The Rush

When FOZZIE breaks his leg after a rocket launch goes badly wrong, blowing up wasp nests, dead cows and launching rockets higher and higher into the stratosphere with the help of the town’s kids is no longer enough. Because he experienced, in that moment when the rocket was heading straight for him, what he calls the Rush. He and his friends, HUNTER and JESS, try to recreate it, finally building the rush generator secretly in the farm workshop on the dairy farm owned by Hunter’s parents. The other kids must now fill their spare time milking cows but still try to see what Fozzie is up to. Jess’ neighbor, the GOP (Grumpy Old Person), needs his email fixed, and his Netflix, and Google, and warns her not to meddle with nature because he knows, as most of the older generation in the town do. They once found the alternative world themselves. But filled with expectation, the three friends try the Rush Generator for the first time, Fozzie in the seat. The workshop fills with so much smoke from the rockets they think it fails . . . . . . until they look at the camera footage in Fozzie’s bedroom that night. He disappeared for at least a nanosecond. On her way home from Fozzie’s, Jess, walking alone, is attacked by a bat, salvia dripping from its fangs, the wind from its wings flattening her as she tries to run. The next day, the wounds on her hands, red and angry, send her to the medical center. But no antibiotics work and she lingers between life and death for days. Finally recovered, she finds summer has somehow turned to winter. The wind howls around houses, rain lashing, lightning taking out cell phone towers. The wife of their hated school principal is killed in the supermarket carpark by a wolf that afterwards climbs a tree. At night people see things looking into the windows – some sort of ghost peering at them, watching what they’re doing. The GOP is silent. He knows what will happen. It happened to him once. The teens will have learn, just like he did, what loss really means. When the weather finally clears a boy is missing. James Ryan. The school’s pupils are organized into lines, including Jess, and march with the police through the sodden paddocks on Hunter’s farm looking for clues. And then Jess remembers Fozzie’s real name is James. She runs to the workshop and there is the Rush Generator. The railway irons are no longer rusty but smooth and gleaming. How many times has Fozzie hurtled down them, Hunter recording it all while she was lying forgotten about in a hospital bed? Telling herself not to think, she jumps in, pulls the straps tight and flicks the switch. The rockets roar and she finds him in the alternative world. It’s beautiful, amazing, colors that cannot be described. Fozzie is so busy looking at everything he doesn’t even turn around when she yells out. And then she is heading back as the bats and the wraiths and everything else circle in the freezing darkness around her. When she opens her eyes the Rush Generator has stopped and a large bat, its wings stretching from one wall of the workshop to the other, flap once as it flies into the sunshine before dissolving. But Hunter is there, screaming at Jess, wanting to destroy the Rush Generator, an axe swinging above his head. She has to stops him. If he destroys it there will be no hope of Fozzie ever coming back.