Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

Jack had to hunch into his coat and grab onto Dad’s belt to keep from being blasted back into the house. The air was thick and wet, and he started to cough before he was three steps onto the porch. His chest hitched, and there was a gassy rasp in the back of his throat as he fought to breathe. Part of it was the insanity of the storm, which was worse than anything Jack had ever experienced. Worse than it looked on TV. Part of it was that there simply wasn’t much of him. Even with the few pounds he’d put on since he went into remission, he was a stick figure in baggy pajamas. His boots were big and clunky, and he half walked out of them with every step.

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 nothing as Dad pulled the shotgun trigger and nothing happened.