My bolting awake might not have woken Calico J, but my half-falling down the stairs does. He's halfway off the couch by the time I skid into the living room, and he's got a hand on his bat like he's ready to run or fight or grab me depending on what the emergency is.

"Meg? What happened?"

"The rain's talking to me." It comes out perfectly coherent, though I'm sure my mind isn't all here right now. "It told me to run. We need to leave."

It sounds ludicrous out loud. My face heats up as fast the first time I tried to kiss Ditzy. She was kind enough to pretend it never happened. Calico J is a lot more blunt.

"Wait," he says. "Sorry, repeat that?"

"The rain's talking to me," I repeat, stupidly. I dig my fingernails into my upper arms, then snatch my lucky shark keychain from my pocket and hug it to my chest like that will return my sanity. "It told me to..."

I break off as I realize I'm about to say the exact same thing with no extra explanation, but I don't know what explanation to give. As if that wasn't bad enough, the next moment, I hear someone else coming down the stairs. It's both Patrick and Ditzy, because that's just what I need right now. Now they're all going to hear me make a fool of myself.

I leap in my skin as hands land on my shoulders. Calico J steers me to the couch and sits me on it.

"Focus," he says. "Tell me what happened. Ignore them."

That's easy for him to say... except now Ditzy's gone. If her track record holds, she's probably down in the basement, seeing firsthand if the Redding has found us. Because obviously walking into the most dangerous part of the house is the best way to look for an invasion of red sludge that looks like water and moves like it has a mind of its own. Patrick tucks himself into a shadowed corner. He looks like he plans to listen quietly. I can ignore that.

"Meg," says Calico J. It's not a warning. He sounds concerned.

"The rain. Morse code. It told me to run. I heard it..."

But did I? I woke up after thinking I heard it the first time, and was too sleep-addled to hear clearly the second. I have no aural memory. It was probably just coincidence.

"I heard it," I finish pathetically. I shrink down on the couch. My gut still screams that we need to leave, but I'm second-guessing myself too hard to think straight. Just tracking what Calico J says takes enough mental energy to make the rain-sounds outside warp harder. That's evidence of my unreliability. I refuse to drag us from our longest-running safe house without a second opinion, but if nobody else was awake...

"Were you the only one who heard it?" says Calico J.

"I think so?" I don't actually know. Patrick sometimes lies awake in bed, dead-still enough to fool us into thinking he's sleeping when he's actually not. Like a mouse that can't sleep when a cat's around, only none of us is a cat. Or maybe the whole world is a cat. Maybe he can hear the Redding, too. Or maybe he just doesn't trust us yet. That's what Calico J said when Patrick asked for a room alone at our last safe house, before the Sleepers started moaning. I woke up the next morning to find him curled up on the floor beside my bed. He didn't even bring a mattress.

"Can you check with Ditzy?" says Calico J, and I look up. He isn't talking to me. Patrick nods and slips away into the shadows. So he wasn't awake, then; my heart sinks at the lack of corroboration. Ditzy sleeps like a granite boulder. It was probably just me who heard—or imagined—the rain.

Calico J digs both heels of his hands into his forehead with a sigh. "And just when we thought things couldn't get any crazier." I don't answer, so he continues, "Can you describe it in more detail? When you heard it, how many times, if applicable. Where, too, I guess? Anything you remember."

This is why I shouldn't be our leader. Still, I did wake him up, so I relay the whole experience in as much detail as I remember. Which isn't much.

"So you heard it twice," says Calico J when I finish.

"Or imagined it."

"Meg, I know I say the opposite to the others all the time because Ditzy is slightly insane and Patrick has anxiety, but seriously. I trust your perception way more than theirs. If you heard it twice, you heard something, and it wouldn't be the weirdest thing that's happened to us in the last six weeks."

I can't argue with that part, at least.

Calico J glances back across the room. Patrick has reappeared in his corner, and I startle as I spot Ditzy leaning in the doorway to the kitchen. I didn't hear either of them arrive. Calico J raises an eyebrow at Patrick, who shakes his head.

"Thoughts, then?"

Patrick's fingers dig into his upper arms, hard enough to make me worry he'll bruise himself. "Why would it even want to talk to us? And why Morse code?"

"Ships." Ditzy's head snaps around; she was watching out the kitchen windows. The neighborhood we're in is dark, but electricity has made a guest appearance somewhere in the town tonight. There's enough light pollution reflecting off the clouds to make Ditzy's smile look like that of a serial killer, a mad scientist, or both. "Isn't it the first language an entity made of water would learn if it's used between ships?" she says, and I opt for mad scientist. For now. "The ocean is full of them."

"We don't know if it's connected to the ocean," says Patrick.

"We're on the coast and it's in the water. Ocean."

"We don't know for sure."

"Its also in the rain," Calico J reminds them. "And all fresh water that we've found. The ocean is the only place we haven't proven it. Well, seen it."

"Because we haven't checked," says Ditzy. "Maybe it moved inland. Found out humans like fresh water better."

"That assumes this thing is sentient. Which... you know what? I wouldn't even be surprised."

Ditzy's far too cheerful about all this. "Takes a lot to surprise us now."

"Perks of the apocalypse that they don't teach you in school."

It's sarcasm. Nothing any of us learned in high school even remotely prepared us for this, and my first week of an Outdoor Recreation, Parks & Tourism degree got as far as the syllabi before the world shut down. It's funny how real life puts education in perspective. I might have learned something useful if we'd gotten to the end of the first month, but given that I already know a crampon from a carabiner and some of my classmates did not, maybe I'm kidding myself on that, too.

Calico J rubs his face again. "Okay, let's say just for theory's sake that this... thing, whatever it is, is sentient. It shows up, knocks out most people, finds a household of survivors, and tells them to run. What motivation would it have for that?"

He glances at me first before following with the other two. I want to tell him he's the one going to school for graphic design and creative writing. He knows how books and comics and character arcs and motivations and all that other fancy stuff he talks about works. But I'm also drawing a complete blank and don't want to point that out, so I say nothing.

Ditzy, luckily, is more than capable of filling a silence. "Maybe it likes us," she says with a cute shrug. "Or at least likes Meg. Oo! Meg! You were a competitive swimmer, weren't you? And you do all kinds of backcountry stuff. Maybe you like the water, so it likes you."

I clench my lucky shark keychain tighter. I do like the water, even if it hasn't always liked me back. But there's something more than a little sickening in the possibility of being liked by something that's put ninety-nine percent of humanity to sleep within the last six weeks.

Patrick speaks up again. "If it likes Meg, though, wouldn't it leave us alone?"

"Maybe that's why it's telling her to run," says Ditzy. "If it likes Meg, it doesn't care about the rest of us."

Patrick cringes.

"That's one hypothesis," says Calico J, pulling the conversation—thankfully—away from that topic again. "Any others?"

"What do you think?" says Ditzy, tilting her head again.

"What about you, Meg?" says Calico J first, glancing at me. I shake my head. He turns back to Ditzy. "If I'm being honest? No idea. If it wants any of us alive, it's doing a terrible job of that. If it wants any of us dead, it's doing... a slightly better job, if we count Patrick or the accidental Sleeper attacks, but not really overall. It hasn't even come after us in over a week and a half."

"Oh!" says Ditzy. "Is now a bad time to mention that there's Redding in the basement?"

I leap to my feet. Calico J swears and snatches his backpack from beside the couch. "Now you decide to tell us?"

"You were having a different conversation! And it was interesting. Besides, it only found a little crack in the floor, so it isn't moving very fast. Just a little puddle."

"Is now a bad time to mention we have no idea what this stuff is ultimately capable of, and that this is now the fifth house it's chased us out of? Jesus Christ, Ditzy, it was talking to Meg a moment—"

We all freeze in realization.

"Did it just warn you?" says Calico J. "Holy shit."

"So are we leaving or not?" says Patrick. Fear has already pitched his voice up, and he stands poised at the bottom of the stairs like he's ready to run up them the moment he gets an affirmation.

"We're leaving," I say.

That shatters our collective paralysis. We scatter like ants, grabbing strewn belongings from the corners of a house we've gotten comfortable with in only eleven days. I pack faster than anyone except Patrick, who has almost no belongings to speak of. Slinging my bag down by the door, I run to the kitchen with our food pack and begin throwing open cupboards. We forage from grocery stores to stock up: canned beans, lentils, vegetables, soups. There's even a can of coconut milk that's thus far escaped Calico J's reign in the kitchen. He says his mom's Thai and his dad's Dominican, and both taught him how to cook. Ditzy's got some Romanian in her, and the cook-offs get intense when we've got ingredients. Literally none of us are complaining.

Well, except for Patrick, who can't take spice and seems embarrassed about it. He whispered once that his mom would see fit to toughen him up if she knew, and mentioned Bicol in passing. Calico J just laughed and stopped trying to burn all our mouths off after that.

I shovel cans into the bag with little care for packing; there's not enough of them to fill it even halfway. Then I pack away our portable gas stove, stash its fuel cans, and grab any other non-perishable food items I can find in the kitchen while more people drop their stuff at the front door and disperse for a final search. Not that we'll be going far. This town is only an hour's walk across, home to five thousand people if you don't count the university students that flood it every year. We just don't like to come back to houses once we've abandoned them; I've always been wary of it, and nobody else has contested that feeling. I don't know why, but I'm secretly glad. 

Like this chapter if you think Meg heard the Red Rain perfectly fine  👀

Comment what food you'd be most sad to give up in the apocalypse