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The lie was silly and weak, but they both accepted it because there was nothing else they could do.
Then Jack saw the headlights, turning off River Road onto their driveway.
“They’re here!” he cried, and rushed for the door, but Mom pushed past him, jerked the door open, and ran out onto the porch.
“Stay back,” she yelled as he began to follow.
Jack stopped in the doorway. Rain slashed at Mom as she stood on the top step, silhouetted by the headlights as Dad’s big Dodge Durango splashed through the water that completely covered the road. His brights were on, and Jack had to shield his eyes behind his hands. The pickup raced all the way up the half-mile drive and slewed sideways to a stop that sent muddy rainwater onto the porch, slapping wet across Mom’s legs. She didn’t care; she was already running down the steps toward the car.
The doors flew open, and Dad jumped out from behind the wheel and ran around the front of the truck. Uncle Roger had something in his arms. Something that was limp and wrapped in a blanket that looked like it was soaked with oil. Only it wasn’t oil, and Jack knew it. Lightning flashed continually, and in its stark glow the oily black became gleaming red.
Dad took the bundle from him and rushed through ankle-deep mud toward the porch. Mom reached him and tugged back the cloth. Jack could see the tattered sleeve of an olive-drab sweatshirt and one ice-pale hand streaked with crooked lines of red.
Mom screamed.
Jack did too, even though he could not see what she saw. Mom had said that she’d been bitten . . . but this couldn’t be a bite. Not with this much blood. Not with Jill not moving.
“JILL!”
He ran out onto the porch and down the steps and into the teeth of the storm.
“Get back,” screeched Mom as she and Dad bulled their way past him onto the porch and into the house. Nobody wiped their feet.
Roger caught up with him. He was bare-chested despite the cold and had his undershirt wrapped around his left arm. In the glare of the lightning, his skin looked milk white.
“What is it? What’s happening? What’s wrong with Jill?” demanded Jack, but Uncle Roger grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him toward the house.
“Get inside,” he growled. “Now.”
Jack staggered toward the steps and lost his balance. He dropped to his knees in the mud, but Uncle Roger caught him under the armpit and hauled him roughly to his feet and pushed him up the steps. All the while, Uncle Roger kept looking over his shoulder. Jack twisted around to see what he was looking at. The bursts of lightning made everything look weird, and for a moment he thought that there were people at the far end of the road, but when the next bolt forked through the sky, he saw that it was only cornstalks battered by the wind.
Only that.
“Get inside,” urged Roger. “It’s not safe out here.”
Jack looked at him. Roger was soaked to the skin. His face was swollen, as if he’d been punched, and the shirt wrapped around his left arm was soaked through with blood.
It’s not safe out here.
Jack knew for certain that his uncle was not referring to the weather.
The lightning flashed again, and the shadows in the corn seemed wrong.
All wrong.
6
Jack stood silent and unnoticed in the corner of the living room, like a ghost haunting his own family. No one spoke to him, no one looked in his direction. Not even Jill.
As soon as they’d come in, Dad had laid Jill down on the couch. No time even to put a sheet under her. Rainwater pooled under the couch in pink puddles. Uncle Roger stood behind the couch, looking down at Mom and Dad as they used rags soaked with fresh water and alcohol to sponge away mud and blood. Mom snipped away the sleeves of the torn and ragged army sweatshirt.
“It was like something off the news. It was like one of those riots you see on TV,” said Roger. His eyes were glassy, and his voice had a distant quality, as if his body and his thoughts were in separate rooms. “People just going crazy for no reason. Good people. People we know. I saw Dix Howard take a tire iron out of his car and lay into Joe Fielding, the baseball coach from the high school. Just laid into him, swinging on him like he was a total stranger. Beat the crap out of him too. Joe’s glasses went flying off his face, and his nose was just bursting with blood. Crazy stuff.”
“Give me the peroxide,” said Mom, working furiously. “There’s another little bite on her wrist.”
“The big one’s not that bad,” Dad said, speaking over her rather than to her. “Looks like it missed the artery. But Jilly’s always been a bleeder.”
“It was like that when we drove up,” said Uncle Roger, continuing his account even though he had no audience. Jack didn’t think that his uncle was speaking to him. Or . . . to anyone. He was speaking because he needed to get it out of his head, as if that was going to help make sense of it. “With the rain and all, it was hard to tell what was going on. Not at first. Just buses and cars parked every which way and lots of people running and shouting. We thought there’d been an accident. You know people panic when there’s an accident and kids are involved. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming and making a fuss instead of doing what needs to be done. So Steve and I got out of the truck and started pushing our way into the crowd. To find Jill and to, you know, see if we could do something. To help.”
