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“Go to CNN,” suggested Roger, but Jack was already surfing through the stations. They had Comcast cable. Eight hundred stations, including high-def.
The same text was on every single one.
“What the hell?” said Roger indignantly. “We have friggin’ digital. How can all the stations’ feeds be out?”
“Maybe it’s the cable channel,” said Jack. “Everything goes through them, right?”
“It’s the storm,” said Dad.
“No,” said Mom, but she didn’t explain. She bent over Jill and peered closer at the black goo around her wounds. “Oh my God, Steve, there’s something in there. Some kind of—”
Jill suddenly opened her eyes.
Everyone froze.
Jill looked up at Mom and Dad, then Uncle Roger, and then finally at Jack.
“Jack . . . ,” she said in a faint whisper, lifting her uninjured hand toward him, “I had the strangest dream.”
“Jilly?” Jack murmured in a voice that had suddenly gone as dry as bones. He reached a tentative hand toward her. But as Jack’s fingers lightly brushed his sister’s, Dad suddenly smacked his hand away.
“Don’t!” he warned.
Jill’s eyes were all wrong. The green of her irises had darkened to a rust and the whites had flushed to crimson. A black tear broke from the corner of her eye and wriggled its way down her cheek. Tiny white things twisted and squirmed in the goo.
Mom choked back a scream and actually recoiled from Jill.
Roger whispered, “God almighty . . . what is that stuff? What’s wrong with her?”
“Jack—?” called Jill. “You look all funny. Why are you wearing red makeup?”
Her voice had a dreamy, distant quality. Almost musical in its lilt, like the way people sometimes spoke in dreams. Jack absently touched his face, as if it was his skin and not her vision that was painted with blood.
“Steve,” said Mom in an urgent whisper, “we have to get her to a doctor. Right now.”
“We can’t, honey, the storm—”
“We have to. Damn it, Steve, I can’t lose both my babies.”
She suddenly gasped at her own words and cut a look at Jack, reaching for him with hands that were covered in Jill’s blood. “Oh God . . . Jack . . . sweetie, I didn’t mean—.”
“No,” said Jack, “it’s okay. We have to save Jill. We have to.”
Mom and Dad both looked at him for a few terrible seconds, and there was such pain in their eyes that Jack wanted to turn away. But he didn’t. What Mom had said did not hurt him as much as it hurt her. She didn’t know it, but Jack had heard her say those kinds of things before. Late at night when she and Dad sat together on the couch and cried and talked about what they were going to do after he was dead. He knew that they’d long ago given up real hope. Hope was fragile and cancer was a monster.
Fresh tears brimmed in Mom’s eyes, and Jack could almost feel something pass between them. Some understanding, some acceptance. There was an odd little flicker of relief as if she grasped what Jack knew about his own future. And Jack wondered if, when Mom looked into her own dreams at the future of her only son, she also saw the great black wall of nothing that was just a little way down the road.
Jack knew that he could never put any of this into words. He was a very smart twelve-year-old, but this was something for philosophers. No one of that profession lived on their farm.
The moment, which was only a heartbeat long, stretched too far and broke. The brimming tears fell down Mom’s cheeks, and she turned back to Jill. Back to the child who maybe still had a future. Back to the child she could fight for.
Jack was completely okay with that.
