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.
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, 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.
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 Americans worried about nuclear bombs and Russian air raids. Stuff Jack barely even knew about.
In front of the school was a guest parking lot, which was 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 say. 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—?”
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. 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 bone.
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.