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, and 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,” she snapped. “We’ll bundle her up and take the truck.”
“No,” said Roger, “like I said, we tried to take her to Wolverton ER, but they had it blocked off.”
“Then we’ll take her to Bordentown, or Fayetteville or any damn place, but we have to take her somewhere!”
“I’m just saying,” Roger said, but his voice had been beaten down into something tiny and powerless by Mom’s anger. He was her younger brother, and she’d always held the power in their family.
“Roger,” she said, “you stay here with Jack and—”
“I want to go too,” insisted Jack.
“No,” barked Mom. “You’ll stay right here with your uncle and—”
“But Uncle Rog is hurt too,” he said. “He got bit and he has that black stuff too.”
Mom’s head swiveled sharply around, and she stared at Roger’s arm. The lines around her mouth etched deeper. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Just don’t touch that stuff. You hear me, Jack? Steve? Don’t touch whatever that black stuff is. We don’t know what’s in it.”
“Honey, I don’t think we can make it to the highway,” said Dad. “When we came up River Road, the water was halfway up the wheels. It’ll be worse now.”
“Then we’ll go across the fields, goddamn it!” snarled Mom.
“On the TV, earlier,” interrupted Jack, “they said that the National Guard was coming in to help because of the flooding and all. Won’t they be near the river? Down by the levee?”
Dad nodded. “That’s right. They’ll be sandbagging along the roads. I’m surprised we didn’t see them on the way here.”
“Maybe they’re the ones who blocked the hospital,” said Roger. “Maybe they took it over, made it some kind of emergency station.”
“Good, good . . . that’s our plan. We find the Guard, and they’ll help us get Jill to a—”
But that was as far as Dad got.
Lightning flashed as white-hot as the sun, and in the same second there was a crack of thunder that was the loudest sound Jack had ever heard.
All the lights went out and the house was plunged into total darkness.
7
Dad’s voice spoke from the darkness. “That was the transformer up on the access road.”
“Sounded like a direct hit,” agreed Roger.
There was a scrape and a puff of sulfur, and then Mom’s face emerged from the darkness in a small pool of match-light. She bent and lit a candle and then another. In the glow she fished for the Coleman, lit that, and the room was b
right again.
“We have to go,” she said.
Dad was already moving. He picked up several heavy blankets from the stack Mom had laid by and used them to wrap Jill. He was as gentle as he could be, but he moved fast and he made sure to stay away from the black muck on her face and arm. But he did not head immediately for the door.