Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Red Night

Thirty-eight people went down the cistern stairs in the first ten minutes.

There were thirty-one neighbors, my uncle's wife with the two children, Ezra, Tuck and me.

The thirty-eighth was Baba.

Tuck and I had brought her from the care home at noon in the shop's van, over the nurse's loud objection.

She sat on a low crate at the bottom of the stairs and said, "It's raining. Good. Somebody put the kettle on."

Tuck had closed the roof valve that afternoon, so the cistern would take no rain.

We had also bolted steel shutters over every window in the shop.

The rain began to drum on the street grates and the tin awning.

Through the cellar's little ventilation grille, I could see the light go the color of rust.

Then the screaming started.

It came from every direction, thin and far away and then close.

I watched it reach the faces around me one at a time.

A woman from the bakery put both hands over her ears.

The welder's younger daughter began to cry, and her sister held her and didn't say a word.

I went up the stairs with the axe.

My uncle was at the shop's front door, and he was pounding on it with both fists.

His golf shirt was soaked through, and the rain on his forearms was running red.

"Gillian!" he yelled through the wood. "Gillian, open up! For God's sake, I'm your uncle!"

My aunt had come up behind me, with a hand over her mouth.

"Let him in," she said. "Please. Please, he's my husband."

I had a hundred good reasons to say no, and I had been saving them for months.

But I had also stood at a gate once, with my palm on a steel door.

"He doesn't go down there," I said. "He stays in the front room, and I lock the stairs."

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