Jack took a small step forward, trying to catch a peek at Jill. She was still unconscious, her face small and gray. Mom and Dad seemed to have eight hands each as they cleaned and swabbed and dabbed. The worst wound was the one on her forearm. It was ugly and it wasn’t just one of those bites when someone squeezes his teeth on you; no, there was actual skin missing. Someone had taken a bite out of Jill, and that was a whole other thing. Jack could see that the edges of the ragged flesh were stained with something dark and gooey.
“What’s all that black stuff?” asked Mom as she probed the bite. “Is that oil?”
“No,” barked Dad, “it’s coming out of her like pus. Christ, I don’t know what it is. Some kind of infection. Don’t get it on you. Give me the alcohol.”
Jack kept staring at the black goo and he thought he could see something move inside it. Like tiny threadlike worms.
Uncle Roger kept talking, his voice level and detached. “We saw her teacher, Mrs. Grayson, lying on the ground and two kids were kneeling over her. I … I thought they were praying. Or … something. They had their heads bowed, but when I pulled one back to try and see if the teacher was okay…”
Roger stopped talking. He raised his injured left hand and stared at it as if it didn’t belong to him, as if the memory of that injury couldn’t belong to his experience. The bandage was red with blood, but Jack could see some of the black stuff on Uncle Roger, too. On the bandages and on his skin.
“Somebody bit you?” asked Jack, and Roger twitched and turned toward him. He stared down with huge eyes. “Is that what happened?”
Roger slowly nodded. “It was that girl who wears all that makeup. Maddy Simpson. She bared her teeth at me like she was some kind of fuckin’ animal and she just … she just…”
He shook his head.
“Maddy?” murmured Jack. “What did you do?”
Roger’s eyes slid away. “I … um … I made her let go. You know? She was acting all crazy and I had to make her let go. I had to…”
Jack did not ask what exactly Uncle Roger had done to free himself of Maddy Simpson’s white teeth. His clothes and face were splashed with blood and the truth of it was in his eyes. It made Jack want to run and hide.
But he couldn’t leave.
He had to know.
And he had to be there when Jill woke up.
Roger stumbled his way back into his story. “It wasn’t just here. It was everybody. Everybody was going batshit crazy. People kept rushing at us. Nobody was making any sense and the rain would not stop battering us. You couldn’t see, couldn’t even think. We … we … we had to find Jill, you know?”
“But what is it?” asked Jack. “Is it rabies?”
Dad, Mom, and Roger all looked at him, then at one another.
“Rabies don’t come on that fast,” said Dad. “This was happening right away. I saw some people go down really hurt. Throat wounds and such. Thought they were dead, but then they got back up again and started attacking people. That’s how fast this works.” He shook his head. “Not any damn rabies.”
“Maybe it’s one of them terrorist things,” said Roger.
Mom and Dad stiffened and stared at him, and Jack saw new doubt and fear blossom in their eyes.
“What kind of thing?” asked Dad.
Roger licked his lips. “Some kind of nerve gas, maybe? One of those—whaddya call ’em?—weaponized things. Like in the movies. Anthrax or ebola or something. Something that drives people nuts.”
“It’s not ebola,” snapped Mom.
“Maybe it’s a toxic spill or something,” Roger ventured. It was clear to Jack that Roger really needed to have this be something ordinary enough to have a name.
So did Jack. If it had a name then maybe Jill would be okay.
Roger said, “Or maybe it’s—”
Mom cut him off. “Put on the TV. Maybe there’s something.”
“I got it,” said Jack, happy to have something to do. He snatched the remote off the coffee table and pressed the button. The TV had been on local news when they’d turned it off, but when the picture came on, all it showed was a stationary text page.
WE ARE EXPERIENCING
A TEMPORARY INTERRUPTION IN SERVICE.
PLEASE STAND BY
“Go to CNN,” suggested Roger, but Jack was already surfing through the stations. They had Comcast cable. Eight hundred stations, including high-def.
The same text was on every single one.
“What the hell?” said Roger indignantly. “We have friggin’ digital. How can all the station feeds be out?”
“Maybe it’s the cable channel,” said Jack. “Everything goes through them, right?”
“It’s the storm,” said Dad.
“No,” said Mom, but she didn’t explain. She bent over Jill and peered closer at the black goo around her wounds. “Oh my god, Steve, there’s something in there. Some kind of—”
Jill suddenly opened her eyes.
Everyone froze.
Jill looked up at Mom and Dad, then at Uncle Roger, and then finally at Jack.
“Jack…” she said in a faint whisper, lifting her uninjured hand toward him. “I had the strangest dream.”
“Jilly?” Jack murmured in a voice that had suddenly gone as dry as bones. He reached a tentative hand toward her. But as Jack’s fingers lightly brushed his sister’s, Dad smacked his hand away.
“Don’t!” he warned.
Jill’s eyes were all wrong. The green of her irises had darkened to a rusty hue and the whites had flushed to crimson. A black tear broke from the corner of her eye and wriggled its way down her cheek. Tiny white things twisted and squirmed in the goo.
Mom choked back a scream and actually recoiled from Jill.
Roger whispered, “God almighty … what is that shit? What’s wrong with her?”
“Jack—?” called Jill. “You look all funny. Why are you wearing red makeup?”
Her voice had a dreamy, distant quality. Almost musical in its lilt, like the way people sometimes spoke in dreams. Jack absently touched his face, as if it were his skin and not her vision that was painted with blood.
“Steve,” said Mom in an urgent whisper, “we have to get her to a doctor. Right now.”
“We can’t, honey, the storm—”
“We have to. Dammit, Steve, I can’t lose both my babies.”
She gasped at her own words and cut a look at Jack, reaching for him with hands that were covered in Jill’s blood. “Oh, God … Jack … sweetie, I didn’t mean—”
“No,” said Jack, “it’s okay. We have to save Jill. We have to.”
Mom and Dad both looked at him for a few terrible seconds, and there was such pain in their eyes that Jack wanted to turn away. But he didn’t. What Mom had said did not hurt him as much as it hurt her. She didn’t know it, but Jack had heard her say those kinds of things before. Late at night when she and Dad sat together on the couch and cried and talked about what they were going to do after he was dead. He knew that they’d long ago given up real hope. Hope was fragile and cancer was a monster.
Fresh tears brimmed in Mom’s eyes and Jack could almost feel something pass between them. Some understanding, some acceptance. There was an odd little flicker of relief, as if she grasped what Jack knew about his own future. And Jack wondered if, when Mom looked into her own dreams at the future of her only son, she also saw the great black wall of nothing that was just a little way down the road.
Jack knew that he could never put any of this into words. He was a very smart twelve-year-old, but this was something for philosophers. No one of that profession lived on their farm.
The moment, which was only a heartbeat long, stretched too far and broke. The brimming tears fell down Mom’s cheeks and she turned back to Jill. Back to the child who maybe still had a future. Back to the child she could fight for.
Jack was completely okay with that.
He looked at his sister, at those crimson eyes. They were so alien that he could
not find her in there. Then Jill gave him a small smile. A smile he knew so well. The smile that said, This isn’t so bad. The smile they sometimes shared when they were both in trouble and getting yelled at rather than having their computers and Xboxes taken away.
Then her eyes drifted shut, and 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 we 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, goddammit!” 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 blocking 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—”
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 face 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 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 9-mm. 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 .32-caliber Smith & 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 into 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 had 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. The vagrant had gone hustling along the road and never come 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 had been 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’d 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 jerk-off like Tony. On the other hand, Tony had almost hurt Jill, so maybe he got off lightly. 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.
A
lmost.
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 sky above 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 on to 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’d gone 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 were 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.
21st Century Dead Page 27
