H2O (6 page)

“Night night, darling.”

That's what my mom said.

I made a bed nest like Dan does, switched out the light, and crawled into it. Under normal—
normal?!
—circumstances, I would have texted Lee then. No, I would have forgotten how many minutes I had left and called her. I could picture her, with the others, sitting around the big old table in Zak's kitchen. I wondered how Caspar was, whether Sarah had gotten them both to the hospital.

He'd be OK.
Fatal
. He'd be OK.
Fatal
. He'd be OK.

I couldn't stand it anymore, so I got up and turned the computer on.

The Internet was down, just like Zak had said, but maybe Simon had disconnected me. That was possible. That was very possible.

Nothing to do but go back to bed.

Normally, at night, it was dead quiet. Not like at my dad's, where there was noise 24/7. Tonight, Dartbridge sounded like London. You could hear sirens, alarms, car horns. Also, sometimes, shouting. Sometimes shouting…sometimes screams.

And another sound: so quiet, so soft. The rain.
It's only a
shower
.

• • •

I didn't realize I'd fallen asleep until I woke up because someone was banging at the front door. I was up and trying to get out of the room…until I realized I couldn't. Simon must have been asleep too, because it took him a while to get there. The hall light came on, but he didn't open the front door.

“Hello?!” he called.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

I pulled back the curtain a little. Our neighbor, Mrs. Fitch, was standing in the rain. In her nightie, not even a bathrobe on top.

I heard my mom thump down the stairs. I let the curtain drop.

“Simon?” whispered my mom.

“
Simon? Rebecca?!
” cried Mrs. Fitch. “Help!”

I heard Simon, plain as day, which it nearly was—the light had gone gray, the way it does when dawn is coming through the rain. “We can't,” he said quietly to my mom.

“Please!” cried Mrs. Fitch, almost as though she'd heard him.

“We can't help,” shouted Simon. “Go to the hospital.”

“It's my husband! I can't move him!”

“We can't help,” said Simon.

“It's the baby,” cried my mom. “We've got to think about Henry.”

“Please!” screamed Mrs. Fitch.

“Come away,” I heard Simon whisper to my mom.

The hall light went off. I heard Henry starting to fuss upstairs. I heard my mom go to him, already saying, “Shh! Shh, shh, shh, shh,” in her lovely lullaby voice as she rushed up the stairs.

“Ruby?” whispered Simon. “Are you OK?”

I didn't answer. I wanted him to think I was asleep.

“Please!” screamed Mrs. Fitch. She banged at the door.

I didn't hear Simon go back into the living room, but he must have; the TV got turned up.

“
Now
urging
people
not
to
panic—
” I heard.

He must have shut the door then; I couldn't make out what they were saying anymore, just the scary, bossy sound of it going on and on about how bad everything was. But at least it did sound more like normal TV, different voices chipping in, and not the same thing over and over.

“
Help
me! Please!
” screamed Mrs. Fitch.

I stood in the dark. It went quiet. I could hear the rain, still, but not Mrs. Fitch. I peeped through the curtains. She was standing in the front yard. She was clawing at her face, at her head. I couldn't look away, somehow. Something white landed on the grass next to her; I saw it was a box, a small white medicine box of tablets, the instructions, loose, fluttering down after it. My mom must have flung it out. I saw Mrs. Fitch pick it up. She looked up at the window—not the one I was peeking out of but the upstairs one—Mom and Simon's room. She looked up, and in the gray light, I saw the ghostly red running on her face, the skin torn away already where she couldn't help but scratch.

I let the curtain drop and buried myself in my bed. I tried not to listen to it all: the murmur of the scary, bossy voices on TV; the sirens—not so many now—and the car horns, also not so many. Mrs. Fitch, groaning again. Why didn't she just go away? The pitter-patter of the rain. Such a quiet sound you shouldn't have been able to hear it, but once your ears caught it, they couldn't seem to let it go. Then Henry started bawling, throwing a massive tantrum—and that was a good thing. It drowned out every other sound, and it was a noise I knew how to deal with; I wrapped a pillow round my head to muffle the brother-brat out and fell asleep.

When the next morning began, it began like a lot of mornings have begun since then. For a moment, I thought everything was fine. For a moment, I'd forgotten.

And then I remembered.

I woke up thinking about Caspar. I'd been dreaming about him, but not how I'd seen him last, lying in the back of Zak's mom's car. I dreamed we were playing a gig together. It was brilliant. We were brilliant.

I've got to tell you now that even if the entire world hadn't totally ka-boomed, this could only ever have been a dream. That guitar lesson I didn't want to go to? It wasn't just because it was raining—it was because I was terrible. I'd only started doing it because I thought it would impress Caspar. OK, and I thought I'd turn out to be terrific at it, but I wasn't. I was terrible.

And, by the way, I was terrible at singing too, but I sang all the time (in my room or with Lee), hoping that if I practiced enough, I'd suddenly, miraculously, become fabulous at that too.

Dreams—good ones—are beautiful things.

(And sometimes they come true. I should know: I kissed Caspar McCloud.)

Anyway, for a couple of moments before I opened my eyes, I was in heaven. And then I woke up in hell.

I stretched and felt floorboards under my legs where my bed should have been. The cushions had slipped around. I dunno how Dan manages it; he's like a hamster or something, building his little nests. I'd had the worst night's sleep ever, tossing and turning—and even before I attempted to get up, I kind of knew I felt like crap, and then I remembered
why
I felt like crap.

Caspar. Oh my
: Caspar.

I reached up and felt my chin—yeurch! Seemed like overnight it had turned into a kind of giant scab. I felt my nose; that didn't feel scabby, but I'd need a mirror to be sure. If I didn't look like too much of a horror, I'd take the train to Exeter and look for Caspar at the hospital—or get Simon to take me. I had some wicked foundation to deal with the face situation… No, I didn't. That was in the barn with—MY CELL! I HAD TO GET MY CELL PHONE. Get my cell phone—which would mean seeing my friends too, which was great—get my foundation. Go see Caspar. Get a shower first—no, check the Net, then shower. Figure out my outfit, do temporary emergency makeup with items from the reserve makeup supply. Possibly have to do emergency mascara borrow from mother; definitely emergency perfume borrow (aka, “steal”; she had a bottle of this really nice stuff I wasn't supposed to use, and the last time I'd borrowed a little, she'd gone mental—even for my mom—when she'd sniffed and figured out I'd used it). Ask, then borrow, or just borrow? Just borrow. It was an emergency.

MY CELL: priority mission. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. That and I was thirsty—but the glasses of water were gone—and I was bursting, so I had to pee on top of last night's pee in the bucket, and when I'd finished peeing, I checked the computer; it was still on from last night, and everything was still down. It still showed the time though. I tried to remember when I had come in, wondering how much longer I might be forced to stay in that room if Simon got his way. It made my sore head muddle.

Then I opened the curtains. It was raining.

Surrounded by narrow beds of plants that sprouted crazily, there was a little square of grass outside; “the front lawn,” Simon called it. He mowed it, lugging the mower up the garden from the shed and through the house—dropping grass cuttings everywhere—for the two and a half seconds it took to cut the patch. Then he lugged the mower back through the house—dropping grass cuttings everywhere—and back down the garden to the shed. My mom said the front lawn wasn't worth the trouble—the grass didn't even grow properly, the way the shrubs muscled in on it—but Simon did it anyway.

If I felt anything about it, I felt that front lawn
was
Simon. The order in the chaos, something like that.

The front lawn, that small, tidy square of mown green, was muddy, torn up—clawed up, like an animal had been at it.

Mrs. Fitch was lying on it. She had her back to me. The box of tablets lay next to her.

It was raining hard. It was raining on Mrs. Fitch. Mrs. Fitch wasn't moving. I watched. Mrs. Fitch didn't seem to be breathing.

You know what? Even then I thought… I dunno, that she had stayed out in the rain too long or something? That she was old anyway, so she could have just had a heart attack. Died of hypothermia. Or had a stroke, like Grandpa Hollis.

I drew the curtains shut. I'd never seen a dead body before, and I didn't ever want to see another one. It was horrible, just horrible…and the curtains weren't enough. I shut ten thousand doors in my head and even then I couldn't keep it out. I had no words to say to myself to make it OK; instead, it was my body that started to shout.
I'm thirsty! I'm thirsty, and I'm hungry, and I feel really grubby and…I am so not going to poop in a bucket. I want breakfast. I want a shower. I want my cell phone. I want
OUT.

Before I said anything, I turned the handle of the door because you just would, wouldn't you? The door opened.

“Simon?” I called softly. You see, the house was quiet, and I didn't want to wake Henry. Come to think about it, the world was quiet. I could hear a few stupid alarms still, but no sirens, no car horns, no shouts—or shouts that could have been screams. That was all I could hear: a few stupid alarms. And the rain.

I listened
hard
.

“Simon?” I whispered.

Henry had to be asleep. I peeked my head around the door. The door to the living room was open. The TV was still on, sound down. You could see the reflection of it in the glass of all the family photos on the windowsill—Grandma Hollis, smiling, TV flickers on her face.

Maybe Simon was crashed out in front of the TV?

“
Simon?!
” I hissed.

I tiptoed a few steps down the hall, tiptoed to not to wake Henry. I knew I wasn't sick like killer-rain sick, so I kind of felt OK about it. Only, actually, I wasn't that sure that I wasn't killer-rain sick. I wasn't all covered in blood and groaning, but I knew how much I definitely didn't feel right. I felt really, really thirsty, and my head hurt. I was hungry too, but I felt sick at the same time—and a little dizzy. Not good…but I couldn't be sick
that
way
. Surely? Could I be? No. Maybe. No.

The maybe made me scared.

“Simon?” I whisper-called.

Yeah. My head felt really swimmy and swirly.

I tiptoed further down the hall. I stood at the bottom of the stairs; I listened.

It was so, so, so quiet.

I peeped round the corner. There was no one in the living room, but for a moment the TV caught me there because I saw the pictures for the words I'd heard the night before. Now there were no words, but because I had heard them already, I thought I knew what they would be. I thought I knew what they'd be saying. The pictures… These, I had not expected. Not even because of what they showed, but because, well, it just wasn't how they do stuff on TV, not even when something really serious is happening and they're probably all freaked out. It was
amateur
. You know what it reminded me of? When me, Lee, Ronnie, and Molly had done our media studies project together: a news report on a zombie outbreak. We should have given it to Zak to edit, but Ronnie insisted. The costumes, the makeup, the location—the woods at Zak's place—were awesome. The edit was
crap.

(For your information: We got a B. Zak and Saskia teamed up with some of the others and got an A+ for a spoof washing-detergent ad. Zak was supposed to be the producer, but somehow Saskia seemed to end up doing most of that and most of everything else (voiceover; lead role glamorous housewife; bespectacled-but-hot washing-detergent scientist), but, still, can you believe it? Wasn't the whole zombie thing, even with a
edit, a whole lot more creative? Ronnie said they didn't care about that, and that's pretty much what the teacher said too—but I ask you, which project turned out to be more relevant, huh? How to survive a disaster situation versus how detergent gets sold? I'm regrading us to an A+.)

Anyway, the TV. They were cutting in and out of a studio, where a woman behind a desk was talking to two men on screens behind her; it said they were in Manchester and Edinburgh. In between, they cut to stuff they'd filmed earlier—a hospital; a corridor filled with people, bloody, writhing, groaning. You didn't have to hear it to know, just like Caspar. Back to Studio Woman. Then shots of lines of cars. Back to Manchester Man. Then a clip of a politician. OK, I'm not all that up on political stuff, but it could have been the prime minister; it was some man in a suit, trying to look like he really, really meant what he was saying and totally looking like he didn't. Then a clip of the American president—him I knew—doing the same thing. Then back to the studio.

And then a graphics thing—a lousy graphics thing—of the world. As it rotated, weird red raindrops splopped onto countries until it went back to the Europe part—splops already in place—and zoomed in on Britain. Splop, splop, splop. The whole of the southwest got covered in one big, red tear-shaped splop.

Underneath, a stream of words said nothing much different from what I had heard the night before: STATE OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED…PUBLIC ADVISED TO REMAIN INDOORS…DO NOT CALL 911…NO TREATMENT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE…

You know how normally when they do that ticker-tape stream of headlines along the bottom of the screen, they move from one subject to another? They didn't. Same subject, it just kept coming and coming, on and on…

…SCIENTISTS CLAIM BACTERIUM IN RAIN IS CAUSE…SYMPTOMS INCLUDE BLEEDING, SEVERE PAIN, NAUSEA…

And then they showed it: the thing. They put up this picture of this microscopic
thing
. This thing that looked so pretty: a little round sun with these wiggly rays—a little blob of a thing with squirming tentacles.

I had felt sick before; I felt even sicker now. I didn't want to look at it. I wanted a cup of tea.

I went into the kitchen.

The house was so quiet I didn't expect anyone to be there. Simon was at the table. Except for the stove and the table, every surface in that kitchen—and some of the floor—was covered with some kind of container, all of them filled with water. That was weird, but I didn't want to go there. I saw; I did not want to discuss.

When I walked in, he lifted his head up. His face…it was not normal. It was not stiff or shaky either. It looked all collapsed.

“Hey,” he said really quietly.

He looked at me. Whoa! That look! What was
that?!

It was too weird and intense—and I guess it was for him too, because he went back to his list. Yes, he was
writing
a
list
. That would have been a bad sign on any normal day—plus he'd never, ever said “hey” to me in his life, so that was pretty weird as well. But from the way he looked, you could tell he must have been up all night, so his brain was probably completely scrambled. That's what I decided to think; Simon had been up all night (with Henry!), so I'd better be careful because, as well as the list, the laptop was on the table. If I could just get him to let me use it, just for a second…