Storm Read Free Page B

if!)… On the other hand…someone else was in town. Someone who really wanted people to know they were around. A crazy someone-anyone setting a trap—or a desperate someone. Or. Or. Or.
    â€œ!” I boomed.
    I opened the door.
    The sky looked OK—for now—some kind of cirrocumulus stratiformis thing going on = basically a high-level mess of clouds that could turn into a whole bunch of nastier ones…but not yet.
    I’d run out of all excuses other than fear.
    In my family, unless someone was getting married, we went to church once a year—at Christmas, because my mom liked the carols. For me, this was going to be the second time this year, if Salisbury Cathedral counts as a church. That’s the apocalypse for you: makes you go places you wouldn’t normally go, do things you wouldn’t normally do. It’s just great that way, isn’t it?
    I prowled down into the town, the raincoat rustling way too much for my liking. I prowled cautiously , listening for every and any sound…but it was difficult to hear any sound that wasn’t CLANG DONG CLANG because that CLANG DONG CLANG started up again when I was halfway there.
    When the only sound disturbance in your world, for ages, has been yourself or the wind or therain, any other sort of noise is REALLY FRIGHTENING. Not that many times but often enough for me to be pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming, I’d heard planes. I’d even heard other cars a few times. But this?
    It was the loudest thing I’d heard in months (that wasn’t coming out of a CD player in a car). Louder even than the WTCH-UH, WTCH-UH thump of my own heart—which was hammering so hard it felt like I could hear it.
    I snuck up to the church. I hid behind a grave. The bells stopped.
    WTCH-UH, WTCH-UH. My body detected nervous sweat pouring from my armpits. WTCH-UH, WTCH-UH, WTCH—HUH?!
    Someone came out of the church.
    I suppose I did just pop up from behind a gravestone. I suppose it might have been a bit sudden. Anyway, whatever it was, Saskia screamed.
    â€œSaskia?!” my ragged, broken voice squealed out like a strangled thing.
    She just stood there, a frozen human explosion of fright. It seemed a little over-the-top if you ask me. (Considering, before the rain fell, we’d seen each other every day at school and every weekend too.)
    â€œ Sask? ! ” Erm, so I suppose my voice was a bit grunty and cavewoman-like. It definitely sounded pretty weird.
    â€œ Ruby? ! ” she whispered, like she really wasn’t sure about it when—Hey?! Hello! Of course it was ME. OF COURSE IT WAS ME!
    â€œOh my!” She gasped. “What HAPPENED to you?!”
    I wasn’t really listening. I felt this massive…this massive…I want to say it was totally, like, some kind of surge of love and human compassion (even though she looked as annoyingly fresh and perky as the last time I’d seen her, safe inside the army base with all the useful people, and—allegedly and apparently—shacked up with Darius “Don’t Ever Want to Think about Him” Spratt). The truth is, when I realized it was her, just her and not random, scary someone-anyone other people, I felt this MASSIVE SURGE OF RELIEF…which sort of became this massive surge of…oh, I don’t even know what, but before she had time to dodge out of the way, I sort of lunged forward and grabbed her. I hugged her.
    She gasped again. “You scared the hell out of me!”
    I think I might have tried to grunt something back.
    â€œI didn’t know if you’d be here! I didn’t know where you lived! I didn’t know how to find you!” she cried.
    And then there was just this…we hung on to one another, rocking and swaying and trying to hold the world still in the middle of a graveyard. A graveyard full of people who’d died when they should have died—or maybe even tragically, but with people alive to comfort