The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [47]
For forty-nine days, nothing but rain, everywhere, all across the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, in Brazil, in England and France and Germany, in Somalia and South Africa, in the People's Republic of China. It was raining all around the world. Rivers of water flowed out of the sky, tides rose and streams swelled, crops rotted like flesh in the fields.
Weathermen were apologetic. "Rain," they said during the five-day forecast. "Just rain." Statesmen expressed alarm, scientists confusion. Religious fanatics built arks. And Melissa - who once, in a year she could barely remember, had fantasized making love in the rain - Melissa saw her life swept away in the rain. They drove north, to the mountain cabin -three rooms for her and Stuart, her husband. And all about them the unceasing rain.
Melissa sighed and studied the book she had tried to read as they drove east out of Knoxville that afternoon. A failed effort, that, defeated by the swaying car. She glanced at Stuart and almost spoke, but what could she say? The silence was a wall between them; they'd lost the rhythm of conversation. They hadn't exchanged a word since they had changed highways at Wytheville, when Stuart snapped at her for smoking.
Staring at him now, Melissa thought he was changing, a subtle transformation that had begun - when? days ago? weeks? who could say? - some time during the endless period after the clouds rolled in and rain began to descend like doom from the heavy sky. In the dash lights, his once-ruddy features were ghastly and pale, like the features of a corpse. Pasty flesh stretched taut across the angular planes of his skull; his mouth compressed into a white line. Shadow rippled across his tense features, across his hairline, retreating from a sharp widow's peak though he was only thirty-five.
"Do you have to stare at me?" he said. "Why don't you read your book?"
"It's getting dark."
"Turn on the light then."
"I don't want to read. It was making me sick."
Stuart shrugged and hunched closer over the wheel.
Melissa looked away.
At first, it had been refreshing, the rain, lancing out of the afternoon sky as she drove home from her art history class. She parked the car and stood in the yard, staring up at the gray sky, at lightning incandescent in swollen cloud bellies. Rain poured down, spattering her cheeks and eyelids, running fresh into her open mouth, plastering her garments close against her flesh.
By the thirteenth day - she had gone back by then and added them up, the endless days of unrelenting rain - the haunted look began to show in Stuart's eyes. His voice grew harsh and strained as discordant music, as it did when she tested his patience with minutiae. That was his word for it: minutiae, pronounced in that gently mocking way he had perfected in the two years since the baby. Not mean, for Stuart was anything but mean; just teasing. "Just teasing," he always said, and then his lips would shape that word again: minutiae, meaning all the silly trivia that were her life - her gardening, her reading, her occasional class.
By this time the pressure had begun to tell on them all. You could see it in the faces of the newscasters on CNN, in the haunted vacancies behind the weary eyes of the scientists on the Sunday talk shows - vacancies of ignorance and despair. How could they account for this rain that fell simultaneously over every square inch of the planet? How could anyone? By this time - the thirteenth day - you could detect the frayed edges of hysteria and fear. Evangelists intoned portentously that the