Storm (2 page)

The mist went with her—the shadow ghost of me—burning off in the sun, until I was just a stupid girl with a punched face, sitting alone on Hay Tor.

Wake up, Ruby Morris.

*
A very useful term: here's how I learned it:

TEACHER: So, although Molly Stevens is your friend, you're saying you don't know why she's not in PE?

ME: Well…

TEACHER: Just try to answer the question, Ruby.

ME: I wouldn't exactly say we're
friends
friends…

TEACHER: So... (sighs) despite the fact that I see you in each other's company every single day, you're claiming you're not... (sighs
again; does little quote-mark wiggles with exasperated fingertips
) “friends” friends, you're saying you're just
loosely affiliated
?

ME: (
Pause
) That would be correct?

I came down off the moor, half-blinded and face hurting and neck hurting and everything hurting, and headed straight for home.

I wound down through country lanes, blinking faster than a strobe light, face scrunching with pain, and trying not to wipe my stinging eyes. Still I fumbled about, opening every field gate I passed. I'd been doing that for weeks: opening gates, opening up chicken coops (you don't want to think how any survived: Attack of the Cannibal Chickens). Sometimes there'd been creatures in the fields—horses, pigs, cows, sheep, llamas (those had been real; the herd of unicorns I thought I'd released probably wasn't)—sometimes not. Still, I opened them.

So I suppose it was probably me that let the sheep out, the one that had nearly killed me.

(See what I did there? I blame it on the sheep.)

First farm I came to, I tried to go in. I wasn't even thinking “
.” I was thinking “
.” They hurt so bad, and they wouldn't stop weeping, and I was scared that if I didn't find something to wash them with immediately, I wouldn't be able to see at all.

A scrawny sheepdog came out into the yard and barked at me.

I know the type; they won't attack you. They're just telling you: this is not your house.

“You good girl,” I said—or tried to. Since the picture thoughts had taken over, I didn't even speak to myself out loud anymore, and even though I had just shouted at my own shadow, my voice came out all broken up and ragged and weird.

“Good girl,” I tried again, and me and the dog, whose bark also seemed a little strained and peculiar (it could just have been the shock of seeing someone), both stared miserably at each other—except it was getting harder and harder by the second to stare at anything.

“Please…” I begged, but no way was the good girl—who might have been a boy—going to let me in that house.

I drove back home on a tractor. The good girl wasn't too sure about that either, but she gave me the benefit of the doubt. She even followed me, as if she thought it might be time to go to work or something…but that skinny girl, she couldn't keep up. She barked at me to stop and wait for her, but I couldn't. I didn't. I didn't even want to hear that bark.

Dogs, animals…people…they'll break your heart.

I zoomed home on that tractor, so high up on that driver's seat that over the banks and hedgerows, I could make out blurry fields. I didn't feel hemmed in and spooked like I normally do, not knowing what might be around the next bend. Even if we smacked into a wall, the wall would come off worse.

Blind Farmer Ruby, rollin' along. And whatever I might have rolled over, I didn't see it. I just felt the occasional bump. There is some terrible stuff lying about these days.

I made myself dump the tractor at the end of our road because I was worried if I went any farther, it'd get stuck between the lines of cars and I'd lose an exit route. I dumped it and I ran, my eyes so blind, my hands so shaky I could hardly get the key in the lock.

I stepped inside the house and called, “
Dad?
!
”

Yeah. That'd be the last time.

I slurped cola and washed my eyes with the tiny bit of water I had left. Couldn't even see anything much in the mirror, just a blurry version of my face that looked like it felt: puffy, red, and busted. I squinted at one particular mark on my cheek. Double circles. Matched my watches. (I wore four: two digital, two wind up—don't ask.) Perfect imprints of one wrist's worth on my cheek. But it was my eyes that looked weirdest.

“Love! You look like Joe Bugner,” Grandma Hollis once said to me, at the time when I'd first been told my mom and dad were splitting up and I'd cried so much my eyes puffed up.

I didn't know who Joe Bugner was; I still don't. All I ever knew was that he was a boxer.

Yeah, I looked like I'd been in a fight.

There were decisions to be made. I knew that, but all I wanted to do was go to bed. No idea what the time was, no idea what day it was. No idea what I was going to do. The only thing I did know was that I needed to do something. But first, there would be sleep.

It was a very long, bad, and snore-y sleep. It was snore-y because my nose was full of blood. I couldn't breathe properly, and eventually I worked out this was how come I kept waking myself up—waking myself up but not really waking up—thinking the ghost girl was in the room, speaking some growly shadow language at me. The last time I snored myself awake, I picked out dried blood from my nose (too much information?). It hurt a lot. I guzzled cola and went back to sleep and dreamed the ghost girl in the mist had become a death angel, coming toward me as church bells tolled.

But I wasn't dreaming.

When I woke up, the church bells were close and clanky, and went on and on in a random, awful, dong-clank-dong-dong way—not like the fancy tunes the proper bell ringers used to do. At first I thought I
hadn't
woken up. I'd had plenty of dreams like that—nightmares—when I'd thought I'd woken but I hadn't, and the nightmare would go on and I'd think it was really happening, and then if I did wake up for real, it was no good going back to sleep because the whole thing was lurking in my Planet Ruby head waiting to start over. What you had to do was wake yourself up good and proper and 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?