Mom said nothing.
“Your son is dead.”
Mom still didn’t say anything, but her breathing was getting fast and harsh. She had her eyes and mouth squeezed shut as if to keep Jerry from getting in, but he was bent so close over her that Lucy didn’t think she’d have to have her eyes open to see him or her mouth open to taste him. His tongue lapped at her lips, and he matched his breathing to hers, breathing in when she breathed out.
Jerry was chanting now. “Ethan Michael Brill is dead. Your firstborn child is dead. You let him die. You didn’t protect him. You didn’t keep him safe. Ethan is dead. Ethan Michael—”
“Stop!” Mom shrieked, and the instant she opened her mouth Jerry pressed his over it. There was a slurping sound that seemed to go on for a long time. Under her hands, under Rae’s hands, Mom’s body shuddered.
Rae’s white lips were making motions that Lucy didn’t understand at first. Then she saw that her sister was sending her a secret, silent, very important message: “Get ready.”
Jerry’s chant was so rhythmic and insinuating that other people in the circle had picked it up. Ethan Michael Brill. Ethan Michael Brill. Rae Ellen Brill. Lucy Ann Brill. Lucy Ann Brill. Lucy Ann Brill.
Lucy heard herself saying her own name over and over again with him. She tried to stop but couldn’t tell whether she did or not.
Ethan Michael Brill. Rae Ellen Brill. Lucy Ann Brill. All your children, one by one. Lost. Dead. You can’t keep any of them safe.
Mom was screaming now, no words, just terrible raw noise matched to Jerry’s rhythm that made her rise up and fall down under Lucy’s hands. Her screams and the movements of her body got mixed up with everything else, and Lucy couldn’t tell where one thing stopped and something else started, where she stopped and her mother started and Jerry started, until Rae jumped.
Rae hurled herself at Jerry. He hadn’t seen her coming. She broke the circle, stopped his chanting and his feeding. He gasped, choked, and fell over sideways, away from Rae’s assault and into Lucy’s lap.
As soon as Jerry’s hands and mouth were off her, Mom tore loose from the others. She and Rae pulled him off Lucy. Nobody was making any loud noise now. Mom was panting. Rae as making a high-pitched whine in her throat. Around the room everybody was quiet, except for Stephanie, who gave a long, low moan and collapsed onto the mat.
Jerry was gurgling. Bubbles came out of his nose and mouth. He lay on his side like a huge baby, or like a mannequin made of light plastic. Afraid to touch him, Lucy forced herself to kick at his arm; it moved as if it didn’t have any weight at all. His enormous bloated belly lay ahead of him on the mat. It sank like bread dough as Rae knelt beside it and pushed fists into it again and again.
29
It was hard for her to climb back up all those stairs, but she did it. Rae was ahead of her, and Mom was behind her with her hand on Lucy’s back. Way far behind her were Jerry Johnston and Billy and Stephanie and the others. Way far behind her, under the ground.
When they finally reached the heavy padded door at the top and climbed through it and were in the dark outside again, it was hard for her to know where she was. But she made herself remember: this was the courtyard in the middle of Jerry’s secret house, the hole at the core of it that made it hollow.
She heard crackling, and tinny voices. A radio, she realized. A police radio. She heard sirens.
She heard her father’s voice.
She stumbled over a prickly bush. She rammed her knee into a wooden box full of sharp dead flower stalks. She heard Dad, calling and calling Mom’s name, but she didn’t know where he was or how to get to him.
Rae fell.
Mom crouched beside Rae and yelled, “Tony! Tony! We’re in here!”
“Car-ole!” Mom’s name sounded much longer than it was when Dad called and called it; it sounded almost not like a name at all. Lucy’s head swam. She swayed and grabbed onto a branch, but it snapped off in her hand.
All of a sudden there were blinding searchlights and loud voices, and lots of people in uniforms, and Dad kneeling beside and Mom saying over and over again, “I’ve got them. I’ve got both the girls,” and Dad saying Rae’s name and Mom’s name and then, “Where’s Lucy?”
“I’m here,” Lucy said out loud.
Dad came through the lights and knelt in front of her and took her in his arms.
Rae was sitting up. Mom was saying to the cops, “He’s down there. They’re all down there. Hurry.”
“Down where, ma’am? Who’s down where?”
“I’ll show you.” Lucy twisted away from Dad and ran to the spot among the bushes and benches and hedges where she knew the big trapdoor would be. She didn’t know how she knew it was there; she’d thought she was lost. But there it was, still open, and she jumped down into it before any of the pursuing grown-ups could stop her.
She had to see him again. Nobody was making her. She just had to.
She went by herself down all those steps. They kept moving around under her feet. All of a sudden they’d curve and dip or get wider or skinnier, for no reason. She wished somebody would be there to guide her, or at least to warn her ahead of time how the steps went. But nobody was. She had to figure it out for herself.
She tripped a lot of times when the steps rose up or sank. She kept running into walls, because a minute ago they’d been somewhere else. One time she fell and had to turn around and crawl with her hands up the steps behind her in order to get back on her feet. It occurred to her that if somebody had been there to help her they’d have made things worse; in this distorted and shifting darkness, she had to find her own balance.
The steps kept going down and down. She’d lost count of them. Maybe I’ll never get out of here, she thought, but that was just a habit, self-indulgence. She knew she’d get out.
And she had to see him again.
Finally she seemed to be on more or less level ground. She pushed her hands straight out in front of her until they rested against the padded door. Trying not to think too much about it, she drew her hands back in, took a deep breath, and flung herself at the door. It swung open so easily that she almost fell, and she stumbled headlong into the underground room.
Teenagers were still sitting and lying around the room, but the circle was so broken now that if you didn’t know there’d been one, you’d have thought there was no pattern at all. They weren’t touching each other anymore, and of course they weren’t touching Jerry. Some were slumped over in a sitting position, legs awkwardly crossed and hands limp in their laps. Some had tipped over sideways onto the mat among the scattered pillows. Their arms were bent and their legs were drawn up and their lips were pursed as if for sucking or kissing. They looked like pictures Lucy’d seen of fetuses in the womb.
Billy was still on the cot by the door. Lucy made herself crouch beside him and peer into his face, as if she wanted to kiss him. She didn’t want to kiss him. But you had to know the truth. You had to understand as much about the truth as you could.
Billy was dead.
The truth was: Billy was dead. Jerry had killed him.
The truth was: Ethan was dead, too, but he wasn’t here. She would never see Ethan again.
The truth was: Lucy was alive, and she wanted to be.
Stephanie and a few of the others had made their own smaller circle around the enormous body of Jerry Johnston. They were holding hands and swaying and trying to chant, but their voices broke. One by one they reached out and put their hands on him. Lucy dropped to her hands and knees, because she couldn’t trust her legs to hold her upright, and crawled across the mat to join them.
The body was both bloated and collapsed. The eyes were craters filled with brown pus. The belly had imploded so that now it sank in as far as it used to swell out, like a pumpkin somebody’d hollowed out for Halloween. The rings glinted and hung loose on the fingers. The tongue, swollen and coated white, stuck out of the side of the mouth.
Lucy crawled to the top of the head, leaned
way over, and put her mouth on Jerry’s. It was cold and still, no sucking. It was so quiet, too; there wasn’t any voice saying darling, saying I need you, saying feel what I need you to feel and then give it to me. There wasn’t any breath.
Lucy sat back and put her hands on her own rib cage. Her breath went in and out.
She raised up on her knees again and leaned forward and rested the heels of her hands on Jerry’s chest. She lost her balance a little and her weight shifted, and her hands went through the shell of bone and flesh into the central body cavity. She cried out but didn’t pull away.
There was nothing inside.
There was no blood. Her hands were dry and unstained. There was no tissue, not even dried-up pieces or little bits like sponge.
There was no heart. Lucy cupped her hands and scooped inside Jerry Johnston’s corpse, and there were no organs at all. No lungs, which she’d always imagined as shaped like those seed airplanes that floated down from maple trees in the summertime and you’d find them all over the yard trying to start new trees. No purse-like stomach.
No heart.
Slowly she withdrew her hands from inside the empty torso and slid them back up to lay them on either side of the head. With her fingertips she traced the eye sockets, the bridge of the nose, the jawline. There were indentations and cave-ins everywhere. Bones bent and moved. The point of the chin flattened under her palm; the nose punched in.
Then she pressed, not very hard, under and behind the ears, and the skull shattered. Jerry’s head came apart in her hands, and she was holding pieces of his skull and clots of his hair. Once it broke, it wasn’t a head anymore, and there was nothing inside. No thoughts. No power. No brain.
Jerry Johnston was empty. He’d eaten himself up.
Lucy heard the murmuring of Stephanie and the others around her. They were saying a lot of things. One of them was her name: “Lucy Lucy Lucy,” a chant.
She heard voices and footsteps outside the door, and then it opened and light came in, just as she sat back from the emptied, heartless, brainless body of Jerry Johnston and put her hands in her lap. The police were here. Mom and Dad and Rae were here, calling her name, loving her.
Lucy thought her own thoughts. She felt her own feelings; many of them had no names, and needed none. She welcomed the blood in her own veins, the air in her own lungs, her heart beating, her brain working, and the rest of her life to live.
She stood up shakily and turned to meet her family; Just before they got to her to take her in their arms, she slipped one small sharp piece of Jerry Johnston’s skull into the back pocket of her jeans—an amulet, a message, a secret code.
Then she said out loud, “I want to go home.”
AFTERAGE
By Yvonne Navarro
To my sister Debbie,
who would've gotten a charge out of this whole thing. Life goes on, but you will always be an irreplaceable piece of its magic.
Special thanks to:
My Mom, for telling me I could do this in the first place;
Rick McCammon, for not laughing in 1984;
Dave Silva, for publishing (and paying me for!) my first short story;
Ann Kennedy, for a vision of what "Victory's Ode" could be;
A big possum hug to Kathy Ptacek, for giving me my first pro sale;
My Dad, not only for his technical teachings and patience, but for helping me pull things back together;
Jeff, for his endless support and encouragement when I needed it most;
Wayne, for Advanced Weapons 1.01 and just for being a buddy;
Roger Coleman, formerly of Mountain View, California, for help with the "medical stuff";
Joe Lansdale, for a turn in the right direction when I was at wit's end;
My agent, Howard Morhaim, for following his intuition;
A wonderful bunch of friends who took me into the fold with tireless advice and support and love: Beth, Brian, Dave, Mark, Peggy, Andrew, Harry, Kathleen, Amy, Kurt, Marthayn, Augie, Jeff J., and again, the Waynester;
And Tams, for her unfaltering "I never had a doubt" attitude.
Most of the quotes from Revelation in these pages have been blatantly, shamelessly, and conveniently paraphrased … but the real words are still frightening enough to twist your dreams.
Prologue
REVELATION 7:16
They shall hunger no more,
neither thirst anymore;
neither shall the sun light on them,
nor any heat.
REVELATION 20:9
And they went upon the breadth of the
earth … and devoured them.
PROPHECY:
In the time before, many had prophesied, wailing loudly of the damage being done to God's good world: the Ten Commandments, they pointed out, were not just being ignored; they were being mocked. Remember, God's seers said as they drew themselves up knowingly behind priests' vestments and holy white collars:
The meek shall inherit the earth.
But those who inherited the earth were not meek at all.
I
March 23
The Survivors—
Life in the Land of the Living
1
REVELATION 11:8-9
And their dead bodies shall lie in
the streets of the great city …
and shall not suffer their dead
to be put in graves.
A quarter of an hour until dawn, and Alex Nicholson could see a woman on the street below.
He woke early, during the gray, pre-safe time before the sun topped the downtown buildings and filled the streets with light. As always, he stood shivering at a window while he scanned Clark Street from thirteen stories up, looking for movement, birds, whatever might catch his gaze. This morning his eyes widened as he saw the female come from around the corner of City Hall. At first he thought she was one of them, but she drifted east across Daley Plaza as if she were out for a morning stroll, back when 5:45 A.M. had been a time ruled by joggers and health freaks. Even at this distance he could see her hands reach to pry at a pale knot atop her head; a moment later a fine sheet of hair fell to her hips, then streamed behind her in the spring wind like bleached corn silk, barely visible against the startling white of her dress. There was no hurry in her step and for a moment she lifted her face to the sky, as if to welcome the soon-to-rise sun.
He stared in dismay as she headed straight for the subway entrance.
All drowsiness fled. "Stop," he hissed. "It's too early—get away from there!" His knuckles gripped the metal ledge until the fingers went bloodless. What the hell was she doing? She must be mad! His thoughts spun desperately. He could grab a weapon and start down, but it’d take him seven minutes—five at least—just to negotiate the stairs and throw back the bolts on the doors. By then the sun would be up.
She was parallel to the stairs sinking to subway level now and Nicholson felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
"Watch out!" he cried uselessly. Her head swiveled to the left as a figure darted from the stairs and clutched at her wrist. From Nicholson's vantage point, she didn't seem to resist as she was dragged into the stone entryway; for an incredible moment he could have sworn she embraced her attacker.
In three seconds she was out of sight.
In another five he was pounding down the stairs, a wickedly sharp machete gripped in one fist while he struggled for balance as he leapt down four and five steps at a time. Each second was precious; there wasn't enough time to drain her, he reasoned wildly, it was too close to sunup. But there was time to drag her somewhere and tie her for later. If it got her into the tunnels, she was finished. He'd never been foolish enough to explore the lightless underground, even during the day. He tried to speed up, every footfall jolting purposely buried memories closer to the surface of his mind, releasing phantom screams and pernicious shadows from beyond the crumbling walls of mental safety. Breath rasping, he reached the first floor and fought with the tight metal bars across the st
airwell door. They grated and screeched as he wrenched them loose, the unoiled hinges screaming their alarm. His senses heightened in the stairwell's blackness, and he could smell his fear for the girl on the sweat squeezing from his pores as he finally tore open the steel fire door.
After the darkness of the hallway, the mild gray light of dawn spilling into the lobby nearly blinded him; he stumbled, then found his footing and raced for the main doors. Too long! he thought frantically as he fumbled keys into the locks. For the first time, he regretted welding shut the building's underground entrances, but his good intentions could be contemplated later. Right now, he clenched his teeth in frustration as his fingers tangled and his hold on the keyring jittered. I’ll bet she's—
Then he was out and running across the plaza, his grasp on the machete precariously slick. He skidded to a stop at the top of the stairs and peered below, then turned away in revulsion; the smell sliding up his nose reminded him of dead frogs in long-ago biology classes.
There was no sign of the woman. The bloodsucker that had attacked her was crumpled on the stairs, a mass of slowly disintegrating flesh; where its mouth had been was a maw of blackened skin and fused stumps that might have once been fangs. Insane red eyes blinked against the light and fastened on Nicholson as it tried to crawl away. In them he saw pain, rage, and hate, and the legs kicked as Nicholson covered his nose in disgust and raised his machete. In another moment, the thing's head thumped down the concrete stairs into the shadows, leaving bits of flesh and sticky fluid in its wake as the mouth still worked hungrily. At Alex's feet, the fingers twisted and reached reflexively and he backstepped, watching until the sun did its work and nothing was left but a tarlike puddle.
Where one of the hands had been, Nicholson saw several strands of fine white hair; he plucked them from the gooey remnants with the point of his blade and held them up. Still clean, they sparkled like silver threads in the brightening sunlight before the breeze flung them away.
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