Storm (25 page)

They have their pony butts turned to us. They do not want to get involved.

“Of course I didn't!” says Dar.

I sigh with relief and point at the massive crumpled heap of the bouncy castle.

“Ruby,” Darius says. “I thought you were dead.”

I cannot look at him. “How did you even get here?!”

“I drove. Oh, Ruby, I thought you were dead…”

I cannot have one more word of this conversation here, with everyone watching. I feel very, very confused. I don't know what this all means. I must stay on mission. I do an emergency think.

“Wait here,” I tell the Spratt.

I stride back to the house; I don't have to go inside because as soon as my snooping dad sees me coming, he's out of those doors…

“What is it?!” he says. “Are you OK?!” Whoa! Does he really think…that the Spratt has somehow molested me when—hello?!—we've just been standing right there, with everyone watching?

“Yeah, we're just going to go into town and stuff,” I tell him.

My dad's face clouds quicker than the sky is about to.

“I need things, Dad.”

“What kind of things?” he blurts.

“Steven…” Tilly says. I could—maybe—get to like her.

“Clothes and things.”

“We've got clothes. Tilly's got clothes,” my dad gibbers.

“Steven…”

“And things. Tilly's got
things
. Haven't you?”

Uh. Could he get any more embarrassing?! Is my dad really, seriously, meaning
tampons and sanitary napkins
? Oh…my…
.

“She probably needs
condoms
for her
boyfriend
,” Dan chips in, super-helpfully.

My dad actually cuffs him around the head. Not hard—my dad's not like that—but not playfully either. But Dan is grinning his head off. The Princess gasps out a little wheezy laugh; Tilly bites her lip, trying hard not to do the same. Only me and my dad are not finding any of this in the least bit funny. I'll never be able to say for sure, but I suspect we're on about the same level, horror-wise, though for different reasons. I have to take control of this situation now. This is not a negotiation. I have made the classic mistake of telling a parent what I intend to do.

“We are going into town,” I say. Oh: my dad's face. I make a concession, it being the apocalypse. I give him precise information. “For an hour,” I tell him.

Urk: see my father's face calculating what could happen in an hour. Have never had to deal with this before.

“Dad, I've driven, like, all over the whole country. I
know
how to take care of myself. I've been on my own for months and…”

I have to stop myself. Not just because he looks horrified, like he's only just realizing all this and his imagination is adding a ton of stuff that didn't happen to the TEN TONS of stuff that did, but because I feel I could quite easily have another total, screaming meltdown (probably ending in me yelling, “FATHER! I AM BOTH THE SECRET AND THE KEEPER OF THE SECRET!”). Plus, this line of persuasion is not working.

“Oh, Daddy, please…” I try.

Cumulus-congestus look on his face. A downpour of no is about to happen. I must evaporate it. Heat must be applied. I have a Ruby the Genius moment.

“He's the
school nerd
,” I tell my dad. “I am so not even about to…”

Whoa! I have kind of just mentioned sex, without actually saying “sex.” This is the wrong direction to go in.

“Dad, he's a
nerd
,” I say—and roll my eyes. (HE'S JUST A NERD WHOM I ONCE KISSED PASSIONATELY IN A CLOSET AND WHOM I… My feelings are so confused, I couldn't speak the next part even if I tried.)

“Steven…they'll be fine,” Tilly says.

Behind her back, behind everyone's backs, the brother-brat is doing a horrific smooch pantomime. Next opportunity I get (coming up real soon), I am going to be so horrible to him.

My dad looks at Darius, standing, shuffling awkwardly, on the lawn. The sight seems to reassure him.

“OK,” my dad caves. “But
I think he likes you
,” he whispers—doing this comedy eye-bulge/watch-out thing.

Dan snorts with laughter.

“He's a
nerd
,” I say to my dad, and I comedy eye-bulge back. Right: discussion over—swift exit. “Thanks, Pop.”

I've never called my dad “Pop.” My dad smiles at me—and I remember how much I love him for being like this. It's a new one, this situation, but he has always been prepared to be on my side…even when he didn't really get where that was. At this moment, he certainly doesn't, but I am his Ruby, his girl. And I always will be.

I get the brother-brat back straightaway. I give him the tiniest mean look as we're leaving and watch him panic.

“Ruby…” says Darius, the second we get into the car.

I can't look at him. “Wait,” I tell him. “Please. Let's just get away from here first.”

Dan and the Princess come running after the car, but by the time he gets to his zoo in a cottage, me and Darius are already confiscating his most lethal pets—in silence. The brother-brat is also silent. He can't say a thing about it.

“It's for the best,” I tell Dan.

He does this pouty thing.

“They're too dangerous.”

Super-pout.

“They'd die in the winter.”

The pout twitches; he knows it's true. Yeah—pout all you like. Game over.

“And anyway, if Dad found out, he'd probably make us eat them. Snake stew, Dan.”

So we load them up. Dan even helps, mainly so he can whisper his little good-byes to them. He's given them all names.

“Now you go back to the house, and you stay in the house,” I tell him.

I've seen the sky; the sky looks like the beginnings of questionable. Some stratocumulus starting to hang out on the horizon.

“You're not the boss of me,” Dan mutters.

He kisses the bunny he's clutching; the Princess has hold of “her” guinea pig, the one hilariously named Pretty.

“Go back to the house, Dan.”

He scowls at me. Because I can't kiss him anymore, I kiss the bunny in his arms.

“Please?” I whisper.

And my brother-brat, he amazes me.

“I am happy you're home, Ru,” he whispers back.

“I love you so much,” I whisper. My brother blinks; his nose twitches like the bunny's. I am so glad I told him that.

Me and the Spratt drive away. There is this horrendous few minutes more of silence as we bump out onto the main road. I feel like the whole world really is disappearing.

I can't drive. I stop the car. We kiss like we are falling off the edge of the world.

We are leaning against each other, forehead against forehead, in a car that has not moved.

I do not want us to talk. I just want us to stay here, fallen off the edge of the world.

“I thought I'd never see you again,” I tell him.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Why did you come here? How did you find me?”

“I made you a promise.”

I remember. A long time ago, when I had thought I was about to die, I asked Darius to do this. To find my dad and tell him I was dead.

“But how…how did you find me?”

Even before I've got the question out, I know the answer. I
see
the answer. I know it before Darius tells me that he tried my dad's house, in London, then he went straight back to Dartbridge, to the school. He looked at my records; he found my house. I see the kitchen door. I see, written on it in Saskia's neat handwriting, the list of every place I was going to look for my dad.

The Lancaster people said the army had already come calling…

…but that was before I ran away.

I am the secret, and the keeper of the
secret
.

“Ruby…” Darius whispers. I trace my finger across his lips, and he kisses it…but I keep it there, keeping him quiet.

“I'll tell you. I will tell you. Just wait.”

I leave him in the car, saying I just want to quickly say thank you to the Lancaster people. There are only a few of them at home, guarding the kids like proper responsible adults should do. I stand in front of them and I tell them… Well, I just kind of ramble on. It goes something like this:

“So…the thing is…if anyone else shows up asking for me…please just tell them you don't know where I am. Or my dad. Yeah—um—please just don't tell anyone about us.”

There're mumbles, mutters, concern. There're mumbles, mutters, concern in my own head too. This plan is a terrible plan, the main flaw being that it's not going to work. It's just like the Internet is back. It's just like posting a thing and hoping people won't have opinions about it, when you so know that if you post something, EVERYONE is going to have an opinion about it, whether or not they actually, like, saw what you originally said. Instead of just going Thumbs-Up, Like, Favorite, and moving on, they're going to say stuff about it. Some of them may even ask questions.

“Why?” would be the main question here. No one asks it. I think that Bridget lady might have done, so really it's probably just as well that she's not there.

I see how it is: although it is the apocalypse, I'm still just a teenager to them. I am, basically, a kid with pubic hair and more problems.

We are taking Dan's creatures to the Butterfly House. It is high on a hill outside town. We went there so many times with Grandma. I remember it as a warm, tropical paradise, filled with gorgeous butterflies.

It is like an autumn out of a nightmare fairy tale. It is bone dry and weepingly sad. We scrunch in over a carpet of dead leaves and butterfly bodies, their wings still so shockingly pretty it hurts to tread on them.

From dead plants draped with the webs of desperate spiders, butterfly cocoons still hang, so easy to spot—bright green, bright blue, bright yellow. The weird worst thing is that the door was not locked; it is the weird worst thing because it makes me have some random thought that if the butterflies could have somehow realized this, maybe they could have all piled down onto the door handle and gotten out. That maybe the weight of all of them would have been enough to set them free.

It is a stupid thought.

Darius looks so worried. I know I'm going to have to tell him now. I know I'm going to have to tell him.

I find that I cannot stand. I sit down on the leaves and the wings, and put my head in my hands and say it:

“I am a freak.”

I hear Darius scrunch down beside me. He puts his arm around my shoulder. I can almost hear his brain trying to calculate an appropriate response. As usual, it's a disaster.

“I don't think you're
that
much of a freak,” he says.

“Muh-hoo, muh-hoo, muh-hoo,” I go. It is a feeble crying that is as dry and thin and ugly as this greenhouse freakish autumn. It is not a mighty troll crying. It is the crying of a freak.

“Oh, Ru, sorry… You know what I mean. You're not really a freak.”

“You don't know,” I muh-hoo, “you don't know.”

“Or, I mean, you know, maybe I am too,” the Spratt blunders on. “Probably in many ways a lot of people are.”

I look up at him. “Darius. I AM a freak.”

He smiles this sweet little worried smile. “I still love you,” he says. The sweet little worried smile falls from his face, replaced by a look of devastating seriousness. “I love you,” he says.

I stare at him. This is what you're supposed to wait your whole life to hear, isn't it? Someone who really does genuinely, truly, completely, and utterly love you telling you that they love you. Of course, any which way you'd ever dare to imagine such a moment, it wouldn't IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM BE LIKE THIS, WOULD IT? YOU WOULDN'T BE HEARING IT SITTING IN A DEAD PARADISE FILLED WITH DESPERATE SPIDERS, WOULD YOU?

AND IT CERTAINLY, IT CERTAINLY, IT CERTAINLY WOULDN'T BE BEING SAID TO YOU BECAUSE THE PERSON SAYING IT HAS JUST COMPLETELY MIS-UNDERSTOOD SOMETHING YOU ARE SAYING.

WOULD IT?

I breathe. I wonder what it would be like to just whisper back, “I love you too,” and then take it from there. (Never mentioning the whole
FREAK
thing again.) I wonder what it would be like to say that to Darius Spratt, period. And you know what? Part of me feels more scared of that than anything else.

“I am both the secret and the keeper of the secret,” I tell him.

The little worried smile creeps back onto his face…

By the time I've finished explaining, there's no smile and nothing little left. We are way beyond worry. We are into BIG FROWN territory. The Spratt is deeply, deeply troubled.

“Ruby…” says Darius.

Then, just like Xar, he asks many questions I can't really answer, and one I can:

“So do you think the army is after you?”

“No.”

“Hn.”

We have not fallen off the edge of the world. It has gotten colder. It has gotten darker. Time is not going to wait for us, not now.

“We'd better go,” I tell him.

“Ru—wait,” he says.

He grabs my arm. I glare at him. He's going to say something I don't want to hear. I know it in my cold bones. Worse than that, I know it in my head. I know it exactly.

“We need to tell people about this,” says Darius.

“No, we don't.”

I shake loose and stomp out to the car, yank open the trunk, and grab up a tank of deadly things. The Spratt is hot on my heels; he is not going to let this go.

“I wish you'd just let me explain,” he says, taking the tank off me.

“You don't
need
to explain,” I tell him, grabbing another tank; the lid falls off—which would be pretty alarming, but whatever Dan has got in there is hiding under a bunch of bark and leaves. “I get it. But there are other people who know about this stuff, Darius—they're probably sorting it all out right now.”

The thing in the tank stirs. Best not hang around; I stomp back into the greenhouse.

“Yeah—what if they're not, Ruby?”

“Well, they will be. It's all going to be OK.
Everything's going to be
OK
.”

I dump the tank far from the door; Darius—following me—does the same.

“You don't know that,” he says. “You saw it for yourself how they're trying to shut people up. What if there's been some kind of coup or something?”

“
! You sound just like Ronnie!”

“The conspiracy kid?”

“Yeah, Ronnie. My friend Ronnie.”

Who kept a whole school supplied with terrifying information that people only ever took seriously for kicks. Who knew the rain was coming. Who is now dead. But he died knowing he was, finally, right about something.

All I want to do is live.

“I wish I'd never told you.” I kick the tank over.

“But you did,” he says, kicking his tank over.

“Yeah, well, I wish I'd never.”

And I stomp back to the car for more. It was horrific, what happened after I blurted it to Xar, but somehow this is even more awful. This is different; this is Darius.
Hn
. How did this ever happen? I care about what Darius Spratt thinks.

“But, Ru,” he says, as I load up his outstretched arms with the last batch of deadly creatures.

“What if…?”

“What if what?!” I say, stomping off…but I am not so lost in where I am now, feelings-wise, that I do not totally register that the tank I am carrying has the scorpion in it.

“What if…?” the Spratt says, kicking over his tank—just lizards. They look harmless enough. They scuttle out, rustling across dry leaves.

I watch them go, disappearing into the gathering dark. I see the scorpion scuttle after them. I back off; a tarantula starts to climb a dead plant.

“What if what?” I snarl.

“I mean…this isn't just about you, is it, Ru?”

“
Don't you think I know that?
!
” I screech. “Don't you think I know?! I'm scared, Darius. I'm scared and tired, and I've had enough.”

We stand there for a second, still as still can be, staring at each other, our eyes glinting in the last of the dying light like we were stuffed things in the museum. Creatures rustle around us, crackling through the dead stuff. That place, that greenhouse, it is suddenly very scary.

“We can't let these things go, can we?” I say out loud.

It is what we are both thinking, I know. On this point, I know we are in agreement. It is as clear as the moment, months ago, when we realized we couldn't take Whitby the puddle drinker with us—only not nearly so heartbreaking. These creatures are NOT cuddly.

“Look, Ru,” Darius says.

I remember that he's not supposed to call me that, but I am too weakened by the horror of everything to point that out right now. The Spratt bends to examine a cocoon. I peer at it. Inside it, I see life. I see a new butterfly, wriggling.

The Spratt yanks up part of a metal drainage grid; I don't get what he's doing until it's done. He flings, high, at the glass and a pane shatters.

The butterflies have a way out now. I mean… I'm not a total idiot, OK? I do realize if any of them do get out of here, they'll probably snuff it anyway, but I did see a weird thing once about butterfly migration (thank you, Simon) and if they figure out where they are, they can go thousands of miles to the nearest nice place. Maybe. A chance is a chance, isn't it?

That's a pretty brilliant thing for a nerd to do (especially the one I am arguing with) to give them a chance, and I turn round to tell him that and—

WOOOOOOAAAAAAARRRGGGH!

TRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Just a few feet away from us—like, REALLY, don't ask me to get specific about DISTANCES right now!—a RATTLESNAKE lies coiled, head up, tail up—rattling—ready to strike. Either the snake has cottoned onto our plans, or I guess there weren't enough hamster casualties to go around and the snake wants a snack. I grab hold of the Spratt. We stand there, face-to-face, and for a minute fraction of a microsecond, he doesn't get it and probably thinks I'm going to kiss him again or something before his eyes swivel and he gets it and I feel him—

“Noh!” I breathe, squeezing his arms hard to hold him still. “Don't move,” I tell him, as quiet as quiet can be—and it even comes out like “Don't 'oove” because I am too terrified even to let my mouth move enough to make the words.

TRRRRRRR!

Dar wants to run; I feel it. Oh, man! I just want to run too! But if you do that with a rattler, it'll just strike. The SAS were very clear about that.

“Noh.” I can't even shake my head. All I can do is attempt a mind-control stare, trying to force that no deep into the Spratt's mind.

In his eyes, I see the question, “Are you sure?” Which is just as well because when he tries to say it, I can't really understand it, and also it comes out at the sort of low, buzzing pitch that I suspect would annoy any snake.

I death-ray stare to the max. “Shu-uh,” I breathe at him.

It is not working. He's a runner; I can feel it. He bolts, snake will strike, and—NEW PICTURE: me and the Spratt lying dead among leaves and butterfly wings with deadly stuff crawling all over us.

“Is ore scare ov us an ooee are ov it.”

TRRRRRRRRR!

The Spratt stares into my eyes; his bulge with fear—same as mine. The snake is clearly failing to understand the situation—but SO IS THE SPRATT. I feel him strain in my grasp.

TRRRRRRRRR!