The Day the Rains Came

Small towns have a certain allure. It might be the landscape or the architecture. It might be the people. It might even be a combination of things, and Fallover was no different. It was just another small town with its share of lore and mystique—two qualities which seemed to rise and fall in proportion to the number of tourists who were in town—but all-in-all, Fallover could have been Anywhere, USA.

Until the rains came.

Until the bad things started.

That’s what Roger Crocket eventually called them: the bad things.

Roger’s goldfish had turned belly up the day the rains came, and even though no one (including Roger) understood on that day that it would be remembered as the day the rains came for as long as Fallover existed, Roger did understand a fish who was belly up was a goner. He also understood that his fish had been fine earlier that morning. (Of course, that idea remained in the boy’s subconscious until he began to connect the rains to the beginning of the bad things.)

The passing of a goldfish isn’t cause for alarm, and neither is rain—even the odd spurts Fallover was experiencing at a time of the year during which precipitation was basically unheard of—but after nearly two weeks of the rains, it wasn’t just a small boy grieving for his goldfish who began to notice something was very wrong—that bad things were happening.

The rains that came to Fallover were not unrelenting showers spread out over days-on-end. They began as one or two daily instances of sudden, torrential downpours that lasted no longer than one minute a piece. There was never a cloud in the sky, nor was there a change in the temperature, and the smell that should have been in the air was absent: in other words, the rains came out of nowhere.

It became apparent that the passing of each little storm left a tragedy in its wake: Roger’s goldfish had been the first, but to the list had been added a variety of in-home mishaps, several traffic collisions, and the fire that had broken out so suddenly at the town’s only grocery.

If you were to chart these events—as many in Fallover began to do—you’d have noticed that each new rain brought with it a tragedy of increasing seriousness. The first few in-home mishaps were things like small appliances malfunctioning, but these events quickly escalated to include larger appliances.

When the ice-maker on Mrs. Tarlson’s refrigerator shot out a knife-like “cube” that embedded itself into her forearm, people began to get worried.

The traffic accidents followed a similar path: first, a car that had been parked before one of the storms ended up in motion after the rain had passed—it took out a large section of the fence surrounding the grade school. Shortly thereafter, car-chasing dogs became a thing of the past. Just before objects began igniting in Fallover, a cadet was run-over in the fire house. No one had seen what happened, but little sense could made of a man’s being found beneath the rear tires of a fire truck that was parked as usual in the station house.

The escalating tragedies were only part of the problem: with the passing of time, the frequency of the rains had increased: near the end of the fourth week, they occurred up to five times each day.

By the time the residents of Fallover realized leaving might be the only thing standing between themselves and death, the fence had been put up around the entire town. No one saw it go up, and no one had heard anything either.

One morning it was just there.

Everywhere.

Surrounding Fallover.

It had been six weeks since the day the rains came, and suddenly, the people of Fallover were trapped. The bad things continued after each of the storms, but once the fence went up, worse things began to occur.

Fallover lost all contact with the outside world. While the residents still had electricity, not a television or a radio or a telephone worked. Meanwhile, each time one of the rains ended, a fire broke out. The grocery had gone up first, and though this complicated the food situation in town, at least no one had been inside. Shortly after the store burned, the first occupied vehicle was incinerated. The next day, an entire house (and its family) was reduced to ashes.

The rains had become even more frequent, and like the clocks that chimed the hour in Fallover, the rains marked the passing of time—as did the fires.

Bit-by-bit, person-by-person, and building-by-building, Fallover was being transformed into piles of charred and soggy rubble.

Roger was trying to explain to his mother and his grandparents that all of all of the bad things had started with the death of his goldfish when another of the rains came. Roger’s mother went to the back door and yelled for her husband to come in from the garage. As she yelled, the rain stopped. The sound of the pelting drops was instantly replaced by the WHOOSH of the flames that engulfed her home, her son, and her parents.

Roger’s father didn’t bother to watch his home and family burn to the ground. He knew, as did everyone who was left in Fallover, that the fires burned so fast and hot that nothing would be left of everything he had loved in his life.

Turning back to the garage, Roger’s father got into his car and drove to the section of the fence closest to what had only moments before been his home. He got out of the car and looked the fence up and down. After several minutes, he ran straight at it, determined to climb his way out of Fallover.

As Roger’s father ran toward the black monster that kept Fallover’s residents at bay, another of the rains fell, and at the instant he hit the fence, the rain stopped.

His body exploded into fleshy particles as water droplets mixed with the high voltage of the fence.

A lone, dry spot remained to mark the last efforts of a man—until the next of the Fallover rains fell.