I’m already dead.
Jill crawled so slowly that she was barely halfway across the porch by the time one of them tottered to the top step. Jack felt it before he turned and looked. Water dripped from its body onto the backs of his legs.
The thing moaned.
Jack looked up at the terrible, terrible face.
“Mom . . . ?” he whispered.
Torn and ragged, things missing from her face and neck, red and black blood gurgling over her lips and down her chin. Bone-white hands reaching.
Past him.
Ignoring him.
Reaching for Jill.
“No,” said Jack. He wanted to scream the word, to shout the kind of defiance that would prove that he was still alive, that he was still to be acknowledged. But all he could manage was a thin, breathless rasp of a word. Mom did not hear it. No one did. There was too much of everything else for it to be heard.
Jill didn’t hear it.
Jill turned at the sound of the moan from the thing that took graceless steps toward her. Jill’s glazed red eyes flared wide and she screamed the same word.
“NO!”
Jill, sick as she was, screamed that word with all of the heat and fear and sickness and life that was boiling inside of her. It was louder than the rain and the thunder. Louder than the hungry moan that came from Mom’s throat.
There was no reaction on Mom’s face. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish.
No, not like a fish. Like someone practicing the act of eating a meal that was almost hers.
There was very little of Jack left, but he forced himself once more to get to his feet. To stand. To stagger over to Jill, to catch her under the armpits, to pull, to drag. Jill thrashed against him, against what she saw on the porch.
She punched Jack, and scratched him. Tears like hot acid fell on Jack’s face and throat.
He pulled her into the house. As he did so, Jack lost his grip and Jill fell past him into the living room.
Jack stood in the doorway for a moment, chest heaving, staring with bleak eyes at Mom. And then past her to the other figures who were slogging through the mud and water toward the house. At the rain hammering on the useless truck. At the farm road that led away toward the River Road. When the lightning flashed he could see all the way past the levee to the river, which was a great, black swollen thing.
Tears, as cold as Jill’s were hot, cut channels down his face.
Mom reached out.
Her hands brushed his face as she tried to reach past him.
A sob as painful as a punch broke in Jack’s chest as he slammed the door.
He turned and fell back against it, then slid all the way down to the floor.
Jill lay on her side, weeping into her palms.
Outside the storm raged, mocking them both with its power. It’s life.
“Jill . . . ” said Jack softly.
The house creaked in the wind, each timber moaning its pain and weariness. The window glass trembled in the casements. Even the good china on the dining room breakfront racks rattled nervously as if aware of their own fragility.
Jack heard all of this.
Jill crawled over to him and collapsed against him, burying her face against his chest. Her grief was so big that it, too, was voiceless. Her body shook and her tears fell on him like rain. Jack wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close.
He was so cold that her heat was the only warmth in his world.
Behind them there was a heavy thud on the door.
Soft and lazy, but heavy, like the fist of a sleepy drunk.
However Jack knew that it was no drunk. He knew exactly who and what was pounding on the door. A few moments later there were other thuds. On the side windows and the back door. On the walls. At first just a few fists, then more.
Jill raised her head and looked up at him.
“I’m cold,” she said, even though she was hot. Jack nodded, he understood fevers. Her eyes were like red coals.
“I’ll keep you warm,” he said, huddling closer to her.
“W-what’s happening?” she asked. “Mom . . . ?”
He didn’t answer. He rested the back of his head against the door, feeling the shocks and vibrations of each soft punch shudder through him. The cold was everywhere now. He could not feel his legs or his hands. He shivered as badly as she did, and all around them the storm raged and the dead beat on the house. He listened to his own heartbeat. It fluttered and twitched. Beneath his skin and in his veins and in his bones, the cancer screamed as it devoured the last of his heat.
He looked down at Jill. The bite on her arm was almost colorless, but radiating out from it were black lines that ran like tattoos of vines up her arm. More of the black lines were etched on her throat and along the sides of her face. Black goo oozed from two or three smaller bites that Jack hadn’t seen before. Were they from what happened at the school, or from just now? No way to tell; the rain had washed away all of the red, leaving wounds that opened obscenely and in which white grubs wriggled in the black wetness.
Her heart beat like the wings of a hummingbird. Too fast, too light.
Outside, Mom and the others moaned for them.
“Jack . . . ” she said, and her voice was even smaller, farther away.
“Yeah?”
“Remember when you were in the hospital in January?”
“Yeah.”
“You . . . you told me about your dream?” She still spoke in the dazed voice of a dreamer.
“Which dream?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.
“The one about . . . the big wave. The black wave.”
“The black nothing,” he corrected. “Yeah, I remember.”
She sniffed but it didn’t stop the tears from falling. “Is . . . is that what this is?”
Jack kissed her cheek. As they sat there, her skin had begun to change, the intense heat gradually giving way to a clammy coldness. Outside, the pounding, the moans, the rain, the wind, the thunder—it was all continuous.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, “I think so.”
They listened to the noise and Jack felt himself getting smaller inside his own body.
“Will it hurt?” she asked.
Jack had to think about that. He didn’t want to lie but he wasn’t sure of the truth.
The roar of noise was fading. Not getting smaller but each separate sound was being consumed by a wordless moan that was greater than the sum of its parts.
“No,” he said, “it won’t hurt.”
Jill’s eyes drifted shut and there was just the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. There was no reason for it to be there, but it was there.
He held her until all the warmth was gone from her. He listened for the hummingbird flutter of her heart and heard nothing.
He touched his face. His tears had stopped with her heart. That was okay, he thought. That’s how it should be.
Then Jack laid Jill down on the floor and stood up.
The moan of the darkness outside was so big now. Massive. Huge.
He bent close and peered out through the peephole.
The pounding on the door stopped. Mom and the others outside began to turn, one after the other, looking away from the house. Looking out into the yard.
Jack took a breath.
He opened the door.
The lightning and the outspill of light from the lantern showed him the porch and the yard, the car and the road. There were at least fifty of the white-faced people there. None of them looked at him. Mom was right there, but she had her back to him. He saw Roger crawling through the water so he could see past the truck. He saw Dad rise awkwardly to his feet, his face gone but the pistol still dangling from his finger.