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  Rain, dripping off his clothing, made the blood on the floor look pink.

  A young woman in his path slapped at the dripping man who had come into their sanctuary, hoping to get some distance from him since she recognized the woman. She took a nasty slice across her palm but managed to half-slide under a table at a booth, her hand curled protectively to her chest.

  Lydia screamed, “No. No. No.” over and over as she watched in horror as her boyfriend, Chris, attacked all in his path, sent them running away from him or to the ground, bloodied and injured. He was the big man who had been the third one through the door, and his eyes seem to be searching for her.

  Lydia covered her face with one of her arms, waiting for the knife to slice into her; Jake and Pax prepared to hit Chris with a tackle.

  But something else happened first.

  Chapter 13

  Across from Coral’s Diner in the other direction was the big Catholic Church with a tall steeple and stained glass; it was one of the oldest buildings in town, built solid and beautifully. After mass, parishioners watched a violent attack right in front of the church on the steps. In mass, they had retreated and called the police, only to be told this was going on all over, to avoid the rain at all costs, and stay dry with a group until daylight, and then the rain had stopped.

  Some of the ladies had set up with cookies and coffee and iced tea and soda for the younger set. They used the kitchen to whip up sandwiches: tuna salad, chicken salad, ham and cheese, and cheese with tomatoes. There were chips and dip, and one of the ladies set out a salad and dressing.

  Everyone had theories and ideas about what was going on that he shared or raved about, depending on one’s view of what sharing was. Tired of the bantering, Joleen thought she would just go out into the rain and be done with it all. This was maddening to be stuck here.

  Some said there was something wrong with the rain that fell relentlessly from the sky, but Joleen didn’t believe in government conspiracies or that any aliens were testing them; that was all spook-talk and silly.

  The younger kids were all suggesting that aliens had come down and poisoned the rain or that a giant alien was watching them like one would watch an upset, angry hill of ants. Some laughed and thought this was a grand adventure.

  The older folks were trying to rationalize everything and come up with a logical reason for the sudden violence; one or two began speaking of an apocalypse, but most thought it was mass hysteria, but those who dismissed the worry and said it wasn’t the rain causing a rash of violence still didn’t rush out into the water to their cars.

  No, indeed they did not, Joleen noted to herself. They all watched the rain, whispering and wondering, but didn’t stick a toe in the rain.

  They didn’t believe, but they didn’t disbelieve, either.

  “Lookie, the police cruiser is over to the diner now, might be Ronnie….” That was Charles Williams commenting and pointing out the obvious. He was an African American man that worked at the big spa, making reservations and commiserating with the aches and pains of all who came there. He dressed in fancy clothes: a starched button-up, long sleeved shirt, silk tie {bought at a shop not in Cold Springs}, and crisp wool slacks every day of the year.

  “I think Charlie is right…looks like one of the cruisers,” Shelly Dulane said.

  While Joleen waited for a chance to slip past those who were keeping them here in the church, yes, like prisoners, she occupied herself by fixing coffee and tea and plates of cookies for everyone. She patted everyone’s arms in a motherly way and murmured that they would all be fine.

  Her mind was somewhere else; the other day at Mildred’s house, Joleen had done something so unlike herself, so very funny, that she still giggled to herself about how clever she was to have thought of such mischief.

  While Mildred was in her bathroom with its fresh white paint, blue butterflies all over the walls, and a cute crocheted toilet and tank cover, Joleen took a bag from her heavy purse and exchanged three-fourths of the artificial sweetener with real sugar. There on the counter was a fruit gelatin box ready to be mixed for a sugarless treat that Mildred could snack on; Joleen exchanged the packet inside with one she had brought that was far more flavorful and full of sugar.

  With a smile, she suggested Mildred go and sit on the sofa and relax and find some of the shows they enjoyed: where doctors always saved patients at the last second and had brilliant, perfect white smiles, and never wore anything but fancy duds. She prepared things for Mildred to enjoy all that day and the next since Mildred seldom went out. Jolene made a very sugary pitcher of lemonade and a strong, sweet kettle of tea and exchanged some cookies that she put on a plate.

  Joleen wasn’t sure what the sugar might do but knew that Mildred was diabetic and wasn’t supposed to have it. She poured mints into her handbag and from a zippered bag, added sugared ones in the little bowl; they looked just alike.

  What a fine joke this was. She had been very angry with Mildred.

  Joleen kept her hair long and tightly braided and went down to the salon to get a rinse put in every so often so that it didn’t have that terrible yellow color.

  At eighty, she was still very active, walking around the block each day and helping at the church. If she had had one regret, besides losing her husband of fifty years some ten years before, it was only that her false teeth were a little too big and made her seem wolfish when she looked into the mirror.

  Joleen felt a wave of intense passion for doing her mischief.

  Right now in the church while everyone discussed the rain. Mildred sipped a sweet cup of coffee that Joleen had made for her, making Joleen almost laugh out loud at her little joke. “I’ll get you more when you want,” she promised Mildred.

  “You make the best cup of tea,” Mildred remarked.

  Joleen didn’t know it, but she had a prank played on her as well, a terrible prank that would cause great heartache.

  She would go home and find her precious silky-haired white cat, Penelope, with one leg ending in a stump, torn and bloody. Blood would be all over the floor and the soft white fur. The actual paw would be in one of the big rat traps Joleen kept in the attic for vermin but which was there in the middle of Joleens’s pristine white kitchen. The cat hadn’t really gotten a foot caught in the trap and gnawed its foot off, but the tableau was set up to seem that way, and Joleen would be hysterical.

  She would say it was her fault: Penelope must have gone up and gotten into the trap, made it back to the kitchen, and then died while trying to free herself by chewing away the offending foot. Joleen would wail and berate herself for even having the traps in her home, but then she know who was to blame, and she would make him pay.

  Charles Williams had set the stage himself, and because he wasn’t an evil person or sadistic, he had killed the cat before removing the paw and setting up the prank on old Miss Joleen, putting one trap where it would have the biggest effect. His brain itched when he thought about what he had done.

  When he went home, he would find they had been the subjects of a prank as well. ‘Nigger’ and ‘coon’ were written in black magic markers all over his house on Grande Street, scribbled on the front door, a pretty eggshell blue, and on the cream-colored siding. The offending words were written again in oily red lipstick and in something that was malodorous. The words would hurt Charles deeply.

  No one had ever been rude to them, but they were two of the only ten black people in the whole town. People that Charles and his mother were around, such as their neighbors, were mystified by those who judged others by skin color. Charles never had felt even the slightest hint of racial discrimination. Had people been hiding how they really felt? Who thought that about them?

  He would wonder who could have defaced their door that way. They would be outraged by the excrement rubbed into the siding of the home, wiped on the fabric of the seats and the wood of the rocking chairs on the porch, and mashed into the floorboards. Everywhere, they saw nasty, foul dog turds. And who had a dog
on their street?

  Bryce Landell.

  Charles would recall how the man walked past their house every evening with his dog, Slugger that never seemed as friendly to Charles as he did to the rest of the neighbors. Was Slugger a racist dog?

  Bryce Landell had been busy as well because he pranked Aimee Bright. Pretending to be someone else for a day or two on the computer, he had gained her trust and then had done something so clever and funny that it was almost too much to bear. {Periodically, Bryce broke into giggles for no reason anyone could see}.

  A few years before, Aimee had been a cheerleader and homecoming queen, and now, seven years after high school graduation, she was just as pretty as a speckled coon dog with her long blonde hair, good skin, and perfect teeth and pretty blue eyes. She was a very pretty girl, and everyone knew it and remarked about it.

  Oh, she was a smart one and worked at the library and had reading classes for little kids, and everybody liked her, but she was too good, she thought, to date locals. She was all over-stuffed about herself; she was full of herself.

  Bryce might not have been much in the looks and charm department with his nerdy ways and big over bite and thick, coke-bottle glasses, but he was smart.

  Aimee had a double whammy. Yesterday, while she was at work, he sneaked into her house and smelled her panties and pillow, but we won’t mention that part in her bedroom (where he felt the soft fabric of a burgundy satin bra that was glossy, cool, and slick and tossed to the floor), he added a little juice from Toxicodendron Radicans also known as poison ivy to her face cream and hand cream.

  ‘Leaflets three, let it be.’

  And he added a strong hair remover to her shampoo and conditioner.

  The rest was much easier. He simply set a program on the computer to bombard her email and Face Book pages with ads and web pages for weight loss and a site for Fatty Chasers; at a slim hundred and fifteen pounds, she worried obsessively about her weight. She would be assailed with images of fat women and suggestions that she should diet away the extra pounds.

  Watching her there in the church as she worried about the rain and talked about it to everyone, Bryce chuckled, excited for her to go home and use the cream and shampoo and to get a bashing about her weight; it was just such a funny prank. Maybe it would make her less sure of herself and a little less snobby if she had doubts about her weight and a rash on her skin and excessive hair loss.

  Beauty, meet the Beast.

  Bryce worked at the pharmacy, and while it was true that sometimes he felt very nervous and sneaked a few tablets from a prescription, he did well at his job and gave people advice about their medications and helped everyone in town stay healthier.

  Every day he grinned with his big choppers and wore the blue, calming pharmacy coat on his skinny frame ( his Adam’s apple stood out like Ichabod Crane) and helped his neighbors get their medication as prescribed and ignored the fact that some of the patrons snickered at him and thought he was unattractive.

  Unfortunately for him, soon, he would have been the talk of the town as people found in the street or sitting on benches, leaflets that promised, “Cheap abortions, no questions asked, done in the back room under sterile conditions” with his name, the address of the pharmacy, and the phone number. The newspaper personnel would have come over and ask why on earth he wanted a quarter of a page for an ad for back room abortions.

  He would have been furious at the prank, of course, and when approached by Father Tom, he angrily would have led the priest to the back room which Bryce hardly ever used and thrown open the door to show how dusty and unused it really was. Unfortunately, the prankster had hung a plastic baby from the ceiling and covered it with fake blood.

  Bryce would have fainted and smacked his head hard enough to need a few stitches.

  The little old lady down the street, Mildred, had used an old baby doll and bottle of ketchup for that prank, and a computer and copy machine were all one needed to pull a great joke on someone.

  Aimee, who would lose her pretty golden hair and break out in a terrible itchy rash that would scar, had pulled her own prank on Drew, the man who had defaced Charles’s home with dog poop.

  She had slid glossy porn pictures into his sock drawer in the bathroom behind the soaps, in the laundry room on a shelf, in the garage, and between the mattresses, and Aimee had left Drew’s wife a note in the mailbox saying that Drew was a porn addict. Aimee was on the Internet and Face Book all the time, and it was nothing to subscribe Drew to a ton of porn websites that would pop up in his e-mail.

  Soon, Drew would also have gotten mail from companies with samples of enhancement products, wild toys, ads for swinger’s clubs, and more.

  Aimee had finished by taking gallons of bleach and dosing his prized roses and miniature gardenias and azaleas.

  If you asked each of them: Drew, Charles, Mildred, Joleen, Bryce, and Aimee why they did such terrible things, they wouldn’t have an answer at all but would look blank and confused and claim it was a simple prank they had thought of. No one had suggested it to them.

  Deep inside, Drew had always disliked Charles because…well…he was black. And Joleen thought Mildred made way too much of her medical issues; Bryce thought Aimee was a snotty bitch, and Charles considered Joleen a busy body in everyone’s business. Drew was attractive, and Aimee might have dated him, but what did he do, he up and married that piece of trash from the trailer park!

  The compulsions had worked their way into each person’s head, squirming and digging for the little things that set each off, and once an action was taken, it was as if the itch were purged and cleaned, and then serenity began to set in.

  They might not have acted as violently but would be as smooth as anyone else in a few days.

  They were of the slow process.

  Chapter 14

  They didn’t particularly recall the little shower, sprinkle actually, that had come up a few days before, barely dropping any water at all; Mildred counted a few drops that landed on her, making her hair frizz. Mildred and Joleen had been admiring Drew’s roses. Aimee had closed the sunroof of her car as she backed out of the driveway with a half-hearted wave to buck-toothed Bryce as he picked up a piece of litter from his lawn. Charles and his mother sat on the porch, rocking, but Charles had been gathering the mail when the little drops fell.

  Of the other two houses on Grande Street, one was empty with a cheerful For Sale sign on the front lawn, and the other was a corner lot that sided up to Hickory and belonged to Lydia and her daughter, Samantha, but neither had been outside at the time.

  But that is what some of the people in the Catholic Church across from Coral’s Diner were doing as both the night and the rain fell.

  “God have mercy,” Father Tom almost yelled as he watched the action across the street.

  They could all see clearly into the windows of Coral’s. Everything was happening at once: a woman jumped on a table and was fighting with some people, a man was swinging something at people, knocking them down, and a big, burly man {who looked kind of like Lydia’s man Chris, but he was a good man and would never do this} was raising and slashing with what was a big butcher knife?

  “That’s Ronnie over there; she’ll get ‘em straight,” a voice called out.

  “Coral can handle it,” someone said.

  Father Tom said a silent prayer and drew everyone back into the church, away from the rain. No one tried to leave, but all talked about more theories.

  Someone brought up Noah and his Ark; that possibility, that it was the end-of-time-flood that drew the older people and younger on the same side.

  It might rain poison forever.

  Chapter 15

  Ronnie pulled her gun, and on the exhale, she pulled the trigger. Three bullets hit Chris in the head. She wasn’t crazed by rain but just protecting the people in the diner, doing her duty.

  Lydia screamed.

  In Coral’s Diner, people began scurrying to safety, to secure the violent maniacs, to bandage a
nd calm those who had been injured, and to restore order.

  Lydia stood and screamed hysterically, and Ronnie, her jaw open, looked at the man on the ground, whom she had shot and killed. Her blood was running cold in her veins.

  Ronnie let her arm fall to the side and shook as she watched Chris bleeding out and listened to Lydia screaming.

  “Now simmer down,” Coral roared. The two police officers were useless as they looked to Coral for instruction. “One thing at a time.”

  Coral gently pushed Ronnie’s hand down and helped her holster her gun. He ordered her to go to the counter, sit down, and drink some soda or coffee to combat shock. Like a child, she obeyed, and Mark took her arm to help her along although she cut her eyes to the side to watch Coral.

  Coral went to Chris and checked for a pulse, shook his head, and sighed as Lydia cried harder. Ronnie had actually made a fantastic shot, but she took no pride in it.

  Dan and George had the woman, Daisy, hanging between them as they carried her to the storeroom; sadly, the dead would just have to share space with the violent people. They tied up Daisy even if she did have extensive head injuries and was unconscious. They tried to feel sorry for Daisy, but she had used the fork to stab Carrie and had crossed over to being a criminal.

  Jake carried the toddler to the back (Coral again noted the tiny Chuck Taylor sneakers), and then he carried the little girl to the back, her blonde pig tails with the blood dried to sharp little points. Jobie helped with the woman and then with the partially eaten teen boy. They laid the bodies in a line and covered them with the diner’s tablecloths. Each of them looked sick after having to move the pitiful bodies to the back.

  Bill, who had barreled in and wielded a brick at people, was still out cold from where Mark had bashed him in his head, but they tied him up as well.