Read The Rain for Free Online Page B

friends – the worse it got . . . like how it
is when you are little and they teach you to pray and to ask God to bless everyone and you get really worried about remembering everyone, thinking if you don’t something bad will happen to
them and it’ll be your fault.
    ‘Shhh! It’s OK, Ruby . . . shhh,’ she said, when I started up again about Nana and Gramps. ‘Now, do you need anything else?’ she asked.
    ‘Sing to me,’ I said.
    I wanted the lullaby song she did every night when I was little.
    She sighed – so loud I could hear it through the door.
    ‘Mum, please . . .’ I tried.
    ‘Ru-by, it’s bedtime,’ she said.
    Please don’t leave me.
That’s what I thought. ‘OK,’ I said.
    ‘Night-night, darling.’
    That’s what my mum said.
    I made a bed-nest like Dan does, switched out the light and crawled into it. Under normal –
normal?!
– circumstances, I would have texted Lee then. No; I
would have blanked the bill situation and called her. I could picture her, with the others, sitting round the big old table in Zak’s kitchen. I wondered how Caspar was, whether Sarah had got
them both to hospital.
    He’d be OK.
Fatal
. He’d be OK.
Fatal
. He’d be OK.
    I couldn’t stand it any more, so I got up and put the computer on.
    The internet was down, just like Zak had said . . . but maybe Simon had disconnected me. That was possible. That was very possible.
    Nothing to do but go back to bed.
    Normally, at night, it was dead quiet. Not like at my dad’s, where there was noise 24/7. Tonight, Dartbridge sounded like London. You could hear sirens, alarms, car horns. Also, sometimes,
shouting. Sometimes shouting, sometimes screams.
    . . . And another sound: so quiet, so soft. The rain.
It’s only a shower
.
    I didn’t realise I’d fallen asleep until I woke up because someone was banging at the front door. I was up and trying to get out of the room until I realised I
couldn’t. Simon must have been asleep too, because it took him a while to get there. The hall light came on, but he didn’t open the front door.
    ‘Hello?!’ he called.
    ‘Help me! Help me! Help me!’
    I pulled back the curtain a little. Our neighbour, Mrs Fitch, was standing in the rain. In her nightie, not even a dressing gown on top.
    I heard my mum thump down the stairs. I let the curtain drop.
    ‘Simon?’ whispered my mum.
    ‘
Simon? Rebecca?!
’ cried Mrs Fitch. ‘Help!’
    I heard Simon, plain as day – which it nearly was; the light had gone grey, the way it does when dawn is coming through the rain. ‘We can’t,’ he said, quietly, to my
mum.
    ‘Please!’ cried Mrs Fitch, almost as though she’d heard him.
    ‘We can’t help,’ shouted Simon. ‘Go to the hospital.’
    ‘It’s my husband! I can’t move him!’
    ‘We can’t help,’ said Simon.
    ‘It’s the baby,’ cried my mum. ‘We’ve got to think about Henry.’
    ‘Please!’ screamed Mrs Fitch.
    ‘Come away,’ I heard Simon whisper to my mum.
    The hall light went off. I heard Henry starting to grizzle upstairs. I heard my mum go to him, already saying ‘Shh! Shh, shh, shh, shh,’ in her lovely lullaby voice as she rushed up
the stairs.
    ‘Ruby?’ whispered Simon. ‘Are you OK?’
    I didn’t answer. I wanted him to think I was asleep.
    ‘Please!’ screamed Mrs Fitch. She banged at the door.
    I didn’t hear Simon go back into the sitting room, but he must have done; the TV got turned up.
    ‘
Now urging people not to panic
–’ I heard.
    He must have shut the door then; I couldn’t make out what they were saying any more, just the scary, bossy sound of it going on and on about how bad everything was . . . but at least it
did sound more like normal TV, different voices chipping in, and not the same thing over and over.
    ‘
Help me! Please!
’ screamed Mrs Fitch.
    I stood in the dark. It went quiet. I could hear the rain, still, but not Mrs Fitch. I peeped through the curtains. She was standing in the front garden. She was