Rain. Buckets and buckets of it fell from the heavens, blanketing the city with a coldness so uncharacteristic of summer.
It was familiar to Artemis, this rain, but he could not recall when he had seen it, when he had stood in it. It hadn't been as a child, or as a young adult, yet no matter how he pressed his overly taxed mind, he could not dredge up the memory.
And that frightened him.
For it wasn't the rain that he feared but something else that loomed in that mist, something that no one else around him seemed to sense, not even the all powerful Arthur Penn.
Artemis shifted the large black umbrella he was holding to his other hand and looked out at the traffic. Or rather, the lack of it.
Traffic density on the island had declined slowly early on, but more recently it had dropped like a stone. Shops had closed, so had schools, and even the normally dense green vegetation that sneaked a living between overpasses and piping had wilted. The whole city was dying.
