Make It Rain

(also known as 'Wrym Dust')

It was seconds from midnight when I met him, I only know because the countdown for the New Year happened moments later. He crashed into me at the bar and kept swearing about some ex-girlfriend. My uncle owned the club and I was drunk off vodka and high on pixy sticks so I dragged the stranger behind the bar and into the storeroom, giggling my head off. I must have looked so stupid. That was the night my skirt broke and it was tied on one side so I showed off a lot of thigh. My hair was a mess from dancing and I could barely stand.

We sat there in the darkness while I giggled and gasped for breath for almost a minute until he asked what I was high on. When I offered him my pixy sticks he started laughing too and told me his night had been made. I asked after his ex and why he was being chased but couldn’t remember how he replied, or if he did at all. All I remember was waking up the next morning in his bed on the wrong side of town and being told over the phone by my best friend that he had claimed to be my new boy toy when he carried me out of the club. He walked in moments after I put my phone down and smiled when he spoke, “Don’t worry, your dignity is in tact. I just didn’t know where you lived, and the guy claiming to be a friend of yours looked pretty darn suspicious. I couldn’t let a sweet lady get raped.”

“Please don’t talk,”

“I’ll get some painkillers, shall I?”

He had been quite nice and offered me a ride home so I had offered up my number and a date the next night. He agreed and after a week of dating all my friends were convinced it was serious, at least on my part. At that point in time I was working as a co-host on a popular radio station and he was just starting out as a doctor, having finished his internship a few months before, and because we both kept odd hours we had time to get to know each other.

After three months of steady dating, among other things, he moved in with me. It was more because I was closer to the hospital than because I complained about moving into the ‘bad’ side of town. That night we celebrated at my favourite club and got high on pixy sticks, as was my tradition. A storm blew in around eleven and I just couldn’t resist dragging him out into the street to dance in the rain, where half the club joined us and the DJ ordered speakers placed at the open windows. That night he held me from behind and nibbled on my ear when he told me he loved me and I laughed until the rain made me cough. The next morning he insisted he was serious.

But as we danced in the soaking street and he held me, one hand itching to slide down my pants and the other fighting with my shirt, and the music throbbed up threw the flooded streets to make our legs tremble and the whole world was singing; I replied in kind. The sugar made me feel like anything was possible and though we were far from alone I pressed against him and told him dirty things over the boom of the music and the thunder crashing overhead. His hands were so cold when the zip on my jeans finally broke.

That was an age ago, and though our bodies never forgot that night it seemed that the time to replicate it had been whisked away. Not long after he moved in reports began to come into the station and I was the one to read them out over the live radio, dread growing every week. At first there were only minor skirmishes in the bad side of the city, a few scuffles with the police that were quickly squashed. But as the days wore on and summer seeped into the bones of the smoky city they became more frequent and much angrier. A week after they started a policeman and two rioters were killed, the people were outraged. The mayor ordered the murderer of the cop to be euthanized while the two policemen who killed the rioters were given pay raises.

And it only got worse. From somewhere unknown the rebels found bombs and planted them in front of police stations, killing seven people and seriously injuring two dozen others. Raids were made into the slums and more people killed without a source of the explosives ever being found. By this point my voice was becoming slow when I read out the news, purely to keep it from trembling. I had also taken to leaving the paper on the desk and asking the boy who wrote it up to use a large font. It was easier to read when it wasn’t shaking.

Then, two weeks later, my voice finally cracked when I told the horrified listeners that a shipment of weapons had been discovered coming into the city and the police claimed rebels in the bad side of the city had been planning to use them to take over the mayors office. Apparently they had stopped six trucks as part of a routine inspection and discovered four of them were packing. Helicopters had been forced to chase down eight more suspects, three of which had good reason to run. That night I went home and clung to my boyfriend until he kissed the tremors away.

Although the police caught two more shipments of guns one must have finally gotten through about six weeks after the troubles began. This was despite the heavily increased security on the city outskirts and the tripled police presence in the streets themselves. Ragged, dirty men with high powered AK47s walked into a supermarket and gunned down everyone inside before the police arrived to kill them. Not including the rebels, two policemen and nineteen innocents lost their lives. Otherwise there was only bruising, on the skin and the hearts.

When my boy came home from work that night and heard about the massacre he decided against dinner and looked terribly sick, mumbling something about leaving no survivors when I hugged him. He wouldn’t stop shivering even when I turned the heater up. He was too sensitive, a fragile thing. I always picked the odd ones.

After that the mayor declared a curfew so no one could be on the streets between eleven at night and six in the morning. This meant that the station had to change its hours and play nothing but music at night and my boy was sometimes forced to spend his nights at the hospital. I didn’t like that. He worked too much as it was and rumours were starting to circulate, glimpses of those mythical immortals. People were claiming their involvement in the troubles though their side was unclear. These creatures were supposed to roam the night and kidnap innocents off the street, sometimes even out of public buildings. What they did then was never spoken so it could only be terrible, surely nightmare-inducing. When I brought this up, hesitantly, with my boyfriend he looked at me strangely and quietly insisted, “Those stories aren’t true.”

The clubs closed as well and in an act of pure depression one day I went to the supermarket and bought a big box of pixy sticks, discounted because no one else could bother buying them. A quarter of the population had now moved from the city, mostly parents fleeing with their children, so many businesses were closing down and taking themselves elsewhere. My boyfriend was lucky he had such a stable and necessary job, even if the rebels’ victims began to haunt his nightmares far too often. I often woke to find him thrashing at the sheets, shouting that the blood wouldn’t come off and scratching at his hands until they were red raw. It alarmed me every time and always made me wonder, what had he seen?

“Maybe we should move,” I offered one night after waking him. He sat, sweat soaked and tangled in the sheets, and looked at me as if I were the crazy one. His bright eyes were wild with fear and guilt.

“We can’t, I’m needed at the hospital. I can’t turn my back on them. And we’re still safe. They haven’t gotten this far into the city yet.”

“Ok, if you’re sure,”

The way he said ‘yet’ made me feel like it was just something he had said as one of those mistakes of talking too fast. I made them too sometimes. I didn’t think the city could fall any further into ruin. A part of me still trusted the police force and the promises of the national government that soldiers from the army would be filtered into the city to help contain the rebels. When I began to see these camouflaged men it relieved me and for a time even my boyfriend seemed to be sleeping more soundly, or maybe he was just pretending for my benefit.

Looking back, that trust in a higher power like the government was probably misguided, although the riots weren’t really their fault. The rumour that the unknown immortals were behind the attacks, supplying them or encouraging them, had the smallest of tiny possibilities of being true. After all, they had never been proven as mere fantasies, although they hadn’t been proved real either.

Eight weeks into the Troubles, as the media had now dubbed them, things seemed to quiet down. No one was dying outside natural causes and my boyfriend had regained his usual sleep patterns. The police came out saying the rebel leader had been tracked down and was now taking his vacation in the newly repaired station lock up. Peace descended rather suddenly and for the first time in an age I saw kids in the park again, though they were closely watched by weary parents.

I stopped one day to ask a mother why she had stayed in the city and she quietly admitted that it was because her youngest son had been injured in the first bombing and couldn’t be safely moved. When I asked my boyfriend about the child he said he knew the boy and none of the doctors gave him long to live. A few days later I stopped seeing the woman and her children at the park. My boy told me that the mother had finally decided to cut the cord and that he was ashamed for being grateful; now the machines could be used for people who had more hope at life than the boy with half his chest missing. I rarely like logic.

On the tenth week the Troubles returned in force. I was thrown from my sleep one morning by the rumble of an explosion, followed by the sounds of dogs barking, children screaming and my boyfriend swearing. He was the first to find his mind and turn on the TV, though it was several long minutes before breaking news interrupted the repeats of some old sitcom. I think it was the Brady Bunch. By then we had already seen the smoke rising.

“At fourteen past five this morning rebels activated homemade bombs planted on all the highways out of the city,” the woman read, not even looking up at the camera as she scanned the sheets in her hands. She must have been dragged out of bed; they hadn’t even had time to program the teleprompter for the poor woman. It shocked me somewhat that she wasn’t even wearing make up. “The roads to the north and west have been blocked by rubble from the canyons, and the bridge south is completely destroyed. The eastern highway is partially unaffected but drivers are being advised to avoid using it until the shrapnel has been cleared away. The authorities are also advising people not to panic, as driving in the surrounding desert could lead to more deaths than the rebels have caused already.”

There was a long pause in which no one was sure what to do next. Then someone in charge remembered they were in charge and started making orders that would let the public know more. They showed us hastily set up live shots of the damage and it was a cameraman that pointed out to the police that a car had been crushed under a waterfall of rock on the northern highway. The TV station was too fascinated with the possible images of carnage to switch the feed, but did remember to warn any remaining parents just in case someone was discovered in the jeep.

It was a father and his son that were dragged out of the twisted metal, the later missing most of his head and the former lacking legs. Boyfriend fumbled with the remote until the images disappeared but I had already seen the horror and he had to hold me for what felt like hours until the tears stopped and I could stumble into work, only to find out that no one expected me to be able. Everyone was just sitting around staring at the floor. No one seemed to know what to do or say. Someone had enough strength to make coffee and then had to lie down on the floor for several minutes.

The police, army and hundreds of volunteers cleared away the destruction on the highways and then got down to repairing the damage, starting with the east because it was the easiest and lead to the nearest town that could send supplies. For days until it was finished the whir of helicopter blades bringing in emergency rations never seemed to stop. The walls were always shaking and the windows acted as if they desperately wanted to fly. Most of our dishes were broken or chipped.

“We should leave,” I said to boyfriend as the rotations overhead drove yet another headache through my skull. I was bent over the sink, trying not to throw up and wishing I hadn’t taken a handful of pixy sticks to work.

“I can’t…” he sighed again. It was the thousandth time I’d brought this up, and the hundredth time he repeated his next line. “You can go, if you want. I’ll call.”

“No, not yet, I suppose we’re still safe here,”

A week later the news seemed to be all the usual stuff, until the station manager burst in and shoved a new sheet into my hands. I cleared my throat and made the sad announcement that rebels had broken into an apartment building only an hour ago, forcing their way into homes and threatening many of the occupants into jumping off their balconies. The streets were blocked off in a mile wide radius. Citizens were asked to stay away because of the traumatizing scene, though there was no doubt it would soon be all across the internet, and also because the seven men were still inside with approximately two dozen hostages. They were demanding to talk to the head of the police, and nothing else. It seemed strange that that was all.

As music drifted through my booth I stumbled out on a quest for coffee and heard more rumours, there were always rumours these days. According to office gossip and word from the street there were immortals hiding in the apartment behind the same masks the rebels were using. No one knew why they might have wanted to talk to the police chief; it was just another mystery of the immortals.

“Maybe they want to take over the city!” one girl cried. She worked in reception but had abandoned her post. I wanted to tell her off so the group crowding around the coffee maker would disperse to somewhere more productive.

“Why?” the manager asked. He didn’t look at all perturbed by the fact that his employees weren’t working for their pay. These days few did any work and fewer others cared. “What the hell would the immortals want with our city? It was a cess pit before this shit started.”

“At least now even the muggers are too scared to roam the streets,” my co-host added, managing a smile. This was one of the weirdest guys I’d ever met. He was still happy with his life, even after his fiancé fled last month.

“Yeah, now all we have to worry about is being snatched up by rebels.”

“Or immortals,” the receptionist added.

“Those stupid things don’t exist!”

“How would you know? It wouldn’t be that hard to hide golden eyes.”

“You’re forgetting they’re supposed to have totally gold eyes. Contact lenses only cover the coloured part of your eye, not the whole thing.”

“Yeah… but they have magic! They could hide that easy.”

Finally our dear boss realised he couldn’t win an argument against this silly girl and turned on the entire group. “Don’t you lot have work to do? Do I pay you all to just sit around and let the robot decide what this city listens to?”

They all scurried off to find something that would make them look busy until he wandered outside to calm down with a cigarette. I tried to mumble out something that would lead to work, but all that came out was “Coffee.”

An hour later the station manager had me interrupt a song to announce that the chief of police had gone into the building to negotiate and wasn’t seen again. Instead the rebels came out rifles blazing and killed four policemen and three soldiers before being gunned down. Inspection of the apartment building had revealed that all the hostages had been shot in the head and the chief of police was hanging from a chandelier in the executive suite by a rope around his neck. We weren’t given any more details than that to report. I was grateful.

That night boyfriend looked me in the eyes and said he only became a doctor to get his parents off his back. I told him to quit. He sighed and said it felt like the only thing he had left in the world that made him feel like he was helping.

For two weeks the attacks continued and, slowly but surely, the rebels began to take over more of the city. Block by block the city was turning into a shadow of itself, as if the day had turned its back on us. The mayor’s office reluctantly admitted they were stumped, no one could explain where so many people were coming from. There seemed to be a least a dozen rebels guarding every block. From what the police said the population of the ‘bad’ side of town had almost doubled since before the Troubles began, only twelve weeks ago. More people than ever were running for their lives out of the city and those that stayed were declared to be mentally disturbed.

“We have to leave.” I told boyfriend during the twelfth week.

He sat there on the floor, leaning against the balcony window, with his tears fogging up the grimy glass and just said, “I can’t…”

I resorted to shouting. “It’s not safe here! We’ll be killed if we stay!”

“Then go, I’ll call,”

“I won’t go if you don’t.”

On the dawn of the thirteenth I woke up alone in bed and knew that everything was going to go wrong this week, they’d planned it like that. I ran around the apartment looking for boyfriend but he was long gone, with a note in the kitchen telling me to leave, that he’d already called my relatives further to the north. He even left a map with directions to them laid out in thick red pen. I sent his beeper a message calling him a damn fool and went to work despite the complaints he replied with.

It was around lunchtime during my second news report for the day that a faint commotion drifted up to my booth. I glanced outside and thought nothing of it, the manager often got into scraps with his employees these days. But then the gunfire started too close. The next thing I knew there was a barrel in my face mixing with my tears and a filthy young man was ordering me to read out the tattered sheet of paper he had thrust at me. The handwriting was terrible, stains covered some words, the edges were torn beyond repair, my throat was blocked with fear and my eyes wouldn’t focus; but he kept shouting until I read it. And with the red light blinking like a warning in the corner of my misty eyes I told the terrified city just who we had harboured on our fringes all these years.

The words didn’t come out so smoothly, but this is how it went:

“People of the city, it is time you know what you have done. We have lived in your filth without complaint and patiently accepted your insults for centuries or more, but this has gone too far. We have warned your leaders each day now since the Troubles started and you still have not delivered on our demands. We ask only that you return our kidnapped leader, but as you have failed to do this within the time limit we are now forced to resort to destroying the entire city to find him. This will be the last time you dare to offend the immortals.”

When it was finished and the city seemed to be holding its breath I looked up at the young man holding the gun and saw for the first time that his eyes were golden, the mark of one born into immortality. It was almost hidden under the dirt and grime that covered his face, and he only wore one green contact. He stared back at me with his mismatched eyes and for a moment looked like he didn’t know what to do, as if he hadn’t been given instructions beyond this point. He was so young.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. The red light was still blinking in the corner of my eye.

“Oh… will you tell them what I look like?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No!”

“I could forget you, if you want,”

“Um… do that. Are you sure nothing else is-”

The sound of the bullet destroying the glass window of my booth registered before my brain could understand the sight of the young man’s head exploding, and as the silence dripped down the wall I took a breath to scream. The soldier didn’t help when he walked in to shoot the immortal again, three more times, in what was left of his head. I was sent to the hospital and in the trauma ward boyfriend held me for hours, crying as hard as I was and saying nothing. The nurses didn’t dare come in. They all knew they couldn’t help.

That night when we got home I told boyfriend that we were leaving, even if it meant having him bound and gagged. That was when he made me sit beside him in front of the balcony window and pointed out across the burning city at the darkness of the slums. He spoke with his slowest and gentlest tone, holding one of my hands in his and not daring to look at me, “I came from there. I can’t leave here because I’m one of them, an immortal. We’re bound to this place.”

I turned his face to me to look in those sad blue eyes, only to find the truth. There were two cobalt contacts sitting on his fingers. So for a while we sat there and I wondered if he was still worth staying in this awful place, for it would be my grave all too soon. Eventually when I got to my feet it made him cry and for the first time he asked me to stay. “I don’t want you to leave. I do love you. Don’t you love me?”

My head hurt so badly. It always hurt these days. So I snapped at him. “What’s that got to do with anything? I got a gun to my head today!”

“I’m sorry… I thought… I thought you would be safe…”

Yelling at him wouldn’t help either of us, but I did it anyway. “What part of ‘a gun to my head’ do you not understand?”

“I promise, if you let me then I can keep you safe, I just have to talk to some friends and no one will-”

Slapping him was mean. But these days have turned me into something dark.

In a fit of shame I slammed the door and ran away from him. He thought we had gone far enough in this world together that I would die here with him. I’d already stayed longer in this damned city than was sane. I’d much rather take my risks with the bus heading north and stay with relatives, at least until boyfriend made the decision that he was serious and came to get me.

But the overloaded vehicle didn’t even make it out of the city limits before it arrived at a roadblock manned by heavily armed rebels. We were ordered out and told to lie facedown on the ground, where they began to shoot us one by one. I closed my eyes, put my fingers in my ears and prayed it would be a quick death.

     I would never leave this city now. I’d haunt it all my life. 

28-04-09: This is the short version that I wrote originally. It was later extended into a full story, with more branching off from it. I have fallen completely in love with the setting for this piece. I've always been a country girl and always will be, but Asintime City still appeals to me in a way that nothing else could. I love everything about it and the universe that was grown from its seady heart.