Occasionally he saw snakes lying in the shelter of the trees, snakes lying in the road: copperheads, coral snakes, king snakes, lying right beside the occasional spotted or red-cheeked salamander. Like worms escaping the ground after a heavy rain. He almost went off the road trying to avoid them, not because he was afraid, but because he thought they deserved to live.
At one point, he had to swerve sharply to avoid a Nole Company truck left upside down in the middle of the road. Another time he stopped and pointed out a shady area by the lake to his passengers. There, on the edge of the deep blue water, was the old wood-burning stove from Charlie Simpson’s store, sitting perfectly upright in a cleared area as if it were right where it belonged. He could see shadows under the trees there, and imagined, briefly, the shadows bunching their feet around the fire guard, passing on news and swapping stories, retelling the legend of the last great Simpson Creeks flood, and the giant lake that appeared overnight, again and again. It had been several minutes before he’d been able to pull out again and leave that antique stove behind.
As they traveled farther south toward Four Corners, they saw more and more pieces of water-sculpted, almost shapeless debris. Debris you could read like clouds, imagining anything you wanted. He kept staring at the pieces, wondering what they might be, daring them to move.
The insects, once so prevalent, had been silenced. Here and there, a whisper of circular ripples broke the surface, but he saw nothing that might have caused them. Whatever it might be remained beneath the surface.
They were still uneasy around the water. He wouldn’t drive too closely—he stayed on the far side of the road away from the lake wherever possible—and crossing bridges was a real terror to him. He did it quickly, and would not look into the water below him.
Many animals would have survived, although the toll in deer and rabbit—vulnerable animals—would be high. The trees’ seed crops—berries and nuts and the like—would have been stripped in such a storm. It suddenly occurred to him that a bear wouldn’t find the Big Andy too hospitable a place to its kind at the present time.
But so much still survived here. Hillsides blooming with purple rhododendron. The lake bank was painted with golden ragwort and Indian paintbrush, fairy wand and trumpet honeysuckle, and delicate pink lady’s slipper. Tufts of panic grass clutching sheer rock faces he’d have thought too unfriendly for any kind of life. Big Andy was one persistent devil.
Most of all, it looked to be virgin land here. As if this country had never been mined at all.
Not sure even these thoughts were his own, Ben Taylor drove the old pickup out from under Big Andy’s shadow toward Four Corners. Toward his wife Martha and the kids. He had to resist the urge to speed, to maneuver around these roads too rapidly, dangerously. He’d thought he’d never see them again. Terrible thing…the way people seemed to take family for granted. Big Andy had left the remaining Taylors intact; they’d been lucky. So many had lost everything, including their lives.
His passengers were still shell-shocked; impossibility upon impossibility, the great number of bizarre appearances and deaths had overloaded their brains. No wonder; he’d be surprised if any of them got a good night’s sleep for months to come. Ben could say that they’d actually been through hell and back.
Inez and Joe were in the front seat of the old truck with him. He’d been worried about Inez—she’d been deathly quiet for most of the trip. That thought made him feel like a foolish old man. After all, what did he expect? She’d lost everything. But the last few miles she’d been talking about the flowers they’d passed, and how unusual it was to have flowers like that around here this late in the year. Inez was going to be okay.
They’d picked Joe up on the way, walking down the road by himself. Ben and Joe’d talked excitedly for the space of several minutes…how neither had expected to see the other one ever again, how they both figured they were the only survivors. Then they’d caught the gloom in everyone else’s faces and it made them remember, made them think about where they were. They got back into the truck and headed down the road. Survivors. Now that was a word. Ben started to think about Charlie…that image of him gazing off into the distance before going over the waterfall. Ben would never forget that.
But he had to get a grip on himself; these people depended on him. He was probably the only one in good enough shape to drive; he couldn’t afford to break down now. None of them could.
Survivor. He hoped so. He dearly hoped they were survivors.
Joe was still talking pretty actively, more words than Ben could ever remember hearing out of the man. Gesturing with a queer sort of nervous energy. “Going back to Cincinnati, that I am, Ben,” he said. “Going to find my wife and that pretty little daughter of mine when I get there, yessir. Make a good life for us all. Make a family. Been hanging around down here too long, not being responsible. That’s gonna stop, I can promise you that!” Something had happened to Joe Manors. Ben believed him.
Audra huddled in the bed of the truck, leaned up against the back of the cab behind Ben. She’d been the quietest of the bunch; she hadn’t said a word since they found her, just whimpering occasionally, looking up at you out of those dark-circled, blood red eyes. You couldn’t bear to look into those eyes for very long. Ben was afraid she might never be the same; there was damage in that girl, he could see it.
And she wouldn’t go anywhere near Reed.
Reed sat upright in the truck bed behind Joe Manors. By looking into the rearview mirror Ben could look directly into his nephew’s face. Now the boy was sitting comfortably, staring ahead of him, hands folded neatly in his lap.
Ben had to admit Reed looked better than expected. In fact, he looked healthier, if anything, than the evening he got off the train. His pale complexion was almost ruddy now, as if he’d spent years outdoors. His movements seemed confident, agile. And he seemed to have completely gotten rid of that damn cold.
Reed’s eyes were dark and shadowed, actually pretty handsome, Ben thought. His hair had gotten a little wild, seemed a little longer than Ben remembered it. As if he hadn’t had it cut in years. There was something dark…mud or scum…smeared and dried into his hair, something from the flood, putting reddish highlights into the pitch-black hair.
Reed turned and looked Ben directly in the eye. His nephew’s eyes had odd, sickle-shaped highlights in the upper halves of the pupils.
What you can’t face…it controls you. They’d had the conversation a day ago. It seemed like years.
Reed was smiling. A gleaming tooth on one side of his mouth caught the lower lip and pulled it away from the mouth. He unfolded his hands. The knuckles were worn, the skin stained, dirty. The nails were like digging tools—or, Ben suddenly thought, like claws: long, curved, thick with the years.
For just a moment, Ben closed his eyes.
THUNDER RISE
Book One of the Thunder Rise Trilogy
By G. Wayne Miller
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many helped; many lent support. I’d especially like to thank: Liza Bakewell, Brown University; John Castellucci; the Centers for Disease Control; David Conboy; Jane Dempsey, R.N., Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island; Alison C. Guinness; Kelly Howland; Dave Silva; Mary Wright, R.N.; Irene Wielawski, medical writer, Providence Journal-Bulletin; and the rest of the PJB crew, who have always been supportive of my writing, no matter what kind.
PART ONE
NIGHTMARES
CHAPTER ONE
Sunday, August 3
Maureen McDonald, Susie and Hank McDonald’s five-year-old, was the first.
Unlike June and July, when it had been unbearably hot and drought had ruined the corn, the weather that Sunday afternoon was a vacationer’s nemesis—drizzly, unseasonably cool, with no promise of quick improvement. The Red Sox and the Mets, who might have brought some color to the gray, had both been rained out; TV programmers had substituted an old western and a bad Bogart. Even the annual Berkshire Crafts Fair across Thunder Rise in highb
row Lenox had been postponed, according to Ginny Ellis, who’d called Susie just before lunch to commiserate. The weather had put such a damper on things that Susie had actually toyed with the idea of cranking up the wood stove, cold and dusty since jonquils had pushed through the ground back in early May.
At the approximate moment the Mystery Disease (as many would later call it) gained its first toehold inside Maureen, her mother was sorting socks.
She was in the living room, sitting on the couch, three drawers of the damn things heaped in front of her on the floor. Hundreds of them, Susie thought. Easily hundreds. In a family where the telephone bill was a monthly argument, how could such a wealth of socks possibly have accumulated? she wondered idly. How, with so many permutations, were there so few mates? One of the burning issues of our time, she thought self-derisively. She sighed, once again contemplated firing up the wood stove, and then opened a new line of debate: whether 2:20 P.M. was too early to crack a beer or whether a cold one was just what the doctor had ordered.
Hell of a way to start a vacation, thought her husband, a millwright at General Electric in Pittsfield, as the western flickered across the twenty-five-inch TV he’d given the family last Christmas. Along about one o’clock he’d waged—and quickly settled—his own beer debate. He was nearly through his third Pabst Blue Ribbon now and glad he had most of a case left on ice.
When you get only a week, is it too much to ask for decent weather? he mused as he went to the window. It’s like somebody up there has it in for the McDonald family. Last year, rain. The year before, that crazy tornado. The year before that, cloudy every single day and so cold your balls were turning blue. Every year, nothing but crap. It’s like being cursed or something.
The weather hadn’t made any noticeable impression on Maureen.
Dressed in her favorite orange slicker, hood up and tied, she’d cheerfully spent the better part of the morning playing some child’s secret game on the lawn by the edge of the woods. Yankees down to their very soles, the McDonalds owned twelve acres of God’s good green earth and considered it the best investment they would ever make. It was a mostly wooded spread, with an inconsequential stream licking across it, hidden away at the end of a twisting gravel road halfway up Thunder Rise. The nearest neighbor was Ginny Ellis, a quarter of a mile distant. Next to her it was Old Man Whipple, that crazy coot, almost a mile away.
The beauty was that Thunder Rise was mostly state forest, with a goodly portion of it belonging to the Pittsfield watershed, a restricted zone. Translation: no development. A century ago it had been quarried and mined by tough-talking entrepreneurs from Boston and Albany and Hartford. No matter how deep they’d gone or how furiously they’d dug or fervently they’d prayed, they’d found no mother lode of copper or granite and not even a trace of the gold an Indian legend promised was deposited inside the mountain’s innards. One by one the companies had gone bust, and the workmen had drifted away to better places and times, leaving behind only rusting machinery and crumbling shafts.
Through the living room window Maureen’s parents had kept an attentive but not overbearing eye on her—the way parents do when their kids have coexisted with the wild since before they could walk. These were people who recognized the outdoors as a trusty companion, who valued its quiet and simple order, who respected its rules, admired its beauty. They found peace in nature, the McDonalds did.
A few minutes after lunch (grilled cheese sandwiches and reheated canned clam chowder, an economical choice that did nothing to raise Mommy and Daddy’s spirits), Maureen waded through the living room socks and asked Mom if she could go upstairs and nap. “Tired, pumpkin?” Susie asked.
“Yes, I am,” Maureen answered languidly. Her voice was an echo of Susie’s, soft and undemanding, but not without a modest authority. Her voice wasn’t all she’d inherited from Mom. Physically she was a miniature replica of Susie, as people meeting the two of them never failed to remark: same black hair, same green eyes, same long legs, same perfectly sculpted hands and neck. About the only gene Dad seemed to have gotten in the pool was the one for noses. Father and daughter had identical sharp, oversize noses.
It had been two years since Maureen had volunteered to nap. Still, nothing to be alarmed about. Kids naturally get exhausted on rainy days, Susie reassured herself; the dampness sucks the energy straight out of them.
“Do you feel all right, honey?” The standard precautionary question.
“Well . . . my stomach hurts,” Maureen said.
Stomach, Susie thought with a sudden tightening of her own insides. Uh-oh.
“Does it hurt bad?”
“Kinda bad.”
“Show me where, sweetheart.”
When they were children, Susie’s sister had almost died of a burst appendix. The experience—the crying, the crazy telephone calls, the ambulance arriving, that long wait with a babysitter, the touch-and-go recovery—was all seared into Susie’s memory.
“Here,” Maureen said, rubbing her lower abdomen.
“Right in the middle?”
“Yeah.”
“Not over here,” Susie said, lightly kneading her daughter’s right side just below her rib cage.
“Unh-unh.”
“It’s not tender where I’m touching now.”
“Unh-unh.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure. It’s down here,” she said, indicating her lower abdomen again, “and it feels squishy-like.”
“Probably something you ate, honey,” Susie said, trying to convince herself. At least it’s not her side, she thought. That’s when the red light flashes.
“Maybe it was the chowder,” Maureen said. “It tasted real old.”
“Could be. Sometimes chowder doesn’t settle right.”
“What’s ‘settle right’ mean, Mommy?”
“It means your body hasn’t been able to digest it properly. Digestion is what your body does to food so it can run itself. Sort of like how a car uses gas.”
“Am I going to throw up, Mommy?”
“I certainly hope not.”
“I don’t like to throw up. I think it’s yucky.”
Susie laughed. “It is yucky.”
“Mommy?” Maureen said, her eyes widening a bit.
“Yes?”
“Do they let you take naps in kindergarten?” Can’t be anything too serious, Susie thought, the relief starting to take hold, if she’s got her mind on kindergarten.
All summer, kindergarten had been on the front burner of family discussion. It was only another month now before she would start. They were sensible folks, the McDonalds, and they wanted their child to be in love with learning (she’d not attended nursery school; this would be her all-important first taste of the classroom). Since June they’d kept up a drumbeat of talk of new clothes, a new backpack, a Rainbow Brite Thermos, slews of Popple stickers, and her very own set of click ballpoint pens. Maureen and her friend Jimmy Ellis, Ginny’s son, were going to ride the bus together to the Morgantown School. As it was turning out, that bus ride was going to be the biggest thrill of all.
“Sure they let you take naps in kindergarten,” Susie said. “Little ones. I think they call them quiet time. Now come on, pumpkin. Upstairs with you.”
“OK.”
“I’ll get you all snuggly under a blanket,” Susie said as they threaded their way through the tangle of socks. “The calendar may say summer, but it sure feels like fall.”
“Yeah, it does. I hope I didn’t get a bug playing outside, Mommy.”
“I hope so, too, sweetheart. Now, come on. Say sweet dreams to your father.”
“Sweet dreams, Dad,” Maureen said.
“Sweet dreams,” Hank said. The last five minutes he’d been half listening to his family, half listening to the TV. “I’m sure you’ll feel all better after a little rest.”
Mother and daughter were one step shy of the top stair when Maureen began to scream.
“OWWWWW!” she wailed.
“What is it, honey?”
“MOMMY, MY STOMACH! MAKE IT GO AWAY! PLEASE, MOMMY! I DON’T WANT A BUG! I WANT IT TO SETTLE RIGHT!”
The color in Maureen’s cheeks had drained away, and she was on her knees, doubled over and sobbing. For one frightening second Susie was afraid she was going to lose her balance and go crashing down the stairs. Somehow, she managed to catch her. Maureen clung to her and clawed the stair rug with her perfectly formed fingers.
It’s burst, Susie thought with a dread that made the inside of her skull swirl.
Her appendix has burst, and we’re twenty-five miles minimum from the nearest hospital, and half of those miles are potholed gravel and dirt roads, and it’s been raining buckets, and the mud’s a foot deep if it’s an inch, and the car’s going to get hopelessly stuck in that mud, I just know it is, and Maureen, my little baby Maureen—my only little pumpkin who I love with my heart and my soul a million times over—is going to die before we can get her there, and it’s all because of our pigheaded insistence that our closest neighbors be the fucking birds and bees and flowers and trees.
She wrapped her arms around Maureen, but that did nothing; the child continued to wail without interruption, without even stopping to catch her breath, already dangerously short. Susie felt helpless, completely and utterly and terrifyingly helpless, helpless the way someone newly afflicted with spinal paralysis must feel helpless when he tries to move his legs the first time.
So she did what any good parent does when she’s over her head and going down for the third time: she yelled for her mate.
“Hank!” she shouted.
No immediate answer. The sounds of a western brawl in the background.
Susie shouted again. Louder. Longer.
“HANK! HAAAAANNNNKKKKK!”
Hank had heard that tone only once before, and it was drilled into his subconscious. It was when Maureen had been an infant and she had the croup, at 2:00 A.M.
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