Something Terrible Came With The Rain

[4]

This book was made by u/rikndikndakn123 on Reddit. 

    I expected Alyssa's mood to change drastically after leaving Harry behind, but she was as focused on surviving now as she was prior to that. The streets were way emptier now than they were when I first ran outside my house. We walked in the middle of the road to avoid getting jumped from the corner, even though we knew it was equally risky exposing ourselves like that.

    Whenever we heard an inhuman sound in the distance, Alyssa made us stop until we were sure we weren't in any danger. Walking in the rain gave us some cover, which allowed us to move relatively faster, but we still had to be careful.

    "Wait!" – I whispered to Alyssa, pointing down the street – "See that?"

    There was a little girl a few hundred yards away from us, standing in the middle of the road, facing away from us. My initial instinct was to go and see if she was okay, but based on everything I'd seen by that point, I knew there was a high probability that this wasn't a little girl in distress at all.

    I was right, because as soon as Alyssa saw her, she cursed under her breath and pulled me aside behind a bush.

    "What's wrong?" – I asked.

    "Whatever you see there, that's not a little girl." – Alyssa peeked behind the bush where we hid – "Saw her, or someone resembling her, a bit earlier. She stood exactly like that and when a guy approached to help her during the chaos, she turned around and she had no fucking eyes or nose. Instead, her entire face was replaced by a big fucking vertical line for a mouth with sharp fucking teeth. The poor guy never stood a chance."

    "So what do we do?" – I asked.

    "Let's try a different street." – she suggested.

    We sneaked through a backyard, ignoring the dead bodies along the way and went through the adjacent street. Halfway through, I heard a pained groan coming from a dark alley to my left. I readied my hatchet, while Alyssa readied her gun. A creature crawled out into the light, barely able to pull its own weight with what was left of its human-looking arm. The thing looked like a swollen blob in its shape, barely recognizable where the head was, which I could only tell from the eye visible under the heavily swollen blisters. Some of the blisters looked volatile, pulsating under the street light, looking like they would pop on the slightest touch.

    I tried not to think about whether it used to be human, as it pathetically dragged itself towards us, groaning through the small slit of a mouth, the one visible eye wide open and darting from Alyssa to me intermittently.

    "Leave it." – Alyssa said – "It's harmless unless it manages to grab you. I've seen one earlier."

    She holstered her gun and urged me to follow her. I gave the amalgamation of the creature one last glance before following my partner.

    "What exactly have you seen, Alyssa?" – I asked while walking behind her.

    She was silent for a moment before responding:

    "I got caught in the downpour while heading home. It was like a warzone. Military killing everything... monsters of all shapes and sizes killing everything... and civilians just trying to escape. I didn't stick around to find out, since the heavy rain brought some really bad monsters."

    "Wait, look!" – I pointed to a graffiti on a billboard.

    It said '36 WILL SAVE US'.

    "You mentioned it before, right?" – Alyssa asked – "What is it?"