“What is it?” she asked.
The people were coming now.
Many more of them.
Most of them strangers now. People from other parts of the town. Coming through yards and across lawns.
Coming.
Coming.
“Jesus, Sherrie, get in the damn car!”
She stepped back from him, shaking her head, almost smiling the way people do when they think you just don’t get it.
“Sherrie—no!”
She backed one step too far.
Tom made a grab for her.
Ten hands grabbed her too. Her arms, her clothes, her hair.
“What is it, Tom?” she asked once more. Then she was gone.
Gone.
Sickened, horrified, Tom spun away and staggered toward the car. He thrust his sword into the passenger foot well and slid behind the wheel. Pulled the door shut as hands reached for him. Clawed at the door, at the glass.
It took forever to find the ignition slot, even though it was where it always was.
Behind him, Benny kept screaming.
The moans of the people outside were impossibly loud.
He turned the key.
He put the car in drive.
He broke his headlights and smashed his grille and crushed both fenders getting down the street. The bodies flew away from him. They rolled over his hood, cracked the windows with slack elbows and cheeks and chins. They lay like broken dolls in the lurid glow of his taillights.
7
Tom and Benny headed for L.A.
They were still eighty miles out when the guy on the emergency broadcast network said that the city was gone.
Gone.
Far in the west, way over the mountains, even at that distance, Tom could see the glow. The big, ugly, orange cloud bank that rose high into the air and spread itself out to ignite the roots of heaven.
He was too far away to hear it.
The nuclear shock wave would have hit the mountains anyway. Hit and bounced high and troubled the sky above them.
But the car went dead.
So did his cell phone and the radio.
All around him the lights went out.
Tom knew the letters. He’d read them somewhere. EMP. But he forgot what they stood for.
That didn’t matter. He understood what they meant.
The city was gone.
An accident?
An attempt to stop the spread?
He sat in his dead car and watched the blackness beyond the cracked windshield and wondered if he would ever know. On the backseat, Benny was silent. Tom turned and looked at him. His brother was asleep. Exhausted and out.
Or . . .
A cold hand stabbed into Tom’s chest and clamped around his heart.
Was Benny sleeping?
Was he?
Was he?
Tom turned and knelt on the seat. Reaching over into the shadows back there was so much harder than anything else he’d had to do. Harder than leaving Mom and Dad. Harder than using his sword on the neighbors.
This was Benny.
This was his baby brother.
This was everything that he had left. This was the only thing that was going to hold him to the world.
No.
God, no.
His mouth shaped the words, but he made no sound at all.
He did not dare.
If Benny was sleeping, he didn’t want to wake him.
If Benny was not sleeping, then he didn’t want to wake that, either.
He reached across a million miles of darkness.
Please, he begged.
Of God, if God was even listening. If God was even God.
Please.
Of the world, of the night.
Please.
How many other voices had said that, screamed that, begged that? How many people had clung to that word as the darkness and the deadness and the hunger came for them?
How many?
The math was simple.
Everyone he knew.
Except him. Except Benny.
Please.
He touched Benny’s face. His brother’s cheeks were cool.
Cool or cold?
He couldn’t tell.
Then he placed his palm flat on Benny’s chest. Trying to feel something. Anything. A breath. A beat.
He waited.
And around him the night seemed to scream.
He waited.
This time he said it aloud.
“Please.”
In the backseat, Benny Imura heard his brother’s voice and woke up.
Began to cry.
Not moan.
Cry.
Tom laid his forehead on the seat back, held his hand against his brother’s trembling chest, and wept.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
ON TOM IMURA
(BEFORE ROT & RUIN)
Tom hated it when anyone said that he was a hero.
He was a hero, but he always said he wasn’t.
My mom thinks he is. I think Mom is in love with him. So is Mrs. Murphy, who runs the Wash-N-Soak over on Cranberry Street. So is Jenn, the librarian at school. And Lupita and her sister. They make knives and tools, and Tom is in their store all the time. They stand at the window and stare at him when he leaves. I mean total googly-eyed stare.
Even the mayor’s wife, Mrs. Kirsch, stares at him a lot. I’ve seen it when I go over to the Imura place to hang out with Benny. Mrs. Kirsch seems to find a lot of reasons to come out in the yard whenever Tom’s out there working in his garden or just coming back from a run. And don’t get me started on what happens when Tom’s out back with his swords.
Tom uses swords. It’s a thing with him. He calls it kenjutsu, which is a Japanese word (I looked it up) that means “the art of the sword.” It’s what the samurai, the warriors of ancient Japan, used to practice. Tom started studying it, and some unarmed stuff called jujutsu and karate, way back before First Night. He started when he was a little kid. His dad was born in Japan, and so was his older brother, Sam. They’re both dead now. Sam went missing during First Night, and Tom and Benny’s dad died during the outbreak. Benny’s mom, too. She wasn’t Tom’s mom, though. Both of Tom’s parents were Japanese, but his real mom died of cancer. His dad married an Irish-American lady, so that makes Benny his stepbrother. Or half brother. Not sure which is right. (NOTE: Look that up.)
Anyway, when Tom’s outside training with his sword, he sometimes does it with no shirt on. It’s funny, but when he wears a shirt he looks kind of skinny, but when he takes it off, he’s got all these muscles. They aren’t huge—not like Mr. Williams, who has muscles on his muscles on his muscles. Tom’s muscles are more like Mr. Olivetti, our gym teacher at school.
When Tom’s in his yard working with his sword, Mrs. Kirsch seems to find a lot of reasons to water her flowers, even if it just rained. Or to put seed in the bird feeder, even after they’ve migrated south. Sometimes she has her friends over. They sit on the porch and seem to drink a lot of wine no matter what time of day it is.
I don’t get it. I mean, sure, Tom’s cute, but he’s old. If he was twenty on First Night, then he’s at least thirty-four. That’s almost as old as my mom. Kind of gross.
Now Benny . . .
Yeah, that’s different.
He’s older too, but only by a year. He just turned fifteen.
Benny’s so cute. God.
He doesn’t mess around with swords, though. And he can’t stand Tom. He thinks Tom’s a jerk. He thinks Tom ran away and didn’t try to help their folks when the outbreak happened.
Benny said he ran away and left them there to die.
Benny hates Tom.
I asked Mom about that, and she said that Benny’s wrong. She says Tom is a hero because he saved Benny. That he saved a lot of people.
I don’t know what to believe. Benny seems so sure.
It makes me wonder, though . . . what exactly is a hero?
I’ll have to
look that up too.
Jack and Jill
Stebbins County, Pennsylvania
During the Outbreak
(On First Night, fourteen years before Rot & Ruin)
1
Jack Porter was twelve going on never grow up.
He was one of the walking dead.
He knew it. Everyone knew it.
Remission was not a reprieve; it just put you in a longer line at the airport. Jack had seen what happened to his cousin, Toby. Three remissions in three years. Hope pushed Toby into a corner and beat the crap out of him each time. Toby was a ghost in third grade, a skeleton in fourth grade, a withered thing in a bed by the end of fifth grade, and bones in a box before sixth grade even started. All that hope had accomplished was to make everyone more afraid.
Now it was Jack’s turn.
Chemo, radiation. Bone marrow transplants. Even surgery.
Like they say in the movies, life sucks, and then you die.
So, yeah, life sucked.
What there was of it.
What there was left.
Jack sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed, watching the weatherman on TV talk about the big storm that was about to hit. He kept going on and on about the dangers of floods, and there was a continuous scroll across the bottom of the screen that listed the evacuation shelters.
Jack ate dry Honey Nut Cheerios out of a bowl and thought about floods. The east bend of the river was three hundred feet from the house. Uncle Roger liked to say that they were a football field away, back door to muddy banks. Twice the river had flooded enough for there to be some small wavelets licking at the bottom step of the porch. But there hadn’t ever been a storm as bad as what they were predicting, at least not in Jack’s lifetime. The last storm big enough to flood the whole farm had been in 1931. Jack knew that because they showed flood maps on TV. The weather guy was really into it. He seemed jazzed by the idea that a lot of Stebbins County could be flooded out.
Jack was kind of jazzed about it too.
It beat the crap out of rotting away. Remission or not, Jack was certain that he could feel himself die, cell by cell. He dreamed about that, thought about it. Wrote in his journal about it. Did everything but talk about it.
Not even to Jill. Jack and Jill had sworn an oath years ago to tell each other everything, no secrets. Not one. But that was before Jack got sick. That was back when they were two peas in a pod. Alike in everything, except that Jack was a boy and Jill was a girl. Back then, back when they’d made that pact, they were just kids. You could barely tell one from the other except in the bath.
Years ago. A lifetime ago, as Jack saw it.
The sickness changed everything. There were some secrets the dying were allowed to keep to themselves.
Jack watched the Doppler radar of the coming storm and smiled. He had an earbud nestled into one ear and was also listening to Magic Marti on the radio. She was hyped about the storm too, sounding as excited as Jack felt.
“Despite heavy winds, the storm front is slowing down and looks like it’s going to park right on the Maryland/Pennsylvania border, with Stebbins County taking the brunt of it. They’re calling for torrential rains and strong winds, along with severe flooding. And here’s a twist . . . even though this is a November storm, warm air masses from the south are bringing significant lightning, and so far there have been several serious strikes. Air traffic is being diverted around the storm.”
Jack nodded along with her words as if it was music playing in his ear.
Big storm. Big flood?
He hoped so.
The levees along the river were half-assed, or at least that’s how Dad always described them.
“Wouldn’t take much more than a good piss to flood ’em out,” Dad was fond of saying, and he said it every time they got a bad storm. The levees never flooded out, and Jack wondered if this was the sort of thing people said to prevent something bad from happening. Like telling an actor to break a leg.
On the TV they showed the levees, and a guy described as a civil engineer puffed out his chest and said that Pennsylvania levees were much better than the kind that had failed in Louisiana. Stronger, better maintained.
Jack wondered what Dad would say about that. Dad wasn’t much for the kind of experts news shows trotted out. “Bunch of pansy-ass know-nothings.”
The news people seemed to agree, because after the segment with the engineer, the anchor with the plastic hair pretty much tore down everything the man had to say.
“Although the levees in Stebbins County are considered above average for the region, the latest computer models say that this storm is only going to get stronger.”
Jack wasn’t sure if that was a logical statement, but he liked its potential. The storm was getting bigger, and that was exciting.
But again he wondered what it would be like to have all that water—that great, heaving mass of coldness—come crashing in through all the windows and doors. Jack’s bedroom was on the ground floor, a concession to how easily he got tired climbing steps. The house was 115 years old. It creaked in a light wind. No way it could stand up to a million gallons of water, Jack was positive of that.
If it happened, he wondered what he would do.
Stay here in his room and let the house fall down around him.
No, that sounded like it would hurt. Jack could deal with pain—he had to—but he didn’t like it.
Maybe he could go into the living room and wait for it. On the couch, or on the floor in front of the TV. If the TV and the power were still on. Just sit there and wait for the black tide to come calling.
How quick would it be?
Would it hurt to drown?
Would he be scared?
Sure, but rotting was worse.
He munched a palmful of Cheerios and prayed that the river would come for him.
2
“Mom said I can’t stay home today,” grumped Jill as she came into Jack’s room. She dropped her book bag on the floor and kicked it.
“Why not?”
“She said the weatherman’s never right. She said the storm’ll pass us.”
“Magic Marti says it’s going to kick our butts,” said Jack.
As if to counterpoint his comment, there was a low rumble of thunder way off to the west.
Jill sighed and sat next to him on the edge of the bed. She no longer looked like his twin. She had a round face and was starting to grow boobs. Her hair was as black as crow’s wings, and even though Mom didn’t let her wear makeup—not until she was in junior high, and even then it was going to be an argument—Jill had pink cheeks, pink lips, and every boy in sixth grade was in love with her. Jill didn’t seem to care much about that. She didn’t try to dress like the middle school girls, or like Maddy Simpson, who was the same age but who had pretty big boobs and dressed like she was in an MTV rap video. Uncle Roger had a ten-dollar bet going that Maddy was going to be pregnant before she ever got within shooting distance of a diploma. Jack and Jill both agreed. Everyone did.
Jill dressed like a farm girl. Jeans and a sweatshirt, often the same kind of sweatshirt Jack wore. Today she had on an olive drab US Army shirt. Jack wore his with pajama bottoms. Aunt Linda had been in the army, but she’d died in Afghanistan three years ago.
They sat together, staring blankly at the TV screen for a while. Jack cut her a sly sideways look and saw that her face was slack, eyes empty. He understood why, and it made him sad.
Jill wasn’t dealing well with the cancer. He was afraid of what would happen to her after he died. And Jack had no illusions about whether the current remission was going to be the one that took. When he looked into his own future, either in dreams, prayers, or when lost in thought, there was an end to the road. It went on a bit further, and there was a big wall of black nothingness.
It sucked, sure, but he’d lived with it so long that he had found a kind of peace with it. Why go kicking and screaming into the dark if none of that would change anything?
&nbs
p; Jill, on the other hand, that was different. She had to live, she had to keep going. Jack watched TV a lot, he saw the episodes of Dr. Phil and other shows where they talked about death and dying. He knew that some people believed that the dying had an obligation to their loved ones who would survive them.
Jack didn’t want Jill to suffer after he died, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He told her once about his dreams of the big black nothing.
“It’s like a wave that comes and just sweeps me away,” he’d told her.
“That sounds awful,” she replied, tears springing into her eyes, but Jack assured her that it wasn’t.
“No,” he said, “ ’cause once the nothing takes you, there’s no more pain.”
“But there’s no more you!”
He grinned. “How do you know? No one knows what’s on the other side of that wall.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be something cool. Something nice.”
“How could it be nice?” Jill had demanded.
This was right after the cancer had come back the last time, before the current remission. Jack was so frail that he barely made a dent in his own hospital bed. He touched the wires and tubes that ran from his pencil-thin arm to the machines behind him. “It’s got to be nicer than this.”
Nicer than this.
That was the last time they’d had a real conversation about the sickness, or about death. That was nine months ago. Jack stopped talking to her about those things and instead did what he could to ease her down so that when the nothing took him, she’d still be able to stand.
He nudged her and held out the bowl of cereal. Without even looking at it, she took a handful and began eating them, one at a time, smashing them angrily between her teeth.
Eventually she said, “It’s not fair.”
“I know.” Just as he knew that they were having two separate conversations at the same time. It was often that way with them.
They crunched and glared at the TV.
“If it gets bad,” Jack said, “they’ll let everyone go.”
But she shook her head. “I want to stay home. I want to hang out here and watch it on TV.”