Scarlet Rain, part one
A horror short story
Hi, all,
Sorry it’s been so long since my last update. I wrapped up Sweet Silius Island Honey right as I began student teaching, and I’ve been so focused on school (plus finishing a WIP I’ve been busy with about a year) that I let this slip by.
To get things rolling again, I’m serializing this 6000-word short story I wrote in 2021. It’s sort of a darker turn for me, but what the heck, I like being versatile.
This story also available in my anthology Advanced Word Associations.
Dribbles of red dotted the paper of Shae's sketchbook, with a particularly large one spreading smaller streaks all around. More fell on her arms, her vest, her hair, and on the grass around her. The red pattered into the surface of the river, and onto the fishermen Shae had been drawing. Before long it blotted out her entire sketch of them on their little boat. The rain lasted about five seconds, then stopped. It was a very distinct red, with a distinct odor. Blood.
Her pulse cranked, and she still held her pencil over the page, as if she could even try to draw on slick, soggy paper. She looked up at an overcast of high, thin clouds. Surely the blood must have fallen from somewhere. There must be a reason she looked like a murder victim. Right?
The fishermen were turning their boat back toward the dock on the other side of the river. Whatever that rain was, it had ruined their day as much as it had ruined Shae's.
Another shower came, and this time it didn't stop. Shae got to her feet and ran to the parking lot, constantly smearing blood off her glasses. The clouds above were still too high and too thin for something this persistent.
She almost didn't find her car. It was bad enough with all these streaks on her glasses, but the rain had nearly painted everything from top to bottom. It was only the antenna in back that gave her Chevy away. She dived in, threw her sketchbook and pencil to the passenger's seat, used a leftover napkin to wipe her glasses. The raindrops made an endless drumroll on the chassis. So much blood covered the windshield that the light dyed everything inside red. Shae took several deep breaths from the bottom of her belly. Stay calm. There was a perfectly rational explanation for all this. Blood doesn't simply fall out of the sky.
Crimson, copper-smelling blood. Someone's blood.
Or something's.
Thanks to her trembling, it took three tries to simply push the button to start the car. The radio blared on. Naturally they were talking about the rain.
"We are monitoring the situation with chief meteorologist Paul Mescon of Channel 3," the DJ said. "We'll be sure to pass along any updates as they come along."
Paul Mescon. The most popular weatherman in the town of Fairground. Shae's father. The way she saw it, if the weather got bad enough, she was probably safer with him than anywhere else. She could collect herself, figure out what was going on, see if he knew anything.
She turned the wipers up to full speed and peeled out toward the freeway. The DJ got an update explaining the phenomenon of a "blood rain." Usually, the DJ said, it was the result of dust or algae that winds up in rain clouds. It was rare, but it happened, and it wasn't dangerous.
Shae wasn't so sure about that. Something about this felt different.
Channel 3 was about a mile away, uphill from a Methodist church and a barbeque shack. Dad had brought her here plenty of times growing up, either on Bring Your Child to Work days or when Mom was sick and couldn't look after her. It was always such a joy as a kid to see the things behind the TV screen, the sets and the production room and the meteorology equipment. She remembered feeling a small betrayal during one visit, when she realized the city skyline behind the nightly news anchors wasn't a window.
Shae went in and told a very alarmed receptionist who she was. The receptionist pushed the button to unlock the door, still paralyzed by the sight of Shae covered with the blood rain.
Shae's arms hung still beside her as she walked down the hall. The reporters and technicians looked at her like she was Carrie at her prom. "It's that bad out there?" one of them said.
Shae simply nodded.
The TV set in the break room was tuned to the news report from down the hall. Her father was in the studio now, in his small office past the news desk and the talk show stage, not many yards away. She was still dripping wet, with a red trail streaking behind her and a puddle around her. A woman brought her a towel from the office gym, plus a duffel bag with some exercise clothes inside. "You can keep them," the woman said.
"Thanks." Shae wiped off as well as she could. "Do they know what's causing it yet?"
The woman shook her head. "All we have are guesses right now. Hopefully this doesn't last too long. It's like something out of Revelation."
That was what Shae was afraid of. Maybe God had finally had enough, and was starting to show it, just like he did to the Egyptians. Was the rain hitting anywhere else? Or just here at Fairground?
The TV went to the anchor desk, and shortly after, Shae's father came to the break room. "Shae, are you all right?"
"I'm fine, just rattled," she said. Her hair and clothes were getting crusty now that the blood was drying. Not blood-colored water. Blood. "It ruined my sketchbook." She looked up at him, thinking about the tagline, Paul's got the answer! that she used to say in ads when she was little. Well, Paul, do you have the answer?
"Mom left a voicemail," he said. "She's fine. Today was one of her work-at-home days, and she's staying inside."
"Good, as long as she's safe." Shae tugged on her vest. "I really don't think this is like that blood rain you were talking about."
"I'll be honest, I'm not sure what's going on. There was nothing on the radar to show a storm front coming in. The satellites seem to be picking something up, but I can't tell—"
A male reporter rushed in from down the hall. "Paul, have you seen it?"
"Seen what?"
The news anchors listened to someone off screen. "We're getting word that a video has just come in from a passenger on Delta Flight 922, which just landed here at Hayes Airport on its way to Cincinnati."
The screen then showed a vertical video pointed out the window of a passenger jet, briefly washed out by the light, but then showing mountains of clouds. Among them was a dark cascade spraying out of thin air. Shae knew it as soon as she saw it: the source of the shower of blood.
"I don't know what's going on," the male passenger said in the background. "One minute we're flying, and then the whole plane shakes like we ——ing hit something, and we nearly ——ing nosedive to the ground, then the pilots pull us back up, and now we're circling around some bum—— town, and look at that. ——ing look at that."
He focused the phone as well as he could on the cascade. It seemed to be rotating in the opposite direction of the plane, spraying the blood over an even wider field than if it had been stationary. In fact, it was more than one—there was another spray of blood orbiting around it. Someone else on the plane said, "How big is that thing?" It was hard to tell from the video, but from this distance the gash must have been colossal.
Suddenly a splash of color spread out from the gash, and filled the view of the phone camera above the cascade. The passengers of the plane screamed, cried out for Jesus, turning the whole video into a cacophany of terror.
The blood was flowing from the bottom of a bulbous mass that hovered and spun in the air. Tentacles stretched out like highways, with one of them spilling blood as well. A short pod stuck out the top with a ring of eyes staring out.
"HOLY F—ING S—!" the passenger said. "We hit THAT thing?"
Shae clutched at her blood drenched vest. Whatever the hell that thing was, it was all over her! "Be right… Ugh." She ran with the duffel bag to the nearest bathroom and locked herself in the nearest stall. She managed to get herself out of the vest and into an athletic top before she vomited. If only it had just been dust or algae. If only it had been raining something nicer, like frogs. But that thing, that hideous thing, was still hanging up there, still bleeding. Its blood—its life—had gotten all over her.
And eventually that thing in the sky would run out. It would die. But how long would it take? What would happen when it did? To spread out so much rain over so far a distance, it must be as big as a city itself. And if it fell…
To be continued…