Storm Read Free Page A

read something or listen to some music (the boom box and the cassette tape of brass band music belonging to my dead neighbor, Mr. Fitch, had been upgraded to a CD player and a vast, jumbled heap of discs and cases) and no matter how much you wanted to go back to sleep, you just couldn’t let yourself do it until the nightmare had been battled back into the part of your brain it had snuck out from and could only rattle at the crummy lock on the door.
    But those bells, they didn’t stop, not even when I got up—WAH! MY BODY HURT! WHOA! I HAD THE MOST MASSIVE DIZZY FIT!—and picked my way around the house slugging cola (I was SO thirsty!), shivering because I felt weirdly, seriously cold and because I was SCARED OUT OF MY MIND.
    I must have been asleep all day and all night, because it was day again—middle of, judging from the light, which I had to do because my watches all told different, blurry stories—but at least I could see them. At least I could see. That was the only comfort in the situation because I felt this most incredible panic…a different kind completely to the one I had felt up on the moor, different again to the one I had felt thinking I was going blind and how would I get back home. It was the panic of another human being coming. It was the panic of choice.
    Those church bells? They’d only clank and dong like that if a person—a real, live, actual person was ringing them.
    It was a panic I couldn’t even stall by doing something normal, like getting dressed or something, because I was already dressed. Ha! I even had my rubber boots and raincoat on still.
    All I could do was stand at the front door, slugging cola and going, “Oh—”
    Mom, I can’t put any more pretty butterflies where swear words should go. I’ll put a new thing:.
    It is what killed you. It is the thing in the rain. There is no worse thing. So I will put this thing instead. And I will fill it with hate.
    So yeah, I stood at the front door going, “Oh, oh, oh,” because I was too scared to go out.
    You know that stuff you learned at school and from your parents when you were tiny? That stuff about “stranger danger”? Well, really, right up until the apocalypse, I’d sort of thought, Yeah, right , because most people you ever met were OK, really, and some of them were really nice. (And anyway, how would anyone ever meet anyone if everyone was scared of strangers? All you’d ever know was your own family.) But since the apocalypse? Strangers make me really nervous. I’ve seen all kinds of random freaking out and nastiness. (I’ve also seen all kinds of weirdness: e.g., opened the door to a discount warehouse near here and saw a butt-naked man lying on a pile of sheepskin rugs singing.) (I closed the door and left.) (Quickly.) If some stranger came now, if someone found out where I was, I couldn’t run, could I? How could I go when my dad said he was coming back?
    It’s that, I think, more than anything, that made my default setting LIE LOW. Anytime I went to a place to check it out for water or food and I even thought for one second that someone had been there, I left. (Quickly.) Even if there was a whole Aladdin’s cave of stuff right in front of me and no naked man singing, if I saw something—a spilled thing, crumbs, mold even—that looked fresh or even halfway fresh (know your molds!) or I smelled something recent-ish and human, I’d just leave. (Quickly.) That’s how it got. That’s how sharp I could be when I wasn’t zombied out with misery.
    The church bellsstopped ringing.
    â€œOh.”
    I said it out loud. I think I said it out loud. Seemed to me my own voice boomed out in the silence louder than any bell. It was, perhaps, the most complicated “Oh” there has ever been. On the one hand, relief swept over me—because I could maybe think that it was over, so chillax, Ruby, go back to sleep (as