5 Chapter 4.5 - Rain (Interlude 1)

The steady sound of water thrumming against the roof was soothing to most. For the young man inside though, it was just annoying. He stuffed the buds deeper into his ears, trying to drown out the sounds of the rain on his roof with some thick and heavy sounds from the rock on his phone. As he tried to refocus on his game something seemed to scuttle over the window behind him. His music and the rain hid the sounds extremely well from him, veiling the scurrying danger approaching with ease.

The creak of the door was masked by the sounds of thunder booming overhead. The young man jumped at the shocking burst of noice cutting through his music, but shook it off before getting up to go make himself a cup of coffee. It was starting to stress him, this storm. Something this large in the middle of Winter made no sense to him...

To bad it wasn't going to matter to much in a couple of minutes. Unknown to him, the storm had given cover to the first of many problems for a group of rogue agents in the United States, Japan, Australia, Korea, Canada, Britain, and dozens of other groups worldwide... A crash as a mug falls to the ground from his hands, his screams being drowned out by the raging storm outside...

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A woman hummed quietly as she washed the dishes, not noticing the skittering black shape pulling itself along the edge of the floorboards behind her. A soft hissing was silent by comparison to her humming and the running water. She thought on what she might be able to make for dinner tonight for her family, lightly considering a peach cobbler as a dessert. Sadly, as she turned to place a plate in the draining rack, she saw it scuttling up to the counter and opened her mouth to scream as it leapt towards her face. Her daughter dropped her book in surprise and came down, and the numbers grew from there...

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The slushy mixture drizzled against the window of the bus as he watched the world rolling by outside of it. Anchorage was now cold, but unfortunately not enough to produce anything thicker than a slushee from the gas station. His eyes turned as the driver pulled to a stop and went to let a man aboard. Something was wrong with the way he moved... Was this a drunk, or junkie of some kind? Just his luck, he guessed. Best to watch the guy and be ready to move or act if the odd older male approached. He just wanted to get to his stop and do his mile walk to work. He hoped the creep would leave him alone.

Thankfully, he chose to stay near the front. He didn't seem to be doing anything, besides twitching in slightly sporadic ways. Maybe it was a mental tic? Four stops later, with the guy moving oddly in ways that made all of the other passengers notice, he pulled the cord to be let off the bus. As the vehicle slowed to a halt and the shutter for the back door got pulled, the strange man began to mutter gibberish and began to stand up.

Call it a subconscious sense of preservation, but the young male grabbed his stuff and moved quickly. He turned and froze in horror, seeing something mortifying poking out of the man's mouth as he began to rush the driver to shut the door shutters. Whatever this guy wanted, it wasn't going to be pleasant. He reached back and grabbed for anyone to pull them free before the doors trapped them, pulling free a young female and a man in a uniform. When the door slammed nearly on the man's foot and the bus began to shake, the windows fogged up with heat from panicked screams clashing against the chill emanating from the outside of the windows and doors.

"Mister...call the cops. Get away from here, and got the friggin' cops. You got me?? Move!" The man stood stunned for a second, then nodded and took off. The guy turned to his only other rescue and looked at her, before popping open his umbrella and waving her under. "Let's go call your mom and get out of this rain. We should try to keep you safe and away from the media nightmare this is about to become... After that, I get to call my job and explain why I can't make it in less than an hour anymore and hope they let me keep it. Crummy as it is, it does help pay for a roof." He huffs as he mutters, gently taking the girls hand to head to a safe location. He didn't realize that the eyes were watching him through the fogged and bloodied windows... Or what he had just gotten dragged into the middle of.