Zombies: More Recent Dead (39 page)

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 were something that could wake up and bite her.

She suddenly seemed to remember Jack was 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 on the road, 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 apeshit 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 shit out of him, too. Joe’s glasses went flying off his face and his nose just bursting with blood. Crazy shit.”

“ . . . 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 took 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 fuckin’ 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 batshit 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 station 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 smacked his hand away.

“Don’t!” he warned.

Jill’s eyes were all wrong. The green of her irises had darkened to a rusty hue 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 shit? 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 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.