The Rains (Untitled #1)(70)

With a single lurch, Bob hurled himself from his back onto his feet. He spun the shackles around his hand and charged again.

None of my weapons were in reach.

But something else was.

I reached for the blackened handles sticking up out of the forge and ripped the tongs free. As Bob came at me, I raised the glowing yellow tips up to the level of his eyeholes and let Bob’s weight carry him onto them. He impaled his face on the tongs, the membranes popping, the hot metal sinking deep, winding up somewhere near the middle of his head. I clenched the handles hard, cinching the tongs inward toward his brain. His eyes fizzled around the hot metal. Black sludge poured into the eyeholes. Noxious smoke drifted from his ears and nose, his mouth foaming.

With the tongs embedded in his face, he fell to his knees and stayed there, kneeling, motionless, his head dipped as if in prayer.

Snatching up Alex’s bag, the revolver, and my hooks, I shot for the door, wanting to get clear after all the racket we’d made. Cassius and I ran from the hardware store. I dove across the hood of the same car we’d hidden behind earlier, Cassius bounding around the grille. On the sidewalk I flattened to the ground, peering through the tires, my dog beside me.

Nothing.

Then a set of legs walked past, just on the far side of the car, heading for Bob n’ Bit.

I looked at Cassius, put a finger to my lips. He understood the command. I lowered my head further so the cowboy hat wouldn’t poke up into view.

When I looked back, there were two sets of feet shuffling by. Then a flurry more. The parade kept coming, though I could only see the Hosts from the knees down. I lay there, breathing, until the torrent slowed.

A last set of boots trudged by, and then there was quiet for a good long time.

At last I risked a peek through the car windows.

I couldn’t see in the hardware store, but the rear door was rolled back, shadows of Hosts thrown about the walls.

I snapped my fingers at Cassius and ran a brief distance up the sidewalk, my baling hooks raised as I ducked into the first doorway.

The general store.

A bell above the swinging glass door clanged our arrival. Flying in, I was immediately attacked from all sides, hands flying in my face, tangling in my hair.

I’d dived right into a nest of Hosts.

I swung the baling hooks wildly. It took a few moments for me to realize that no one was fighting back.

I’d stumbled into the Christmas-ornament display, rows of them hanging from the drop ceiling tiles. As I calmed and lowered my hooks, the ornaments tinkled against one another, throwing off glints of light.

Aluminum Santas and tin reindeer and trees made of pine cones.

Relics from another life.

I thought about all the trees that wouldn’t be trimmed ever again. Our birthdays had been turned into something awful, but I hadn’t considered that the other holidays were all gone as well, vanished into the sinkhole of this new reality.

I could hear footsteps on the sidewalk, drawn by my loud and graceless entrance. I ran through the aisles toward the side door, skimming through with Cassius just as I heard the front-door bell clang again.

We scrambled up the slope alongside the general store and onto the roof where Patrick, Alex, and I had stood the first time we’d gazed across the town square and found it overrun.

I could see several Hosts there now, moving about. A herd of them still clustered around the back of the hardware store, lit by the orange glow of the forge like shamans performing some ancient rite.

I raced up the slope into the woods, running through twigs and bushes, banging off tree trunks. Finally I stopped in a clearing, panting. Even Cassius was breathing hard.

I reached over and stroked his head. “You and me, boy,” I said, his tail wagging at the sound of my voice. “We—”

A whoosh of air came at me from behind. Something hard cracked me across my shoulder blades, and then suddenly the world flew upside down.

Somehow I was flat on my back. Groaning, I tilted my head in the matted pine needles to catch an inverted view of chubby Chet Rogers walking toward me, his big cheeks flushed as always, holes bored straight through his head.

Gripping a jagged branch like a club, he closed in.





ENTRY 31

I rolled to the side an instant before the jagged end of the branch slammed down inches from my head. Chet wore a coil of calf rope looped over his shoulder.

I drew the revolver and aimed at his face, the barrel wavering back and forth.

Chet’s face. Chet, who used to sneak me free soda when he worked at the diner. Chet, who’d driven me to school that week Patrick had the flu. Chet wasn’t a grown-up. He was a high-school student like Patrick. Like Alex. Like me.

A bunch of images came at me.

Chet sitting on the bleachers, his face sunk into his hands as he wept.

His fingers gripping the chain-link as he stared pleadingly at us through the fence. I don’t want to be out here alone. I don’t want it to happen to me.

He came at me again, drawing back the branch. The end of the revolver wobbled even more in my hand. “Please don’t make me,” I said.

Patrick would shoot him, a voice in my head said. Patrick would’ve shot him already.

Chet terrified on the far side of that fence. I’m just a kid. I’m a kid like you.

That made it so much worse.

He stepped within reach, and still I didn’t fire.