When ended their work, stood they with the empty-eyed ones; but their word they had kept, and so the eorl gave wergeld to their kin.
What abided still they put into a box, whose lid they nailed down with iron. At ene fell dead the god-man, and his body rotted where it lay. At this ill foretoken, more gave in to fear, but said the eorl that all his strength had gone into the spell, and his death was a mark of its might.
Few then yet stood at the eorl’s side. Frost-bitten was the wind and dim the light, and held many to their homes; of those who did not, too many walked about bearing white skin and empty eyes. But yet lived hope in the eorl’s heart. Took he the box and rode to the wealth-house of the dead, shifting aside the stone to bury his burden where first they had laid the lich, in harvest-time so long before. Then, having roofed the room anew, set he a watch, to see if things would now be well.
The end of this, all men know. Upon the dark of the moon, rose for the last time what men had thought to rid themselves of, fed full by the blood of the god-man, witlessly given. Came then those who yet lived, herded before the white-handed ones, to see the doom of the eorl, torn asunder for seeking to stop this thing. Fell his wound-flood upon the watching ones, waking hunger in their hearts. Crawled they up the barrow’s side to beg the blessing from the dréag; cut he his arm, and from it drank they the wolf-wine, which gave to them knowledge of their wyrd, and new ravening.
And so has it been since that day. Never came the sun over this land after that; dwell we therefore in darkness, that men from without hold in fear. From our new god take we our gift, and do his will however he bids. All hail to the holy one, the bestower of blood, the gainsayer of the grave, whose life and might shall be everlasting.
Jonathan Maberry
1
Jack Porter was twelve going on never grow up.
He was one of the walking dead.
He knew it. Everyone knew it.
Remission was not a reprieve; it just put you in a longer line at the airport. Jack had seen what happened to his cousin, Toby. Three remissions in three years. Hope pushed Toby into a corner and beat the shit out of him each time. Toby was a ghost in third grade, a skeleton in fourth grade, a withered thing in a bed by the end of fifth grade, and bones in a box before sixth grade even started. All that hope had accomplished was to make everyone more afraid.
Now it was Jack’s turn.
Chemo, radiation. Bone marrow transplants. Even surgery.
Like they say in the movies, life sucks and then you die.
So, yeah, life sucked.
What there was of it.
What there was left.
Jack sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed watching the weatherman on TV talk about the big storm that was about to hit. He kept going on and on about the dangers of floods and there was a continuous scroll across the bottom of the screen that listed the evacuation shelters.
Jack ate dry Honey-Nut Cheerios out of a bowl and thought about floods. The east bend of the river was one hundred feet from the house. Uncle Roger liked to say that they were a football field away, back door to muddy banks. Twice the river had flooded enough for there to be some small wavelets licking at the bottom step of the porch. But there hadn’t ever been a storm as bad as what they were predicting, at least not in Jack’s lifetime. The last storm big enough to flood the whole farm had been in 1931. Jack knew that because they showed flood maps on TV. The weather guy was really into it. He seemed jazzed by the idea that a lot of Stebbins County could be flooded out.
Jack was kind of jazzed about it, too.
It beat the crap out of rotting away. Remission or not, Jack was certain that he could feel himself die, cell by cell. He dreamed about that, thought about it. Wrote in his journal about it. Did everything but talk about it.
Not even to Jill. Jack and Jill had sworn an oath years ago to tell each other everything, no secrets. Not one. But that was before Jack got sick. That was back when they were two peas in a pod. Alike in everything, except that Jack was a boy and Jill was a girl. Back then, back when they’d made that pact, they were just kids. You could barely tell one from the other except in the bath.
Years ago. A lifetime ago, as Jack saw it.
The sickness changed everything. There were some secrets the dying were allowed to keep to themselves.
Jack watched the Doppler radar of the coming storm and smiled. He had an ear bud nestled into one ear and was also listening to Magic Marti on the radio. She was hyped about the storm, too, sounding as excited as Jack felt.
“
Despite heavy winds, the storm front is slowing down and looks like it’s going to park right on the Maryland/Pennsylvania Border, with Stebbins County taking the brunt of it. They’re calling for
torrential rains and strong winds, along with severe flooding. And here’s a twist . . . even though this is a November storm, warm air masses from the south are bringing significant lightning, and so far there have been several serious strikes. Air traffic is being diverted around the storm.
”
Jack nodded along with her words as if it was music playing in his ear.
Big storm. Big flood?
He hoped so.
The levees along the river were half-assed, or at least that’s how Dad always described them.
“Wouldn’t take much more than a good piss to flood ’em out,” Dad was fond of saying, and he said it every time they got a bad storm. The levees never flooded out, and Jack wondered if was the sort of thing people said to prevent something bad from happening. Like telling an actor to break a leg.
On the TV they showed the levees, and a guy described as a civil engineer puffed out his chest and said that Pennsylvania levees were much better than the kind that had failed in Louisiana. Stronger, better maintained.
Jack wondered what Dad would say about that. Dad wasn’t much for the kind of experts news shows trotted out. “Bunch of pansy-ass know-nothings.”
The news people seemed to agree, because after the segment with the engineer, the anchor with the plastic hair pretty much tore down everything the man had to say.
“
Although the levees in Stebbins County are considered above average for the region, the latest computer models say that this storm is only going to get stronger.”
Jack wasn’t sure if that was a logical statement, but he liked its potential. The storm was getting bigger, and that was exciting.
But again he wondered what it would be like to have all that water, that great, heaving mass of coldness come crashing in through all the windows and doors. Jack’s bedroom was on the ground floor—a concession to how easily he got tired climbing steps. The house was a hundred and fifteen years old. It creaked in a light wind. No way it could stand up to a million gallons of water, Jack was positive of that.
If it happened, he wondered what he would do.
Stay here in his room and let the house fall down around him.
No, that sounded like it would hurt. Jack could deal with pain if he had to, but he didn’t like it.
Maybe he could go into the living room and wait for it. On the couch, or on the floor in front of the TV. If the TV and the power was still on. Just sit there and wait for the black tide to come calling.
How quick would it be?
Would it hurt to drown?
Would he be scared?
Sure. Rotting was worse.
He munched a palmful of Cheerios and prayed that the river would come for him.
2
“Mom said I can’t stay home today,” grumped Jill as she came into Jack’s room. She dropped her book bag on the floor and kicked it.
“Why not?”
“She said the weatherman’s never right. She said the storm’ll pass us.”
“Magic Marti says it’s going to kick our butts,” said Jack.
As if to counterpoint his comment there was a low rumble of thunder way off to the west.
Jill sighed and sat next to him on the edge of the bed. She no longer looked like his twin. She had a round face and was starting to grow boobs. Her hair was as black as crow’s wings and even though Mom didn’t let her wear make-up, not until she was in junior high, and even then it was going to be an argument. Jill had pink cheeks, pink lips, and every boy in sixth grade was in love with her. Jill didn’t seem to care much about that. She didn’t try to dress like the middle school girls, or like Maddy Simpson, who was the same age but who had pretty big boobs and dressed like she was in an MTV rap video. Uncle Roger had a ten-dollar bet going that Maddy was going to be pregnant before she ever got within shooting distance of a diploma. Jack and Jill both agreed. Everyone did.
Jill dressed like a farm girl. Jeans and a sweatshirt, often the same kind of sweatshirt Jack wore. Today she had an olive drab U.S. Army shirt. Jack wore his with pajama bottoms. Aunt Linda had been in the army but she died in Afghanistan three years ago.
They sat together, staring blankly at the TV screen for a while. Jack cut her a sly sideways look and saw that her face was slack, eyes empty. He understood why, and it made him sad.
Jill wasn’t dealing well with the cancer. He was afraid of what would happen to Jill after he died. And Jack had no illusions about whether the current remission was going to be the one that took. When he looked into his own future, either in dreams, prayers, or when lost in thought, there was an end to the road. It went on a bit farther and there were was a big wall of black nothingness.
It sucked, sure, but he’d lived with it so long that he had found a kind of peace with it. Why go kicking and screaming into the dark if none of that would change anything?
Jill, on the other hand, that was different. She had to live, she had to keep going. Jack watched TV a lot, he saw the episodes of Dr. Phil and other shows where they talked about death and dying. He knew that some people believed that the dying had an obligation to their loved ones who would survive them.
Jack didn’t want Jill to suffer after he died, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He told her once about his dreams of the big black nothing.
“It’s like a wave that comes and just sweeps me away,” he’d told her.
“That sounds awful,” she replied, tears springing into her eyes, but Jack assured her that it wasn’t.
“No,” he said, “ ’cause once the nothing takes you, there’s no more pain.”
“But there’s no more
you
!”
He grinned. “How do you know? No one knows what’s on the other side of that wall.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be something cool. Something nice.”
“How could it be nice?” Jill had demanded.
This was right after the cancer had come back the last time, before the current remission. Jack was so frail that he barely made a dent in his own hospital bed. He touched the wires and tubes that ran from his pencil-thin arm to the machines behind him. “It’s got to be nicer than this.”
Nicer than this.
That was the last time they’d had a real conversation about the sickness, or about death. That was nine months ago. Jack stopped talking to her about those things and instead did what he could to ease her down so that when the nothing took him she’d still be able to stand.
He nudged her and held out the bowl of cereal. Without even looking at it she took a handful and began eating them, one at a time, smashing them angrily between her teeth.
Eventually she said, “It’s not fair.”
“I know.” Just as he knew that they were having two separate conversations at the same time. It was often that way with them.
They crunched and glared at the TV.
“If it gets bad,” Jack said, “they’ll let everyone go.”
But she shook her head. “I want to stay home. I want to hang out here and watch it on TV.”
“You’ll be
in
it,” he said.
“Not the same thing. It’s better on TV.”
Jack ate some Cheerios and nodded. Everything was more fun on TV. Real life didn’t have commentary and it didn’t have playback. Watching a storm beat standing in one while you waited for the school bus to splash water on you. It beat the smells of sixty soaking wet kids on a crowded bus, and bumper-to-bumper traffic waiting for your driveway.
As if in response to that thought there was a muffled honk from outside.
“Bus,” said Jack.
“Crap,” said Jill. She stood up. “Text me. Let me know what’s happening.”
“Sure.”
Jill began flouncing out of the room, but then she stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. She looked from him to the TV screen and back again. She wore a funny, half-smile.
“What?” he asked.
Jill studied him without answering long enough for the bus driver to get pissed and really lay on the horn.
“I mean it,” she said. “Text me.”
“I already said I would.”
Jill chewed her lip, then turned and headed out of the house and up the winding drive to the road where the big yellow bus waited.
Jack wondered what that was all about.
3
Mom came into his room in the middle of the morning carrying a tray with two hot corn muffins smeared with butter and honey and a big glass of water.
“You hungry?” she asked, setting the tray down on the bed between them.
“Sure,” said Jack, though he wasn’t. His appetite was better than it had been all summer, and even though he was done with chemo for a while, he only liked to nibble. The Cheerios were perfect, and it was their crunch more than anything that he liked.
But he took a plate with one of the muffins, sniffed, pasted a smile on his mouth, and took a small bite. Jack knew from experience that Mom needed to see him eat. It was more important to her to make sure that he was eating than it was in seeing him eat much. He thought he understood that. Appetite was a sign of health, or remission. Cancer patients in the full burn of the disease didn’t have much of an appetite. Jack knew that very well.
As he chewed, Mom tore open a couple of packs of vitamin-C powder and poured them into his water glass.
“Tropical mix,” she announced, but Jack had already smelled it. It wasn’t as good as the tangerine, but it was okay. He accepted the glass, waited for the fizz to settle down, and then took a sip to wash down the corn muffin.