Suffer the Children (19 page)

Nothing.

“If you don’t want me to do that, you need to tell me right now, okay?”

Again, nothing. Her body felt like a live wire.

She wished Doug were here.
Why me? Why did Nate pick me to ask?

But she already knew.

Because I’m his mother. It has to be me.

She didn’t think men understood how deep the connection mothers had with their children was. If push came to shove, a man would eat his kids to survive because he could always have more of them. A mom was different. If push came to shove, she’d let her kids eat her.

The kids needed a transfusion. A transfusion in a hospital with a matching donor, overseen by licensed medical professionals.

“
Do it
,” she said to herself.

She gasped in pain and shock as the knife’s edge parted the skin on her thumb.

The cut rang alarm bells in Joan’s brain.

“Ow, ow,
ow
!”

Nothing happened. All that pain, and it didn’t even look like she’d pierced the skin. Then a bright red drop of blood bloomed from the wound. The drop became a tiny flood that covered her thumb and dripped onto the carpet.

She held it high with her other hand. Now she worried she’d cut too deep. The initial sting had begun to fade, but her thumb still tingled with angry surprise. The amount of blood was alarming.

“I seriously hope this is what you want.”

She was already hating herself. But she knew she was right. Nate was staring at her red thumb. His eyes gleamed. His eyes looked, well,
hungry
.

He didn’t want a transfusion.

She opened Nate’s mouth and placed her thumb inside.

Drop, drop, drop. Nothing.

“Oh, gross,” she whined. “So gross.” She turned away and exhaled a loud sigh.

So what happens now? What comes next?

She was starting to feel stupid.

Nothing comes next, you lunatic.

Nate clamped down on her thumb and sucked with incredible force. Joan cried out, torn between the instinct to push him away and another urging her to stay where she was.

She finally pulled her hand away. “Jesus, Nate!” She felt nauseous. Her thumb tingled with the memory of blood draining out of it. “Oh my God. Nate?”

His cheeks blushed a little and his chest rose and fell.

It was working. She couldn’t believe it. But a part of her had known it would.

Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, my dear boy. Welcome back.”

“Good,” Nate murmured. He looked sleepy.

“Anything,” she whispered. “Anything for you.”

Nate’s smile froze into a grimace. His eyes glazed over. The flesh on his face rippled.

“No,” Joan moaned. “Wait!”

“
More
,” he breathed. “
Pleassssse . . .
”

He sounded like a deflating balloon. His face went slack. His cheeks turned blue. The last of his breath whistled from his lungs.

“Please, Nate. Don’t go.”

Nothing.

“Wait! Tell me how much more!”

Nothing.

“If I get you more, will you stay longer? Will you stay forever?”

Again, nothing.

More. Pleassssse.

“Okay,” she said quietly. It was a promise.

14 hours after Resurrection

Little Bear helped Duck find the missing chicks.

Ramona had watched this episode of
Little Bear
at least a dozen times with Josh over the past year. So many times that she’d memorized most of the lines. She’d always found the show charming, but now it just seemed saccharine and haunting. She turned it off, which was Josh’s cue to cry and demand more TV.

Instead, he did nothing.

Always nothing.

She sat on the edge of the bed while Josh continued to stare at the black screen as if the cartoon had never stopped.

She grabbed the bottle of saline from his dresser and squeezed a few drops into each of his eyes. She did this because he didn’t blink, and she didn’t want dust in the air to scratch his corneas and eventually blind him.

“Why don’t we play a game together? We could play with your LEGOs.”

Saline tears rolled down his cheeks.

Ramona was starting to think she was stuck in some cruel Greek myth. Her grief was so strong that it had recalled her boy from Hades but offended the gods. Now she was doomed to be his mother but remain unable to connect with him. She’d gotten back a facsimile of him. A rotting puppet.

On the heels of this thought came the nagging feeling she’d be burdened by a vegetable forever, one that didn’t even breathe, who just lay there and robbed her of life, attention, energy.

The guilt came right after.

How many times did you let him down, Ramona? How many times did you tell him NO because you were too tired? How many hours did you work overtime and leave him in the care of other women? How many times did you put yourself first?

You always wanted things to be perfect. You should have wanted things to be perfect for HIM. You want to make it up to him? Then do it.

She emptied a bag of LEGO bricks onto the bed. “I’ll start. You join in when you’re ready, okay?” She grabbed a handful of red ones and worked them together. “Guess what this is?”

She glanced at him. His eyes had shifted to stare at the blocky thing in her hand.

“That’s right, little man. It’s a robot. A giant monster robot. He fires lasers from his eyes. Earth is doomed.”

His large eyes shined like carved glass. He looked like a poorly stuffed child. An insane taxidermist’s gift to a grieving mother.

“We were fools to believe we could stop it with our paltry weapons,” she said in her movie voice. “If only a hero would arise and save the planet from this galactic menace.”

Josh should have been shrieking with laughter at this point.

Ramona offered him a weak smile. “Mommy will be right back, okay?”

She hurried to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and cried her eyes out into a towel.

When she was finished, she stood, blew her nose with a tissue, and dropped it into the toilet.

In the mirror, she saw a haggard version of herself. Dark circles under eyes burning with fear and desperation. She wondered why Ross kept coming back. What he saw in her. Ramona felt as beautiful as dirt.

She stormed back into Josh’s bedroom.

“What do you
want
, Josh?”

He was looking right at her. She had his full attention.

She knelt on the carpet next to his bed. “You know how Mommy makes deals with you sometimes and we shake hands on it? Like when I let you watch one
Little Bear
cartoon if you promise not to cry when I say it’s time to stop watching? Let’s make another deal and shake on it. All you have to do is talk to me. You talk to me, and I’ll do something for you.
What do you want?
”

She held his cold hand and tried to smile.

“Make it big, because the sky’s the limit, little man. Mommy will give you anything. That’s right. Anything at all. You can have chocolate. Gum. Hours of TV. You can stay up as late as you want. You don’t have to eat dinner. You can play all the time. I mean it, Josh.
Anything.
”

Her heart leaped as the doorbell chimed. She wanted to scream.

My nerves are fucking SHOT.

It chimed again. Grated like nails on a chalkboard.

She stood and forced a smile.

“Mommy will be right back.”

His eyes had widened a little. As if he were afraid. The doorbell chimed again.

Halfway to the door, she hesitated.

Is he afraid of me?

The idea made her realize how afraid she was of
him
.

Ramona opened the front door. “Ross, it’s not a great time for a—”

It wasn’t Ross. A petite woman stood in the doorway.

The woman smiled. “Hi, Ramona. I’m Nadine Harris.”

“Yes, of course. Your husband is Josh’s doctor. Please come in.”

Nadine put her medical bag on the floor and took off her coat. “You have a lovely home.”

“Thank you. Pardon the unpleasant smell. It’s Josh’s condition.”

“It’s all right,” Nadine said. “I’ll get used to it in a moment.” She looked around. “Is Josh here? Did he come home?”

“Yes. He’s in his bedroom. Resting.”

“Oh, good. That’s good to hear. I’m so pleased for you. I’ve been making the rounds, visiting our patients. If you’d like, I’d be happy to take a look at him.”

Ramona wanted to be left alone. On the other hand, having a medical professional examine Josh sounded good to her. Maybe she’d missed something. Something the nurse could fix.

“I’d like that,” she said. “Where’s Dr. Harris today? Seeing another patient?”

“He’s resting. He spent all morning volunteering at the burial ground.”

She didn’t have to explain what that meant. Ramona knew thousands of the children were still buried in the cold ground, awaiting rescue.

Nadine added in a brighter tone, “Let’s talk about Josh. How is he doing?”

“Not very well.” Heat rose to her cheeks. “It’s like he’s . . . still dead.”

“What about his eyes?”

“Yes! His eyes move. They
look
at me. Is that, you know, normal? Is he really in there?” Ramona worried it was mechanical. A reflex. Like Pavlov’s dog.

“I think Josh is very much with us. Let’s have a look at him.”

Ramona led the woman into Josh’s room.

“Josh, you remember Mrs. Harris. She’s a nurse and wants to take a look at you.”

“Look how big you’ve grown,” Nadine cooed. “And handsome!”

She rolled back the covers. Josh lay in his pajamas, arms limp at his sides. She shined a light into his eyes and checked for a heartbeat with her stethoscope. Josh followed her movements with his wide eyes.

“Has he spoken?” Nadine asked. “After he got home, I mean.”

Tell her.

“No, he hasn’t said a word since we walked in the door.”

Tell her! Tell her what he said!

“Nothing at all? Something just a bit out of the ordinary, perhaps?”

Blood.

Last night, Ramona had slept on the floor in Josh’s room—an exhausted, dreamless sleep from which she’d woken every half hour. Then he startled her awake with shouting.

“Blood. Blood, blood, BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD—”

By the time she turned on the light, he’d stopped, leaving her wondering if she’d dreamed it. Her heart pounded as if a gun had gone off in the room.

She didn’t sleep a wink after that.

Nadine caught Ramona’s terrified expression and nodded. She put away her stethoscope and pocket flashlight. “Why don’t we talk somewhere private?”

Ramona didn’t notice. She was remembering how Josh had bellowed like that in the car, loud as a grown man:
I’M HUNGRY
.

“Ramona?”

She jumped. “Yes? I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said maybe we should talk in private.”

Ramona made coffee. They sat in the living room. Nadine told her a story about her friend Caroline and her daughter Kimberly who’d returned from the grave and asked for blood. Had said she wanted to drink it, in fact.

She told Ramona how Caroline had begged her to draw her blood.
How she eventually did it. How they opened her mouth and squirted some down her throat.

How Kimberly woke up changed.

15 hours after Resurrection

David tried to nap but couldn’t sleep, so when Charlie Donegal called and said he’d discovered Shannon eating paper, he agreed to see her right away at his office.

Her obstetrician wasn’t seeing patients. The man’s two children had come home. The same with her general practitioner. Desperate, Charlie had called David as the option of last resort.

David dressed and washed down a Vicodin with a glass of water.

A nerve in his leg kept spasming. It felt like a little snake had worked its way into the muscle of his leg and was now struggling to get out.

All those months of physiotherapy, all that hard work, and he’d blown it on several days standing on his feet cutting open dead children.

Children who turned out to be not so dead after all.

The first rule of being a doctor is to do no harm.

Maybe today he could do some good. Shannon’s problem sounded simple, with a simple diagnosis, but it didn’t make any sense.

He found his cane in the coat closet. He hated the damn thing, but he needed the help right now. He didn’t want to drive either but forced himself to do it.

Charlie and Shannon met him in front of his office building. She looked pale and withdrawn. Her lips had lost much of their usual
healthy color. He led them inside and turned on the lights. Once they were seated in his office, he asked how she was feeling.

“It’s like I said on the phone—she’s tired all the time,” Charlie answered for her. “She’s irritable and weak and having dizzy spells.”

“My head hurts,” she mumbled.

“Headaches too,” her father confirmed. “A little short of breath at times. I already told you about her eating paper. I caught her mashing up little pieces of it and shoving them in her mouth like popcorn.”

David nodded. Everything added up. But it still made no sense.

“I’d like to examine you, Shannon, if you don’t mind.”

He pulled himself onto his feet with his cane and led her into his examination room. Charlie handed him Shannon’s medical records related to her pregnancy, and he read through them.

David weighed her and discovered she’d lost more than a pound since her last visit to her obstetrician. He checked her pulse and found out her heart rate was elevated.

When he reached for her belly, he hesitated. “May I?”

Shannon nodded. “Jonah’s been moving and kicking constantly. I can’t sleep more than an hour until he wakes me up again.”

“Jonah?” David asked. “Not Liam?”

“I changed my mind about his name.”

“Jonah’s a great name,” he said.

My God.

He’d felt the baby kick. It was remarkable. While the other children struck down by Herod’s had wound down into a paralytic state soon after their return, Shannon’s was still animated.