Storm (6 page)

It's hard to miss a pink stretch limo.

It was outside a mansion. A house so big you'd have to call it that. Like, really, you could have stuck it in the country, and in the time before the rain, people would have paid to go and see it.

I remembered a girl pointing—when Darius Spratt and I had been here in Bristol thirsty (so thirsty!) for water—and even more vaguely remembered the direction she was pointing in.

Where we were now, that's where she had pointed.

“Ruby?” Saskia said, freaking as I drove up to the house.

I idled in the road for a moment, looking at it. That's how good my driving is now: I can “idle,” foot just resting on that accelerator, hand still clutched on that gear stick, ready at any second to take off.

“I know these people,” I said, ignoring her freaking. I turned off the engine.

“Ru,” breathed Saskia.

I could hardly hear her. I could hear music! Thumping music! Someone was having a party.

A grin—a small but hopeful grin—crept onto my face.

“We could just say hi,” I said. “Just see what's happening… Trust me…these people are cool. They're really, really cool.”

Trust me?
How could I even trust myself? I didn't really know those people at all.

A kid dressed as a pink fairy ran past the front of the house, chased by another kid in a dinosaur getup, spiny tail dragging.

“They've got kids here…” said Saskia as if that was a wondrous thing.

“Yeah,” I said. I'd seen that before too—how these cool people had been kind enough to take in stray kids.

The track that was playing quieted—for a second or two, you could hear the noise of a generator—and then—OH! A track we knew came on! I grinned bigger. It hurt…but any place where kids are messing about having fun, that's got to be all right, doesn't it? Any place where people like the same music as you… Those people have got to be all right, don't they?

“S'pose we could just see,” said Saskia.

We piled out of the car. Couldn't have cared less about the sky. Excited, that's what we were—nervous, obviously, but
excited
. We crunched up the gravel of that drive, the both of us high-pitched whisper-singing the chorus right up until we got to that great big front door. Then we went quiet. Nerves.

We did knock, but I don't suppose anyone would have heard over the racket. The front door was open anyway, so we went in.

We stood in the darkness of a grand entrance hall. There was this huge staircase right in front of us. Around the banisters, Christmas lights were wrapped: twinkling, disappearing into the blackness at the top of the stairs. There were portraits—old oil painting–type portraits—hanging on the stairwell. I didn't suppose they'd had glasses and mustaches like that originally. Certainly not the ladies. I also didn't suppose their clothes had been spray-painted in rainbows of neon paint. And I know for a fact that none of them would have had speech bubbles coming out of their mouths saying—

“Hi!” shouted another kid, this one dressed in one of those crazy, padded muscleman Superman outfits as he chased the fairy and the dinosaur through the hall.

They whacked open the door to the room where the music was coming from—a blast of sound and smoke and weed and alcohol-y drink fumes escaped—and ran in, the door slamming behind them.

Two seconds later, Superman flung the door open again and shouted “Bye!” at us, then disappeared again.

“Sask?” I said.

That was pretty much the last thing I remember saying to her that night. A new track started up—superb mixing!—we burst into singing and—hey!

She shrugged and grinned. She walked toward the door, singing. I followed, singing. Did a little shimmy. (It hurt.)

Sask poked the door open:

PARTY CENTRAL!!!!!

If you need that explained to you, your life has been even more unfortunate than mine. But I judge not, so here's a summary:

Music Frenzy! Dance frenzy! Fun frenzy!

Champagne frenzy! (CLASSY!)

And most hilarious and brilliant of all: FANTASY COSTUME FRENZY!

Ha! Every single fabulous person in that place was in a costume. Every kind of beautiful and fantastic creature was there, from masked and gowned ladies to aliens from outer space to a very convincing beady-eyed fox in a hunter's jacket, and a gold-painted guy who actually appeared to be naked. Hard to tell with everyone dressed up, but it seemed like there might have been a lot of new people because I didn't seem to recognize anyone much…apart from the one who had to be as old as my grandma: Granny Lycra—last seen wearing a leopard-print catsuit and now rocking a white meringue of a wedding dress.

Sask and I, we looked at each other, eyes wide… If there's one thing a Dartbridge girl loves, even during an apocalypse—maybe especially during an apocalypse—it's a kicking, crazy party. (Even—and also maybe especially—when that Dartbridge girl has been scared stupid and scraped rock-bottom low and has no clue about what kind of a future there might be.) (
Bring it on!
If I thought anything, that's what I thought:
Bring it
on
!
)

In the blockbuster film of
my
blockbuster story, the next thing that happens will be a
tzzzzzzzzzp!
as the DJ rips the needle off the vinyl and the whole room goes silent.

What really happened was the music got turned down a little, and out of the crowd, the only other person (apart from us) who wasn't dressed up approached: Xar.

I'd met him before, what seemed like years ago but was only a few months: a six-foot-something, impressively gorgeous, blond, dread-head, tree-hugging crustie—only not really a crustie. More manicured. More deliberate. More composed. Naked from the jeans up, his chest shone with dance sweat. And I got that impression again, the one I'd first had, that he was somehow their king, because everyone made way to let His Royal Hotness through.

“Lay-deez,” he said, pulling on a white cotton shirt as he strolled through the madness toward us.

The music got turned down a little more, and everyone quieted down with it, looking our way. That's how mesmerizing he was: you tuned in to his voice automatically.

“And what can we do for you?” Xar asked.

“Hi,” I said, a bit too shoutily. “I'm Ruby?”

“If your name's not on the list, you're not coming in,” hooted Granny Lycra, pulling not a bride's veil but a widow's veil of black over her face. It looked weird and horrible and scary—but I ignored her. I ignored them all and spoke only to Xar.

“Ruby from Dartbridge? We met? Before…”

“Did we,” he said. It wasn't a question.

“And this is Saskia,” I shouted.

“Any chance of a drink?” she asked, and before Xar could answer, she was elbowing her way across the room.

That's Sask for you; she just does stuff, doesn't she? And she gets what she wants. She wasn't going to wait to be invited, so she invited herself. Xar didn't look too pleased.

“She's just come from the army base,” I said, hoping that would explain Sask's party-jeopardizing behavior.

“Oh, has she,” he said—again, no question—and he laughed—a quick and quiet ha-ha of a laugh—and waved his hand in the air in a very royal way, which was apparently the command for the music to be turned back up, because that's what happened.

The music got cranked back up, everyone carried on partying, and King Xar wandered off after Saskia.

For a moment I just stood there, like a panda/idiot—then I spied… Oooh! There was a table piled high with food. Not the kind of trash I'd been eating, but properly made stuff. Stuff that looked deliciously good. I felt my stomach growl louder than the music.

Come to Momma!
my head whispered at it.

I barged toward it.

“Hi!” shouted this girl who was already at the table. Her costume was hilarious: a walrus in a furry brown onesie, her plate piled high with items that she stuffed into her mouth between the two enormous papier-mâché tusks on either side of her jaws.

“You look brilliant,” I shouted, giving her huge belly a friendly poke. It was seriously hard and seriously…real.

“I'm so sorry!” I shouted.

It wasn't just an apology for the pregnant belly poke; it was a sorry for…uh. Dressed up or not dressed up, I could see immediately that she couldn't have been much older than me. Nah—it was worse than that. She was younger.

“You
do
look brilliant though,” I told her.

“You look awful,” she shouted but in a kind way. In the din, in the madness, I heard that kindness.

“I feel awful!” I shouted.

I did feel awful. I mean, it all looked great and stuff—the party, the food—but… Oh, my body! It hurt! And my head, which so often seemed to have a separate life from my body, it hurt too. It hurt a lot.

“I think I might have been in a coma,” I shouted.

And Grace—that's what I was just about to find out her name was—said, “Oh my
!” and stared at me, oozing big walrus sympathy.

I could have cried right there and then, because that sympathy felt so gorgeous. I put down the plate I'd grabbed.

I want to warn you about this. I want to warn you that if you know you should be hungry because you can't remember the last time you ate but you no longer feel hungry—for whatever reason—YOU SHOULD STILL EAT. Just something. Eat something. Same way with drinking (water!). YOU SHOULD JUST DRINK. Just take some stuff in, so your body and your brain will at least stand a chance of making some sensible decisions about things.

I gave neither of them a chance.

“Do you wanna dress up?” she yelled. “We could get you an outfit and stuff.”

“Yeah! Yeah, sure!”

I mean…why not, eh? Why not?

That's how I ended up in a room with Grace, the party blasting on downstairs. In a plush, wood-paneled bedroom of the sort you'd normally have to stand behind a red “Keep back, you visitor” rope to look at—me and Grace and a bottle of champagne.

“I know I shouldn't drink,” she said, rubbing her walrus belly as she glugged a glass of bubbly, “but it's hard not to. You know,
under the
circumstances
.”

“When's it due?” I asked her. But “it” sounded so harsh. “The baby,” I said.

That's what people ask pregnant people, isn't it? That's what they're supposed to ask.

“The seventh of October,” said Grace. She rubbed her tummy. “But they do say a first baby usually comes early. Up to two weeks, the midwife said…”

Guess that had been said to her in the time before the rain. Guess that had been said to her when there were still midwives, when there were still people around to help and there was no reason—or at least a lot fewer reasons—to be scared. Guess there was now.

This girl, Grace, I felt so sorry for her. She ditched her glass and rummaged through the pile of costumes on the (four-poster) bed.

I tried on stuff—because she was so happy, playing dress-up like that. I mean, most people like dressing up, don't they? But Grace? Ah, she was loving it!

“See?” said Grace as I looked at myself in the mirror.

The costume…I guess you could call it Evil Fairy. Like, it had the puffy skirt and the glitter and the wings and stuff, but it was jet-black.

I did, really, just want to go then—like, just dance myself stupid and forget about the whole thing—but she pulled the panda card on me.

“I could do your face,” she said.

“Could you?” I asked. I so just wanted to go. “Like how?”

“Like,” she said, “just wait there!”

I sat on the bed. In the moments that she was gone I did briefly think,
What
am
I doing here?
But then she came back, bubbling with excitement, and dumped out the world's most massive makeup bag.

And I smiled so hard it hurt. She had A LOT of products. A LOT of products.

Grace rolled up her sleeves—her arms were covered in tattoos—and worked at my face so lightly I could hardly even feel it. And as she worked, we chatted—and drank!—and she told me all about how she'd gotten expelled from school (she hit a teacher who had said that she shouldn't have hit a boy for calling her a slut) and had to lie to her mom about the whole thing because her mom didn't know about the pregnancy, but Grace was going to tell her when…

That's the problem with any conversation these days, isn't it? Sooner or later it blunders into the unbearable. She didn't have to say it for me to know it: her mom had died when the rain fell.

“She wouldn't have been cross with you for long,” I told Grace. It seemed like the right thing to say.

“She wouldn't have been cross at all. She'd have gone ballistic.”

I smiled. I couldn't help myself. Grace grinned. “Seriously, she would have gone
crazy,” she said.