The Last Storm, page 16
Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, and more and more rain came down, and through the wooden supports and stalks of dead plants, and curtains of strengthening rain, Jimi saw Papa standing before the strange man. The man had blood leaking from his arms and a long box held across his chest. He could see from Papa’s stance that he could hardly stand. Something was tangled in his beard.
“I brought rain,” the man said, and then he took one step back as Papa reached for him and fell flat on his face.
The man ran into the rain and out of sight. Jimi ran for Papa, focusing only on his motionless body. He looked to his right as he ran, in case the man with the box and bloody arms returned to do to him whatever he had done to Papa. He was wet and warm, yet chilled by what he saw happening all around. Jimi didn’t understand any of this.
Just before he reached Papa, something skittered across the framework above him. Jimi glanced up and saw the scorpion hanging by a couple of spiky legs. It was small and bright yellow. He’d never seen a scorpion here before. There were more on Papa, one in his hair, another knotted in his beard, with bright red streaks on the ends of its legs. Its sting was curled over and stuck in Papa’s top lip, and it was bracing its legs against his chin and lower cheek, tugging, trying to extract the sting and pulling his mouth into a pout. It gave his face the semblance of movement, and planted hope in Jimi that he was still alive.
But rain fell into Papa’s open eyes, brimming like tears.
Jimi knelt in the mud, reached out, held back. His father had never been a tactile man, nor an emotional one, offering love in gruffness and advice rather than kind words or contact. Jimi could not remember the last time either of them had even touched.
“Papa,” he said, his voice lost in the storm. The rains were what his Papa had been desperate for these past six months, as irrigation efforts failed and contracts with Soakers fell through. Jimi didn’t understand the business or politics, and he tried not to dwell on the darker, more violent aspects of what his father and his associates did. He was sheltered in that respect, and much of that sheltering had been enforced by Papa. “I know you’ll never be like me,” Papa had once told him, and Jimi could never work out whether he’d spoken with regret or pride.
“Papa!” he said again, a little more desperate this time, and more scared. Shapes wriggled and scuttled and crawled in the mud, and he knew it wasn’t the man who had killed Papa. Not directly, at least. But whatever he had been doing, plugged into the box, arms wide and bleeding, face turned to the sky as it changed and became heavy and dark and wet… that was what had killed him.
The man had brought rain, and other things besides.
He reached out again, and when he touched his father’s arm, the scorpion on his face extracted its stinger and scurried away. Jimi heard voices. Distant, quiet, from one of the huts hidden from view. He froze and half stood, head tilted to one side to hear. Mike and Lucy-Anne? Why hadn’t they protected Papa when that was their job?
“Rainmaker,” he heard Lucy-Anne say, and as he took a step towards her voice a gunshot rang out, shockingly loud in the gathering quiet, and Jimi ran in the other direction. He spared one last glance for his dead Papa, then fear carried him, and moments later he tripped over Mike’s body. He was contorted in agony, and a large spider was crouched in the hollow of his throat, long legs clasping into his skin as its head pressed against his neck.
Jimi almost cried out in shock, but he held it in.
Rainmaker.
He knelt beside Mike’s body. He’d dropped his gun and it had come to rest against one of the timber support legs for the suspended plant grid.
Rainmaker, Lucy-Anne had said, and then the gunshot. Papa was dead. Mike was dead. And now maybe Lucy-Anne was dead as well, and the mysterious Rainmaker had done it all.
Jimi picked up the gun and ran. It was heavy in his hand, so he tucked it into the waistband of his shorts. The weapon was just as heavy there, weighted by the promise of revenge.
“Rainmaker,” Jimi said, the first time the word passed his lips. But it would be far from the last.
* * *
Alone in the Desert, what he’d absorbed from Papa kept Jimi alive. The hardness, the determination, the drive to persist and push back against difficulties. That, and his search for the Rainmaker.
Once the panic lessened, he’d gone back. He’d found Lucy-Anne’s body, but nothing else. No sign of the man and his box. He had come at Papa’s behest, brought down rain and other things, and then disappeared, as if he too had dissipated with the steam from those fields.
Alone for the first time, Jimi went in search of his mom and sister, but they were long-lost to him. He found no trace, and he came to believe that they’d hidden themselves away from what Papa had become. He did not look for long. Even if he did find them and they took him in, they’d offer only a safe, boring life. That was no longer what he wanted. Jimi believed he was more like his father than even Papa had believed.
Instead, Jimi spent some time searching for the Rainmaker. He’d never even heard the word before that fateful day, but afterwards he researched and found out as much as he could. The Rainmakers came from only one family bloodline, the talent handed down from generation to generation. There were stories from over a century before, when a Rainmaker wandered the Dust Bowl attempting to offer help. Her death was mysterious and violent. Through the following decades there were more reports, most of them disputed and often ridiculed. The family of Rainmakers were usually regarded as fakers, and at worst, as preying on others’ misfortune.
Jimi knew it was not fake. But the trail had grown cold, and though he kept looking, there were only rumours about the last Rainmaker family—a man called Jesse and his daughter, Ash. Some said they were both dead and gone. Other whispers claimed they were estranged, and the rainmaking talent had died along with their relationship. The Rainmaker remained on Jimi’s mind. As time passed, his Papa—cruel and gruff, strong and powerful—became larger than life, something of a hero in Jimi’s eyes. The dream of avenging his father’s murder kept him in balance for those first few years on his own in the Desert.
As he grew older, he worked a variety of jobs. Crop picker, ground digger, burger flipper, barman, decorator, driver, store assistant, labourer, woodworker. He was small and slight, like Papa had been, so when he started somewhere new he was always the butt of the joke or, in some cases, the target of bullies.
They only ever targeted him once.
Jimi fought back every single time, and he gained scars as numerous as the jobs that were forced to let him go.
One day, ten years later, when he was in his mid-twenties, a caravan of Soakers stopped by the large roadside diner where he worked. He’d only been there for a few weeks, and he didn’t think he had very long left. He was screwing the owner’s wife. She was thirty years his senior, but hungry for him every moment they could steal, her appetite voracious. She did things to him he’d never had done before, and allowed him to do things he’d never done, and she told him her sex life had been a decade of drought. Jimi found that funny. She was rescuing herself from her own Desert.
The Soakers parked their wagons on the large lot on the other side of the road, away from the buildings and the other vehicles. Jimi watched from the diner window as the haze settled and the wagons slowly came into view. He’d seen Soakers before, but only in groups of two of three. Now there were a dozen, each wagon different in shape, size, and colour, and the twelve Soakers who crossed the road and approached the diner were equally diverse. They ate and drank, and he served them and talked with them, and became entranced by their stories and their outlook on the world.
By the time they left, an hour later, he knew it was also his time to leave. He did so without looking back, stealing the owner’s car and following the Soakers at a cautious distance.
It took a day and a night before one of the wagons peeled off and took a minor road out into the Desert. Jimi followed. In the end it was easy. The Soaker was a woman, old and thin and not at all surprised when he stepped into her firelight. She offered him a drink and a share of her meal, and he shot her in the chest. She fell back, away from the fire, with a deep sigh. She stared at the stars as she died.
Jimi stood there for a long time looking at what he had done. Since picking up Mike’s gun he’d kept it oiled and maintained, but it held the same bullets it had been loaded with back then. He hadn’t even made sure it still worked.
The first bullet he’d ever shot from the gun had put a hole in this Soaker and taken her from the world.
His heart hammered, so hard that he thought he saw its shockwaves rippling the campfire’s flames. I could have just taken her wagon, he thought. But she would have come after him. I could have taken it and driven far away, all across the Desert, and left her out here to survive or die on her own. But Soakers were a hardy bunch. He had to look ahead without worrying who or what might approach from over his shoulder.
Papa had been right. The first was definitely the hardest.
After the old Soaker woman, killing became so much easier.
* * *
Though not quite existing in the shadow of the dam, its influence on the town was strong. Jimi walked in along the main street, and just on the edge of town he crouched by a trickle of a stream and washed blood from himself. The better he looked, the more likely they’d be to help. He smelled the water as he splashed it on himself, tasted it when he washed his face, and he turned aside from the stream just in time to puke. He cried out as he retched, braced on hands and knees as his stomach convulsed, his back arched, and his cracked ribs screamed as he vomited into the dust. There was a little blood in the puke, but he hoped it was only from his mouth. His broken teeth cast shards of pain across his face as the acid bathed open wounds and nerve endings, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the agony. Everything hurt so much more now than when he was being beaten and broken.
Alison had made him swallow the water, and he guessed there was a sick poetry to that. He’d dumped them close to his blazing wagon, hoping the heat would eventually reach them and set their clothing aflame. Even if it didn’t, anyone who found the wreck might assume that a couple of Soakers had fought and killed each other. Death was common in the Desert, and those who inhabited its societal fringes—Soakers were closer to the edge than most, save perhaps for the Hotbloods—were rarely mourned. Now, the same water he’d sold to Mosey churned in his guts, infecting his damaged body. Revenge from Alison’s ashen grave.
Walking beside the stream on the edge of town he saw the first of the water treatment plants. It was a basic affair, and he’d seen many of its ilk across the Desert. It consisted of several large water containers, each holding several thousand gallons, and a series of pumps, filtering devices, and a final treatment tank. Here at least the system was fairly complex, if a little roughshod, with a long, low timber building which he guessed was used as a community bottling plant. It was from here that two teenagers emerged, a boy and a girl about the age he’d been when he saw Papa die. They saw him and came closer, tentative and cautious. As if his body had been holding itself together until he reached help or safety, a faint took Jimi away. Up and down became fluid, and he slumped to his side, away from the stream and onto the hot, hard ground. He heard the slap of footsteps, then felt the touch of a bottle to his bloodied lips and the tepid flow of blessed fresh water.
* * *
During his years in the Desert, Jimi had become good at reading people. He often wore his own face of lies, and seeing deceptive masks on others was useful, and sometimes a matter of survival.
He knew from the first moment the kids’ mother saw him that she didn’t believe at least half of what he was saying. It was obvious in her clipped tone, her sideways glances at him as she helped him walk, and her silent signals to the teens to keep their distance. He gave her the story he’d come up with about crashing off the highway and rolling into the ditch, and at least she didn’t come straight out and say she didn’t believe him. She saw he was injured and needed help, and there was no need to lie about that. Her name was Mally and she was a good person. Jimi sensed that in her, and saw it reflected in her two children, whose innocent concern for an injured stranger was heartening. If more people were like them, and fewer like him, the Desert would not be such a dangerous place.
Mally knew that many of his injuries weren’t from a crash. She didn’t address this until she sat him on a bench outside a store and sent the teens inside to buy bandages and painkillers.
“Russ has a pickup, I’ll ask him to go and tow your car.” She took out her phone, but her finger hovered over the screen. She was inviting Jimi’s real story, giving him time. She was good, yes, but also strong. The safety of her children came before everything, and she sensed that he was dangerous.
“Car’s totalled,” he said.
“Russ can still fetch your belongings. Bag, whatever.” She glanced him up and down. She must have felt the gun in his belt when she helped him walk into town. Plenty of people carried guns, but it would have made her more wary.
“Nothing important,” he said. He felt hot and queasy, pain from his broken teeth drilling into his skull, each breath and movement hurting his cracked ribs and wounded shoulder. His stomach gurgled and lurched. Every part of him hurt, and the thought of puking again was terrible.
But he was moving with purpose, an aim in mind for the first time in years. All the pain and discomfort did nothing to change that.
“So where’re you headed?” Mally asked.
Jimi sighed and shifted on the bench, trying to find a more comfortable position that didn’t exist.
“You seem nice,” Jimi said. “Your kids, too. Nice kids.”
“They are. It’s important to be kind, don’t you think? Now more than ever.”
Jimi thought of Papa, devoid of affection and dying in the mud. And the Rainmaker who’d brought down the things that had killed Papa, and Mike and Lucy-Anne. Once he’d started running from that old life he had never looked back, and he’d relied on the kindness of strangers many times since. “Sure. Kind is good.”
“So what do you need?” Mally asked.
“You’re talking as if you want me gone.”
“This is a good town. Peaceful. We’ve had our share of trouble, but we avoid it when we can. And deal with it when we have to.”
“I’m no trouble to you,” Jimi said, and he meant it. He had the cash he always kept in his pocket, and trouble took time and exerted a price. He was paying some of that price now.
Mally’s expression showed that she didn’t believe him. He could hardly blame her.
“A car. I can pay for it. That medicine your kids are fetching, I’ll pay for that too.”
“And then you’ll go?”
“Sure. I’ll go. No trouble.” He smiled at her, and however tough she was, she was also perceptive. Whatever she saw in his eyes made her look away, and she glanced back at the store.
“Nice to have your own water,” Jimi said. “I’ve spent time with Soakers. I know what a pain it is treating enough to supply a town this size.”
“We make do, and we all contribute.”
“Sure,” Jimi said. He was fishing and she knew it, but she didn’t know what he was fishing for.
“Guess you won’t need to worry now there’s a Rainmaker again.”
She frowned at him. “What’re you on about?”
“I saw it on the news. Before the crash, before I lost my cell phone. Reports of a woman, a Rainmaker, somewhere in the Desert in a little town…” Jimi trailed off, frowning, as if trying to recall the town’s name.
“You don’t believe that crap?”
“Sure I do.”
Mally laughed.
“I’ll need a new cell phone, too,” Jimi said.
Mally’s son and daughter emerged from the store, both carrying paper bags.
“Just leave the bags here,” he said. “Thanks.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Much of what people surviving in the Desert dealt with was cash only. Papa had taught him that, and it was a lesson well learnt. He handed Mally a handful of folded notes and smiled at the boy and girl.
“Aren’t we taking him to Doc Merryweather?” the girl asked.
“We should ask Russ to fetch his car back to town,” the boy said.
“He’s not staying,” Mally said. She took the cash and flicked through it. “This’ll cover a car and a cell.”
“Thank you.”
“And a full charge, too, to get you where you want to go.”
Jimi nodded, closed his eyes, and lifted his face to the sun. She means as far away as possible, he thought, and he was fine with that. Mally and her kids didn’t need the trouble that hung around him like a stink.
As Mally led her son and daughter away from the wounded man she knew was trouble, Jimi reached for the paper bags, eager for whatever chemical relief they might contain.
* * *
He still didn’t know the name of the town as he watched it dwindle in his rear-view mirror. He drove far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to track him when someone found the bullet-ridden car and the bodies by the reservoir, then he paused to start up the phone Mally had given him. Along with the car it had eaten up most of his cash, but she’d handed a few notes back to him with the phone. Jimi had felt a twinge of guilt. It was people like her who helped people like him survive, even though people like him kept her awake at nights.
As the cell phone connected, he popped another handful of painkillers. He’d wound the bandages as tightly as he could around his broken ribs, and used a hardening putty compound pressed into his two broken teeth to cover the exposed nerves. It was meant to be temporary until he could get it fixed. The pain kept him alert.
The cell phone buzzed when it was ready and connected to the net, and it only took him a minute to search for the word ‘Rainmaker’. There were thousands of hits, but he filtered for the most recent and a handful of stories came up.
Stories about a young woman bringing rain to a town, causing flash floods, and rumours of creatures tumbling down from previously clear, sun-bleached skies.
