Then her eyes drifted shut, the smile lost its scaffolding and collapsed into a meaningless slack-mouthed nothing.
There was an immediate panic as Mom and Dad both tried to take her pulse at the same time. Dad ignored the black ichor on her face and arm as he bent close to press his ear to her chest. Time froze around him, then he let out a breath with a sharp burst of relief.
“She’s breathing. Christ, she’s still breathing. I think she just passed out. Blood loss, I guess.”
“She could be going into shock,” said Roger, and Dad shot him a withering look. But it was too late, Mom was already being hammered by panic.
“Get some blankets,” Mom snapped. “We’ll bundle her up and take the truck.”
“No,” said Roger, “like I said, we tried to take her to Wolverton ER, but they had it blocked off.”
“Then we’ll take her to Bordentown, or Fayetteville, or any damn place, but have to take her somewhere!”
“I’m just saying,” Roger said, but his voice had been beaten down into something tiny and powerless by Mom’s anger. He was her younger brother and she’d always held power in their family.
“Roger,” she said, “you stay here with Jack and—”
“I want to go, too,” insisted Jack.
“No,” snapped Mom. “You’ll stay right here with your uncle and—”
“But Uncle Rog is hurt, too,” he said. “He got bit and he has that black stuff, too.”
Mom’s head swiveled sharply around and she stared at Roger’s arm. The lines around her mouth etched deeper. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Just don’t touch that stuff. You hear me, Jack? Steve? Don’t touch whatever that black stuff is. We don’t know what’s in it.”
“Honey, I don’t think we can make it to the highway,” said Dad. “When we came up River Road the water was halfway up the wheels. It’ll be worse now.”
“Then we’ll go across the fields, God damn it!” snarled Mom.
“On the TV, earlier,” interrupted Jack, “they said that the National Guard was coming in to help because of the flooding and all. Won’t they be near the river? Down by the levee?”
Dad nodded. “That’s right. They’ll be sandbagging along the roads. I’m surprised we didn’t see them on the way here.”
“Maybe they’re the ones blocked the hospital,” said Roger. “Maybe they took it over, made it some kind of emergency station.”
“Good, good . . . that’s our plan. We find the Guard and they’ll help us get Jill to a—”
But that was as far as Dad got.
Lightning flashed as white-hot as the sun and in the same second there was a crack of thunder that was the loudest sound Jack had ever heard.
All the lights went out and the house was plunged into total darkness.
7
Dad’s voice spoke from the darkness. “That was the transformer up on the access road.”
“Sounded like a direct hit,” agreed Roger.
There was a scrape and a puff of sulfur and then Mom’s faced emerged from the darkness in a small pool of match-light. She bent and lit a candle and then another. In the glow she fished for the Coleman, lit that and the room was bright again.
“We have to go,” she said.
Dad was already moving. He picked up several heavy blankets from the stack Mom had laid by and used them to wrap Jill. He was as gentle as he could be, but he moved fast and he made sure to stay away from the black muck on her face and arm. But he did not head immediately for the door.
“Stay here,” he said, and crossed swiftly to the farm office. Jack trailed along and watched his father fish in his pocket for keys, fumble one out, and unlock a heavy oak cabinet mounted to the wall. A second key unlocked a restraining bar and then Dad was pulling guns out of racks. Two shotguns and three pistols. He caught Jack watching him and his face hardened. “It’s pretty wild out there, Jackie.”
“Why? What’s going on, Dad?”
Dad paused for a moment, breathed in and out through his nose, then he opened a box of shotgun shells and began feeding buckshot cartridges into the guns.
“I don’t know what’s going on, kiddo.”
It was the first time Jack could ever remember his father admitting that he had no answers. Dad knew everything. Dad was Dad.
Dad stood the shotguns against the wall and loaded the pistols. He had two nine-millimeter Glocks. Jack knew a lot about guns. From living on the farm, from stories of the army his dad and uncle told. From the things Aunt Linda used to talk about when she was home on leave. Jack and Jill had both been taught to shoot, and how to handle a gun safely. This was farm country and that was part of the life.
And Jack had logged a lot of hours on
Medal of Honor
and other first-person shooter games. In the virtual worlds he was a healthy, powerful, terrorist-killing engine of pure destruction.
Cancer wasn’t a factor in video games.
The third pistol was a thirty-two caliber Smith and Wesson. Mom’s gun, for times when Dad and Uncle Roger were away for a couple of days. Their farm was big and it was remote. If trouble came, you had to handle it on your own. That’s what Dad always said.
Except now.
This trouble was too big. Too bad.
This was Jill, and she was hurt and maybe sick, too.
“Is Jill going to be okay?” asked Jack.
Dad stuffed extra shells in his pockets and locked the cabinet.
“Sure,” he said.
Jack nodded, accepting the lie because it was the only answer his father could possibly give.
He trailed Dad back into the living room. Uncle Roger had Jill in his arms and she was so thoroughly wrapped in blankets that it looked like he was carrying laundry. Mom saw the guns in Dad’s hands and her eyes flared for a moment, then Jack saw her mouth tighten into a hard line. He’d seen that expression before. Once, four years ago, when a vagrant wandered onto the farm and sat on a stump watching Jill and Jack as they played in their rubber pool. Mom had come out onto the porch with a baseball bat in her hand and that look on her face. She didn’t actually have to say anything, but the vagrant went hustling along the road and never came back.
The other time was when she went after Tony Magruder, a brute of a kid who’d been left back twice and loomed over the other sixth graders like a Neanderthal. Tony was making fun of Jack because he was so skinny and pantsed him in the school yard. Jill had gone after him with her own version of that expression and Tony had tried to pants her, too. Jack had managed to pull his pants up and drag Jill back into the school. They didn’t tell Mom about it, but she found out somehow and next afternoon she showed up as everyone was getting out after last bell. Mom marched right up to Nick Magruder, who had come to pick up his son, and read him the riot act. She accused his son of being a pervert and a retard and a lot of other things. Mr. Magruder never managed to get a word in edgewise and when Mom threatened to have Tony arrested for sexual assault, the man grabbed his son and smacked him half unconscious, then shoved him into their truck. Jack never saw Tony again, but he heard that the boy was going to a special school over in Bordentown.
Jack kind of felt bad because he didn’t like to see any kid get his ass kicked. Even a total jerkoff like Tony. On the other hand, Tony had almost hurt Jill, so maybe he got off light. From the look on Mom’s face, she wanted to do more than smack the smile off his face.
That face was set against whatever was going on now. Whatever had hurt Jill. Whatever might be in the way of getting her to a hospital.
Despite the fear that gnawed at him, seeing that face made Jack feel ten feet tall. His mother was tougher than anyone, even the school bully and his dad.
And
she had a gun. So did Dad and Uncle Roger.
Jack almost smiled.
Almost.
He remembered the look in Jill’s eyes. The color of her eyes.
No smile was able to take hold on his features as he pulled on his raincoat and boots and followed his family out into the dark and the storm.
8
They made it all the way to the truck.
That was it.
9
The wind tried to rip the door out of Dad’s hand as he pushed it open; it drove the rain so hard that it came sideways across the porch and hammered them like buckshot. Thunder shattered the yard like an artillery barrage and lightning flashed in every direction, knocking shadows all over the place.
Jack had to hunch into his coat and grab onto Dad’s belt to keep from being blasted back into the house. The air was thick and wet and he started to cough before he was three steps onto the porch. His chest hitched and there was a gassy rasp in the back of his throat as he fought to breathe. Part of it was the insanity of the storm, which was worse than anything Jack had ever experienced. Worse than it looked on TV. Part of it was that there simply wasn’t much of him. Even with the few pounds he’d put on since he went into remission, he was a stick figure in baggy pajamas. His boots were big and clunky and he half walked out of them with every step.
Mom was up with Roger, running as fast as she could despite the wind, forcing her way through it to get to the truck and open the doors. Roger staggered as if Jill was a burden, but it was just the wind, trying to bully him the way Tony Magruder had bullied Jill.
The whole yard was moving. It was a flowing, swirling pond that lapped up against the second porch step. Jack stared at it, entranced for a moment, and in that moment the pond seemed to rear up in front of him and become that big black wall of nothing that he saw so often in his dreams.
“Did the levee break?” he yelled. He had to yell it twice before Dad answered.
“No,” Dad shouted back. “This is ground runoff. It’s coming from the fields. If the levee broke it’d come at us from River Road. We’re okay. We’ll be okay. The truck can handle this.”
There was more doubt than conviction in Dad’s words, though.
Together they fought their way off the porch and across five yards of open driveway to the truck.
Lightning flashed again and something moved in front of Jack. Between Mom and the truck. It was there and gone.
“Mom!” Jack called, but the wind stole his cry and drowned it in the rain.
She reached for the door handle and in the next flash of lightning Jack saw Jill’s slender arm reach out from the bundle of blankets as if to touch Mom’s face. Mom paused and looked at her hand and in the white glow of the lightning Jack saw Mom smile and saw her lips move as she said something to Jill.
Then something came out of the rain and grabbed Mom.
Hands, white as wax, reached out of the shadows beside the truck and grabbed Mom’s hair and her face and tore her out of Jack’s sight. It was so
fast,
so abrupt that Mom was there and then she was gone.
Just . . . gone.
Jack screamed.
Dad must have seen it, too. He yelled and then there was a different kind of thunder as the black mouth of his shotgun blasted yellow fire into the darkness.
There was lightning almost every second and in the spaces between each flash everything in the yard seemed to shift and change. It was like a strobe light, like the kind they had at the Halloween hayride. Weird slices of images, and all of it happening too fast and too close.
Uncle Roger began to turn, Jill held tight in his arms.
Figures, pale-faced but streaked with mud. Moving like chess pieces. Suddenly closer. Closer still. More and more of them.
Dad firing right.
Firing left.
Firing and firing.
Mom screaming.
Jack heard that. A single fragment of a piercing shriek, shrill as a crow, that stabbed up into the night.
Then Roger was gone.
Jill with him.
“No!” cried Jack as he sloshed forward into the yard.
“Stay back!” screamed his father.
Not yelled. Screamed.
More shots.
Then Dad pulled the shotgun trigger and nothing happened. Nothing.
The pale figures moved and moved. It was hard to see them take their steps, but with each flash of lightning they were closer.
Always closer.
All around.
Dad screaming.
Roger screaming.
And . . . Jill.
Jill screaming.
Jack was running without remembering wanting to, or starting to. His boots splashed down hard and water geysered up around him. The mud tried to snatch his boots off his feet. Tried and then did, and suddenly he was running in bare feet. Moving faster, but the cold was like knife blades on his skin.
Something stepped out of shadows and rainfall right in front of him. A man Jack had never seen before. Wearing a business suit that was torn to rags, revealing a naked chest and . . .
. . . and nothing. Below the man’s chest was a gaping hole. No stomach. No skin. Nothing. In the flickering light Jack could see dripping strings of meat and . . .
. . . and . . .
. . . was that the man’s spine?
That was stupid. That was impossible.
The man reached for him.
There was a blur of movement and a smashed-melon crunch and then the man was falling away and Dad was there, holding the shotgun like a club. His eyes were completely wild.
“
Jack for Christ’s sake get back into the house.
”
Jack tried to say something, to ask one of the questions that burned like embers in his mind. Simple questions. Like, what was happening? Why did nothing make sense?
Where was Mom?
Where was Jill?
But Jack’s mouth would not work.
Another figure came out of the rain. Mrs. Suzuki, the lady who owned the soy farm next door. She came over for Sunday dinners almost every week. Mrs. Suzuki was all naked.
Naked.
Jack had only ever seen naked people on the Internet, at sites where he wasn’t allowed to go. Sites that Mom thought she’d blocked.
But Mrs. Suzuki was naked. Not a stitch on her.
She wasn’t built like any of the women on the Internet. She had tiny breasts and a big scar on her stomach, and her pubic hair wasn’t trimmed into a thin line. She wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t sexy.
She wasn’t whole.
There were pieces of her missing. Big chunks of her arms and breasts and face. Mrs. Suzuki had black blood dripping from between her lips, and her eyes were as empty as holes.