H2O (9 page)

(The phone bill—which I cunningly, scaredly intercepted—is still under my bed.)

I am going to write it down anyway, what was said about the rain. I am going to write down everything I know about what was happening, because maybe someone should…and because maybe I need a break from thinking about what that was like: me and Simon in the living room, and my mom and my Henry upstairs dead.

So, this is the Ruby Morris Killer Rain Summary. This is what they said on the TV and the radio. This is what I heard, plus what Simon told me he'd heard, plus the things Simon figured out all by himself…plus a little of the stuff that I got to know and hear about after. This is, I think, as much as anyone knows.

To begin with, they said they didn't know—
really
know, for sure—what was causing it, but some people—not just any people, scientists—thought it had to do with the asteroid. That when it had been blown to smithereens, it had made kind of a mess. Tons and tons and tons and tons of rocky mess. After a while—like, nearly seven years—the mess got to Earth. It got sucked here by gravity and—
Pop! Pop! Pop!—
the mess of rocks got into the Earth's atmosphere, making a really gorgeous firework display that you could see pretty much everywhere on Earth—except boring old Dartbridge, where it was cloudy and no one got to see a thing. A few big chunks did fall to Earth, and before there was no one left alive to fight about it, some of the scientists and politicians were having a big argument about what exactly had happened to those pieces of asteroid. I don't suppose it really matters. You see, the rest of the mess had been blown into even tinier smithereens of dust that got spread around, all over the sky.

Everyone knew about the dust. It was the dust that made the sunsets everyone had been ooh-ing and ahh-ing about, the kind of heavenly sunset there'd been on the night of Zak's party. Yup, doom was written right across the sky and everyone was going, “Ooo! Isn't that lovely?” and probably taking pictures of it.

Selfie with sunset and sausage. Having a lovely holiday weekend.

What no one knew (Ronnie would probably disagree) was that there was something in the dust: a tiny, weird space thing. A bacterium. A thing that had lived inside the asteroid for millions—maybe billions?!—of years. They didn't know how it did that, but apparently even some bacteria on Earth—
extremophiles
, that's what they said they were called—can survive for endless centuries—for, like, forever. Can survive how and where no normal living thing could, gobbling sulfur in boiling hot springs, for example, or at the bottom of the sea, or in the armpits of certain boys.

They said the space thing was a kind of
polyextremophile
because, unlike your regular extremophile, there were tons and tons of things it couldn't care less about: heat, cold, radiation… But what it was really, really pleased to see after all that time stuck in a hunk of rock in space was water. It likes water A LOT.

It breeds in water. Not breeds, exactly; it likes itself so much it just makes more of itself. It replicates. It replicates
really
fast. Like—ka-boom—one minute there was a smashed-up asteroid's worth of bacteria, and the next minute, the whole sky, our beautiful sky, was teeming with them. Riddled with them. Swarming with them. The clouds were poisoned.

I never really thought of the rain as being beautiful. If it ever got clean again, I would go out and dance in it. I would love every single precious drop.

It's only a shower.
It
sure
is, Mom! Why, I just adore the
rain!

Get on with it.
Yes
sir, Mr. Simon, sir! No
problem!

Every single precious drop of rain got contaminated. And every single precious drop fell to Earth.

When the rain touches human skin, there are a few moments when nothing happens—when, perhaps, you might even think that you will be OK. Then it starts: a rash that burns…that burns so bad you will want to scratch the skin from your own body. Do that—and you won't be able to stop yourself—and you're just helping it along. It starts to chow down into your flesh. It doesn't care about the pain if it gets snarled up around your nerve endings. It is
very
aggressive. It attacks anything in its path; it is up for a fight. It is determined to get what it wants—and what it wants is to burrow its way into your veins, into your arteries, into your blood.

That's what it's after. Your blood. They think it's the iron; that it likes to snack on iron—and, boy, after all that replicating, it was starving.

Depending on how much you've been exposed—if, say, you got drenched with water from head to toe—the first blast of pain as the bacteria elbow their way past each other to the all-you-can-eat buffet inside you can be enough to send you into total catastrophic shock. If so, you will die very quickly. If that happens to you, you're lucky—same as if you go and drink it. That's just like flinging open the front door to your insides and saying, “Come on in!”

If you just get a few drops of water on your skin—like my mom—you will die more slowly. Though, if you are tiny, like Henry…the beloved…it will still be quick.

It's a really fussy eater; it only likes your red blood cells. It's so happy to be inside you, gorging, after millions and billions of years of hungry thirst. It helps itself to the most juiciest parts of you, replicating super-fast as it gets its strength back, barging its way right into your blood cells, making more and more and more of itself until—POP! Your cells just burst.

The inside of your body is exploding, cell by cell.

There is nothing—NOTHING—to be done. It laughs in the face of antibiotics. No medicine on Earth can save you; there is no cure. They advised acetaminophen for the pain. Aspirin, apparently, just brings on more bleeding. So they advised acetaminophen.

HA! It does nothing.

And, when it was all too late, they said victims—or anyone suspected of sickness—should be quarantined for twenty-four hours. This is a joke, and in two ways:

1. “Quarantine” makes it sound as if you might come out alive (you won't); and

2. I've never seen or heard of anyone who lasted longer than three hours. Max.

I suppose the other way in which quarantine is a joke is that you can't get it from having a sick person just breathe on you or something. It can't get into you through your lungs. Incredibly, I'm with the space bug on this one; before I dropped biology, we studied the respiratory system, and I didn't get it either.

To get sick from a sick person, you have to actually get the sick person's blood on you, on your skin. Or a dead person's? I don't know. Who
would
know? That, like a lot of other stuff, isn't exactly the kind of thing anyone's going to be in a rush to test out.

(I mean, really, what kind of an idiot would think, “Hmm, I wonder if this lovely fresh apple I just picked is OK? Maybe I'll take a great big bite and see…”)

In fact, there's plenty of stuff people don't know (even if they say they do), so my advice would be… Well, Simon said it on his list. Don't do this, don't do that. Otherwise, basically, you're dead.

• • •

To anyone living in the future, my recommendation would be that if there's an asteroid heading toward your planet, either blow it up when it's NOWHERE NEAR your gravity, or else move to another planet.

Is there anything positive to add? Apart from no one is ever going to find that phone bill under your bed or make you walk anywhere ever again when it's pouring?

Yes! IT COULD BE WORSE!

It could be, apparently. There's moisture in the air, isn't there? There are teensy droplets of water everywhere. I don't just mean when you get dew or condensation or stuff like that; I mean really, really teensy droplets that you can't even see. Simon showed me a picture in a newspaper once:
Dew
on
a
damselfly
. I remember precisely which kind of tiny winged creature it was because, although I just said, “Oh wow, yeah,” or something like that when Simon showed me, it was so OH WOW! YEAH! I looked it up on the Internet myself after. It was ah-may-zing! This little boggle-eyed alien-looking critter covered—COVERED—in teensy-weensy globules of water.

A while after this whole thing started, I remembered that picture. I remembered it and it made me paranoid for about five minutes, but then it made me understand what Simon said the scientists had been going on about: that you've gotta get hit by a certain number, a certain volume, of bacteria to get got; otherwise, your body
can
fight back. But what that certain number is? You can add that to the list of things only an idiot would try to figure out.

Drip. Drip. Drop. Dead.

That's it. That's all I've got to say.

Hold on. If there's one thing they tried to drum into us at school—and actually there were about five million things they tried to drum into us, day in, day out—it's that it's no good just repeating facts. No, for good grades, it is important to not just bleat what someone else has told you, but to show that you are capable of actually thinking about what it is you have learned.

Sooooo, in conclusion…

What I think, really, is that this should have been the moment in human history when teenagers should have taken over the Earth (a little like they said cockroaches would do in the event of nuclear war, but obviously we're a lot nicer than cockroaches).

Think about it: we don't like to go outside when it's raining; we don't like drinking water (it's boring); we don't like eating fresh fruit and vegetables (because the THEY are always going on about how we should).

We'd have had to get over the need to shower, but frankly, I hadn't used soap on my face for at least a month (since Lee read an article that said it gave you premature wrinkles), and I can fully vouch for the cleansing properties of baby wipes. The showering: we would have gotten over it. We would have had to. We are, actually, very capable of adapting.

If this sounds like a joke to you, read on and think on because the other thing about us teenagers is that we're much, much nicer people than most adults (
see
footnote
1
)
.
Our world would have been a better world.

OK, that's my take on it. It's probably not quite right, but mainly it probably is. I'm giving myself another A+.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: With some exceptions.

We watched the broadcast thing a few times. There was a pause when it got to the end, and then it would start over again. I asked Simon some stuff; he answered—when he could answer. There was so much stuff he didn't know, that no one knew. The main question, I guess, was what was going to happen next.

I'm glad no one could answer that. I wouldn't have wanted to know.

You know what it reminded me of, though, Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two? It reminded me of how, when you're in trouble and you know it, the way you kind of go easy on the basic facts. That's Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number One; you're cornered, so you've got to fess up, but it's much better to keep the fessing to a minimum to avoid a full parental freak-out. You want to hold off blurting the further details—well, for as long as you can, really. That's Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two: what you confess when there's no longer any point in denying stuff. The worst example I can think of is this girl at my school who basically got caught with a boy, so she had to admit they'd done the deed (when they'd actually been doing it for months). Her parents went nuts about EPSB No. 1; they went so nuts she didn't actually get around to telling them the second part (EPSB No. 2) until they found the pregnancy-testing kit in the trash…

Let's just take an easier example:

EPSB
No. 1:
“OK, so I've just come home in an outfit I didn't leave the house in…so I might as well tell you I went to a party.”

(“OK, you'll have noticed anyone who got rained on has become sick, so we may as well tell you: it's in the rain.”)

EPSB
No. 2:
“I think I might be sick in a minute, so you may as well know that at that party I drank some punch—with gin in it.”

(“You may have noticed some people are dead, so we may as well tell you it's fatal. Oh! You've got it too? Shucks! We may as well tell you: it's contagious.”)

You'd think you'd get your head around it, hearing the same thing again and again—there's an initial freak-out, then people get over it—but somehow Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two got worse the more times you heard it. And it wasn't just because my mom and my Henry were dead—that was bad enough. It was because it made you start thinking about…stuff you couldn't even begin to start thinking about—say, like, whether the world was ending. So I tuned out.

It must have been too much for Simon too because, not long after, he put the DVD back on. The history thing had made it up to World War I. I told Simon we weren't doing that at school, so he put the bird thing on instead, but really it was because it was too horrible to look at: all those people dying. He left me watching a thing about woodland birds while he went and messed around with the radio in the kitchen. He kept it so quiet I couldn't hear whatever it was people were saying. There was music sometimes. I don't know what. I wasn't even listening for it. I wasn't listening to the bird thing either, and not even to the rain. I was thinking about my mom and about Henry, my dearest, babiest, brother-brat beloved.

In the morning, it was sunny, like it had been for so many days before the rain came. It was sunny, and the sky was blue—the kind of blue that makes you forget there's even such a thing as rain. The kind of blue that made you think it was all over.

Before I remembered it was supposed to be a vacation day, I had this one random thought—really so stupid and silly but also kind of almost funny—that Simon was actually going to say I had to go to school. Really, I could almost just imagine it!
Look, Ruby, I know you're upset and some terrible things have happened, but we have to get on with things
(“It's only a shower”)—
plus
you've got your practice exams coming up
(he was obsessed with exams)
and, after all, what would your mother want?
Etc., etc., etc.: GO TO SCHOOL.

But that didn't happen. So we put the radio on. It wasn't over.

The same emergency broadcast played over and over. Simon turned it down, but I'd already tuned out, same way you would if it was some blah-blah thing about politics (or
Gardeners' Question Time
). That was how to deal with it.

The thing that was less easy to deal with was the thirst. The day before, I hadn't really noticed it so much, not after I'd seen Mom. That next day…best way to describe it is: you know how it gets when you really, really like someone, when you're basically totally in love with them? Well, it was like a horrible version of that. I COULD NOT STOP THINKING ABOUT HOW THIRSTY I WAS.

(And you know how if you can actually SEE the person you like, it makes it even worse and you keep wanting to look at them? I felt like every other second I found myself staring at the little poisoned mini-sea of pots and pans and jugs of water in the corner of the kitchen.)

I had to close the fridge door quickly to avoid the terrible sight of Henry's teething rings. There was nothing to drink anyway. The orange juice was long gone; that last tiny drop of milk had gone bad, and I'd already scraped the freezer clean of ice—completely. I'd even found a pizza—they never bought pizza—stashed (as in
hidden
from
me
) under the peas and the fava beans in the freezer drawer that had all the vegetables in it, where no one in their right mind would go looking. Through the little plastic window they put so you can see they're not lying about how good the pizza is, I saw it had gathered a giant layer of frost on top, so the sneaks must have had it stashed for a while. I picked off the frost and boiled it in the kettle with the tiny bit of melt-water I'd thawed off the peas. The tea, Simon had said, savoring the taste like a chef would, tasted of oregano…with a hint of fish. He was right; I'd also found half a box of frost-furry fish sticks and carefully scraped the little spikes of ice off them.

We had one can of fruit left: peaches. Simon wanted to give them all to me, and even though I wanted them all, I made him split it. He gave me more though. I saw him do that. I mashed mine up in a cup. I slurped as slowly as I could, pretending I was having a smoothie, as we watched the town from the kitchen window, taking turns to zoom in on the action with his binoculars.

In some ways, the outside world looked normal. Mainly that was because what you can see from our kitchen window are rooftops and trees; when all the leaves are out, when all the plants are grown, you can't really see down into the streets (where there were dead people); you can't see down into the patios of pubs (where there were dead people); you can't see into people's homes (where there were dead people); and you can't really see into people's backyards. If you could have, you would have seen what I've seen a million times since: dead people sprawled around barbecues. So, yes, it all looked normal. The trees and plants seemed to be OK. Nothing looked withered or sick or dying. Birds flew in the sky. It looked like a nice, normal day…except, even with the windows still shut tight, you could
hear
it wasn't right. There were alarms going off all over the place and…you could see the parking lot behind the library. Cars were coming and going; not tons like there'd normally be, going around and around looking for spaces, but there were some cars.
People
were coming and going. That was where the normal part stopped.

The people in the parking lot—they weren't just your regular shoppers; they were staggering back from town with bags and bags of stuff, shopping carts even. Not just food, either; all sorts of tons of stuff, like it was Christmas or the January sales. A man and a woman had a massive flat-screen TV in a cart; it tipped over in the parking lot and the TV smashed. They went off again with the cart, but I didn't see them come back. Then a couple of guys got into a fight, and this woman started jumping around all over the place, waving her arms—screaming at them to stop probably, or screaming for help.

And all the while, the radio was on, the emergency broadcast quietly telling people, over and over, to stay home and remain calm.

Remain?
Doesn't that sort of make it sound as if people were calm and had to stay that way? When exactly did they think people had been calm?!

“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Simon, disgusted.

He put the binoculars down and went out of the kitchen; I heard him tramp upstairs to use his bucket in the bathroom. I picked up the binoculars.

From a distance, the fight had just looked a little silly: tiny men scrapping; tiny lady jumping. Close up, it was fascinating—in a nasty sort of way. I almost cheered when the smaller guy managed to knock the bigger guy down—but the bigger guy didn't get back up.

That parking lot, didn't Simon always go on about how it was a disgrace? Full of potholes that were now full of water. Water that was now full of death.

You could see the big man clawing at his arm, then wrenching his whole shirt off, his body bloody where he'd hit the ground.

It turned out the woman was with him and not the other guy; she ran to him.

Don't touch him! Don't touch him! Don't touch him!
I thought, even as she slumped down and cradled his head like it was a baby.

Don't touch her! Don't touch her! Don't touch her!
I thought, even as the big man reached up his hand…to push her away? She grabbed his bloody hand in hers. She—NO! NO! NO!—kissed it.

Stay
home, remain
calm.

The woman bent over the man, kissing and kissing his lips; not making out, not one long kiss, but kisses and kisses and words in between, saying stuff, her body rocking, her hand going from his head to rake at hers—at hers, where her face had turned bloody—and back to his, stroking his cheek. Kissing him, rocking him, saying stuff.

Love is stronger than pain. In the parking lot behind Dartbridge Library.

“We need water,” said Simon, bustling back into the kitchen. “I'm going out.”

I put the binoculars down.

We kind of had a fight then. It wasn't one of our old fights; this was a very new kind of a fight.

There was no shouting, for starters. There had been no shouting (except about the faucet and that) since I'd seen my mom. The high horses did get saddled up, but very quietly, with no yee-haa. Simon didn't want me to go with him because he was worried it wouldn't be safe. I didn't say I knew it wasn't safe because I'd just seen two people dying (probably) in the library parking lot. In any case, that was other people. That wouldn't happen to us. I point-blank refused to stay home alone.

You
can't leave me, you can't leave me, you can't leave me
—that was all I had to say about everything he said.

Also, even then—maybe especially then—I still thought that if I went with him, I might be able to get him to take me to Zak's. I would see my friends. I would get my phone.

I really did think this. I really did think all my friends would still be at Zak's, wondering whether they should go out or not—although stuck in the country like that, they wouldn't know that no one seemed to be paying any attention at all to what the broadcast was telling people. And maybe they'd know how Caspar was. I had seen what had happened to my mother and to Henry, and to the parking-lot people and to Mrs. Fitch, and still I had this thought that Caspar would still be alive. I suppose you could say it was more of a hope.

By the time me and Simon had finished having our new not-a-fight fight, clouds had begun to appear in the sky—not big clouds, not rain clouds, but gangs of little raggedy clouds.

Some kind of altocumulus type I now think they must have been, but I can't remember whether they were castellanus (raggedy at the top) or floccus (raggedy at the bottom). Little, raggedy clouds.

“Ruby,” said Simon. “I have to go
now
.”

“You can't leave me,” I said. For the zillionth time.

Simon caved. He had to: I would not be left alone.

“Don't look,” he instructed as he opened the door.

He didn't say what at; I knew. I looked anyway. There were flies all over the mess that had been Mrs. Fitch's face. I felt…what I would come to feel a lot, for a while—this thing I didn't even know what to call back then, this wave of grief and shock and horror—not so much for Mrs. Fitch, in truth, but because Mrs. Fitch made me think about my mom.

Not even out of the garden gate and all I wanted to do was go back and hide under my duvet and watch
Birds
of
the
British
Isles
until it all stopped.

The gate banged shut, and I heard them: the neighbors' dogs. Alarms screeching and squealing up from the town and still you could hear them. Dogs that wouldn't normally be bothered by the bang of a gate being bothered by it.

We got in the car and got as far as the end of Cooper's Lane. It was like the traffic jam that had been there on the night Zak's mom drove me home hadn't budged. In fact, most of it probably hadn't. It took a few moments to realize that most of the cars heading into town weren't moving at all, were just stopped still, abandoned—or worse…there were people in those cars and the people weren't moving. In between the stopped cars came the cars of the living, horns honking pointlessly as they tried to find a way through. There were cars stopped on the other side too, coming out of town, but fewer of them.

“Perhaps we'd better walk,” said Simon, jamming the car into reverse.

We went back home.

We had one last not-a-fight fight, a mini one, right outside our garden gate.

“Ruby,” he said. “I really want you to stay home.”

You
can't leave me, you can't leave me, you can't leave me
, and all the while the alarms going, the sirens going, the neighbors' dogs barking, the buzz of flies…the little gangs of poisoned clouds snuggling up together, getting just a little thicker and fatter and sinkier.

I won the fight that wasn't a fight, but I paid a terrible price for it. Even though it was totally obvious it wasn't going to rain anytime soon, Simon made us go back into the house and get dressed in rain boots, waterproof pants, and double raincoats. He told me to put the hood up on my raincoat, then produced one of his “Indiana Jones goes bird-watching” hats.

“No,” I said. “No way. I'd rather die.”

I didn't mean I'd rather die as in killer-rain die. I just meant…whatever it was I used to mean when I said stuff like that. He slapped the hat on my head, then cruelly tightened the hood of the raincoat.

I was outraged by the horror and shame of it, but I couldn't say anything, could I? Yes I could! I loosened the hood from my mouth and scabby chin.

“Well, what are we going to do about our hands?” I said.

I only said that to point out the pointlessness of it all, not so he'd go and get dishwashing gloves for us both.

He dangled them in front of me.

“If you'd rather not,” he said, “we can both stay home and die of thirst.”

I did feel that was somewhat unnecessarily brutal, but I put the awful gloves on and retightened the hood of the raincoat. The less you could see of my face, the less likely it'd be that someone would recognize me—with any luck. Simon handed me Mom's massive umbrella.

“I'm not putting it up,” I mumbled through the raincoat.

“Right,” said Simon. “But if I say you need to, you do it.”

“'K,” I mumbled.

We marched back out the gate, and he opened the trunk of the car and handed me the shopping bags; you know, those big “green” long-lasting ones people use—“because they fit so well in the back of a car,” Ronnie said, meaning there was nothing eco about them.

“So you do what I say, when I say, young lady.”

“Yes,” I said. It came out all loud and wobbly, so it sounded about a micro-millimeter off a yee-haa yes…but, truth is, I was scared.

It was baking hot, and I was sweating by the time we'd walked about three steps. When we got to the alleyway that led from right by our house into town, I was sweating even more—and I got more scared.

What you might need to know at this point is that Dartbridge is basically the hippie capital of the universe. It is drowning in tie-dye and organic vegetables. People walk barefoot through the streets not because they are poor, but because they want a closer connection to the Earth (despite the fact that there's a ton of asphalt on top of it). Even the graffiti, which looks kind of cool, is hippie; this squiggly symbol for peace gets spray-painted everywhere. Dartbridge, Ronnie said, was “a place so laid-back it was practically comatose.”

Below the alarms and the sirens and the car horns, you could hear…not just shouts and screams, but the sound of things—glass—smashing.

“Is it a riot?” I asked.

I'd seen stuff like that on TV before. It happened in other countries mainly, but also in the UK when people were annoyed about stuff the government was doing—which Ronnie said would happen a lot more often if people knew what was really going on.