“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.
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, 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,” Mom snapped. “We’ll bundle her up and take the truck.”