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Not even the thunder and the rain could drown out the sounds of screams.
And gunfire.
“Mom . . . ?” asked Jack. “What’s happening?”
But Mom had nothing to stay. The bundle of towels fell softly to the floor by her feet.
She ran to the table by the couch, snatched up the phone, and called 911. Jack stood so close that he could hear the rings.
Seven. Eight. On the ninth ring there was a clicking sound and then a thump, as if someone had picked up the phone and dropped it.
Mom said, “Hello—?” Jack pressed close to hear.
The sounds from the other end were confused, and Jack tried to make sense of them. The scuff of a shoe? A soft, heavy bump as if someone had banged into a desk with their thighs. And a sound like someone makes when they’re asleep. Low and without any meaning.
“Flower,” called Mom. Flower was the secretary and dispatcher at the police station. She’d gone to high school with Mom. “Flower—are you there? Can you hear me?”
If there was a response, Jack couldn’t hear it.
“Flower—come on, girl, I need some help. There was some kind of problem at the school, and Steve’s bringing Jilly back with a bad bite. He tried to take her to the hospital, but it was closed and there were barricades set up. We need an ambulance. . . .”
Flower finally replied.
It wasn’t words, just a long, deep, aching moan that came crawling down the phone lines. Mom jerked the handset away from her ear, staring at it with horror and fear. Jack heard that sound, and it chilled him to the bones.
Not because it was so alien and unnatural . . . but because he recognized it. He knew that sound. He absolutely knew it.
He’d heard Toby make it a couple of times during those last days, when the cancer was so bad that they had to keep Toby down in a dark pool of drugs. Painkillers didn’t really work at that level. The pain was everywhere. It was the whole universe, because every single particle of your body knows that it’s being consumed. The cancer is winning, it’s devouring you, and you get to a point where it’s so big and you’re so small that you can’t even yell at it anymore. You can’t curse at it or shout at it or tell it that you won’t let it win. It already has won, and you know it. In those moments, those last crumbling moments, all you can do—all you can say—is throw noise at it. It’s not meaningless, even though it sounds like that. When Jack first heard those sounds co
ming out of Toby, he thought that it was just noise, just a grunt or a moan. But those sounds do have meaning. So much meaning. Too much meaning. They’re filled with all the need in the world.
The need to live, even though the dark is everywhere, inside and out.
The need to survive, even though you know you can’t.
The need to have just another hour, just another minute, but your clock is broken and all the time has leaked out.
The need to not be devoured.
Even though you already are.
The need.
Need.
That moan, the one Jack heard at Toby’s bedside and the one he heard now over the phone line from Flower, was just that. Need.
It was the sound Jack sometimes made in his dreams. Practicing for when it would be the only sound he could make.
Mom said, “Flower . . . ?”
But this time her voice was small. Little-kid small.
There were no more sounds from the other end, and Mom replaced the handset as carefully as if it was something that could wake up and bite her.
She suddenly seemed to notice Jack standing there, and she hoisted up as fake a smile as Jack had ever seen.
“It’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s the storm causing trouble with the phone lines.”
