Cascade

The Garden's Keeper

I could already hear my parents' frantic yelling as I pulled up the drive. I'd had to fight my way to my car with a broken pipe I'd been lucky enough to find in the parking deck. Those thing were everywhere, and more people were still crouched over, bleeding in the street as their bodies twisted and oozed, either melting them down or turning them.

It didn't affect everyone though; I was one of the lucky ones it seemed. The rain poured down on me when I stepped out of my car. It soaked through my clothes, patches of their colors oozing off in a mixture of steam and syrupy goo. My car wasn't in much better shape, it was a wonder that I even made it home. The paint had already mostly been stripped off and the rain was starting to slowly eat away at the metal. What was this stuff? I had never seen something that could do this to paint or dyes, but it could eat through metal and mutate people too?

And yet here I stood, hair plastered to my skull and rain dripping down my skin while I remained completely unharmed. It left a strange tingling feeling on my skin and that was all. No melting, no loss of color, no mutating.

It didn't seem to affect the plants either. Maybe that's why my clothes weren't melting down further then color loss. They were cotton after all.

I made my way to the front door, shaking off as much of the liquid and goo as I could under the protection of the awning before knocking on the door. There was a sound of scurrying before my mother opened the door, her face and skin pale as bone china.

"Gray, you're soaked! Are you all right?" she asked in a high-pitched voice. I nodded, as her hands fluttered around me like she wanted to help, but wasn't sure if the liquid would harm her. In the end she stepped aside a gestured for my to come inside. "Quickly, those things are everywhere!" she said before turning towards the inside of the house and calling for my dad. "Richard, I need a towel!"

I hurried through the door onto the tiled floor of the entryway as my dad came in from the hallway. He threw me a towel and I immediately started to dry myself off.

It was quiet as I toweled off my hair, my mother wringing her hands as she and dad watched me with nervous expressions. "You weren't affected by that stuff, the rain?" asked my mother after awhile.

I shook my head. "I'm not the only one, I saw a lot of other people trying to escape on my way here."

My mother and father exchanged nervous glances and my father swallowed. "The news said that this was happening all over the country, but not everywhere. Some of it's already passed, the news people said it lasted about five hours," he said quietly "No one knows what it is, said they had the greatest scientist working on it."

"From what I saw it's like it's some kind of acid, it can eat through metal and I'm not even sure what it's doing to the paint and those people." I fell silent with a shaky breath.

My mother nodded to herself. "We need to get out of town as soon as it stops. Find somewhere safe, away from those things."

Images of those things flashed before my eyes, still fresh. Men and women and children all being cut down as they tried to escape from those snarling monsters with twisted black claws. My ears rang with the sounds of their screams as their blood pooled into the street, mixing with the paint and the rain. I tasted bile on my tongue as I forcefully shoved the thoughts away.

I swallowed it back and nodded. "Yeah, we should."

~ ~ ~

I let out a light sigh of content as a warm breeze brushed against my face. It was a nice change from the normal coolness of the fall, but as another warm breeze brushed against me I couldn't help wrinkling my nose at its odd, coppery sent.