Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Garbage – Only Happy When It Rains

For thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights it has rained, breaking rivers and dams, flooding cities and towns and everywhere else. Wiping humanity off the face of the Earth. And Melissa couldn’t be happier about it.

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Sheets of rain lashed the building. From her thirteenth story apartment, Melissa watched the street below transform into a raging maelstrom. Churning rapids, eddies filled with scrap and debris. For thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights it had rained. Another twenty-four hours and it would be officially biblical. Dams burst, rivers broke their banks, seas rose and ravaged their coastlines. Looking down as the world disappeared beneath the rising waters, Melissa only had one thought.

Good. Fuck them.

Lightning flared behind the clouds. Moments later, thunder rocked the building. Drunk on a bottle of red wine, Melissa staggered. She wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol or if the floor actually shifted for a moment. All the same, she made her way to the balcony and forced the door open. Howling wind nearly blew her backward, rain spraying across the living room. Unsteady, she pushed to the railing to get a better view.

Below, cafes and restaurants, cars and trees and the lower levels of the surrounding buildings all vanished under the grey water. Grey water and grey buildings and grey skies. The sun was nothing but a dull silver dollar behind banks of stormclouds that drifted so low they choked the tops of the surrounding apartment buildings.

Strobing orange lights drew Melissa’s attention back to the street. Some kind of rescue boat fought the angry current. The city had been under mandatory evacuation for weeks. The army and the police had gone door to door in her apartment building and presumably the surrounding buildings as well. She’d had to hide so she could stay. The rescue boat must have been looking for stragglers who’d done the same but came to regret it when it became clear the rain wasn’t stopping. When there was no food and no medicine and the waters kept rising.

“Idiots,” Melissa slurred. “Fucking idiots.”

The balcony lurched. There was no question about it that time, it shifted under her feet. The movement threw Melissa into the wet railing and she nearly went over. For a moment, she saw herself plunging the thirteen stories to the raging water below. Deep but also filled with a threshing machine of random destruction. Floodwaters had ripped away earth and trees, swept through streets and scoured them free of cars and signage, and clawed away the lower levels of all the buildings themselves. All that trash and debris gave the flood terrible, gnashing teeth.

“Shit.”

Melissa didn’t want to die just yet. She’d stayed behind because the world was drowning and she wanted a front row seat instead of being stuck in some refugee camp somewhere. Wherever they’d taken everyone, she had no idea where they could even go since it was raining like this literally everywhere. She pushed away from the railing and staggered back inside. When she decided she’d had enough, she was going out on her own terms. On the coffee table was a 9mm pistol and a whole box of ammunition. Loose bullets were scattered on the tabletop. She’d found the gun in one of the other apartments. It had probably belonged to someone who’d been told they couldn’t bring it with them when they were evacuated so they left it laying on their kitchen counter. She’d never even touched a gun before but she’d figured it out. When she’d had enough, she would put the barrel to the side of her head and pull the trigger.

Melissa picked up a wine bottle from the same table and drained the last dregs of it. It was good wine, expensive, another looted find, but after a while it all tasted the same and the remnants were thick and almost silty. When she was done, she hurled the bottle at the wall as hard as she could. The glass was too thick to break and it bounced instead, falling to the carpet.

When it started, Melissa thought the rain was just for her. She was only really happy when it rained. When it chased everyone else off the sidewalks and washed the world clean. When the bleakness of the sky matched the bleakness of her outlook. Fresh off of her breakup with Quinn, sick of her job, sick of her fake friends. Sick of bad news and foreign wars and homeless junkies and stupid, stupid, stupid people. Stupid people who seemed to be getting louder and stupider and more confident in their own stupidity all the time. In the darkness of her mood, she’d revelled in those first storm clouds. Rain sheeting down like it could drown the whole city. That had turned out to be a whole lot more accurate than she’d ever suspected at the time.

It hadn’t taken long for the news to start coming through that the rain was happening everywhere. It rained on cities and on farms, and on forests and mountains and swamps. It rained on the just and the unjust alike. Deserts were already drowning under unexpected torrents. Over Antarctica, rain froze before it hit the ground. Over the oceans, water spouts that were miles wide somehow siphoned vast quantities into the skies but that still couldn’t explain where all the rain for these worldwide storms was coming from.

Instead of going to work and trying to find the good in her friends, and avoiding eye contact with the junkies and making excuses for the stupid people, and working on getting over the breakup, instead of doing all those things, Melissa indulged. For as long as the clouds glutted themselves with rain and spewed it back onto the world then she could indulge in her misery and spew bile at the empty walls of her apartment. And it felt good. It felt good not to care and not to try and not to fix a merry little smile on her face. But then the rains went on. For days, for weeks. Roads and highways were shut down, low-lying suburbs and cities flooded, humanity paralysed. Crops and food supplies were ravaged to the extent that even if the storms stopped then starvation would become a major concern. Infrastructure was destroyed. Some famous meteorologist shot himself on live television. Governments disappeared. Militaries were going to war over scant resources. Melissa started to think this really was the end of the world but by that time she’d become so bloated with loathing that she couldn’t find it in herself to care. She decided she wanted to stay right where she was and watch, even as the city was evacuated and humanity scrambled toward higher ground.

Briefly, Melissa hunted the main body of her apartment and realised she was out of alcohol. In the early days of the storm, she’d drank whatever she had sitting around in a kind of frenzy. Luckily, she’d then managed to restock before everything really turned to shit. And then, since the building was evacuated, she’d started looting other apartments.

Wearing a filthy bathrobe over her pyjamas to ward off the chill, and pink slippers, she left the apartment. In one hand she carried the 9mm pistol with a heavy pipe wrench tucked under her arm. The batteries in the flashlight she carried in her other hand were dying, its light fading. Before finding the gun, she’d used the wrench to bash open the doors of other apartments on her level. She’d managed to spread to several levels of the building above and below her too, propping open their doors in the stairwell. She didn’t attack the apartments with any kind of system, choosing them entirely at random when she needed booze or food, or was bored.

Water streamed down the wall in places and pooled on the carpet in the corridor. More dripped down the walls in the stairwell. The rains were so pervasive that water was worming its way through the structure, eroding, chewing through conduits and cracks. The stairwell tunneled down through the core of the building next to the elevators, which were no longer working. Bare concrete walls and stairs with metal railings.

On impulse, Melissa went up one floor and joined the corridor there. She picked out an apartment at random, 1408, and hammered on the door.

“Hello? Hello? Anyone there? Hello?”

No one answered. Unsteady, Melissa raised her pistol at the door and dropped her pipe wrench in the process. Turning her face away, she fired several times. Bullets drilled the lock above the handle, exploding with sparks and shrapnel, shattering its structure inside the frame. The claps of the gunshots echoed up and down the empty hallway. Her ears rang in the aftermath. Leaving her wrench on the floor, she kicked and bashed the door until it fell open. Melissa kept the gun, safety switched off, as she entered the dark apartment.

“Hello? If anyone’s here, I’m not, like, robbing you! Well, I’m looting you, but I don’t want to steal from you if you’re here.”

The apartment didn’t answer. Rain drummed the outside of the building, a distant, constant background. The apartment layout was identical to Melissa’s own place. The kitchenette sat to the left. The balcony door was straight ahead, across the living area. There were some clothes and stuff scattered over the floor as if whoever lived here did so in a hurry. Probably during the mandatory evacuation.

Melissa moved to the kitchen and pulled the fridge open. A horrible sour smell smacked her in the face. The power had been off for weeks now, everything perishable had spoiled. She went to close the fridge again but heard glass rattling in the door. Pointing her flashlight into the fridge she saw three bottles of warm beer. Not her first choice but better than nothing. Taking them, she briefly swept the rest of the fridge then slammed it shut.

As Melissa rooted through the rest of the kitchen, she heard a shrill noise behind her. For a moment, she thought it was a crying baby. She spun, searching, and saw a dark shape slinking across the carpet.

“Oh, hello?” Melissa said.

A cat, small and skinny, mostly black but with white stockings and a white patch on its chin. Its eyes pleaded with her in the gloom. Cautious, it raised one paw and eased forward. It let out another plaintive miaow.

“Honey, did you get left behind?”

Kneeling, Melissa dropped her flashlight and pistol. She stroked the cat’s back and raked her fingers through its fur. It immediately began to purr.

“How did they leave you behind? You poor thing, how could they leave you?”

Melissa felt the slats of the cat’s ribs along its sides. The poor thing must have been starving. The gunshots would have scared it, made it hide, but hearing Melissa in the kitchen it had emerged to see if she would feed it. It must have been desperate. Grinding the top of its head into her hands, it purred and kept miaowing.

“Sweetheart, of course, hold on.”

Returning to the kitchenette, Melissa swept through the cupboards. She found packets of both wet and dry cat food as well as bowls. She dumped a packet of wet food into a bowl and set it on the ground. It stank of fish. The cat wolfed it down in under a minute. She dropped another packet in the bowl and the cat ate it just as fast. Thunder peeled outside. She petted the animal but it seemed skittish after she’d fed it.

“That’s okay, sweetheart, you’re coming home with me. I’m not going to leave you behind.”

Melissa found a shopping bag in the kitchen and began to fill it. She took the cat food and the bowls, and the beers from the fridge. She found a couple of bottles of wine in a cupboard. The cat threaded around her ankles.

A shudder went through the building. It felt like an earthquake, a real one this time. First flood and now quake. Melissa felt the floor vibrating under her feet. Walls shook and she saw paintings and photographs toppling off their hooks. The glass in the balcony door cracked then shattered. She reached out and grabbed the bench for support. The cat clung to her lower legs.

When the shaking stopped, the room leaned to one side like the deck of a ship. Melissa wasn’t sure at first but when she let go of the bench she felt her feet sliding in her slippers. She wasn’t sober but she’d definitely sobered up a little.

“What the fuck was that?”

Melissa hesitated over what to pick up first. The cat glued itself to her. After a few moments, she picked up her flashlight and the gun, and then she scooped the cat under her arm. She left the bag she’d been collecting. The cat wriggled and dug its claws into Melissa’s bathrobe but it was happy enough to be carried.

The ground rested at such an angle that Melissa fell into the wall. The doorway to the apartment looked warped, slanted, and cracks ran up the wall surrounding it. With a flash of insight, she realised what was happening.

“Oh, shit.”

Before the power went out and news was still coming in from all over the world, Melissa remembered seeing buildings, whole houses, real houses, being washed away in floodwaters. Uprooted from their foundations and drifting away like unanchored boats. There’d been footage of other buildings, mostly in poorer countries, apartment blocks, office buildings, crumbling under the relentless rains. According to what she remembered, the unending rain stripped away topsoil, it stripped away trees and roots. Water widened gaps around foundations and worked its way into concrete and bedrock, eating and eating until the foundations and layers of rock started to slide apart.

The building shuddered again as Melissa moved into the hallway. Metal girders inside the walls groaned and more cracks appeared in various surfaces. The doors of the elevator shaft made a buckling sound. She’d chosen this, Melissa thought. She figured she would head back to her own apartment and await the end. She hadn’t thought it would end like this exactly but she’d told herself she was here until the bitter finale. Looking down, though, she studied the cat wriggling under her arm.

“I might have chosen this but you didn’t, did you? It’s not fair.”

The cat, in spite of its awkward position, purred and kneaded its paws into Melissa’s robe. The hallway canted under Melissa so that she was climbing uphill. A crack split the ceiling overhead and more water began to run through it.

Even if she wanted to live, however, or to save the cat, Melissa had no idea how to go about that. She had no escape route planned. Everyone else had been evacuated. Then she remembered the rescue boat she’d seen plying the street below, looking for survivors. Maybe they were still there. If she could get to the lower levels, maybe she could get their attention.

“Okay, honey,” she said. “I’m getting you out of here.”

Melissa returned to the concrete stairwell, the doorway bent at a strange new angle. Rainwater ran freely down the stairs from above. There were major fractures at points of tension, as if the building was splitting at the seams. Without hesitation, she started moving down. The cat jostled at her side. Running as fast as she could, she was more worried about holding onto the animal than she was about the building coming apart around her. Her slippers clapped against the damp steps. Another groan ran the length of the building, like the structure was crying out in pain. She imagined the force of all that water pushing, pushing, against the base of the building, unmoored from bedrock or from its foundations, sending the whole thing over like a house of cards.

“Fuck!”

Melissa’s foot came down wrong and her ankle twisted. She staggered to the next level. Her leg worked but each step sent a lance of pain shooting up her calf. The cat writhed against her side, claws digging into her hip.

Things got worse as she reached the lower levels. Walls bowed and concrete peeled open. The weight of all the upper levels pushed down on the lower ones. Around the third floor, she reached a point with nothing but water below. Dark, black, filthy water filled the stairwell, presumably the rest of those levels were underwater. Ankle throbbing, she backed up to the nearest landing. She hadn’t been down there before so the door was sealed shut. All the doors in the emergency stairwell only opened one way then there was supposed to be no way to get out again until you reached the very bottom. On the upper levels, while stealing from other apartments, she’d had to pry the doors open.

Melissa aimed her pistol where she estimated the latch would be, on the smooth inner surface of the door, and fired. The clap was absolutely deafening inside the stairwell. She felt the pressure jamming her in the eardrums. A tiny black hole appeared in the door. In spite of the pain, she fired twice more.

The door broke and swung inward. Against her side, however, the cat went absolutely wild. Yowling, it turned into a screaming dervish. Burning lines raked through her stomach as its paws reached under her clothes and sliced her skin open. It sprung out of her robe and scrambled up the stairs again.

“No, no! Come back!”

Ears ringing, ankle throbbing, Melissa raced after the cat. Holding the gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, she tried to tackle it. She had to chase the cat up several levels before it cornered itself. Bits of concrete dropped from the ceiling. The building moaned. Tucked into the edge of the landing, the cat shivered.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that was scary,” Melissa said. “Let me help you.”

The cat allowed Melissa to scoop it back into her arms again. Maybe it hoped for more food. She wrapped it in her bathrobe. Blood stained her t-shirt where the cat had scratched her.

“Come on.”

The building banked further to Melissa’s right, pushing her toward the stairwell railing. Her footing was uneven. She made her way back down calmly, methodically, as more cracks split the walls and pieces rained from overhead.

Water lapped the third story landing as Melissa reached the door she’d blasted open. The corridor was dark and damp. She looked for an apartment on the street side of the building. Only a few paces away, she found a door that was already sitting ajar. Pushing inside, moving through the apartment, was like moving through some kind of funhouse. Tipped furniture and debris covered the floor. She crossed the room to the balcony. All the glass in the door and accompanying window had shattered and strewn itself across the carpet. As she tried to navigate through it, a shard jumped and cut her heel. She yelped and staggered on.

Floodwater lapped the edge of the balcony. Rain and spray flew sideways and soaked Melissa to the skin. Squinting, she hunted for the rescue boat that she’d seen earlier. With the condition of the building though, the rescuers had withdrawn to a safe distance. The balcony slanted beneath her. With another shudder, the building groaned and dozens more windows shattered somewhere overhead. After a minute of searching, she spotted the strobing orange lamp on top of the boat at the far end of the block.

“Hey! Hey!” Melissa shouted.

It would be impossible for them to hear her over the storm. Melissa raised the pistol and emptied it into the sky. Gunshots echoed across the water. Under her robe, the cat fought but she was anticipating it and she clamped down so the animal wouldn’t escape. Hearing the shots, the boat turned and began to lurch in her direction.

The upper levels of Melissa’s building bore down. It felt like it might collapse at any second. She could leap into the water, she thought, but the current was so wild and full of refuse that she’d be pulled under in seconds.

The boat was thirty-foot-long with a broad, flat hull. A rippling canvas cover did little to protect its deck from the rain. There was a crew of three on board, two men and a woman, all in heavy weather gear, and a few bedraggled survivors were hunkered in the centre of the deck. Struggling to steer, the woman peeled around against the side of the building. Thunder roared. Something inside the apartment tower broke with a snap that sounded like a missile strike. One of the men reached out to help Melissa aboard in the chaotic conditions. Instead, she stripped off her bathrobe and used it to wrap the cat.

“What are you doing? Jump!” the man said.

“Take them!” Melissa said.

Melissa thrust the rolled up bathrobe across the gap. The man caught it and staggered backward, surprised at the snakelike way it writhed. More rain soaked Melissa’s clothing, unprotected.

“What are you doing? Come on!” the other male rescuer shouted.

She shook her head. “I chose this, take them.”

Melissa slipped back inside. In the gloom of the apartment, she disappeared. The rescuers hesitated but the building made the decision for them. Its lean became fatal, inevitable. With a grinding roar, it teetered over and crashed into the building neighbouring it. The lower level just above the waterline, where Melissa had disappeared, imploded under the weight of the many stories above it. The woman steering the boat whipped around in a tight circle. Fighting the current, they tore away in the direction they’d just come.

Stunned, Carey, the man holding Melissa’s robe, peeled it open. The green eyes and confused face of the black and white cat greeted him. It hissed then retreated again into the robe. Hugging it to his chest, he grabbed one of the boat’s supports and let his knees absorb the shocks as the boat bounded across the water’s surface.

“Is it a baby?” the woman steering, Slater, asked.

“It’s a cat!” Carey replied.

“Even better!”

Breaking into pieces, the apartment building collapsed into its neighbour and slammed into the water. Its neighbour, dislodged, began to twist and fall in on itself as well. Waves dozens of feet high heaved into the air. Thick clouds of dust rose then were quickly flattened by the rain. A churning maelstrom filled the street, then settled, then went still, and was lost again in the splatter of the falling rain.

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Sean: I love writing about rain. The sole reason this book exists was so I could write a bunch of scenes of storming and flooding, and some fun, weird aliens, that’s why I just gave it away for free because I had nothing else I wanted to do with it. Same reason for this story, inspired by watching summer storms. There’s probably others.

Of all the songs I’ve used for Mixtape so far, this one probably feels the most meaningful at the moment. It’s one I sing to my daughter pretty frequently, especially when we’re sitting out on the balcony watching the rain fall. Little bit of a hiccough this week with what was supposed to be her first week of daycare, she got sent home with suspected gastro so taking care of her today! Thankfully she’s really upbeat and happy so she’s been pretty fun.

Thanks for reading! I’ve definitely got to put out a couple of stories not under the Mixtape banner, the next one is way too close to the vibe of this one. Need something different. But there’ll definitely be something here in another couple of weeks, unless, of course I have been claimed by the icy grip of death that eventually comes for all of us. Hope not!

Next Track: Tiffany – I Think We’re Alone Now