Weathered

I ran inside with mascara and eyeliner smeared down my face. “Get in the basement!” I yelled to Edgar, my husband of 30 years. He looked confused as he began to ask what was wrong. “Edgar, there’s no time. Get in the basement or you will die!” Edgar considered my words for a moment before deciding to listen to me. I don’t think I’d ever seen him run before, but he was running now.

“What’s going on?” he asked, searching for the light switch.

Edgar was a fat man. He had thinning grey hair, the most pathetic mustache you’d ever seen, and yet he somehow maintained the ego of a young buck. He was charismatic and funny. He made all the girls laugh every day at his firm. I heard them giggling when I’d visit. They’d stop abruptly when I walked in. Luckily, he had decided to retire.

We had less of a basement and more of a bunker. It was twice the depth further underground than a normal basement with no windows and no contact with the outside world. “Edgar, you were right about building this place. It’s horrible out there!” I threw myself into his arms and sobbed so hard it made my head hurt. He pulled me in close to him and let me regain my senses before I began explaining. “It’s the rain. Everything was normal this morning. All of a sudden, this afternoon the rain began to tingle on my skin. Some people started to say it burned and then they just started melting. People melted in front of me, Edgar! Their skin separated and dripped from their muscles, and I watched them die! The flesh slid off their bone like a fucking rack of ribs!” I sobbed even more loudly than before.

Edgar was in shock. He couldn’t find the words to say until he finally asked, “Well are you alright?” I showed him a small but painful burn on my arm. “I don’t know what it is, but some of us are able to go into it without experiencing it the same. I’m so confused. We were sent home and told to not leave the house until further instructions. They said to test everyone in our homes with this!” I pulled out a small glass vial. “Well, what is it?” Edgar looked at the tube as if it contained all the world’s worst secrets. “It’s the rain. They want us to test and see who is able to go out and who isn’t. We know I can. Maybe you can too!”

I took the tiniest drop and touched it to Edgar’s extended wrist. “Shit!” Edgar yelled in pain as his skin sizzled. I looked at Edgar and tears filled my eyes again. “Edgar, you’re not immune.” “Well, what does that mean,” he asked quietly? “It means you have to stay here,” I choked. “You have to stay down here in the basement until this is all over. We can’t risk you being on the main floor. We don’t know how strong this is. Even a breeze when the door opens is enough to kill you. I’ve seen someone with my own eyes die within fifteen minutes. She cooked in front of me. I wanted to save her but I didn’t know what to do!”

I pulled out the necklace. A thick silver chain surrounded a small, white gold locket with a heart shaped ruby encased in its tiny claws. On the inside, a photo of Tiffany’s late husband smiled back at them. “Tiffany,” Edgar had whispered. “She was such a pretty girl. It was horrible to see, Edgar. I took a photo because I didn’t want people to think I was crazy until I started seeing it happen to other people!” I pulled out my phone. “No!” Edgar had shouted almost too quickly. “I believe you.” Tears filled the edges of his eyes as he held the locket in his hands and gently placed it in his pocket.

“Honey, look, we have to start thinking differently now. We have to get more supplies down here. This may be enough for a few days, but we need to get non-contaminated supplies before people start getting greedy. Do you understand? I have to go out to get more, and I need you to stay here.” I put on a brave face, knowing how he must feel with being so helpless right now. Edgar nodded, still touching the locket.

Two Weeks Later

It was the same routine every day, all day at home. I had made Edgar promise not to come up to the main floor. It was for his own safety. I locked the basement door when I left each day to keep him from coming out into the murderous rain. When I got home in the evenings, I prepared dinner. Every day we had canned food to avoid cooking with anything that needed to be made with water. Edgar hated it. He loved to eat, and he loved when I cooked. He had slowly begun losing weight for the first time since his twenties. His blood pressure was through the roof from all the sodium in the canned food though, and he often complained of being weak.

His morbid curiosity had gotten the better of him one day. He had asked to see the photo I had snapped of Tiffany. He lost his lunch when I showed him. She was unrecognizable. Her once perfect skin had been stripped off her face. It took him two days to notice what I thought he never would.

“Is this photo taken at her apartment?” He asked in an innocent tone, though I knew this would be hard to explain if this day had ever come. “It is. It started to happen outside of the firm. I had stopped by to get your retirement paperwork when I saw her. I brought her to her place because I wanted to find some way to help her. The hospitals were overrun with so many patients and emergency services weren’t answering. By the time I got her inside though it was too late.” “You have such a good heart,” he smiled. We attempted another rain test. Once again, Edgar was burned.

The next morning as I got ready to go out, I locked the basement door. I logged onto our computer and ordered a second gallon of hydrochloric acid from the trusty dark web.

I thought about how I had felt when I found the locket in our bedroom. Tiffany hadn’t been very careful in messing around with my husband, and she had no clue who she was fucking with. I knew her username and password from a sticky note she stupidly had written it down on in her living room.

So, I got ready for my day of working from home as Tiffany. I received and sent her messages, attended her conference calls, and even went and checked on her once a week to see if her body had been discovered. Eventually, it would start to smell. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep this up.

Just like every other day though, I put my coat on and stepped out into a world that had never really changed at all.



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