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 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 Dad pulled the shotgun trigger and nothing happened. Nothing.
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, holding the shotgun like a club. His eyes were completely wild.
“Jack—for Christ’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 had tiny breasts and a big scar on her stomach, and her pubic hair wasn’t trimmed into a thin line. She wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t sexy.
She wasn’t whole.
There were pieces of her missing. Big chunks of her arms and breasts 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 had only 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 him 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 h
is 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 one another 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 read. 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 on 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 what little 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 again, 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 pawing and 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 underside 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 as 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 were 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 his arm around Jill.
“Run!” he cried.
They cut between two of the figures, and the things turned awkwardly, pawing 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.
Her. Not him.
Why?
Because they want life.
That’s why they went after Mom and Dad and Uncle Roger.
That’s why they want Jill.
Not him.
He wasn’t sure how or why he knew that, but he was absolutely certain of it. The need for life was threaded through that awful moan. Toby had wanted more life. Jack wanted to be alive, but he’d reached the point where he was more dead than alive. Sliding down, down, down.
I’m already dead.
Jill crawled so slowly that she was barely halfway across the porch by the time one of them tottered to the top step. Jack felt it before he turned and looked. Water dripped from its body onto the backs of his legs.
The thing moaned.
Jack looked up at the terrible, terrible face.
“Mom…?” he whispered.
Torn and ragged, things missing from her face and neck, red and black blood gurgling over her lips and down her chin. Bone-white hands reaching.
Past him.
Ignoring him.
Reaching for Jill.
“No,” said Jack. He wanted to scream the word, to shout the kind of defiance that would prove that he was still alive, that he was still to be acknowledged. But all he could manage was a thin, breathless rasp of a word. Mom did not hear it. No one did. There was too much of everything else for it to be heard.
Jill didn’t hear it.
Jill turned at the sound of the moan from the thing that took graceless steps toward her. Jill’s glazed red eyes flared wide and she screamed the same word.
“No!”
Jill, sick as she was, screamed that word with all the heat and fear and sickness and life that was boiling inside her. It was louder than the rain and the thunder. Louder than the hungry moan that came from Mom’s throat.
There was no reaction on Mom’s face. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish.
No, not like a fish. Like someone practicing the act of eating a meal that was almost hers.
There was very little of Jack left, but he forced himself once more to get to his feet. To stand. To stagger over to Jill, to catch her under the arms, to pull, to drag. Jill thrashed against him, against what she saw on the porch.
She punched Jack, and scratched him. Tears like hot acid fell on Jack’s face and throat.
He pulled her into the house. As he did so, Jack lost his grip and Jill fell past him into the livin
g room.
Jack stood in the doorway for a moment, chest heaving, staring with bleak eyes at Mom. And then past her to the other figures that were slogging through the mud and water toward the house. At the rain hammering on the useless truck. At the farm road that led away toward the River Road. When the lightning flashed he could see all the way past the levee to the river, which was a great, black, swollen thing.
Tears, as cold as Jill’s were hot, cut channels down his face.
Mom reached out.
Her hands brushed his face as she tried to reach past him.
A sob as painful as a punch broke in Jack’s chest as he slammed the door.
11
HE TURNED and fell back against it, then slid all the way down to the floor.
Jill lay on her side, weeping into her palms.
Outside, the storm raged, mocking them both with its power. Its life.
“Jill…” said Jack softly.
The house creaked in the wind, each timber moaning its pain and weariness. The window glass trembled in the casements. Even the good china on the dining-room breakfront racks rattled nervously, as if aware of their own fragility.
Jack heard all this.
Jill crawled over to him and collapsed against him, burying her face against his chest. Her grief was so big that it, too, was voiceless. Her body shook and her tears fell on him like rain. Jack wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close.
He was so cold that her heat was the only warmth in his world.
Behind them there was a heavy thud on the door.
Soft and lazy, but heavy, like the fist of a sleepy drunk.
However, Jack knew that it was no drunk. He knew exactly who and what was pounding on the door. A few moments later there were other thuds. On the side windows and the back door. On the walls. At first just a few fists, then more.
Jill raised her head and looked up at him.
“I’m cold,” she said, even though she was hot. Jack nodded; he understood fevers. Her eyes were like red coals.
“I’ll keep you warm,” he said, huddling closer to her.
“W-what’s happening?” she asked. “Mom…?”
He didn’t answer. He rested the back of his head against the door, feeling the shocks and vibrations of each soft punch shudder through him. The cold was everywhere now. He could not feel his legs or his hands. He shivered as badly as she did, and all around them the storm raged and the dead beat on the house. He listened to his own heartbeat. It fluttered and twitched. Beneath his skin and in his veins and in his bones, the cancer screamed as it devoured the last of his heat.
21st Century Dead Page 28