Storm

Chapter 1

Booze.

Marylou needed booze.

Any booze. A tall boy would do. A fifth of a fifth of vodka. A goddamned apple cider. Anything.

One drink and she'd be good as new, ready to face another day of re-boarding the windows. Of breaking doors into wood for warmth and light. Of ransacking the cafeteria next door. Of roaming around endlessly the once-crowded-now-deserted halls of Kennedy High in that perpetual seesaw she lived now, oscillating from bored to terrified to bored to terrified, depending on the weather.

Not that the weather was ever good. But there were several levels of bad. Several instances of the Storm, ranging from I-might-die' to I'm-probably-gonna-die' to 'I'm-definitely-gonna-die'. Tonight, the rain was somewhere between the two last options.

She closed her eyes and listened to the thunderclapping of the raindrops, loud like bugs smashing against the glass pane over her head. A distant thud informed her that a window board had given in, somewhere on the other side of the building.

"Welcome, Ghosts," she said. "Please, make yourselves at home."

It was a joke, the kind she had to tell herself every so often to keep the fear at bay. She didn't believed in the Ghosts. Had never seen one. Had never met anyone who had seen one, or anyone who knew anyone who had seen one. Any Ghost stories she knew were always a-friend-of-a-friend's. Third hand at best.

And Marylou wasn't exactly the kind of girl that could easily be convinced of the existence of invisible rain-monsters that roam the endless storm, waiting for a chance to suck your insides out through your every hole.

But you don't have to believe in something to be scared of it. Like her grandma Teresa used to say: Yo no creo en brujas, pero que las hay, las hay.

I don't believe in witches, but they exist nonetheless.

She felt a coarse touch against her skin and pulled back, startled for a second, her mind still on the image of thin, long-limbed shadows roaming around the rain. Then she relaxed.

"Hey, there, Evil Noodle," she whispered, relieved and feeling a bit silly. "You got any beer in you?"

The ball python coiled around her wrist and she brought it up to eye level. It raised its tiny head and seemed to look Marylou right in the eye. Tongue flashing in and out of its mouth every couple of seconds as if checking for food.

"Yeah, I'm hungry too," Marylou said. The snake bluff charged her. She didn't flinch. "What? At least you got your rats. Stop complaining."

The snake trailed down her chest and leg, dropping down to the floor and dancing away towards the dark of the corridor ahead.

"You'll be back," Marylou said, faking a soap opera voice. "You always come back, my love!"

And true that was, but not because of Marylou. She knew the snake's loyalty was not to herself, but to the fire. Snakes can't make bonfires out of doors and chairs, but they do feel cold. Or at least Evil Noodle did, because it kept coming back every night to ball up near the fire, eyes up to her now and then as if inquiring about the marshmallows.

Then, after warming up enough, it would crawl away back into the darkness, because snakes also can't be afraid of Ghosts or the end of the world.

Marylou watched the snake fade away in the misty darkness ahead. With her used-to-be-a-teacher's-desk-leg wooden stick, she poked the fire.