Booze.

Marylou needed booze.

Any booze. A tall boy would do. A fifth of a fifth of vodka. A goddamned apple cider. Anything.

One drink and she'd be good as new, ready to face another day of re-boarding the windows. Of breaking doors into wood for warmth and light. Of ransacking the cafeteria next door. Of roaming around endlessly the once-crowded-now-deserted halls of Kennedy High in that perpetual seesaw she lived now, oscillating from bored to terrified to bored to terrified, depending on the weather.

Not that the weather was ever good. But there were several levels of bad. Several instances of the Storm, ranging from I-might-die' to I'm-probably-gonna-die' to 'I'm-definitely-gonna-die'. Tonight, the rain was somewhere between the two last options.

She closed her eyes and listened to the thunderclapping of the raindrops, loud like bugs smashing against the glass pane over her head. A distant thud informed her that a window board had given in, somewhere on the other side of the building.

"Welcome, Ghosts," she said. "Please, make yourselves at home."

It was a joke, the kind she had to tell herself every so often to keep the fear at bay. She didn't believed in the Ghosts. Had never seen one. Had never met anyone who had seen one, or anyone who knew anyone who had seen one. Any Ghost stories she knew were always a-friend-of-a-friend's. Third hand at best.

And Marylou wasn't exactly the kind of girl that could easily be convinced of the existence of invisible rain-monsters that roam the endless storm, waiting for a chance to suck your insides out through your every hole.

But you don't have to believe in something to be scared of it. Like her grandma Teresa used to say: Yo no creo en brujas, pero que las hay, las hay.

I don't believe in witches, but they exist nonetheless.

She felt a coarse touch against her skin and pulled back, startled for a second, her mind still on the image of thin, long-limbed shadows roaming around the rain. Then she relaxed.

"Hey, there, Evil Noodle," she whispered, relieved and feeling a bit silly. "You got any beer in you?"

The ball python coiled around her wrist and she brought it up to eye level. It raised its tiny head and seemed to look Marylou right in the eye. Tongue flashing in and out of its mouth every couple of seconds as if checking for food.

"Yeah, I'm hungry too," Marylou said. The snake bluff charged her. She didn't flinch. "What? At least you got your rats. Stop complaining."

The snake trailed down her chest and leg, dropping down to the floor and dancing away towards the dark of the corridor ahead.

"You'll be back," Marylou said, faking a soap opera voice. "You always come back, my love!"

And true that was, but not because of Marylou. She knew the snake's loyalty was not to herself, but to the fire. Snakes can't make bonfires out of doors and chairs, but they do feel cold. Or at least Evil Noodle did, because it kept coming back every night to ball up near the fire, eyes up to her now and then as if inquiring about the marshmallows.

Then, after warming up enough, it would crawl away back into the darkness, because snakes also can't be afraid of Ghosts or the end of the world.

Marylou watched the snake fade away in the misty darkness ahead. With her used-to-be-a-teacher's-desk-leg wooden stick, she poked the fire.

It wasn't yet morning, but days and nights were very much alike anyway, and the seesaw was down to the boredom side of Marylou, so she got up to fix the window.

The rain was blasting like carnival drums outside, even worse than before. Looking back, Marylou saw the glass pane rattling like crazy, and hoped it would hold, at least for the night.

That was the last window still intact in the whole building. If she had to board it, she'd lose the outside world completely.

She dipped the wooden stick into the flame until its tip blazed. Held it in front of her face, deep breath, and charged slow steps into the darkness of the hallway. An explorer creeping into a cursed tomb.

The golden light brought to life her old school in a five feet radius around her, changing with every step, but consistently eerie and unfamiliar. Six months were enough to make strangers out of the most familiar things, given the circumstances. And Kennedy High was definitely a stranger now, all broken into pieces and debris and rumble.

The light danced over metal lockers, tumbled over drinking fountains, chairs, desks, lamps, doorknobs -- everything rusty and dented and ruined. To her left, the few doors she hadn't yet brought down for fire stood ajar, their cracks revealing a solid darkness inside the silent classrooms.

This is where I had Math.

This is where I had English.

This is where I made out with Jonathan Lewis.

Every noise would bring her to halt. Every crack of the fire might have come from the darkness behind, or ahead, or to her sides, and she kept reminding herself:

The Ghosts aren't real. The Ghosts aren't real. It's just rain.

Crack, and she'd look back. Just the wind. Maybe a tree collapsing outside. Maybe a manhole bursting open. Maybe Evil Noodle, the bastard.

She reached the bend of the corridor and turned right into the main hallway. In the distance, a pale moon framed in wood revealed the exposed window hole. Even from that far and in the dim light, she could see the rain washing into the hallway like a showerhead turned on just outside. Heavy and steady and merciless, the way the Storm had been since the start.

More confident, she fast-stepped towards the window until the fire light flashed down on the plywood board on the floor. Soaked and cracked, but not broken.

She took a step towards it, then stopped herself just short of the shower.

The Ghosts aren't real. The Ghosts aren't real.

She took a deep breath, then another. A flash of a faceless shadow, just a mouth and a wet clicking noise, creeped into her brain.

It's just rain. Get over yourself, you little bitch.

Marylou let out a quiet wimp, pushing the Ghosts away from her thoughts. The raindrops blasted hard against the board by her feet. Fire and moonlight joined to give her view of the whole path of the shower, from the window to the floor, uninterrupted and dense, almost a vertical river.

One. Two. Three.

She stepped in, grabbed the board and crossed to the other side, cowering behind the torrent, her back against the wall. Soaked, the flame dead on her torch, but safe.

The relief of being out of the rain washed over her like warm chocolate. No Ghosts. No Ghosts. Just cold.

She found two of the three nails on the floor. With her dead torch as hammer, she boarded the window best she could with what she had, and made a note of looking for more nails in the morning.

She started back down the corridor, now with no fire as guide. It took five steps for the darkness to envelop her full, and soon she was zombie-walking at half speed, one hand feeling the emptiness ahead, the other running along the wall.

She looked back at the window for perspective. Once. Twice. Three times.

Her hand touched something. Cold. Wet. For a second only, then nothing. She turned quick and waved her hand.

Complete darkness. Not even the shape of her nose between her eyes.

"Who's there?"

Nothing from the dark.

"I have a... wild animal!" She thought of Evil Noodle. "And a wooden stick! Still hot!"

A screech of the floor tiles reached her, hard to tell how far, but not very.

There are no brujas. There are no brujas.

Even if there are brujas, these particular Ghost-brujas live in the rain, and it's not raining in here, you dim-witted bitch girl. Man up, it's probably just a murderer.

She risked another step. Nothing. The silence was back, a high-pitched note weighing on her ears. Everything around her dark -- an ocean of tar. No sense of direction, of distance. She took another step. She hoped she was reaching the bend of the corridor, the concrete still cold against her left hand. A quick glance behind: a sliver of moon escaped from the cracks of the distant boarded window. It couldn't be far now.

Marylou turned back to the darkness. One more step.

No brujas. There are no brujas.

The wall disappeared from under her hand. Something grabbed her wrist.