Mom was up with Roger, running as fast as she could despite the wind, forcing her way through it to get to the truck and open the doors. Roger staggered as if Jill was a burden, but it was just the wind, trying to bully him the way Tony Magruder had bullied Jill.
The whole yard was moving. It was a flowing, swirling pond that lapped up against the second porch step. Jack stared at it, entranced for a moment, and in that moment the pond seemed to rear up in front of him and become that big black wall of nothing that he saw so often in his dreams.
“Did the levee break?” he yelled. He had to yell it twice before Dad answered.
“No,” Dad shouted back. “This is ground runoff. It’s coming from the fields. If the levee broke it’d come at us from River Road. We’re okay. We’ll be okay. The truck can handle this.”
There was more doubt than conviction in Dad’s words, though.
Together they fought their way off the porch and across five yards of open driveway to the truck.
Lightning flashed again and something moved in front of Jack. Between Mom and the truck. It was there and gone.
“Mom!” Jack called, but the wind stole his cry and drowned it in the rain.
She reached for the door handle and in the next flash of lightning Jack saw Jill’s slender arm reach out from the bundle of blankets as if to touch Mom’s face. Mom paused and looked at her hand and in the white glow of the lightning Jack saw Mom smile and saw her lips move as she said something to Jill.
Then something came out of the rain and grabbed Mom.
Hands, white as wax, reached out of the shadows beside the truck and grabbed Mom’s hair and her face and tore her out of Jack’s sight. It was so fast, so abrupt that Mom was there and then she was gone.
Just . . . gone.
Jack screamed.
Dad must have seen it, too. He yelled and then there was a different kind of thunder as the black mouth of his shotgun blasted yellow fire into the darkness.
There was lightning almost every second and in the spaces between each flash everything in the yard seemed to shift and change. It was like a strobe light, like the kind they had at the Halloween hayride. Weird slices of images, and all of it happening too fast and too close.
Uncle Roger began to turn, Jill held tight in his arms.
Figures, pale-faced but streaked with mud. Moving like chess pieces. Suddenly closer. Closer still. More and more of them.
Dad firing right.
Firing left.
Firing and firing.
Mom screaming.
Jack heard that. A single fragment of a piercing shriek, shrill as a crow, that stabbed up into the night.
Then Roger was gone.
Jill with him.
“No!” cried Jack as he sloshed forward into the yard.
“Stay back!” screamed his father.
Not yelled. Screamed.
More shots.
Then Dad pulled the shotgun trigger and nothing happened. Nothing.
The pale figures moved and moved. It was hard to see them take their steps, but with each flash of lightning they were closer.
Always closer.
All around.
Dad screaming.
Roger screaming.
And . . . Jill.
Jill screaming.
Jack was running without remembering wanting to, or starting to. His boots splashed down hard and water geysered up around him. The mud tried to snatch his boots off his feet. Tried and then did, and suddenly he was running in bare feet. Moving faster, but the cold was like knife blades on his skin.
Something stepped out of shadows and rainfall right in front of him. A man Jack had never seen before. Wearing a business suit that was torn to rags, revealing a naked chest and . . .
. . . and nothing. Below the man’s chest was a gaping hole. No stomach. No skin. Nothing. In the flickering light Jack could see dripping strings of meat and . . .
. . . and . . .
. . . was that the man’s spine?
That was stupid. That was impossible.
The man reached for him.
There was a blur of movement and a smashed-melon crunch and then the man was falling away and Dad was there, holding the shotgun like a club. His eyes were completely wild.
“Jack for Christ’s sake get back into the house.”
Jack tried to say something, to ask one of the questions that burned like embers in his mind. Simple questions. Like, what was happening? Why did nothing make sense?
Where was Mom?
Where was Jill?
But Jack’s mouth would not work.
Another figure came out of the rain. Mrs. Suzuki, the lady who owned the soy farm next door. She came over for Sunday dinners almost every week. Mrs. Suzuki was all naked.
Naked.
Jack had only ever seen naked people on the Internet, at sites where he wasn’t allowed to go. Sites that Mom thought she’d blocked.
But Mrs. Suzuki was naked. Not a stitch on her.
She wasn’t built like any of the women on the Internet. She had tiny breasts and a big scar on her stomach, and her pubic hair wasn’t trimmed into a thin line. She wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t sexy.
She wasn’t whole.
There were pieces of her missing. Big chunks of her arms and breasts and face. Mrs. Suzuki had black blood dripping from between her lips, and her eyes were as empty as holes.
She opened her mouth and spoke to him.
Not in words.
She uttered a moan of endless, shapeless need. Of hunger.
It was the moan Jack knew so well. It was the same sound Toby had made; the same sound that he knew he would make when the cancer pushed him all the way into the path of the rolling endless dark.
The moan rose from Mrs. Suzuki’s mouth and joined with the moans of all the other staggering figures. All of them, making the same sound.
Then Mrs. Suzuki’s teeth snapped together with a clack of porcelain.
Jack tried to scream, but his voice was hiding somewhere and he couldn’t find it.
Dad swung the shotgun at her and her face seemed to come apart. Pieces of something hit Jack in the chest and he looked down to see teeth stuck to his raincoat by gobs of black stuff.
He thought something silly. He knew it was silly, but he thought it anyway because it was the only thought that would fit into his head.
But how will she eat her Sunday dinner without teeth?
He turned to see Dad struggling with two figures whose faces were as white as milk except for their dark eyes and dark mouths. One was a guy who worked for Mrs. Suzuki. Jose. Jack didn’t know his last name. Jose something. The other was a big red-haired guy in a military uniform. Jack knew all of the uniforms. This was a National Guard uniform. He had corporal’s stripes on his arms. But he only had one arm. The other sleeve whipped and popped in the wind, but there was nothing in it.
Dad was slipping in the mud. He fell back against the rear fender of the Durango. The shotgun slipped from his hands and was swallowed up by the groundwater.
The groundwater.
The cold, cold groundwater.
Jack looked numbly down at where his legs vanished into the swirling water. It eddied around his shins, just below his knees. He couldn’t feel his feet anymore.