asteroids,” Alex said. “There were more of them.”

“How many more?” Chet asked.

Alex walked to the bleachers, slid out the TV, set it on one of the benches, and turned it on. The kids swept around onto the gym floor as if drawn magnetically.

A panicked newscaster clutched her papers in her sweaty fists.

“—meteorites scattering the eastern seaboard—”

Alex turned the old-fashioned dial, clicking through the channels, every fresh bit of news as unsettling as the last.

“—confirmed reports of strange stalks sprouting up—”

“—pods splitting open—”

“—afflictions from Los Angeles to Seattle—”

The images were even worse.

Times Square, empty except for trash blowing around and a few Mappers walking their spirals.

A woman with a swollen belly pulling herself atop the hovering disk of Seattle’s Space Needle, lying like Snoopy on his doghouse, and bursting, scattering spores far and wide.

Two men harnessing themselves with climbing gear to the main towers of the Golden Gate bridge, leaning back into the great wide-open, and exploding.

And the small towns, too. Gym-ready housewives on church steeples. Accountants in suits scaling transmission towers. Streets filling with Hosts. Screaming children, fleeing and bloody, like something from the Vietnam documentaries Mrs. Olsen used to show in history class. Everything narrated by the panicked voices of reporters until the cameras, too, shuddered and fell, lenses cracking, screens turned to snowy white. As the broadcasts went down, Alex bit her lower lip and kept clicking through the remaining channels, chasing the thread of civilization. We watched in shock, glued to the images.

Dr. Chatterjee paced, rubbing his head. “After the meteorites hit the soil, the stalks took a week to grow in McCafferty’s field before they burst and infected him.”

At the mention of her father, JoJo stiffened. Rocky took her by the shoulder and said, “C’mon. You don’t need to see all this. Let’s play catch.”

Chatterjee removed his glasses and polished them on his sleeve, though at this point his shirt looked dirtier than the lenses. “It’s happening so much faster now. The process is accelerated. Why?”

My throat felt scratchy, the words coming out hoarse. “They found what they’re looking for,” I said. “Here at Creek’s Cause. We were a test case, maybe. For all we know, there were a thousand test cases on a thousand planets. But this one worked. And now they don’t want to waste any more time.”

“Doing what?” Chatterjee said.

“Taking over.”

“You’re talking about aliens?” Ben said. “You think they sent asteroids from outer space?”

“As opposed to asteroids from Wichita?” Alex said.

“I’m afraid Chance could be right,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “With the deliberate mapping, the directed actions of the Chasers, that squirming eye peering out of Ezekiel…” At this he shuddered. “It seems that they’re seeding Earth.” He placed his smudged eyeglasses back on his face. “Preparing it.”

He returned his solemn gaze to the television. As the rest of us stayed there, mired to the gym floor, the younger kids tossed the Frisbee around, wiping tears from their cheeks in between catches.