Bits & Pieces (9 page)

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 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 from his.

He forced himself to stand and wrapped an arm around Jill.

“Run!” he cried.

They cut between two of the figures, and the things turned awkwardly, clutching 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 wanted 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 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 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, he 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.

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 thud 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 had happened at the school, or from just now? No way to tell. The rain had washed away all 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,” Jill 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's 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.

The lightning and the spill 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 what was left of Roger twitching in 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.

Someone I know died today.

A kid. A girl.

Jasmine Patel. We called her Jazz.

Jazz.

She was a year older than me. A tenth grader.

We weren't friends. I hardly knew her.

Okay, sure, I mean we went to the same school, and there aren't all that many of us. A hundred kids in each grade. You see the same faces in school, on the playground, around town. You bump into people at the New Year's party and the harvest fair and all that. You say hello
if you meet them at Lafferty's Store when you go in to buy pop. Or maybe you're both in the same line on the day the new Zombie Cards come out. You say hi if you pass on the street.

But that's it sometimes. You know them but you don't
know
them.

You're not friends exactly.

Friendly, or maybe just polite. There's probably a difference between those two things.

But I didn't really know Jazz that much.

I always knew her, of course. She was always here in town. She was always a year ahead of me in school. She always was.

And now she's not.

It happened this morning.

We were in the playground on a free period. I was there with Benny and Chong, and we were waiting on Morgie,
who volunteered to go and get us a big bunch of grapes from the cafeteria. We were in our usual spot, on the edge of the softball diamond. The Gorman twins were tossing an old Frisbee that was patched with duct tape, and our history teacher, Mr. West-Mensch, was playing basketball with some of the juniors and seniors. It wasn't too sunny, and there were a lot of big clouds up in the blue sky. We were trying to decide what they looked like.

“See that one there?” said Benny. He was lying on the bleachers with his head on my shoes, pointing up to a cloud directly over us. “That's a parrot.”

“You've never seen a parrot,” said Chong.

“Yes, I have. There's a picture of one in the art room.”

Chong made that face he makes when he doesn't want to admit he's wrong but has to. “Fair enough. But that cloud doesn't look like a parrot.”

“Yes, it does.”

“More like a macaw.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Benny.

I pointed to a little cloud over the trees. “It's a bunny.”

They both looked.

“How come every cloud looks like a bunny to you?” asked Benny.

“No, they don't,” I said.

He pointed to another one. “Okay, then what does that look like?”

I didn't want to answer, because it really looked like a bunny too. Which is not my fault. I don't make the clouds. I can't help it if some of them look like bunnies. That's just Benny being ridiculous.

That's when we heard the scream.

I read once that sometimes people used to hear screams and pretend they didn't. Really. They could be walking down the street in one of those old big cities where millions of people used to live, and they'd hear a scream or maybe actually
see
someone screaming,
and they would just walk on by. Mom says it's because they didn't want to get involved, but she can't be right. How could someone not want to get involved if someone was that hurt or scared, or if they were in trouble? I mean . . . who would
do
that?