The Rain Read online

  I got my bike from the shed and I set out for Zak’s. I had no water, I had no waterproofs, I had no Indiana Jones goes birdwatching hat . . . I didn’t even have a umbrella. Ha ha.

  I never normally cycled anywhere if I could help it. Leonie and me, we’d cycled over to Zak’s once, the summer before, and it had nearly killed us. The plan was we’d cycle back, but Zak’s mum ended up taking us home, the bikes in the back of the estate. Simon and my mum didn’t see her drop me off and thought I’d cycled back . . . and I didn’t put them straight; for weeks I moaned on about how exhausted I was so’s I could get lifts to other places. And after that I moaned on about how dangerous it was. That part was completely true. Those Devon lanes, they look so lovely, but some right nutters drive along them – and with those high banks and hedges there’s nowhere to get out of the way if you’re on a bike.

  That day, that evening, it was not a problem. I didn’t see or hear a single soul. Not one car passed me. I guess if you actually liked cycling, it would have been lovely: a beautiful summer’s evening ride in the country. I didn’t really notice that, same way as this time I didn’t really notice the hills me and Lee had had to get off and walk up (moaning). I didn’t really notice anything until I got to Zak’s and saw the estate wasn’t there. The little zippy car wasn’t there either. What was there was Zak’s dad. It looked as if he had been there for a long time. Like maybe he had coming running out after the car that night. Best not to think about it, best not to look. Poor Barnaby.

  I guess you know what’s coming next. I guess you can guess it. My darling Lee, and most of my other friends were in the kitchen, but not how I had pictured them.

  It looked as though most of them had died the way Simon had died. The cups of tea – half drunk, festering, spilt – were on the table still. The coffee never did get made. Flies that weren’t busy on my friends checked out the toast, the butter and the jam.

  I remembered something Simon had said – or rather something he had not said. I’d questioned the thing about the tap water, you see. Yes, but. They didn’t say anything about that on the TV, but Simon had said he thought it was an obvious risk. How could it be safe? I felt terrible, thinking there must be tons and tons of people like me who wouldn’t have even thought about it, people who didn’t have a Simon to think for them. But I wasn’t even worried about my friends; I told Simon we’d drunk water from the tap that night.

  ‘And it was fine!’ I’d said.

  And Simon didn’t say anything. I guess he knew.

  You didn’t have to be some kind of detective to work it out. Those glasses of water we’d drunk that night, the water I’d scrubbed my face with, those must have been the last drops of good water in the taps. What we had filled the kettle with would kill us.

  And later, when I thought about it, it taught me another thing: this space thing, you can’t kill it by boiling it.

  The radio was still on, telling my dead friends to stay home and remain calm.

  If, that night, instead of going live to here and live to there and ‘Ooo! Look who we’ve got in the studio!’ – if, instead of guessing and going on about all sorts, they had just said DON’T DRINK ANY WATER (AND, BY THE WAY, IT IS CONTAGIOUS) . . . maybe my friends, maybe a whole load of other people would still be alive. If Simon had thought of it, I couldn’t understand why the government or the TV and radio people or whoever hadn’t. If they’d just said that, even if they weren’t sure. If.

  I turned the radio off; I could have smashed it.

  ‘Lee?’ I said quietly, standing as still as she lay.

  There wasn’t loads of blood all over her or anything. There was just flies, buzzing. Other than that, Lee – my sweet, darling Leonie Lee – looked like . . . like maybe she was just messing about. Like we’d done tons of times when we were little. ‘Pretending to be dead’. Like any second she’s just crack up and lose it and laugh.

  ‘Lee, please get up,’ I said, waiting for the smile to erupt on her sunken cheeks, for her to burst out laughing.

  She didn’t. Lee didn’t smile. I was never going to see Lee’s smile again.

  I howled.

  Still howling, sucking in air like a person with an asthma attack gasps it, I made myself look. I made myself check for everyone. I made myself see . . . what I had missed . . . just like you’d want to know about a party you’d had to leave.

  You would never, ever, have wanted to know about this. This’d be a thing you’d have been glad to miss.

  Zak and Ronnie, they’d made it back upstairs. There was dried gore all over the keyboard, so it seemed like someone – Ronnie, for sure – had got back on the computer, still trying to look for answers where he always looked for answers, on the web. And then? They were curled up on the bed together.

  I found bodies all over that house. I found everyone . . . except Saskia. I checked in every room again. I called her name. I went outside and called – I could hardly bear to look at the hot tub, to think about me and Caspar, and how we had kissed . . . on a beautiful evening just like this, and so totally not at all like this. On a beautiful evening when it looked like my life was finally going to be brilliant.

  I wandered into the barn. There was all our stuff. My bag. My clothes. My make-up. My stupid mobile, battery dead.

  I gathered up everyone else’s phones too. I had this idea that people would ring to speak to my friends. Mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins. Other friends. And that it was somehow my duty to tell all those people that all my friends were dead. Like those people – mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, other friends – would still be alive to tell that too.

  There was only one person whose death I wasn’t going to have to explain to anybody: Saskia. Her stuff wasn’t in the barn. Her stuff had gone.

  When I went back through the kitchen, I saw Caspar’s phone and MP3, on the floor, next to his jeans. I took them too. And then I did what really was the most stupid of stupidest things I have ever done.

  I cycled home.

  Hardly any distance from the house, I realised I was dying of thirst – and it felt like I really was. What I had seen at Zak’s, it was so dreadful, so stomach-churningly sick-making in every way, that I hadn’t thought to look for anything to drink. So, so stupid. I’d had nothing but a bit of juice and a few ice cubes; I’d cycled miles on a boiling hot evening, and now I had yet more miles to cycle on a boiling hot night – which was the other stupid part of the stupidest thing; you never travel when you can’t see the sky. Even when there are stars out – and there were – you can’t see what kind of cloud is creeping up at night – and there was cloud creeping up. The sky, the night, the everything closing in on me.

  I could have gone to other houses; there were houses, some with lights on. That didn’t mean much any more. From our kitchen window we’d seen lights on all over; it didn’t mean people were alive . . . and, even if they were, there was no telling what they might do.

  Pain throbbed in my head; my tongue bumped around in my mouth. I remembered the thing Simon had said, about drinking your own pee . . . and I remembered another thing he had said once, a long time ago, when I was just a little kid. We were on a walk and I was moaning about being thirsty – like about five minutes after we’d set off, probably. What was unusual was we didn’t have the ten tons of stuff Simon normally took. (I can hear my mum now: ‘Do we really need to take all that?’ and Simon would say, ‘Well, I’m the one that’s carrying it.’ He was our Sherpa Tenzing. Whenever you wanted something, Simon had it.) Only on that day, he didn’t. It wasn’t a planned walk with maps and stuff; it was a stop-off from a country pub lunch – at which I’d begged for a cola and been given lemonade, like that was somehow better for you. That kind of thing happened a lot.

  ‘Ru,’ Simon said to me. ‘I’ll show you an old Sioux Indian technique.’

  Probably it wasn’t an old Sioux Indian thing at all. Probably it was a birdwatcher’s survival thing. What I don’t
think it was was something Simon made up. Simon didn’t make things up.

  ‘You find yourself a pebble,’ Simon said, picking one off the ground and rubbing it clean on his trousers, ‘and you suck it.’

  He popped the pebble in his mouth.

  ‘It stimulates your production of saliva,’ he said, rolling the pebble around in his mouth, ‘and makes you feel less thirsty.’

  I grabbed the nearest pebble.

  ‘Stop it!’ said my mum. ‘Don’t teach her that! That could be dirty, Ruby. You might choke! What you need to do is imagine – what would you like to drink right now?’

  ‘A cola,’ I said. ‘With lots of ice – and a slice of lemon.’

  I can remember even now: I added the bit about the lemon to show how grown-up I was – but the cola? I chose that because they hadn’t let me have one, and I knew for sure that if I had been allowed one I wouldn’t feel thirsty like I did.

  ‘So you just imagine that’s what you’re drinking,’ said my mum. ‘You try that.’

  I stopped my bike on the moonlit road. I didn’t drink my own pee; I felt like I had no pee in me anyway. I couldn’t see a pebble, so I picked up a small, sharp lump of road grit. I wiped it a bit and put it in my mouth. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out Caspar’s MP3, fiddled with it in the dark. Music blared – seemed like. For a second, I was going to skip the track, look for something I knew, when I realised it was something I knew. It was Caspar. No band playing with him, just Caspar and his guitar. I looked at the sky – stars disappearing, moon disappearing – and I cycled on, listening to Caspar’s sweet, snoggy voice singing love in my ear and thinking about an ice-cold cola, with a slice of lemon.

  When I got in, I gulped so many bottles of water I threw up. I threw up until there was nothing left to throw up but bitter, acidy stuff.

  I had this terror moment of thinking maybe I was sick sick – rain sick – and then I pulled myself together. My head hurt, but I wasn’t about to go see what – if anything – Simon had left that I could take for that.

  I’d called his name, when I got home. An ostrich thing. There’d been no answer. I did not want to go up there and see why. I knew why.

  I remembered what my mum did when I got sunburnt (which totally wouldn’t have had to have happened if we’d gone on holiday to proper places and/or they’d just let me get a decent spray tan, etc.). On the outside, you need to cool the skin; on the inside, what I had, was dehydration. I mixed a bit of salt and sugar with some water and I forced myself to sip, sip, sip it, even though my stomach was churning and I wanted to gulp it and throw it up again at the same time.

  I sorted the phones out, starting with mine. That meant going upstairs, to the attic, to my bedroom, where I hadn’t been – except to grab stuff – for days. I didn’t hang around then, either. I didn’t want to look at my stuff; my stuff that was to do with the me that had been – and my friends. Most especially the photos plastered all over the walls. Me and my friends. And most precious of all: me and Caspar – and Saskia, barging into the photo to lean on his shoulder, pouting.

  Saskia, who might still be alive.

  It was only then that I noticed the rain; coming down on the windows in the roof. Streaming down the windows in the roof. I hadn’t even registered that it had started. I could have been out in it. I could have died.

  ‘ you,’ I told it.

  I got my charger and I went back to the sitting room, to the nest, and I sip, sip, sipped – the birdwatching DVDs playing over – as I charge, charge, charged everyone’s phones – with my charger, with Simon’s, with my mum’s. All those phones, lined up. All those people’s lives – on the coffee table, in one long, neat row. People (like Simon) go on about people (like me) not being able to be apart from their mobiles. They’re missing the point; it’s not the mobile, it’s the life that’s in it you don’t want to be apart from . . . even when they don’t work any more. That phone is your diary, it’s your photo album. Your memory is crammed into its memory. But with the handy option to delete.

  The only thing I couldn’t charge up was Caspar’s MP3, so I made myself switch it off. I wanted that battery to last. I’d already got a bit muddled with some of the phones – whose was whose – which I felt a bit bad about. It didn’t look as if anyone had any missed calls or unopened texts; though I also felt bad about snooping I would have had a look anyway, at least to help work out which phone belonged to which person, but I couldn’t guess their password locks. Only Ronnie’s had no lock on it – yep, that’s right: Mr Conspiracy von Paranoia had zero phone security . . . but there was nothing: no calls or messages from the evening the rain had come, and nothing since. His last text was from Zak, from earlier on the day of the party. I won’t say what that said. It was meant to be private. It was sweet.

  Sometime or another, I fell asleep. I woke up because a phone beeped at me; I thought it was a message!!! Someone’s phone was all lit up! I grabbed it; the screen said it needed charging.

  Huh?! I checked the connection – nothing happened. Huh?! The DVD had been on, I was sure. It was off . . . so were the lights, which I was also sure had been on. I was half asleep, waking fast. I stumbled into the kitchen, clicking on the lights – only the lights didn’t click on.

  How stupid I am is that for a moment I thought that I’d somehow drained the power, or caused something to short-circuit, from charging the phones. Thanks to Simon, I knew what to do; I dragged a chair from the kitchen to the fuse box in the hall. Thanks to Simon, there was a torch there. I grabbed it and switched it on. The beam shone across the fuse box. Nothing was popped out, but what did I know? Electricity’s kind of a scary thing, but I jiggled stuff; I switched switches on and off. I climbed down from the chair. It was so so so dark.

  Drip, drip, drip, went the kitchen tap.

  Oh! I had this gasping moment of panic.

  I ran into the kitchen.

  Where Dartbridge had been – its lights, its street lights – there was darkness. The poisoned world had gone pitch black.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  The first thing you want to do, when there is no light, is to get light. I had the torch, and we had candles, we had matches, we had lighters. We had these things – candles, matches – by the fireplace, in the fuse box, in the kitchen drawer. In the bathroom, because my mum (and me!) liked to take baths by candlelight. I could get them . . . I stopped; I thought about the man in the big house, the supermarket men. I was thinking the way Simon said to THINK.

  Better the dark.

  I switched off the torch. I looked out of the kitchen window. I watched and I waited. Not one house lit up. I got Simon’s binoculars; I scanned about for lights, for even the flicker of candlelight.

  On the other side of the house, there was also nothing. The hill rose above our road, so there wasn’t much of a view from the front-room window, but from the houses opposite, no light shone. You could still see the shape of Mrs Fitch, though, lying in our front garden – then movement (! I panicked!) . . . another small shape, sniffing around her. Ruby: Mrs Wallis’s Siamese.

  I ran to the front door. I opened it.

  ‘Ruuu-by!’ I whisper-called.

  The cat shape stopped her sniffing.

  ‘Ruuu-by!’

  I switched the torch on for a second – and in the beam of it I saw her eyes light up in that scary cat way, and then she sauntered off, weaving silently through the garden gate.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ I whispered. Please don’t leave me.

  I shut the door, locked and bolted it. I went back to the kitchen. I watched; I waited. I got all obsessed, thinking I could see flickers of light, zooming in on houses with Simon’s binoculars; watching, waiting . . . then thinking I had been mistaken, or that maybe I’d caught a glimmer of light out of the corner of my eye. Zooming in on that, watching, waiting . . . The Sun and Moon . . . That bloke could still be there? Watching, waiting . . . I dunno for how long; for hours. Somewhere out there, there had to be someone I could go to, someo
ne to help. Someone kind.

  It was still dark, just, when a very weird and horrible thing happened. I was still watching out of the kitchen window when the mobiles all went off. All of them. There was this burst, this blaring mental chorus of beeping, of alerts, of music, customised – that crummy dance track Ronnie liked. I jumped out of my skin – and ran to get to them. It stopped, but I was already on to it. I grabbed my phone first; hit on the messages, saw one from my dad, hit call sender before I’d even read it. Unlike times before when there was nothing, there was now a voice saying ‘Network Busy’. I hit redial. ‘Network Busy’. I hit redial. Again, again, again. I tried my mum’s phone; I tried Simon’s; I tried Ronnie’s. I tried them all, calling my dad. Network Busy.

  In between times, on the phones that were locked, I hit emergency dial; discovered it really won’t let you ring any other number but 999.

  999.

  Network Busy.

  999. 999.

  999. 999. 999.

  999. 999. 999. 999.

  My dad: Network Busy.

  I put them all on speaker phone. I would get through.

  999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999. 999.

  Network Busy.

  I tried my dad again – Network Busy – then from my mum’s phone I tried Leonie’s mum’s landline. It paused, like it was going to connect.

  Buuuuuuuuur.

  From our landline I tried Molly’s parents’ landline.

  Buuuuuuuuur.

  I tried Ronnie’s parents’ landline.

  Buuuuuuuuur.

  I tried to call my mobile from my mum’s mobile.

  NETWORK BUSY.

  I tried every number I had on every phone I could get into the dial-pad on. I tried them all, over and over and over . . . until I got so desperate I dialled the same on each one, over and over and over:

  999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999; 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999; 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999; 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999; 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999, 999 . . .