A/N: Heads up! This book gets hit by a chapter-chopping glitch. If you feel a chapter's too short and don't see this 👇🏻 star at the end of it, reload the page. The rest should appear for you.
Nothing happens. It's the most anticlimactic outcome imaginable, and I'm not sad about it. Ditzy is. Her anticipatory grin falls to a pout-glare like the Sleeper just cheated her out of two dozen chocolate eggs. She lifts the can in two genteel fingers and drops it on the girl's head. Calico J winces. The Sleeper, thankfully, doesn't react.
"Did it work?" says Patrick. He wasn't watching through the gaps in the fence.
"It worked," I say. "Looks like we're learning Morse code."
"Backup communication." Calico J has started to grin now that the risk of danger seems past. "Even if we don't use it for Sleepers, I bet it'll be useful in lots of other places."
It's true. We've done a lot of sneaking around in the last six weeks: entering houses, foraging in new supermarkets, checking up on lingering survivors we've chosen not to make contact with for a variety of reasons. Those last are mostly gone now, but it hasn't stopped us from taking precautions.
Well, it hasn't stopped me from taking precautions. And most people here who aren't Ditzy, by which I mean everyone here who isn't Ditzy, which is how most things here tend to go. Ditzy, I'm pretty sure, would bash a hostile survivor's head in with the same enthusiasm she applies to Sleepers. I'm glad I've never gotten to see her try.
"Ditz, no," says Calico J, right on cue.
Ditzy spots us through the fence and turns an intensified pout on him instead. "I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it."
"I'm bored. I wanted to run."
She was thinking of waking the Sleeper. Because she was bored and needs exercise. I put a palm to my forehead with a long sigh and leave Calico J to wrangle Ditzy, which he tries and succeeds at because he is not me. Only then will Patrick let us open the gate so we can leave the barricaded safety of the fenced-in yard.
"Wait," says Calico J as we're about to leave. "We need flour."
I raise an eyebrow at him.
"It's closer than the supermarket," he says, with a hopeful smile. "I'll be quick, I promise."
The house behind us looks sound from here, and it's not one we've been chased out of before. Nor one where we've found survivors. There's no car in the driveway, which means at least some of the former residents were either gone when Red Thursday happened, or else fled after it hit.
"Not alone," I say. "I'll come."
Then I add, "You can, too," because Patrick's response to being left alone outside with Ditzy is the response I'd expect from a person left alone in a tiger cage: thinly veiled panic. He scurries after us as we head for the door. Calico J calls something to Ditzy, and I'm not paying close enough attention to catch what it is, because a different sound grabs my focus the moment we step into the house.
Dripping.
It's coming from the kitchen. Leaky taps are common, but six weeks on the run from a water-based apocalypse have left me sharply attuned to anything that sounds watery. I follow the noise. Sure enough, the kitchen tap is dripping. I stand and stare at it for a while before I realize what feels off: where most such taps drip at regular intervals, this one wastes water in a fancier manner, varying its drips in random patterns with an occasional dribble thrown in. There's something in the pipes.
Calico J is poking through cupboards and Patrick is keeping watch out a window, as he often does. I wait for flour to be found before informing them both of what I'm about to do.
"Testing something. Stay back."
Both step away obediently, and I turn on the tap.
For a moment, there's just water. It gutters and coughs, and I'm about to worry that I misjudged bad plumbing when blood-red liquid spurts from the tap. I leap back. So do Patrick and Calico J, the latter of whom drops a cuss in Spanish that sounds more colorful than any English counterpart. A jug's worth of Redding pours into the sink and swirls there before the tap switches back to water. The water drains. I shut off the tap. The Redding keeps swirling.
"Leave, you fucker," I growl. I tested this because I want to keep on top of any new Redding behavior, but I don't actually like finding new things. This town has been apocalypse-stable for the last six weeks, and as far as I'm concerned, if it's not getting better, the least it can do is stay that way.
The Redding drains. The pipes make a deeply sketchy popping sound as they fill, until the last of the red stuff vanishes with a sucking sound and a loud, triple bang that makes us all jump.
"Good riddance to you, too," I say.
"Glad we didn't pick this one to live in," says Calico J.
"No kidding." Forget the Redding. That plumbing is three leaks and a rupture waiting to happen. We're only midway through October, but if we make it to colder weather and the water's still running by then, the last thing I want to deal with is frozen pipes. "Should we—"
I'm interrupted by a knock on the front door. Patrick grabs Calico J's arm. I recognize the knock pattern enough to hide the lurch of my own heartbeat. That's Ditzy.
"Let's go," I say. I'm not at all worried about Ditzy being left outside without us, but I would like to leave this house and its resident Redding alone. We've got what we came for.
Ditzy has feigned death in a porch chair when we open the door. The ruse fails on account of her knock a moment ago, plus the strand of hair that the breeze blows across her eyelashes, making her eyelid twitch. She pops up when I call out the detail, knowing full well that she would respond to nothing less, and that Patrick's nerves are already shot from the Redding encounter. The last thing he needs is a Ditzy possum impersonation.
"Still got the book?" I say.
A sly smile creeps across Ditzy's face, and I realize she's set me up for something a moment too late. She draws the book from inside her denim jacket, right against her chest, with sultry slowness and a suggestive look.
I spin away, my cheeks flaring. "We're going home."
It's automatic: a different part of my brain intervening on the part that has been rendered useless by the demonstration, and equipping me to flee. Ditzy's giggle hits my back like cupid's arrows as she and the others follow me out the gate. Calico J is probably killing himself laughing internally, but he spares me my dignity and says nothing all the way back to the house.
We all start learning Morse code that afternoon.
That feels like studying for finals all over again. The headache. The sounds around me beginning to zone in and out of logical interpretation when I have to focus for too long. All of us sprawled out across the couches and the living-room rug. Ditzy taps dot-dash patterns to Calico J while he wizards dinner out of whatever dribs and drabs Patrick and I scavenged that morning. He says he has an easier time learning things out loud, and with people. Ditzy's the same. In half an hour, they're talking in knocks and scratches like some kind of ghoul pair. I swear there are days I'm convinced they're both geniuses who hide among us plebs for fun.
After dinner that night, we return to the living room. Someone drops to the couch beside me while I have my eyes shut and my fingers to my temples, wrestling with my brain. It likes to jettison auditory information in two seconds flat, and it only gets worse when I'm tired. Morse code is no exception.
"You don't have to master it tonight, you know," says Calico J. He's the one who sat beside me.
"I know. But I want to at least get the basics down. So it goes easier next time."
There's a lot I don't say. How long it takes me to learn anything like this. How long it takes me to learn anything at all. How falling behind my peers leaves me with a sinking feeling that I'd rather beat my head against a wall late into the night than experience at its fullest. I start my mental recitation again. Calico J remains silent. I can tell he's watching me.
"Think of it like pictures," he says at last.
I crack an eye open and raise that eyebrow at him.
"I'm serious," he says. "Turn the dot-dash patterns into pictures and then assign their letter to them. It makes them easier to remember."
"Example?"
"H is four dots, right?" Sure. "That looks like someone went to town with a holepunch, which starts with H. So H is holepunch. I is eyes." Two dots. "K is... well. I never said they all had to make sense."
His guilty grin means I now have to know what he came up with for those letters. Both K, and J, which he skipped. I crack a real smile for the first time in an hour. "You know you have to tell me now."
Calico J is just light-skinned enough for me to see him blush. I grin wider. We've known each other the longest in this little group, and I know he's bad at hiding things.
"Fine," he says. "K is dash-dot-dash, so it's clops, like cyclops."
"And J?"
"J is a ball python named Jaguar. He's very proud of his spots."
I burst out laughing.
"See?" says Calico J. "It works."
"Yeah, I'm never going to forget that now. What are your others?"
We spend the rest of the evening practicing together, then head for bed when we're all so tired that our laughter is getting hysterical, and I'm no longer the only one who can't hear straight. I lie awake until after midnight that night, reciting letters to myself while the Sleepers in the next room moan and toss. They always start up like that after ten in the evening. It's one of those things you think you'll never get used to, but it's been six weeks since Red Thursday, and it feels like a decade already. At least they'll fall silent again when the Red Rain begins.
I must have nodded off then, because my next memory is bolting awake like someone's electrocuted me. I spring up in bed, too, and I'd probably have woken Calico J if it wasn't his turn to keep sleepwatch, napping on the couch one floor below. Thunder unrolls across the sky. I check my watch: the still-faintly glowing hands read 3:01 in the morning. The Red Rain has started. Just the first drops of it, hitting the roof at staccato intervals slow enough to be ominous, but not enough to get someone wet if they stepped outside. I sit like a statue with my heart punching out of my chest. I can't tell if I dreamed what I heard a moment ago.
Then it starts again.
Tap. Taptap. Tap.
A smattering of raindrops closer together than the rest. The sounds warp a little, and you could have convinced me it was Calico J tapping a fork on the counter again if I hadn't always been so attuned to the rain. It's a survival strategy when you're used to things like canoe trips, where a rainstorm might mean anything from moving your shoes inside to getting off your island because it's the tallest thing on the water.
Tap. Tap. Taptap.
I wouldn't have caught it if I hadn't spent the whole evening running drills with Calico J. I might still be wrong about this. But I don't think I am.
Taptap. Tap.
An extended, "random" pattern culminating in three hard knocks.
I learned Morse code for the first time in my life this afternoon. Now the rain is telling me to run.
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