The Weather Read online

  “Some, not many, are immune,” Lolly’s grade six teacher told two haunted faces, eight months after the first storm in a decade. “The storm doesn’t like the immune, and if you don’t catch the disease fast enough, something in their dead brains will click to life long enough to say ‘this one isn’t getting sick’ and then the storm will overtake you, because if it can’t have you, it won’t leave you breathing.”

  The storm continues, wave after wave, trudging down the road, never the drive. The day fades, and for a while the sky is bloody and the road is quiet. Then, as night falls, another wave hits and Granny Ma announces: “I forgot my notebook.”

  Lolly and her mother try to ignore her, but she persists: “I need it. I need to check and see if Froggie’s unfollowed me after I deleted her comment on my post.”

  “Not now, Ma.”

  “I need to check. I need to know. I need to talk to Froggie!”

  “The wifi’s down,” Lolly says, attempting to dissuade Granny Ma. But the old woman ignores her, talks over her, voice going shrill.

  “Just go get it then, Ma. Go get it.”

  Granny Ma clamps her mouth shut and shuffles into the hall. Lolly stares at her mother, who won’t look away from the window.

  “It’s safer,” her mother says. “They might hear her if she stayed shouting. They won’t smell her. She smells too much like them. Safer.”

  Five minutes pass. Ten minutes. Granny Ma doesn’t come back up and Lolly starts scratching at her peeling sunburn. She’s watching over her mother’s shoulder when a part of the storm turns down their drive.

  Immediately, Lolly’s mother opens the window.

  “What’re you doing?” Lolly whispers.

  “The roof. We’re getting on the roof.”

  “But the boards—”

  “You first.”

  “But Granny Ma—”

  “C’mon, Lolly.”

  Lolly eases herself onto the sill, then over it until she finds purchase on the overhang above their porch. The roof slopes to her left, so that she can climb to the flat top of the roof. There’s not room to walk over, so she carefully slides one foot along the overhang, then the other, still gripping the sill.

  When she’s cleared the sill and her mother doesn’t follow, Lolly glances back at her.

  “You get up,” her mother says, “and I’ll get Ma.”

  Lolly’s mother’s gone in an instant, and Lolly continues easing along the overhang, because below her the storm is getting closer and she can already smell them. If the scent gets too strong, she’s afraid she’ll look, and she doesn’t want to look.

  On the top of the roof, Lolly lies on her back, staring up at the night sky. The stars aren’t shooting like Granny Ma wanted. They never are. But they’re there, and they’re more than blackened husks on the ground.

  Lolly wonders if her boss had someone fill her shift. If it was the woman, or the boy, or maybe both of them. She wonders if her boss was ever going to actually marry the woman, and if so, if she would have had Lolly fired. Lolly’s pretty confident that’s what would have happened, unless the boy and his adolescent crush got a say in the matter. Lolly thinks maybe that could have saved her job for a little while, but she doesn’t care either way, not because she’s up on a roof with a storm underneath her, but because it was a really shitty job. She’d sometimes daydream about going to work for Macy instead, because then she might be able to slip a few free hamburgers or smoothies.

  That wouldn’t happen now, or maybe ever. Maybe they’d never have a burger joint again, all thanks to Macy. That Macy.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Caighlan Smith

  Art copyright © 2016 by Keith Negley