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 the 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 she 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 assault and battery, 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 for Tony, 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 nothing as Dad pulled the shotgun trigger and nothing happened.
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, ho
lding the shotgun like a club. His eyes were completely wild.
“Jack—for God’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 wasn’t sexy.
She wasn’t whole.
There were pieces of her missing. Big chunks of her arms and stomach and face. Mrs. Suzuki had black blood dripping from between her lips, and her eyes were as empty as holes.
She opened her mouth and spoke to him.
Not in words.
She uttered a moan of endless, shapeless need. Of hunger.
It was the moan Jack knew so well. It was the same sound Toby had made; the same sound that he knew he would make when the cancer pushed him all the way into the path of the rolling, endless dark.
The moan rose from Mrs. Suzuki’s mouth and joined with the moans of all the other staggering figures. All of them, making the same sound.
Then Mrs. Suzuki’s teeth snapped together with a clack of porcelain.
Jack tried to scream, but his voice was hiding somewhere and he couldn’t find it.
Dad swung the shotgun at her, and her face seemed to come apart. Pieces of something hit Jack in the chest, and he looked down to see teeth stuck to his raincoat by gobs of black stuff.
He thought something silly. He knew it was silly, but he thought it anyway because it was the only thought that would fit into his head.
But how will she eat her Sunday dinner without teeth?
He turned to see Dad struggling with two figures whose faces were as white as milk except for their dark eyes and dark mouths. One was a guy who worked for Mrs. Suzuki. José. Jack didn’t know his last name. José something. The other was a big red-haired guy in a military uniform. Jack knew all the uniforms. This was a National Guard uniform. He had corporal’s stripes on his arms. But he only had one arm. The other sleeve whipped and popped in the wind, but there was nothing in it.
Dad was slipping in the mud. He fell back against the rear fender of the Durango. The shotgun slipped from his hands and was swallowed up by the groundwater.
The groundwater.
The cold, cold groundwater.
Jack looked numbly down at where his legs vanished into the swirling water. It eddied around his shins, just below his knees. He couldn’t feel his feet anymore.
Be careful, Mom said from the warmth of his memories, or you’ll catch your death.
Catch your death.
Jack thought about that as Dad struggled with the two white-faced people. The wind pushed Jack around, made him sway like a stalk of green corn.
He saw Dad let go of one of the people so he could grab for the pistol tucked into his waistband.
No, Dad, thought Jack. Don’t do that. They’ll get you if you do that.
Dad grabbed the pistol, brought it up, jammed the barrel under José’s chin. Fired. José’s hair seemed to jump off his head and then he was falling, his fingers going instantly slack.
But the soldier.
He darted his head forward and clamped his teeth on Dad’s wrist. On the gun wrist.
Dad screamed again. The pistol fired again, but the bullet went all the way up into the storm and disappeared.
Jack was utterly unable to move. Pale figures continued to come lumbering out of the rain. They came toward him, reached for him . . .
. . . but not one of them touched him.
Not one.
And there were so many.
Dad was surrounded now. He screamed and screamed, and fired his pistol. Three of the figures fell. Four. Two got back up again, the holes in their chests leaking black blood. The other two dropped backward with parts of their heads missing.
Aim for the head, Dad, thought Jack. It’s what they do in the video games.
Dad never played those games. He aimed center mass and fired. Fired.
And then the white-faced people dragged him down into the frothing water.
Jack knew that he should do something. At the same time, and with the kind of mature clarity that came with dying at his age, he knew that he was in shock. Held in place by it. Probably going to be killed by it. If not by these . . . whatever they were . . . then by the vicious cold that was chewing its way up his spindly legs.
He could not move if he was on fire, he knew that. He was going to stand there and watch the world go all the way crazy. Maybe this was the black wall of nothing that he imagined. This . . .
What was it?
A plague? Or what did they call it? Mass hysteria?
No. People didn’t eat each other during riots. Not even soccer riots.
This was different.
This was monster stuff.
This was stuff from TV and movies and video games.
Only the special effects didn’t look as good. The blood wasn’t bright enough. The wounds didn’t look as disgusting. It was always better on TV.
Jack knew that his thoughts were crazy.
I’m in shock, duh.
He almost smiled.
And then he heard Jill.
Screaming.
10
Jack ran.
He went from frozen immobility to full-tilt run so fast that he felt like he melted out of the moment and reappeared somewhere else. It was surreal. That was a word he knew from books he’d real. Surreal. Not entirely real.
That fit everything that was happening.
His feet were so cold it was like running on knives. He ran into the teeth of the wind as the white-faced people shambled and splashed toward him and then turned away with grunts of disgust.
I’m not what they want, he thought.
He knew that was true, and he thought he knew why.
It made him run faster.
He slogged around the end of the Durango and tripped on something lying half-submerged by the rear wheel.
Something that twitched and jerked as white faces buried their mouths in it and pulled with bloody teeth. Pulled and wrenched, like dogs fighting over a beef bone.
Only it wasn’t beef.
The bone that gleamed white in the lightning flash belonged to Uncle Roger. Bone was nearly all that was left of him as figures staggered away, clutching red lumps to their mouths.
Jack gagged and then vomited into the wind. The wind slapped his face with all the Cheerios he’d eaten that day. He didn’t care. Jill wouldn’t care.
Jill screamed again and Jack skidded to a stop, turning, confused. The sound of her scream no longer came from the far side of the truck. It sounded closer than that, but it was a gurgling scream.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed her name into the howling storm.
A hand closed around his ankle.
Under the water.
From under the back of the truck.
Jack screamed, inarticulate and filled with panic as he tried to jerk his leg away. The hand holding him had no strength, and his ankle popped free and Jack staggered back and then fell flat on his ass in the frigid water. It splashed up inside his raincoat and soaked every inch of him. Three of the white-faced things turned to glare at him, but their snarls of anger flickered and went out as they found nothing worth hunting.
“Jack—?”
Her voice seemed to come out of nowhere. Still wet and gurgling, drowned by rain and blown thin by the wind.
But so close.
/> Jack stared at the water that smacked against the truck. At the pale, thin, grasping hand that opened and closed on nothing but rainwater.
“Jack?”
“Jill!” he cried, and Jack struggled onto his knees and began slapping at the water, pawing at it as if he could dig a hole in it. He bent and saw a narrow gap between the surface of the water and the greasy metal undersides of the truck. He saw two eyes, there and gone again in the lightning bursts. Dark eyes that he knew would be red.
“Jill!” he croaked at the same moment that she cried, “Jack!”
He grabbed her hands and pulled.
The mud and the surging water wanted to keep her, but not as much as he needed to pull her out. She came loose with a glop! They fell back together, sinking into the water, taking mouthfuls of it, choking, coughing, sputtering, gagging it out as they helped each other sit up.
The white things came toward them. Drawn to the splashing or drawn to the fever that burned in Jill’s body. Jack could feel it from where he touched her. It was as if there was a coal furnace burning bright under her skin. Even with all this cold rain and runoff, she was hot. Steam curled up from her.
None curled up from Jack. His body felt even more shrunken than usual. Thinner, drawn into itself to kindle the last sparks of what he had left. He moaned in pain as he tried to stand. The creatures surrounding him moaned too. Their cries sounded no different from his.
He forced himself to stand and wrapped an arm around Jill.
“Run!” he cried.
They cut between two of the figures, and the things turned awkwardly, clutching at them with dead fingers, but Jack and Jill ducked and slipped past. The porch was close, but the water made it hard to run. The creatures with the white faces were clumsier and slower, and that helped.
Thunder battered the farm, deafening Jack and Jill as they collapsed onto the stairs and crawled like bugs onto the plank floor. The front door was wide open, the glow from the Coleman lantern showing the way.
“Jack,” Jill mumbled, slurring his name. “I feel sick.”
The monsters in the rain kept coming, and Jack realized that they had ignored him time and again. These creatures were not chasing him now. They were coming for Jill. They wanted her.