Scarlet Rain, conclusion
A horror short story
Need to catch up?
This story also available in my anthology Advanced Word Associations.
When she awoke, she was lying down in a bed, surrounded by a blur and a mild antiseptic smell. There was something beeping to one side. The back of her hand stung… which meant she still had one. The last thing she remembered was watching it break apart like dried-up clay.
"She's awake!" she heard her mother say.
Someone laid a pair of glasses on Shae's face, and now she could see the hospital room and her parents and a shut-off TV hanging on the wall. The pain in her hand turned out to be the needle from the IV drip. The beeping was the monitor tracking her heart. "I'm… alive?" Shae said. Outside the window were properly green trees shaking gently under a proper rain shower. She couldn't see as well as she could before, but it helped. Mom must have found the spare frames in Shae's glove compartment. "Where am I?"
"Charlotte," her father said. "Someone found you washed up on a riverbed, and as soon as we heard the description on the news, we knew it was you. Drove all the way out from Louisville."
"Then… The rain… Was it all a dream?"
Her mother shook her head. "No. The city of Fairground's sealed off now. We still don't know if we'll ever be able to go back. But they got plenty of people out first. And now we have a place to stay, and you can join us as soon as you're ready to be discharged."
"So then… Did I actually…?"
"You did," her father said. "We saw it. Everyone did."
"And by everyone, you mean…"
"The entire world." Her mother handed over her phone. "Just look up 'Fairground giant.'"
Shae ran an image search, and got an endless gallery of the colossal gray woman that had launched the thing in the sky back into outer space. Shots of her running, shots of her leaping to the sky, shots of her touching the thing's flesh. Some were taken at a great distance by the news choppers. Closer shots had been posted on social media by evacuees stuck in traffic and by people within the city who had never managed to find transportation. News sites all over the world—Britain, Japan, China, Australia, India—had posted versions of these pictures.
But it was really her. She remembered all of this. She was the giant.
She clicked on one link and got even more user photos with bigger, clearer shots. The giant had no hair, and much more toned muscle than Shae recalled having. And while some (especially the news outlets) had helpfully put a blur or mosaic or colored dot between her legs, on many of them, there was nothing on her body left to the imagination.
"Perfect," Shae said. "Now everybody in the world's seen me naked. Do they know it was me?"
"I don't think so," her mother said. "Nobody else saw you change. And when you turned up here, they probably thought you were just another missing person."
Shae found herself admiring one photo taken just after one of her great leaps into the sky. In her gray nudity, she looked like nothing less than an ancient goddess ascending to the heavens. Or maybe an old sci-fi book cover.
Shae began to laugh.
"What's so funny?" her mother said.
"Mom," Shae chuckled, "you and I were—haha—talking about life drawing right before we crashed. Remember? All those drawings in my sketchbook?" She let out a cackle that felt as large as the thing in the sky. "I just gave every artist on the planet the best nude photo references in history!"
She collapsed onto her back, still laughing.
Her parents looked at each other. "She's still got her sense of humor," her father said.
"I'm just glad I get to see you smile again, Shae." Her mother gave her a kiss on the cheek. "You don't feel any different, do you?" her mother said, running her hand over Shae's hair, now barely more than stubble. "After how that thing changed you?"
"I don't think so." From what she could tell, her body was more or less the way she remembered it, right down to the moles and freckles. The creature that had changed her didn't seem to have missed a thing. It had even put her eyes back the way they were. "Honestly, I didn't even feel all that different then. I was still me. The thing was doing everything it could to help me stay that way."
"Then I guess I had the wrong idea."
"It's not like anyone could blame you," Shae said. "It did look like a giant scab." She gazed back at the rain outside the window. "Well, Dad, I guess you're gonna have to be a weatherman somewhere else."
"That'll be easy enough," her father said. "Every town needs a meteorologist. The important thing is, you're here. I can't explain how, but you're here."
"Well, darn, I was hoping you'd have a clue how I got down. I guess Paul hasn't got the answer this time, huh?"
He chuckled under misting eyes. "Your mother and I weren't sure we were ever going to see you again. Here." He pointed a can of Fresca on the bedside table. "Thought you might be thirsty."
"Thanks, Dad. Thanks so much." Shae noticed what was under the can. "Is that a new sketchbook?"
"I thought you might want to keep your hands busy," Mom said. "Well, they don't want us to stay too long, so we'd better get going. I'm just—I'm just so glad you're safe."
"Right back at you," Shae said. "Thanks. Both of you."
"We should be thanking you," her father said. "My little giant."
They both gave her a kiss and left her alone in the hospital room.
Shae opened the can and took a sip. The rain had died down, and a rainbow began to appear behind the trees—one of the clearest, most colorful rainbows she'd ever seen, and such a relief after so much red.
She reached over to set the can down, and only realized too late that she let go too far from the edge of the table.
Yet the can didn't fall.