Jack and Jill

-1-

Jack Porter was twelve going on never grow up.

He was one of the walking dead.

He knew it. Everyone knew it.

Remission was not a reprieve; it just put you in a longer line at the airport. Jack had seen what happened to his cousin, Toby. Three remissions in three years. Hope pushed Toby into a corner and beat the crap out of him each time. Toby was a ghost in third grade, a skeleton in fourth grade, a withered thing in a bed by the end of fifth grade, and bones in a box before sixth grade even started. All that hope had accomplished was to make everyone more afraid.

Now it was Jack’s turn.

Chemo, radiation. Bone marrow transplants. Even surgery.

Like they say in the movies, life sucks and then you die.

So, yeah, life sucked.

What there was of it.

What there was left.

Jack sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed watching the weatherman on TV talk about the big storm that was about to hit. He kept going on and on about the dangers of floods and there was a continuous scroll across the bottom of the screen that listed the evacuation shelters.

Jack ate dry Honey-Nut Cheerios out of a bowl and thought about floods. The east bend of the river was one hundred yards from the house. Uncle Roger liked to say that they were a football field away, back door to muddy banks. Twice the river had flooded enough for there to be some small wavelets licking at the bottom step of the porch. But there hadn’t ever been a storm as bad as what they were predicting, at least not in Jack’s lifetime. The last storm big enough to flood the whole farm had been in 1931. Jack knew that because they showed flood maps on TV. The weather guy was really into it. He seemed jazzed by the idea that a lot of Stebbins County could be flooded out.

Jack was kind of jazzed about it, too.

It beat the crap out of rotting away. Remission or not, Jack was certain that he could feel himself die, cell by cell. He dreamed about that, thought about it. Wrote in his journal about it. Did everything but talk about it.

Not even to Jill. Jack and Jill had sworn an oath years ago to tell each other everything, no secrets. Not one. But that was before Jack got sick. That was back when they were two peas in a pod. Alike in everything, except that Jack was a boy and Jill was a girl. Back then, back when they’d made that pact, they were just kids. You could barely tell one from the other except in the bath.

Years ago. A lifetime ago, as Jack saw it.

The sickness changed everything. There were some secrets the dying were allowed to keep to themselves.

Jack watched the Doppler radar of the coming storm and smiled. He had an ear bud nestled into one ear and was also listening to Magic Marti on the radio. She was hyped about the storm, too, sounding as excited as Jack felt.

“Despite heavy winds, the storm front is slowing down and looks like it’s going to park right on the Maryland/Pennsylvania Border, with Stebbins County taking the brunt of it. They’re calling for torrential rains and strong winds, along with severe flooding. And here’s a twist … even though this is a November storm, warm air masses from the south are bringing significant lightning, and so far there have been several serious strikes. Air traffic is being diverted around the storm.”

Jack nodded along with her words, as if it was music playing in his ear.

Big storm. Big flood?

He hoped so.

The levees along the river were half-assed, or at least that’s how Dad always described them.

“Wouldn’t take much more than a good piss to flood ’em out,” Dad was fond of saying, and he said it every time they got a bad storm. The levees never flooded out, and Jack wondered if was the sort of thing people said to prevent something bad from happening. Like telling an actor to break a leg.

On the TV they showed the levees, and a guy described as a civil engineer puffed out his chest and said that Pennsylvania levees were much better than the kind that had failed in Louisiana. Stronger, better maintained.

Jack wondered what Dad would say about that. Dad wasn’t much for the kind of experts news shows trotted out. “Bunch of pansy-ass know-nothings.”

The news people seemed to agree, because after the segment with the engineer, the anchor with the plastic hair pretty much tore down everything the man had to say.

“Although the levees in Stebbins County are considered above average for the region, the latest computer models say that this storm is only going to get stronger.”

Jack wasn’t sure if that was a logical statement, but he liked its potential. The storm was getting bigger, and that was exciting.

But again, he wondered what it would be like to have all that water—that great, heaving mass of coldness—come crashing in through all the windows and doors. Jack’s bedroom was on the ground floor, a concession to how easily he got tired climbing steps. The house was a hundred and fifteen years old. It creaked in a light wind. No way it could stand up to a million gallons of water, Jack was positive of that.

If it happened, he wondered what he would do.

Stay here in his room and let the house fall down around him.

No, that sounded like it would hurt. Jack could deal with pain—he had to—but he didn’t like it.

Maybe he could go into the living room and wait for it. On the couch, or on the floor in front of the TV. If the TV and the power was still on. Just sit there and wait for the black tide to come calling.

How quick would it be?

Would it hurt to drown?

Would he be scared?

Sure, but rotting was worse.

He munched a palm-full of Cheerios and prayed that the river would come for him.

-2-

“Mom said I can’t stay home today,” grumped Jill as she came into Jack’s room. She dropped her book bag on the floor and kicked it.

“Why not?”

“She said the weatherman’s never right. She said the storm’ll pass us.”

“Magic Marti says it’s going to kick our butts,” said Jack.

As if to counterpoint his comment there was a low rumble of thunder way off to the west.

Jill sighed and sat next to him on the edge of the bed. She no longer looked like his twin. She had a round face and was starting to grow boobs. Her hair was as black as crow’s wings and even though Mom didn’t let her wear make-up—not until she was in junior high, and even then, it was going to be an argument—Jill had pink cheeks, pink lips and every boy in sixth grade was in love with her. Jill didn’t seem to care much about that. She didn’t try to dress like the middle school girls, or like Maddy Simpson, who was the same age but who had pretty big boobs and dressed like she was in an MTV rap video. Uncle Roger had a ten-dollar bet going that Maddy was going to be pregnant before she ever got within shooting distance of a diploma. Jack and Jill both agreed. Everyone did.

Jill dressed like a farm girl. Jeans and a sweatshirt, often the same kind of sweatshirt Jack wore. Today she had on an olive drab U.S. Army shirt. Jack wore his with pajama bottoms. Aunt Linda had been in the Army, but she died in Afghanistan three years ago.

They sat together, staring blankly at the TV screen for a while. Jack cut her a sly sideways look and saw that her face was slack, eyes empty. He understood why, and it made him sad.

Jill wasn’t dealing well with the cancer. He was afraid of what would happen to Jill after he died. And Jack had no illusions about whether the current remission was going to be the one that took. When he looked into his own future, either in dreams, prayers, or when lost in thought, there was an end to the road. It went on a bit further and there was a big wall of black nothingness.

It sucked, sure, but he’d lived with it so long that he had found a kind of peace with it. Why go kicking and screaming into the dark if none of that would change anything?

Jill, on the other hand, was different. She had to live, she had to keep going. Jack watched TV a lot, he saw the episodes of Dr. Phil and other shows where they talked about death and dying. He knew that some people believed that the dying had an obligation to their loved ones who would survive them.

Jack didn’t want Jill to suffer after he died, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He told her once about his dreams of the big black nothing.

“It’s like a wave that comes and just sweeps me away,” he’d told her.

“That sounds awful,” she replied, tears springing into her eyes, but Jack assured her that it wasn’t.

“No,” he said, “’cause once the nothing takes you, there’s no more pain.”

“But there’s no more you!”

He grinned. “How do you know? No one knows what’s on the other side of that wall.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be something cool. Something nice.”

“How could it be nice?” Jill had demanded.

This was right after the cancer had come back the last time, before the current remission. Jack was so frail that he barely made a dent in his own hospital bed. He touched the wires and tubes that ran from his pencil-thin arm to the machines behind him. “It’s got to be nicer than this.”

Nicer than this.

That was the last time they’d had a real conversation about the sickness, or about death. That was nine months ago. Jack stopped talking to her about those things and instead did what he could to ease her down so that when the nothing took him, she’d still be able to stand.

He nudged her and held out the bowl of cereal. Without even looking at it she took a handful and began eating them, one at a time, smashing them angrily between her teeth.

Eventually she said, “It’s not fair.”

“I know.” Just as he knew that they were having two separate conversations at the same time. It was often that way with them.

They crunched and glared at the TV.

“If it gets bad,” Jack said, “they’ll let everyone go.”

But she shook her head. “I want to stay home. I want to hang out here and watch it on TV.”

“You’ll be in it,” he said.

“Not the same thing. It’s better on TV.”

Jack ate some Cheerios and nodded. Everything was more fun on TV. Real life didn’t have commentary and it didn’t have playback. Watching a storm beat standing in one while you waited for the school bus to splash water on you. It beat the smells of sixty soaking wet kids on a crowded bus, and bumper-to-bumper traffic waiting for your driveway.

As if in response to that thought there was a muffled honk from outside.

“Bus,” said Jack.

“Crap,” said Jill. She stood up. “Text me. Let me know what’s happening.”

“Sure.”

Jill began flouncing out of the room, but then she stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. She looked from him to the TV screen and back again. She wore a funny, half-smile.

“What—?” he asked.

Jill studied him without answering long enough for the bus driver to get pissed and really lay on the horn.

“I mean it,” she said. “Text me.”

“I already said I would.”

Jill chewed her lip, then turned and headed out of the house and up the winding drive to the road where the big yellow bus waited.

Jack wondered what that was all about.

-3-

Mom came into his room in the middle of the morning carrying a tray with two hot corn muffins smeared with butter and honey and a big glass of water.

“You hungry?” she asked, setting the tray down on the bed between them.

“Sure,” said Jack, though he wasn’t. His appetite was better than it had been all summer, and even though he was done with chemo for a while, he only liked to nibble. The Cheerios were perfect, and it was their crunch more than anything that he liked.

But he took a plate with one of the muffins, sniffed, pasted a smile on his mouth, and took a small bite. Jack knew from experience that Mom needed to see him eat. It was more important to her to make sure that he was eating than it was in seeing him eat much. He thought he understood that. Appetite was a sign of health, or remission. Cancer patients in the full burn of the disease didn’t have much of an appetite. Jack knew that very well.

As he chewed, Mom tore open a couple of packs of vitamin-C powder and poured them into his water glass.

“Tropical mix,” she announced, but Jack had already smelled it. It wasn’t as good as the tangerine, but it was okay. He accepted the glass, waited for the fizz to settle down, and then took a sip to wash down the corn muffin.

Thunder rumbled again and rattled the windows.

“It’s getting closer,” said Jack. When his mother didn’t comment, he asked, “Will Jilly be okay?”

Before Mom could reply the first fat raindrops splatted on the glass. She picked up the remote to raise the volume. The regular weatherman was no longer giving the updates. Instead, it was the anchorman, the guy from Pittsburgh with all the teeth and the plastic-looking hair.

“Mom—?” Jack asked again.

“Shhh, let me listen.”

The newsman said, “Officials are urging residents to prepare for a powerful storm that slammed eastern Ohio yesterday, tore along the northern edge of West Virginia and is currently grinding its way along the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.”

There was a quick cutaway to a scientist-looking guy that Jack had seen a dozen times this morning. Dr. Gustus, a professor from some university. “The storm is unusually intense for this time of year, spinning up into what is clearly a high-precipitation supercell, which is an especially dangerous type of storm. Since the storm’s mesocyclone is wrapped with heavy rains, it can hide a tornado from view until the funnel touches down. These supercells are also known for their tendency to produce frequent cloud-to-ground and intracloud lightning than the other types of storms. The system weakened briefly overnight, following computer models of similar storms in this region, however what we are seeing now is an unfortunate combination of elements that could result in a major upgrade of this weather pattern.”

The professor gave a bunch more technical information that Jack was pretty sure no one really understood, and then the image cut back to the reporter with the plastic hair who contrived to look grave and concerned. “This storm will produce flooding rains, high winds, downed trees—on houses, cars, power lines—and widespread power outages. Make sure you have plenty of candles and flashlights with fresh batteries because, folks, you’re going to need ’em.” He actually smiled when he said that.

Jack suddenly shivered.

Mom noticed it and wrapped her arm around his bony shoulders. “Hey, now … don’t worry. We’ll be safe here.”

He made an agreeing noise but did not bother to correct her. He wasn’t frightened of the storm’s power. He was hoping it would become one of those Category Five things like they showed on SyFy. Or a bigger one. Big enough to blow the house away and let the waters of the river sweep him away from pain and sickness. Being killed in a super storm was so delightful that it made him shiver and raised goose bumps all along his arms. Lasting through the rain and wind so that he was back to where—and what—he was … that was far more frightening. Being suddenly dead was better than dying.

On the other hand …

“What about Jill?”

“She’ll be fine,” said Mom, though her tone was less than convincing.

“Mom …?”

Mom was a thin, pretty woman whose black hair had started going gray around the time of the first diagnosis. Now it was more gray than black and there were dark circles under her eyes. Jill looked a little like Mom, and would probably grow up to look a lot like her. Jack looked like her too, right down to the dark circles under the eyes that looked out at him every morning from the bathroom mirror.

“Mom,” Jack said tentatively, “Jill is going to be all right, isn’t she?”

“She’s in school. If it gets bad, they’ll bus the kids home.”

“Shouldn’t someone go get her?”

Mom looked at the open bedroom door. “Your dad and Uncle Roger are in town buying the pipes for the new irrigation system. They’ll see how bad it is, and if they have to, they’ll get her.” She smiled and Jack thought that it was every bit as false as the smile he’d given her a minute ago. “Jill will be fine. Don’t stress yourself out about it, you know it’s not good for you.”

“Okay,” he said, resisting the urge to shake his head. He loved his mom, but she really didn’t understand him at all.

“You should get some rest,” she said. “After you finish your muffin why not take a little nap?”

Jeez-us, he thought. She was always saying stuff like that. Take a nap, get some rest. I’m going to be dead for a long time. Let me be awake as much as I can for now.

“Sure,” he said. “Maybe in a bit.”

Mom smiled brightly as if they had sealed a deal. She kissed him on the head and went out of his room, closing the door three quarters of the way. She never closed it all the way, so Jack got up and did that for himself.

Jack nibbled another micro-bite of the muffin, sighed and set it down. He broke it up on the plate, so it looked like he’d really savaged it. Then he drank the vitamin water, set the glass down and stretched out on his stomach to watch the news.

Rain drummed on the roof like nervous fingertips, and the wind was whistling through the trees. The storm was coming for sure. No way it was going to veer.

Jack lay there in the blue glow of the TV and the brown shadows of his thoughts. He’d been dying for so long that he could barely remember what living felt like. Only Jill’s smile sometimes brought those memories back. Running together down the long lanes of cultivated crops. Waging war with broken ears of corn and trying to juggle fist-sized pumpkins. Jill was never any good at juggling, and she laughed so hard when Jack managed to get three pumpkins going that he started laughing, too, and dropped the gourds right on his head.

He sighed and it almost hitched into a sob.

He wanted to laugh again. Not careful laughs, like now, but real gut-busters like he used to. He wanted to run. God, how he wanted to run. That’s something he hadn’t been able to do for over a year now. Not since the last surgery. And never again. Best he could manage was a hobbling half-run like Gran used to when the Miller’s dog got into her herb garden.

Jack closed his eyes and thought about the storm. About a flood.

He really wanted Jill to come home. He loved his sister, and maybe today he’d open up and tell her what really went on in his head. Would she like that? Would she want to know?

Those were tricky questions, and he didn’t have answers to them.

Nor did he have an answer to why he wanted Jill home and wanted the flood at the same time. That was stupid. That was selfish.

“I’m dying,” he whispered to the shadows.

Dying people were supposed to get what they wanted, weren’t they? Trips to Disney, a letter from a celebrity. All that Make-A-Wish stuff. He wanted to see his sister and then let the storm take him away. Without hurting her, of course. Or Mom, or Dad, or Uncle Roger.

He sighed again.

Wishes were stupid. They never came true.

-4-

Jack was drowsing when he heard his mother cry out.

A single, strident “No!”

Jack scrambled out of bed and opened his door a careful inch to try and catch the conversation Mom was having on the phone. She was in the big room down the hall, the one she and Dad used as the farm office.

“Is she okay? God, Steve, tell me she’s okay!”

Those words froze Jack to the spot.

He mouthed the name.

“Jill …”

“Oh, my God,” cried Mom, “does she need to go to the hospital? What? How can the hospital be closed? Steve … how can the damn hospital be—”

Mom stopped to listen, but Jack could see her body change, stiffening with fear and tension. She had the phone to her ear and her other hand at her throat.

“Oh, God, Steve,” she said again, and even from where Jack stood, he could see that Mom was pale as death. “What happened? Who did this? Oh, come on, Steve, that’s ridiculous … Steve.…”

Jack could hear Dad’s voice but not his words. He was yelling. Almost screaming.

“Did you call the police?” Mom demanded. She listened for an answer and whatever it was, it was clear to Jack that it shocked her. She staggered backward and sat down hard on a wooden chair. “Shooting? Who was shooting?”

More yelling, none of it clear.

Shooting? Jack stared at Mom as if he was peering into a different world than anything he knew. He tried to put the things he’d heard into some shape that made sense, but no picture formed.

“Jesus Christ!” shrieked Mom. “Steve … forget about it, forget about everything. Just get my baby home. Get yourself home. I have a first aid kit here and … oh, yes, God, Steve … I love you, too. Hurry!”

She lowered the phone and stared at it as if the device had done her some unspeakable harm. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t seem to be looking at anything.

“Mom …?” Jack said softly, stepping out into the hall. “What’s happening? What’s wrong?”

As soon as she looked up, Mom’s eyes filled with tears. She cried out his name and he rushed to her as she flew to him. Mom was always so careful with him, holding him as if he had bird bones that would snap with the slightest pressure, but right then she clutched him to her chest with all her strength. He could feel her trembling, could feel the heat of her panic through the cotton of her dress.

“It’s Jilly,” said Mom, and her voice broke into sobs. “There was a fight at the school. Someone bit her.”

“Bit—?” asked Jack, not sure he really heard that.

Lightning flashed outside and thunder exploded overhead.

-5-

Mom ran around for a couple of minutes, grabbing first aid stuff. There was always a lot of it on a farm, and Jack knew how to dress a wound and treat for shock. Then she fetched candles and matches, flashlights and a Coleman lantern. Big storms always knocked out the power in town and Mom was always ready.

The storm kept getting bigger, rattling the old bones of the house, making the window glass chatter like teeth.

“What’s taking them so damn long?” Mom said, and she said it every couple of minutes.

Jack turned on the big TV in the living room.

“Mom!” he called. “They have it on the news.”

She came running into the room with an armful of clean towels and stopped in the middle of the floor to watch. What they saw did not make much sense. The picture showed the Stebbins Little School, which was both the elementary school and the town’s evacuation shelter. It was on high ground and it was built during an era when American’s worried about nuclear bombs and Russian air raids. Stuff Jack barely even knew about.

In front of the school was the guest parking lot, which is also where the buses picked up and dropped off the kids. Usually there were lines of yellow buses standing in neat rows or moving like a slow train as they pulled to the front, loaded or unloaded, then moved forward to catch up with the previous bus. There was nothing neat and orderly about the big yellow vehicles now.

The heavy downpour made everything vague and fuzzy, but Jack could nevertheless see that the buses stood in haphazard lines in the parking lot and in the street. Cars were slotted in everywhere to create a total gridlock. One of the buses lay on its side.

Two were burning.

All around, inside and out, were people. Running, staggering, laying sprawled, fighting.

Not even the thunder and the rain could drown out the sounds of screams.

And gunfire.

“Mom …?” asked Jack. “What’s happening?”

But Mom had nothing to stay. The bundle of towels fell softly to the floor by her feet.

She ran to the table by the couch, snatched up the phone and called 9-1-1. Jack stood so close that he could hear the rings.

Seven. Eight. On the ninth ring there was a clicking sound and then a thump, as if someone picked up the phone and dropped it.

Mom said, “Hello—?” Jack pressed close to hear.

The sounds from the other end were confused and Jack tried to make sense of them. The scuff of a shoe? A soft, heavy bump as if someone banged into a desk with their thighs. And a sound like someone makes when they’re asleep. Low and without any meaning.

“Flower,” called Mom. Flower was the secretary and dispatcher at the police station. She went to high school with Mom. “Flower—are you there? Can you hear me?”

If there was a response, Jack couldn’t hear it.

“Flower—come on, girl, I need some help. There was some kind of problem at the school and Steve’s bringing Jilly back with a bad bite. He tried to take her to the hospital, but it was closed and there were barricades set up. We need an ambulance …”

Flower finally replied.

It wasn’t words, just a long, deep, aching moan that came crawling down the phone lines. Mom jerked the handset away from her ear, staring at it with horror and fear. Jack heard that sound and it chilled him to the bones.

Not because it was so alien and unnatural … but because he recognized it. He knew that sound. He absolutely knew it.

He’d heard Toby make it a couple of times during those last days, when the cancer was so bad that they had to keep Toby down in a dark pool of drugs. Painkillers didn’t really work at that level. The pain was everywhere. It was the whole universe because every single particle of your body knows that it’s being consumed. The cancer is winning, it’s devouring you, and you get to a point where it’s so big and you’re so small that you can’t even yell at it anymore. You can curse at it or shout at it or tell it that you won’t let it win. It already has won, and you know it. In those moments, those last crumbling moments, all you can do—all you can say—is throw noise at it. It’s not meaningless, even though it sounds like that. When Jack first heard those sounds coming out of Toby, he thought that it was just noise, just a grunt or a moan. But those sounds do have meaning. So much meaning. Too much meaning. They’re filled with all of the need in the world.

The need to live, even though the dark is everywhere, inside and out.

The need to survive, even though you know you can’t.

The need to have just another hour, just another minute, but your clock is broken, and all of the time has leaked out.

The need to not be devoured.

Even though you already are.

The need.

Need.

That moan, the one Jack heard at Toby’s bedside and the one he heard now over the phone line from Flower, was just that. Need.

It was the sound Jack sometimes made in his dreams. Practicing for when it would be the only sound he could make.

Mom said, “Flower …?”

But this time her voice was small. Little kid small.

There were no more sounds from the other end, and Mom replaced the handset as carefully as if it was something that could wake up and bite her.

She suddenly seemed to notice Jack standing there and Mom hoisted up as fake a smile as Jack had ever seen.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s the storm causing trouble with the phone lines.”

The lie was silly and weak, but they both accepted it because there was nothing else they could do.

Then Jack saw the headlights, turning off of River Road onto their driveway.

“They’re here!” he cried and rushed for the door, but Mom pushed past him, jerked the door open and ran out onto the porch.

“Stay back,” she yelled as he began to follow.

Jack stopped in the doorway. Rain slashed at Mom as she stood on the top step, silhouetted by the headlights as Dad’s big Dodge Durango splashed through the water that completely covered the road. His brights were on, and Jack had to shield his eyes behind his hands. The pick-up raced all the way up the half-mile drive and slewed sideways to a stop that sent muddy rainwater onto the porch, slapping wet across Mom’s legs. She didn’t care, she was already running down the steps toward the car.

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 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 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 of 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 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 make-up. 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 here. 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 each other.

“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 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 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 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 they 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, 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 E.R. 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, 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 matchlight. 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 he 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 and 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 in 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 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 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, but the vagrant went hustling along the road and never came 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 was 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 Mom 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 assault and battery, the man grabbed his son and smacked him half unconscious, then shoved him into their truck. Jack never saw Tony again, but he heard that the boy was going to a special school over in Bordentown.

Jack kind of felt bad for Tony because he didn’t like to see any kid get his ass kicked. Even a total jerkoff like Tony. On the other hand, Tony had almost hurt Jill, so maybe he got off light. 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.

Almost.

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 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 onto 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 went 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 was 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 black 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.

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 her 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 nothing as Dad pulled the shotgun trigger and nothing happened.

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 God’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 wasn’t sexy.

She wasn’t whole.

There were pieces of her missing. Big chunks of her arms and stomach 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. Jose. Jack didn’t know his last name. Jose something. The other was a big red-haired guy in a military uniform. Jack knew all of the uniforms. This was a National Guard uniform. He had corporal’s stripes on his arms. But he only had 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 Jose’s chin. Fired. Jose’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 his 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 each other 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 everything 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 undersides 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 that 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 was 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 than 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. He 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 down 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 of the heat and fear and sickness and life that was boiling inside of 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 armpits, 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 living 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 who 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 of 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.

He looked down at Jill. The bite on her arm was almost colorless, but radiating out from it were black lines that ran like tattoos of vines up her arm. More of the black lines were etched on her throat and along the sides of her face. Black goo oozed from two or three smaller bites that Jack hadn’t seen before. Were they from what happened at the school, or from just now? No way to tell, the rain had washed away all of the red, leaving wounds that opened obscenely and in which white grubs wriggled in the black wetness.

Her heart beat like the wings of a hummingbird. Too fast, too light.

Outside, Mom and the others moaned for them.

“Jack …” she said, and her voice was even smaller, farther away.

“Yeah?”

“Remember when you were in the hospital in January?”

“Yeah.”

“You … you told me about your dream?” She still spoke in the dazed voice of a dreamer.

“Which dream?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.

“The one about … the big wave. The black wave.”

“The black nothing,” he corrected. “Yeah, I remember.”

She sniffed but it didn’t stop the tears from falling. “Is … is that what this is?”

Jack kissed her cheek. As they sat there, her skin had begun to change, the intense heat gradually giving way to a clammy coldness. Outside, the pounding, the moans, the rain, the wind, the thunder—it was all continuous.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, “I think so.”

They listened to the noise and Jack felt himself getting smaller inside his own body.

“Will it hurt?” she asked.

Jack had to think about that. He didn’t want to lie but he wasn’t sure of the truth.

The roar of noise was fading. Not getting smaller but each separate sound was being consumed by a wordless moan that was greater than the sum of its parts.

“No,” he said, “it won’t hurt.”

Jill’s eyes drifted shut and there was just the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. There was no reason for it to be there, but it was there.

He held her until all the warmth was gone from her. He listened for the hummingbird flutter of her heart and heard nothing.

He touched his face. His tears had stopped with her heart. That was okay, he thought. That’s how it should be.

Then Jack laid Jill down on the floor and stood up.

The moan of the darkness outside was so big now. Massive. Huge.

He bent close and peered out through the peephole.

The pounding on the door stopped. Mom and the others outside began to turn, one after the other, looking away from the house. Looking out into the yard.

Jack took a breath.

He opened the door.

-12-

The lightning and the outspill of light from the lantern showed him the porch and the yard, the car and the road. There were at least fifty of the white-faced people there. None of them looked at him. Mom was right there, but she had her back to him. He saw Roger crawling through the water so he could see past the truck. He saw Dad rise awkwardly to his feet; his face gone but the pistol still dangling from his finger.

All of them were turned away, looking past the abandoned truck, facing the farm road.

Jack stood over Jill’s body and watched as the wall of water from the shattered levee came surging up the road toward the house. It was so beautiful.

A big, black wall of nothing.

Jack looked at his mother, his father, his uncle, and then down at Jill. Her cold hand twitched. And twitched again.

He wouldn’t be going into the dark without them.

The dark was going to take them all.

Jack smiled.