Bits & Pieces (7 page)

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 he 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 the 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 she 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.