Chapter 137: Rain That Shouldn’t Be Here Yet

Chapter 137: Chapter 137: Rain That Shouldn’t Be Here Yet

The thunder hit without warning — a single, violent crack that rattled the windows behind their blackout curtains and sent Aurora shrieking awake in her cradle before anyone had time to react.

"Whoa—" Kai was already moving, but Aunt Mary got there first, scooping Aurora up against her shoulder, murmuring low and steady while the baby’s cries climbed and broke and climbed again.

"That’s new," Ben said, glancing up from the knife and whetstone he’d been working through by lamplight, an activity that had become something close to meditation for him over the last two days.

Another crack followed, closer this time, and beneath it — faint at first, then rapidly, unmistakably louder — the sound of rain beginning to hammer against the building’s exterior.

Erik crossed to the window and drew the blackout curtain aside a careful inch, checking the dark street below rather than the sky itself, old habits from three days of learning that anything visible outside these windows meant something worth knowing.

"It’s actual rain," he said. "Heavy."

Penelope felt something in her chest go very still.

Extreme rain.

She knew that phrase. She’d written it in her own hand, in a notebook she’d filled with half-remembered plot points on the second night in this world, back when she still believed foreknowledge was a weapon she could use to outrun her own death. We will experience extreme rain, which will cause major flooding. Then extreme cold. Then extreme heat.

But not yet. Not this early. In the version of events she’d dreamed, the weather phases hadn’t started until months into the collapse, after the first wave of infrastructure had failed, after most of the population had already turned or died or hardened into whatever they were going to become.

It had been five days since the red sun first appeared.

Too soon.

Across the room, Killian had gone very still as well, his eyes fixed on the gap in the curtain, and when Penelope glanced at him, she caught the exact expression she suspected was sitting on her own face — not fear, not yet, but the particular unease of someone recalculating everything they thought they understood about the shape of the danger ahead.

"That’s early," Killian said quietly, almost to himself.

Erik glanced back from the window, already frowning. "Early for what?"

"The rain," Penelope said. "In what I saw — what I dreamed, before all this started — this phase wasn’t supposed to happen for months. Not five days in."

Erik’s expression sharpened instantly, the same recalibration Penelope had watched cross his face the first time she’d told him and Kai and Aunt Mary the truth about her dreams, weeks ago now, back when Killian had quietly confirmed the same nightmare from his own side and told them, without elaborating, that in whatever he’d seen, she hadn’t survived it.

"You’re sure," Erik said. "This isn’t just early rain. This is the phase itself."

"I’m sure." Penelope glanced at Killian. "Aren’t you?"

Killian nodded once, grim. "Same weather pattern I remember from my own dreams. Extreme rain leading to flooding, then cold, then heat. I never saw it start this fast either."

Another crack of thunder rolled through, and Aurora’s cries pitched sharper against Aunt Mary’s shoulder despite the low, steady rocking, despite the soft words Mary kept murmuring into her hair.

Kai had drifted closer from the window, arms crossed, some of his usual looseness gone from his posture. "So the timeline’s wrong."

"The timeline’s wrong," Killian confirmed.

Erik’s jaw tightened, the same controlled stillness he brought to every piece of bad news, processing rather than panicking. "What does that mean for us. Practically."

"It means we can’t fully trust anything either of us remembers anymore," Penelope said. "Not the timing, at least. We still know the shape of what’s coming — the categories, the order of the phases — but if the schedule’s already broken this badly, I don’t know if we get three months of rain like the dream showed me, or three days."

"Or worse," Killian added. "If something’s accelerated the weather, there’s no guarantee it hasn’t accelerated the severity too."

The room went quiet apart from Aurora’s slowly settling cries and the rain thickening steadily against the glass, no longer scattered but a full, driving wall of sound now, loud enough that Penelope could hear it even through the reinforced windows and the drawn curtains.

Aunt Mary was the one who finally broke it, her voice steady despite the tightness around her eyes, still swaying gently with Aurora against her chest. "Then we prepare for the version we don’t know is coming. Not the one we hoped for."

Erik nodded slowly, already shifting into the particular mode Penelope recognized from every crisis she’d watched him handle — grief and uncertainty set aside for later, replaced by the cold, practical calculus of what do we do about it right now.

"If flooding’s coming," he said, "we need boats. Rain gear. Anything waterproof, anything that floats, anything that gets us moving if the streets become rivers." He glanced toward the curtain, toward the rain hammering steadily beyond it. "There’s a sporting goods store near the marina. Boating supplies, waders, tents — enough to outfit the whole floor if we move fast."

"Tonight," Killian said. It wasn’t a question.

"Tonight," Erik agreed. "Before this gets any worse and the roads become impossible."

Kai was already reaching for his axe, propped in its usual place by the door. "Well. At least the zombies probably hate the rain as much as we do."

"They don’t feel anything," Ben said quietly, not looking up from the whetstone.

"I know. I’m choosing to believe otherwise. Let me have this."

Penelope stood, some of the old fog finally beginning to lift from behind her ribs — not gone, not resolved, Vanya’s face and Oddy’s unfinished sentence still sitting exactly where she’d left them, unaddressed, unexplained. But there was something steadying about having a concrete threat again, something with edges she could actually fight instead of a fear that lived entirely inside her own head.

"I’m coming," she said.

Erik studied her for a moment — the same searching look he’d been giving her for two days now, the one that never quite got an honest answer out of her about whatever else was wrong — and this time, he simply nodded.

"I know," he said. "Get your gear."

Behind them, Aurora had finally quieted against Aunt Mary’s shoulder, small hiccupping breaths the only sign left of the storm that had woken her, though the thunder outside showed no sign at all of doing the same.