The Rain Must Fall: audio version

“The Rain Must Fall” is a short story that takes place one night on the road to Seattle. Blaine and Audrey are on the run from something. But to leave the past behind, they have to confront the storm clouds ahead.

The Rain Must Fall

            They had been driving north for the last twenty hours with little food and no rest between them.

It was dusk on a Saturday in late October and their black 1969 Lincoln Continental zigzagged through a viscous mist that yellowed under the urging of the moon. Audrey Burnham sat in the black leather passenger seat with the window rolled down halfway to let the smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall cigarette drift away. In her left hand, she thumbed the fifty-five beads of her wooden rosary and mumbled to herself in between drags.

Edgy silence hung in the air, exacerbated by the hawkish disposition of the man behind the wheel, Blaine Niéves. Despite dashing down the abandoned interstate under the veil of unending darkness, Niéves wore black reflective wraparound sunglasses. His only discernable movement outside of the act of driving was a slight tick of his upper lip.   Audrey knew without looking that beyond his stoic stare, Blaine’s eyes were bloodshot and bruised. Though her gaze was often aimed towards the snowcapped mountains in the distance, she would sometimes notice him reach into the pockets of his gray and tattered overcoat to procure tiny red pills. She assumed the pills to be Benzedrine, but she said nothing.

The black Continental crossed the Washington state border around three in the morning. A soft drizzle began to fall. Audrey rolled the window down further and stuck out her right arm to absorb some of the down pouring moisture.

“Hey, well, God – this rain sure is a change of pace from all that dust and desert, huh?”

Blaine nodded once, his chin momentarily touching his chest and slowly rising again. Audrey frowned and said, “You don’t ever say much, do you?”

“Not really.” He looked down toward the steering column and flipped on low-level windshield wipers.

“Are we going to stop anytime soon? I’ve really got to pee.” She lit another cigarette.

“When’s the last time we stopped?”

“In Boise. It was fucking hours ago, just so you know.”

“We’ll stop soon.” He needed to shit anyways and knew they’d need a bit more gas if they were to make it back to Seattle. He took in a deep breath, and biting his lower lip, pressed harder on the gas pedal.