~Rain~

Chapter Twenty One

Authors Note: I'm so sorry for the delay. It's here at last. Very short, but here. Expect more soon. Pleave leave a comment! -Lilly

Chapter Twenty One

Tyron stared at the place in his heart where Alice had once been. Every sarcastic word she spoke, every harsh or bitter laugh she cried. Never again would they chime in his ears, and all he had left to cling to of her were the memories. He hadn’t known her for all that long, but they had been through so much he couldn’t look at her empty body for a moment longer.

‘We have to leave.’ His voice was startlingly strong shaking Miles from his own trance. The boy wiped a tear from his eye, jerked into consciousness and dragged his thoughts away from his sister. Willa had died, too. Miles had failed both of them.

‘Why?’ he asked, although he knew it, too.

‘We have to go after Taya. She can’t get away with murder. We have to follow her!’ Tyron’s voice was growing desperate now, and he dragged the back on his hand across his face in frustration.

Miles shook his head, his mind already removing itself from the pain of the situation and calculating the best move they could make. It was easier that way, not to look at what they were doing as a terrible thing, or revenge, or an act because of the pain and suffering they felt. That wasn’t something Miles could do. No, it was better for him to see it as numbers, as something practical he could plan for and think about without it burning a hole in his heart. Reason.

‘Alright,’ Miles wiped his hands on his jeans, and they were left streaked with crimson. ‘We’ll go after her. There must be some kind of tunnel away from here, or she wouldn’t have done this. She would have been to afraid to do this, or she would have done it before. Something has changed, so that she is no longer afraid of us. And that thing could only be her finding a way out of here. So we’ll follow, yes, but we need to prepare.’

Miles took a deep breath, still thinking faster than he had in a long time. The only thing he could rely on now is logic and numbers, because everything else had changed. Even the steady weather that usually frequented these parts had been replaced by a never-ending stream of water from an open sky.

‘We need to prepare, though. Find the exit, and then pack ourselves guns, knives, food, water. Coats for the cold, rainwear. Bandages, perhaps. Matches. Everything we might need. Because the closest land above water is the hills, the ones with Alice’s old school on-‘ Miles choked on her name, composed himself, and then trailed off anyway. He blinked at Tyron to make sure he was getting his point across, and then took one last glance at the girl he had thought of as his best friend for some time. He had said enough.

He rose from where he had fallen, or collapsed, or some mixture of the two, and silently left the room. Tyron stayed for a moment more.

When he has whispered all those words he had never said, he joined Miles outside the door of the sunlit room and began to search in his pocket for the map. Passing it vacantly for the boy to search it, Tyron began to pick at the drying blood on his fingernails. Second passed, minutes, and neither of the two boys uttered a word.

Then, all at once, Miles thrust the map back to the other boy, grinned, frowned again and bit his lip, before jabbing at a marking near the stairway.

‘I found it, I think. But it looks to me like it’s in the area of the building that’s almost underwater.’ He glanced out of the window, avoiding Alice’s body, and then looked back at Tyron. ‘We’ll need to get down there and seal it off in ten minutes if it keeps that up.’

And so, without much happening at all inside their overwhelmed brains, they searched, making a pile of torches and cans and water bottles. They didn’t think as they did so, didn’t notice the way the rain slowed, didn’t wonder whether Cael had been a part of it. They didn’t consider why Taya had done it, never knew what had happened in the girls past to make them hate each other so. They just moved wordlessly and quickly, as though the life had gone from them, too.

And then they were ready.

Tyron slipped into the great room once more and unfastened the locket from around Alice’s neck. Then he left.

…

The tunnel was not a tunnel, as Miles had imagined. It was a darkness. A darkness that neither his eyes nor his torch could penetrate. Yet it was the only way out, and it was the only way after the girl that had killed Alice. And the boys were going to follow no matter how dark it got. So Miles took the first step through the door and into the darkness, not bothering to fumble for a light switch and not bothering to turn on his torch. He felt for the walls, their cold and clammy dampness making him smile a little, and then he turned to Tyron and beckoned for him to follow.  The torch shook in his hand, yet he couldn’t bring himself to waste the precious batteries he hand brought. In his other hand was a shotgun, and strapped to his belt four rounds of bullets. This house seemed to have everything you could want.

The rain had changed Tyron. The Neila had changed him. Death had changed him.

Before, he was a boy. And soon he would be a murderer.

He walked on, down the slowly slating tunnel, without looking back; he trusted Miles to seal the door behind them.  It was going to be a long walk.

And so they walked in the darkness forever.