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.
12
The lightning and the spill 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 what was left of Roger twitching in 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.
All of them were turned away, looking past the abandoned truck, facing the farm road.
Jack stood over Jill’s body and watched as the wall of water from the shattered levee came surging up the road toward the house. It was so beautiful.
A big, black wall of nothing.
Jack looked at his mother, his father, his uncle, and then down at Jill. Her cold hand twitched. And twitched again.
He wouldn’t be going into the dark without them.
The dark was going to take them all.
Jack smiled.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
ON DYING
(BEFORE ROT & RUIN)
Someone I know died today.
A kid. A girl.
Jasmine Patel. We called her Jazz.
Jazz.
She was a year older than me. A tenth grader.
We weren’t friends. I hardly knew her.
Okay, sure, I mean we went to the same school, and there aren’t all that many of us. A hundred kids in each grade. You see the same faces in school, on the playground, around town. You bump into people at the New Year’s party and the harvest fair and all that. You say hello if you meet them at Lafferty’s Store when you go in to buy pop. Or maybe you’re both in the same line on the day the new Zombie Cards come out. You say hi if you pass on the street.
But that’s it sometimes. You know them but you don’t know them.
You’re not friends exactly.
Friendly, or maybe just polite. There’s probably a difference between those two things.
But I didn’t really know Jazz that much.