Children of the Rime by Scott Wakeling

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SUMMARY: Flash Fiction entry, June 2008, 'Torrential'.

I was there when the rain came. It was a cold rain, the air was chilled by it. At night we would huddle together and listen to it hammering on the roof and windows of our little houseboat.
It was raining all over the world. The radio was alive with reports of flooding and rising sea levels. Before the television stopped working we saw pictures of it raining in the desert with a bright blue sky overhead. There were rain clouds over Cambridge to begin with, but once they moved over it just kept raining. I can still remember looking up at that clear blue sky and feeling the rain in my face.
As the river rose higher my father kept us moving. We had a small wind-up radio my grandfather had used in the war. We huddled around it below deck and listened to the news. Nobody had any power. We were lucky, we had firewood and coal on board. The world was in chaos, but all we cared about was when the rain would stop.
They told us it was coming from space. Ice, melting as it came through the atmosphere. They said we were drifting through a giant field of ice, just hanging there in space, and that it would rain until we passed it by.
Soon the radio was mostly interference, hisses and pops. All we could pick up was local military broadcasts, so we listened for news of our area. They said Britain was half the size it once was. I remember Father said we had to move. He was afraid of the sea level reaching us. We made a makeshift sail out of bed sheets, and took turns rowing to save on fuel. We went West, avoiding other boats when we saw them.
One night the meteors came. As we lay together, my parents and I, we watched the rain beating on the window and saw these streaks of light in the sky. We gasped and wondered what they were.
'Crystals.' said the radio. Some of them, 'as big as a man, just falling from the sky.' It was frightening, so unbelievable. I remember seeing flashes in the sky even in the daytime. We were cold. We rationed our food, and when the crystals came it was sudden. We woke to the sound of them whistling down from above and crashing into the water around us. We waited for one to hit, all clung together in a heap, but we were lucky. They missed our little houseboat.
The next day we passed people clinging to driftwood. My father beat them off as they tried to get aboard. He told us to stay below deck. We cried. It was awful, leaving those people behind.
We didn't see any more meteors after that. The radio played broadcasts from inland, people talking about the crystals, the 'pods'. They made craters and destroyed buildings where they landed. They said they were like giant diamonds, some of them six feet long. The military told us not to go near them, that they could be dangerous and were not worth anything. They had told us long ago the rainwater was safe to drink. The only thing worth having after that was food.
When we reached the Midlands and the hills rose up ahead of us, a military boat came out to meet us. They told us it was safe to come in closer and anchor up with some other boats. They gave us food, and a little coal.