Free Armageddon Heights (a thriller) by D. M. Mitchell

with sweat. He gladly took a sip out of the water bottle Amanda Tyler handed him.
    ‘I’ve had practice,’ Wade said vacantly, studying the horizon for any sign of the bus driver. ‘I’ll be fine on my own.’
    ‘We’re good for a while yet,’ said Amanda.
    ‘We can’t stay out much longer,’ Wade observed. ‘If we don’t see him soon we’re going to have to call the search off anyway.’
    They began to move off again, walking in a line about twelve feet apart from each other.
    ‘So where do you reckon we are?’ said Amanda. ‘I mean, this is simply bizarre.’
    ‘No idea,’ Wade replied.
    ‘Aren’t you the least bit frightened?’
    He glanced at her. ‘I’m trying not to think too much about it.’ In fact he knew why he was out here searching for the bus driver, and why his two companions had offered to help. It gave them all a focus, helped redirect their fears into something useful, an action – any action – that put a lid on them having to face the incredible truth. It was evident from the way no one had mentioned their situation till now, each keeping their turbulent thoughts to themselves.
    ‘Rains of fish,’ Martin Bolan called as they trudged along.
    ‘Fish?’ said Amanda.
    ‘Sure, you know, you hear about such things, don’t you? All manner of things falling down from the sky in rainstorms. Fish, frogs – I even heard tell of dogs and cats. That’s where we get the phrase from: raining cats and dogs. Some experts say that things which live in the sea are scooped up into the atmosphere by storms and deposited on land many hundreds of miles away.’
    ‘And dogs and cats?’ said Amanda. ‘They don’t live in the sea.’
    ‘They don’t know everything, of course,’ said Bolan. ‘Some things remain a mystery.’
    ‘What has falls of fishes to do with us?’ Amanda said.
    Wade listened idly to their conversation, but his attention was elsewhere. His mind playing back the day of the doomed patrol...
    ‘We were driving through a storm last night. The worst I’ve seen in a long time,’ said Bolan. ‘I don’t know, maybe we were somehow picked up and dropped here by a freak of nature.’
    ‘An entire bus?’ said Amanda smiling.
    Wade remembered entering the mud-brick house, how cool it felt compared to the heat outside, but inside his uniform he was sweating like mad, his nerves balanced on a knife edge.
    John Travers was first in, checking all was clear. Wade hot on his heels, covering his back. Something felt wrong. Something that lingered just under the natural trepidation.
    ‘I’m just speculating, that’s all,’ said Bolan.
    ‘We’d have known about it, surely,’ Amanda said. ‘Being taken up in the sky. And that would have been some fall to earth!’ She smiled broadly, but realised by Bolan’s crestfallen expression that he’d taken it to mean he was being ridiculous.
    ‘It’s as good an explanation as any,’ he said quietly, his eyes on the horizon.
    ‘Of course it is,’ she replied.
    Their voices were fading as Wade’s memories began to intrude fully.
    Peterson was at the entrance to the house, covering the alley. Wade remembered how Peterson always looked cool, even under extremes like this. Nothing seemed to faze him, but he guessed that most of it was a front he put up to shield his true feelings. Whatever, he was a good guy to have covering his back. Travers was signalling silently at wade, indicating a blanket-covered doorway to another smaller room. Wade nodded.
    ‘Some kind of black hole, then…’ Bolan suggested. ‘There has to be some way we ended up here. A time-space-continuum-kind-of-thing. Maybe it’s to do with quantum physics. I read about such things, how weird stuff like that is. How the universe behaves strangely, far crazier than we’d ever thought. Maybe the explanation’s in there somewhere.’
    ‘Maybe it is,’ Amanda said encouragingly.
    ‘I once tried to read A Brief History of Time but had to give up halfway through.