Plague

right?”
    Howard took a step back in the face of the slender boy’s anger.
    “Didn’t mean to . . . ,” he said, and followed at a safe distance as Sanjit dragged the body off the curb and onto the blacktop.
    Sanjit stopped halfway across and stared at the sky.
    “What’s that? Is that a cloud?”
    “Oh, that? Yeah, it’s raining. More weirdness,” Howard said.
    “What? It’s raining? Like, water?”
    “Yeah, water. It was a shock to me, too,” Howard said. “This being the FAYZ you’d expect it to be raining fire or dog turds or something.”
    “Choooooo!” Sanjit yelled at the top of his lungs. “Chooooo!”
    A few seconds later, his chubby African brother came running down the stairs, looking alarmed.
    “Water!” Sanjit said.
    “Where?” Virtue demanded.
    Sanjit pointed with his chin. “Get a bucket. Get every bucket you can find!”
    Virtue gaped, then ran.
    Sanjit resumed dragging the corpse.
    “Listen, dude,” Howard said. “I need Lana. You know who I mean? The Healer.”
    “You have a boo-boo?” Sanjit snarked. “She’s kind of busy trying to save a couple of creeps Edilio shot.”
    “Where?”
    “Astrid’s house. I don’t know where it is. How about you either help me or get lost?”
    “I’ll choose B.”
    Astrid’s house. Okay. That would be . . . pretty much right directly under the cloud.
    Well, well, Howard thought as the truth dawned on him.
    “Little Pete,” he said. “So that’s out there, then. Well, buckle up, Howard, buckle up.”
    Quinn and his crew were pulling toward shore, far later than usual. They’d had a tough day of it. After a miserable night in camp, they’d had trouble getting one of the boats floating again. They had unknowingly run it ashore and scraped a hidden rock. A gash had been gouged in the bottom, which meant hours of finding a way to patch it.
    Fortunately it was one of the wooden hulls, not one of the metal or fiberglass ones; those would have been impossible to patch without going back to town for equipment.
    Still, they’d had to use just their Swiss Army knives to whittle some driftwood into fairly flat, fairly smooth planks. Then they’d found they had no screws, so they had to remove bolts from other boats, drill through the repair patch and the hull, and use the bolts to attach the patch. They had scraped and then melted some paint to use as a sealant.
    When they were all done the boat was surprisingly sea-worthy. They’d all felt pretty well pleased with their work, but a day of fishing was still to be done.
    Harder later in the day. As the sun heated the top layer of seawater, some of their most reliable catch went deeper or stopped feeding.
    So there were none of the jokes or laughs or bits of song that often accompanied their homeward row.
    “They still haven’t picked up yesterday’s catch!” Quinn yelled when they drew close enough to see.
    And sure enough, most of the fish they’d worked so hard to land the day before were still on the dock, rotting in the heat.
    This revelation set off a round of angry curses from the crews, followed by a more disquieting worry. It was hard to imagine how Albert could have let this happen.
    “Something’s deeply wrong,” Quinn said. “I mean even more wrong than we knew.”
    They were still two hundred yards out when Quinn saw a blur that froze and became Brianna. She was at the end of the dock.
    There was something in her hand.
    “You guys hang back,” Quinn yelled to the other boats. “We’ll go in and see what’s up.”
    Quinn’s boat touched the dock and he tossed a loop over one of the cleats.
    “About time,” Brianna said.
    “Hey, sorry, we were kind of busy,” Quinn snapped. “And I didn’t exactly realize I was on a schedule.”
    “I don’t like what I have to do here,” Brianna said. She handed Quinn the note.
    He read it. Read it again.
    “Is this some kind of joke?” he demanded.
    “Albert’s dead,” Brianna said. “Murdered.”
    “What?”
    “He’s dead. Sam and Dekka are off in the wilderness somewhere. Edilio’s got the flu, he might die, a lot of kids have. A lot. And there are these, these monsters, these kind of bugs . . . no one knows what to call them . . . heading toward town.” Her face contorted in a mix of rage and sorrow and fear. She blurted, “And I can’t stop them!”
    Quinn stared at her. Then back at the note.
    He felt his contented little universe tilt and go sliding away.
    There were just two words on the paper: