The doors flew open, and Dad jumped out from behind the wheel and ran around the front of the truck. Uncle Roger had something in his arms. Something that was limp and wrapped in a blanket that looked like it was soaked with oil. Only it wasn’t oil, and Jack knew it. Lightning flashed continually, and in its stark glow the oily black became gleaming red.
Dad took the bundle from him and rushed through ankle-deep mud toward the porch. Mom reached him and tugged back the cloth. Jack could see the tattered sleeve of an olive-drab sweatshirt and one ice-pale hand streaked with crooked lines of red.
Mom screamed.
Jack did too, even though he could not see what she saw. Mom had said that she’d been bitten . . . but this couldn’t be a bite. Not with this much blood. Not with Jill not moving.
“JILL!”
He ran out onto the porch and down the steps and into the teeth of the storm.
“Get back,” screeched Mom as she and Dad bulled their way past him onto the porch and into the house. Nobody wiped their feet.
Roger caught up with him. He was bare-chested despite the cold and had his undershirt wrapped around his left arm. In the glare of the lightning, his skin looked milk white.
“What is it? What’s happening? What’s wrong with Jill?” demanded Jack, but Uncle Roger grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him toward the house.
“Get inside,” he growled. “Now.”
Jack staggered toward the steps and lost his balance. He dropped to his knees in the mud, but Uncle Roger caught him under the armpit and hauled him roughly to his feet and pushed him up the steps. All the while, Uncle Roger kept looking over his shoulder. Jack twisted around to see what he was looking at. The bursts of lightning made everything look weird, and for a moment he thought that there were people at the far end of the road, but when the next bolt forked through the sky, he saw that it was only cornstalks battered by the wind.
Only that.
“Get inside,” urged Roger. “It’s not safe out here.”
Jack looked at him. Roger was soaked to the skin. His face was swollen, as if he’d been punched, and the shirt wrapped around his left arm was soaked through with blood.
It’s not safe out here.
Jack knew for certain that his uncle was not referring to the weather.
The lightning flashed again, and the shadows in the corn seemed wrong.
All wrong.
6
Jack stood silent and unnoticed in the corner of the living room, like a ghost haunting his own family. No one spoke to him, no one looked in his direction. Not even Jill.
As soon as they’d come in, Dad had laid Jill down on the couch. No time even to put a sheet under her. Rainwater pooled under the couch in pink puddles. Uncle Roger stood behind the couch, looking down at Mom and Dad as they used rags soaked with fresh water and alcohol to sponge away mud and blood. Mom snipped away the sleeves of the torn and ragged army sweatshirt.
“It was like something off the news. It was like one of those riots you see on TV,” said Roger. His eyes were glassy, and his voice had a distant quality, as if his body and his thoughts were in separate rooms. “People just going crazy for no reason. Good people. People we know. I saw Dix Howard take a tire iron out of his car and lay into Joe Fielding, the baseball coach from the high school. Just laid into him, swinging on him like he was a total stranger. Beat the crap out of him too. Joe’s glasses went flying off his face, and his nose was just bursting with blood. Crazy stuff.”
“Give me the peroxide,” said Mom, working furiously. “There’s another little bite on her wrist.”
“The big one’s not that bad,” Dad said, speaking over her rather than to her. “Looks like it missed the artery. But Jilly’s always been a bleeder.”
“It was like that when we drove up,” said Uncle Roger, continuing his account even though he had no audience. Jack didn’t think that his uncle was speaking to him. Or . . . to anyone. He was speaking because he needed to get it out of his head, as if that was going to help make sense of it. “With the rain and all, it was hard to tell what was going on. Not at first. Just buses and cars parked every which way and lots of people running and shouting. We thought there’d been an accident. You know people panic when there’s an accident and kids are involved. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming and making a fuss instead of doing what needs to be done. So Steve and I got out of the truck and started pushing our way into the crowd. To find Jill and to, you know, see if we could do something. To help.”
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 their 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 to 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 him, 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 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 her. It was everybody. Everybody was going 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 could see 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 drive
s 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 that read:
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 stations’ 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 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 suddenly smacked his hand away.
“Don’t!” he warned.
Jill’s eyes were all wrong. The green of her irises had darkened to a rust 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 stuff? 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 was 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. Damn it, Steve, I can’t lose both my babies.”
She suddenly 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; 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, and 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,” she 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 the power in their family.
“Roger,” she said, “you stay here with Jack and—”
“I want to go too,” insisted Jack.
“No,” barked 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, goddamn 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 who 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 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 b
right 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 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 & 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.
Bits & Pieces Page 5