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Behind them there was a heavy thud on the door.
Soft and lazy, but heavy, like the fist of a sleepy drunk.
However, Jack knew that it was no drunk. He knew exactly who and what was pounding on the door. A few moments later there were other thuds. On the side windows and the back door. On the walls. At first just a few fists, then more.
Jill raised her head and looked up at him.
“I’m cold,” she said, even though she was hot. Jack nodded; he understood fevers. Her eyes were like red coals.
“I’ll keep you warm,” he said, huddling closer to her.
“W-what’s happening?” she asked. “Mom . . . ?”
He didn’t answer. He rested the back of his head against the door, feeling the shocks and vibrations of each soft thud shudder through him. The cold was everywhere now. He could not feel his legs or his hands. He shivered as badly as she did, and all around them the storm raged and the dead beat on the house. He listened to his own heartbeat. It fluttered and twitched. Beneath his skin and in his veins and in his bones, the cancer screamed as it devoured the last of his heat.
He looked down at Jill. The bite on her arm was almost colorless, but radiating out from it were black lines that ran like tattoos of vines up her arm. More of the black lines were etched on her throat and along the sides of her face. Black goo oozed from two or three smaller bites that Jack hadn’t seen before. Were they from what had happened at the school, or from just now? No way to tell. The rain had washed away all the red, leaving wounds that opened obscenely and in which white grubs wriggled in the black wetness.
Her heart beat like the wings of a hummingbird. Too fast, too light.
Outside, Mom and the others moaned for them.
“Jack,” Jill said, and her voice was even smaller, farther away.
“Yeah?”
“Remember when you were in the hospital in January?”
“Yeah.”
“You . . . you told me about your dream?” She still spoke in the dazed voice of a dreamer.
“Which dream?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.
“The one about . . . the big wave. The black wave.”
“The black nothing,” he corrected. “Yeah, I remember.”
She sniffed, but it didn’t stop the tears from falling. “Is . . . is that what this is?”
Jack kissed her cheek. As they sat there, her skin had begun to change, the intense heat gradually giving way to a clammy coldness. Outside, the pounding, the moans, the rain, the wind, the thunder—it was all continuous.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, “I think so.”
They listened to the noise, and Jack felt himself getting smaller inside his own body.
“Will it hurt?” she asked.
Jack had to think about that. He didn’t want to lie, but he wasn’t sure of the truth.
The roar of noise was fading. Not getting smaller, but each separate sound was being consumed by a wordless moan that was greater than the sum of its parts.
“No,” he said, “it won’t hurt.”
Jill’s eyes drifted shut, and there was just the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. There was no reason for it to be there, but it was there.
He held her until all the warmth was gone from her. He listened for the hummingbird flutter of her heart and heard nothing.
He touched his face. His tears had stopped with her heart. That’s okay, he thought. That’s how it should be.
