Suffer the Children Page 13

  “Thank you,” Ramona told him. “For everything.”

  “Do you want me to come in? I could put coffee on, and we could try to get our bearings.”

  She shook her head. He glanced at Josh with obvious relief not to be staying.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll call you. Soon.”

  She turned and carried Josh to the door. He felt heavy in her arms. Church bells began to chime across the city. She struggled to hold him in one arm while she rooted in her purse for her keys.

  “How about a nice hot bath before I feed you?” she asked him.

  The water would both clean and warm him. Ramona took his silence as consent. She carried him upstairs, set him on his bed, and stretched out his limbs. It was hard work. His body appeared to be frozen solid. His skin felt like marble. She wondered how he’d been able to walk at all.

  “Mommy will be right back, honey,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. He stared at the ceiling. The muscles in his face were slack. His chest didn’t rise and fall. He didn’t blink.

  She went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. The room filled with warm steam.

  Otherwise, the house was quiet.

  Maybe he’s gone, she thought. She ran into his room and found him lying in the exact same spot. His eyes had shifted to look at her.

  “Mommy’s going to give you a nice hot bath, little man.”

  Ramona took his hands and pulled him into a sitting position. She undressed him until he sat naked and pale. His abdomen had swollen and turned green. His back was heavily bruised. He had blisters on his arms and legs. His fingertips were blue.

  His body is rotting but something inside him is still alive.

  She picked up her son and carried him into the bathroom. It was like carrying a chair. Dead weight. He made no sound as she lowered him into the hot water.

  The routine comforted her. This part was familiar. She would give him a bath. No big deal. A typical Tuesday night. She wouldn’t scream. She wouldn’t run away.

  He’s still Josh.

  She held on to that thought with whatever mental strength she had left.

  “Are you in there, Josh?”

  No answer.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?”

  Ramona wrung out a sponge and washed his back.

  “That’s okay, little man. Mommy will wait. I’m just so glad you’re home.”

  As she worked, she sang: “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word . . .”

  She raised one of his arms and sponged it carefully.

  “Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird . . .”

  Outside, people were cheering. The initial shock had worn off. They were embracing the insanity for the miracle it was, just as Ramona was. The gift. The children were back. How and why didn’t matter right now.

  “And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a—”

  The water turned black. Ramona coughed. The bath smelled like a rotten stew. She raised the toilet seat and retched over it. She turned on the bathroom fan and returned to the tub.

  “I’m going to wash your hair now, so close your eyes.”

  To her surprise, he did. Josh was still in there. They were communicating.

  “You always did hate getting water in your eyes.”

  Ramona had always figured he would abandon her one day—friends, girls, college, and, ultimately, his own family. She hadn’t expected him to die.

  And now that she’d gotten him back, she’d never lose him again.

  Whatever the price.

  FIVE

  Doug

  8 hours after Resurrection

  Doug woke to the worst hangover of his life.

  His head ached as if somebody had taken a baseball bat to it during the night. Joan had raised the shade on the window, and the light pierced his eyes like microscopic needles. His tongue felt too big for his mouth. The room spun. He wondered if he was still drunk. It wouldn’t have surprised him one bit if he was.

  It all came back to him with a jolt.

  Nate and Megan had come back from the dead.

  “Joanie,” he called. He barely recognized his ragged voice.

  She didn’t answer.

  He coughed hard. His mouth tasted like an old ashtray. He took his time standing. He was still wearing his gamey, foul-smelling black suit.

  He had to see for himself if they were still here or if it had all been a dream. Hell, he just wanted to see them.

  He hurried down the stairs. Froze on the bottom step.

  Nate and Megan leaned against each other on the La-Z-Boy sofa. Nate wore his favorite pajamas covered with NHL team logos. Megan wore a pink sleeper with a little patch (ballerina shoes) stitched onto the left breast. The daylight coming through the windows wasn’t kind to them. They looked like figures carved from wax. Soap, shampoo, and lotion had covered up the stink, but the low-grade smell of ongoing decay tainted the air.

  Joan had plugged in the Christmas tree, which filled the room with the parody of cheer.

  “Kids?” he rasped.

  They didn’t answer. Didn’t move a muscle, their eyes glassy and unblinking.

  “Oh, God.” He clamped his hand over his mouth and rushed past them to the bathroom, where he fell to his knees and vomited a single burning trickle of stomach acid. Dry heaves followed.

  “That’s what you get for drinking,” Joan said behind him.

  He yanked a handful of toilet paper off the roll and wiped the tears and snot from his face. “What have we done, Joanie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He’d been hallucinating last night. What had happened at the park couldn’t have happened; therefore, it hadn’t. It was one of those events people call mass hysteria. They’d hallucinated, recovered the bodies of their dead children, and brought them home. But they were still dead.

  And now they have to go back into the ground.

  Then he remembered. They’d taken Nate and Megan home in the truck and carried them inside. Nate said he was starving. Crossing the threshold, he’d said, “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” and went rock still in Doug’s arms.

  They’d washed and clothed them and tried to feed them, but the kids had stopped responding. They put them to bed and pressed their eyelids closed. Afterward, they collapsed, exhausted, in their own bed and slept.

  No, what had happened last night had been real enough.

  He flushed the toilet again, grabbed the edge of the sink, and hauled himself up. When he tried to leave, Joan stood her ground. She held two small cartons of apple juice with straws punched into them.

  “Doug, these are our kids.”

  “They were dead three whole days,” he said. “Doesn’t that bother you at all?”

  Her mouth set in a hard line. “This is a gift. A miracle. The only thing I feel is grateful.”

  He followed her into the living room and watched her offer the juice to the kids. No takers.

  “Have they done anything,” he asked, “other than just sit there staring into space?”

  “No,” Joan admitted.

  “So, what are we doing here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to take things one minute at a time, okay?” Her voice cracked. “What do you want to do? Take them back and bury them again?”

  She was right, but that didn’t make it any easier being in the same room with them.

  “We’ll take care of them like we always have,” he said. “But to be honest, they scare me a little.”

  Her expression softened. “Oh, Doug, they’re still our kids. You know that, right?”

  It was a good question. Were they? If they’d gone into a coma, they’d still be his kids, wouldn’t they? Or had a disfiguring accident? Was this that much different?

  Of course it is. They’re DEAD. They’re dead, and we’re treating them like living people.

  The children’s eyes flickered in unison to look at him.

  “Jesus,” he said with a shudde
r. “Their eyes are following me.”

  Joan turned to gape at the children. “They moved?”

  The phone rang.

  “Goddamn it!” Doug roared, venting his stress. He stomped into the kitchen.

  Their eyes followed his progress.

  “They’re moving, Doug! Look! They’re watching you!”

  He snatched up the phone, nerves jangling. “What?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’?” Otis shouted back. “You were supposed to be here at six thirty!”

  “You want me to pick up trash today? My kids just came back, you prick.”

  “Language,” Joan called from the living room.

  “Well, that’s lucky for you,” said Otis, “because thousands of them haven’t had the chance.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m happy your kids are back. I really am. It’s a goddamn miracle. God bless you. But there are still thousands of kids out at the sites. The ones who went home weren’t buried yet. The rest are still down there in the ground.”

  Doug hadn’t thought of that. “All right, I’m listening.”

  “We have to dig them up. It’s going to be a hell of a lot tougher to get them out than it was putting them in. Hard, delicate work. We’ve had crews working all night, and they’re dropping. We need more people on-site. We need you.”

  Doug heard frantic music and a giggling cartoon voice in the living room. Joan had put on a DVD. He thought about spending the day with his children. His children with their dead faces.

  “My grandkids are still down there, Doug,” Otis pleaded.

  “I’ll be there in less than an hour.”

  Otis hesitated. Apparently, he’d been unprepared for Doug to agree so readily. “Well, good. God bless you, Doug.” He paused again. “Everything okay there?”

  “Yeah, just peachy,” Doug grated. He hung up.

  He returned to the living room. The children’s eyes were glued to the flickering images on the TV. Joan stared at them with naked love. She wasn’t going to like his leaving right now. He steeled himself for a fight.

  “Sorry, babe. I have to go to work.”

  “Fine,” Joan said absently, still watching her kids.

  “It’s an emergency.”

  “Great. You should go. Do what you have to do.”

  “I’m thinking about stopping for a beer on the way home,” he tested her.

  She didn’t answer; she’d stopped listening. Her easy agreement stung. Doug had always figured she would choose the kids over him if push came to shove. He’d always accepted this. He still didn’t like it.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was driving to the burial ground with a thermos of coffee between his legs and his flask snug in the inner breast pocket of his denim jacket. Church bells tolled in the distance. He dialed around the AM talk radio stations and found a guy who was saying the children’s resurrection was a sign of the End Times.

  “The final judgment is coming, friends. It’s practically here. Now, the question you need to be asking yourself is: Am I right with God?”

  Doug turned it off and dry-swallowed some Tylenol. He felt hot and flushed; the guy and his gravelly voice had gotten to him. Just a day ago, he would have welcomed Judgment Day. He’d had a thing or two to tell God when he met Him. But not now.

  Doug wasn’t a religious man, but he believed in a God who kept score. Taking the children home and playing with them as if they were dolls struck him as an abomination. If his children were truly dead, then they should have stayed dead. It was sad as hell, it was hard, it had broken him and Joan, but it was the natural order.

  Those things in his house were not his kids, plain and simple. They were ghosts. A mocking imitation of the children he loved more than himself.

  The soldiers waved him through the checkpoint. He thought about the thermos of coffee warming his thighs and decided to have a snort of Jim Beam instead.

  The sky had turned even grayer this morning as the temperature dropped and snow began to fall. The big machines growled as they reopened the trenches. Work crews followed in their wake, digging up the children.

  Ahead lay the sprawling compound of trailers where the operation was managed, now even bigger with Red Cross tents, ambulances, and school buses filling with children bound for home.

  They couldn’t get them all. As Doug approached the parking area, he saw dozens of children walking off singly or in groups across the frozen fields. Drawn to the warmth of their homes like moths seeking light.

  His skin crawled at the sight. He couldn’t shake his sense of foreboding. Fear both primitive and primordial, rooted in millions of years of evolution.

  His instincts warned him the long nightmare wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

  David

  10 hours after Resurrection

  David stepped aboard the idling school bus with his medical bag, ready to do some good.

  The Red Cross had called for volunteers to help care for the children being dug out of the ground at the burial site. He’d come without a second thought.

  The children at the hospital had returned from the dead. He’d seen it happen firsthand; it still haunted him. It may have been a miracle to most, but it was a medical mystery to him. In time, the scientific community would need to understand why the children came back as much as why they died in the first place. In the meantime, they needed his care as a pediatrician.

  The bus was full. The children stared at some distant horizon, their faces slack and their mouths hanging open. Dead and arranged in this creepy diorama. A gray-haired man in a red ski jacket crouched next to a girl and shined a flashlight into her eyes.

  The wall of stench forced him to back off. He waved down a passing paramedic.

  “They’re all dead in there. Where are the walking ones?”

  The woman handed him a surgical mask that reeked of women’s perfume. “On the bus. This will help with the stink. See the doctor. I think Dr. Simon’s on that bus.”

  What a mess, David thought.

  He put on the mask and breathed through his mouth. He steeled his nerves and climbed back aboard, extending his hand as the gray-haired man approached. “Dr. Simon? I’m Dr. Harris.”

  The man handed him a clipboard and pointed. “Check vitals on the last five rows on the left and fill out these forms.”

  “Why? They’re dead, aren’t they?”

  “Oh yeah? How’d they walk here then?”

  He remembered how little Jonathan Ford had sat up and hopped off the dissection table. He’d appeared dead as well, as had all the rest at The Children’s Hospital. David nodded and approached two girls sitting next to each other.

  They were holding hands.

  “I’m Dr. Harris,” he told them. “I’m a pediatrician. That means I specialize in helping sick boys and girls get better. First, though, I have to figure out why they’re sick.”

  The girls stared straight ahead. If they heard David speak, they showed no sign of it.

  He smiled at the one closest to him. “So let’s start with you. What’s your name?”

  No answer.

  Unresponsive to verbal stimuli, he scribbled. Makes no sounds. His hands shook a little as he wrote, a symptom of too much stress and Vicodin.

  (and fear)

  He put the pen down and flexed his hand.

  “That’s okay.” He checked the yellow laminated card tied to her wrist. “Sally. I’m going to touch your hand and put a little pressure on your fingernail. Can you tell me if you feel it?”

  Any conscious human being would react to the pain.

  Unresponsive to pain. Makes no movements.

  On the Glasgow Coma Scale, these children were in a state of deep unconsciousness. But the Glasgow Coma Scale no longer applied.

  “Okay, Sally. Now I want you to look at the light for me.”

  David produced a pocket flashlight, clicked it on, and shined it in her eyes one at a time.

  He sighed, scribbling. Pupil
s do not contract in response to bright light.

  He reached into his medical bag and retrieved his stethoscope. He touched the girl’s wrist, intending to search for a pulse, and recoiled at the feel of cold, hard flesh.

  “You’re doing great, Sally.” He tried again.

  Nothing.

  No pulse, he wrote. No respiration. The skin is cold.

  Outside, the snow reflected the gray sky. He sighed again.

  “That’s it, Sally. Normally, at the end of an examination, I’d give you a lollipop, but—”

  Sally’s eyes shifted to regard him with their icy dead stare.

  “I’ll be damned.” David shivered with revulsion as he noted it on the form. He tried to sound natural. “That’s great, Sally. Really great.”

  People thought life was a miracle, but it wasn’t. Life was everywhere. The miracle was knowing you were alive. Sentience. Mind. That was the rare, precious gift.

  He looked at the dead girl in front of him and knew there was a mind still in there.

  His phone rang. He peeled off his gloves and answered it.

  “David, I’m glad I caught you,” said Ben. “I’m hoping you can help me. Have you had a chance to examine any of the children yet?”

  “You’re in luck. I’m just finishing up my first examination right now.”

  “I’ve been hearing they don’t show vital signs. Is there any truth to that?”

  “The child I just examined exhibited no heartbeat or respiration nor any response to external stimuli except a movement of the eyes.”

  “What do you mean? There was pupil contraction in response to light?”

  “No, not at all. But her eyes turned to look at me when I mentioned I normally give lollipops at the end of patient exams.”

  “Shit,” said Ben.

  David noticed more of the children were looking at him. He turned away and said quietly, “What’s going on?”

  “Listen, once you examine a few more, I need you to bring me the reports right away. As fast as you can get here. Will you do this for me?”