over the window’s edge, so carefully, but the street was empty now. He sat up to see better, and the man was gone.
Had he ever even been there? Maybe the lack of sleep was really getting to him now. Seeing naked male corpses walking in the street: not something a child of divorce wants to share with a therapist.
And then it came to him: hunger. That was it. The dead eyes looked at him with intense hunger …
Zack dove into his sheets and buried his face in his pillow. The man’s absence did not ease his mind, but instead did the contrary. The man was gone, but he was everywhere now. He could be downstairs, breaking in through the kitchen window. Soon it would be on the steps, climbing ever so slowly—could he hear his footsteps already?—and then in the corridor outside his door. Softly rattling his lock—the busted lock that would not catch. And soon it would reach Zack’s bed and then—what? He feared the man’s voice and its dead stare. Because he had the horrible certainty that, even though it moved, the man was no longer alive.
Zombies …
Zack hid under his pillow, mind and heart racing, full of fear and praying for dawn to come and save him. Much as he dreaded school, he begged the morning to come.
Across the street, in the neighboring house, window glass was broken and the TV light snapped off.
Ansel Barbour whispered to himself as he wandered about the second floor of his house. He wore the same T-shirt and boxer shorts he had tried to sleep in, and his hair darted up at odd angles from continuous squeezing and pulling. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Ann-Marie suspected a fever, but when she came to him with the thermometer, he could not bear to think of that steel-tipped probe being stuck in under his inflamed tongue. They had an ear thermometer, for the kids, but he couldn’t even sit still long enough to get an accurate reading. Ann-Marie’s practiced palm against his forehead detected heat—lots of heat—but then, he could have told her that.
She was petrified, he could tell. She made no effort to hide it. To her, any illness whatsoever was an assault on the sanctity of their family unit. The kids’ throw-up bugs were met with the same dark-eyed fear another might reserve for, say, a bad blood test or the appearance of an unexplained lump. This is it. The beginning of the terrible tragedy she was certain would one day befall her.
His tolerance for Ann-Marie’s eccentricities was at low ebb. He was dealing with something serious here, and he needed her help, not her added stress. Now he couldn’t be the strong one. He needed her to take charge.
Even the kids were staying away from him, startled by the not-there look in their father’s eyes, or perhaps—he was vaguely aware of this—the odor of his sickness, which to his nose resembled the smell of congealed cooking grease stored too long in a tin can rusting beneath the sink. He saw them from time to time hiding behind the balusters at the bottom of the staircase, watching him cross the second-floor landing. He wanted to allay their fears, but worried he might lose his temper trying to explain this to them, and in doing so make things worse. The surest way to set their minds at ease was to get better. To outlast this surge of disorientation and pain.
He stopped inside his daughter’s bedroom, found the purple walls too purple, then doubled back into the hallway. He stood very still on the landing—as still as he could—until he could hear it again. That thumping. A beating—quiet and close. Wholly separate from the headache pounding in his skull. Almost … like in small-town movie theaters, where you can hear, during quiet moments in movies, the clicking of the film running through the projector in the back. Which distracts you, and keeps pulling you back to the reality that this is not real, as though you and you alone realize this truth.
He shook his head hard, grimacing from the pain that went with it … trying to use that pain like bleach, to clean his thoughts … but the thumping. The throbbing. It was everywhere, all around him.
The dogs too. Acting strange around him. Pap and Gertie, the big, bumbling Saint Bernards. Growling as they would when some strange animal came into the yard.
Ann-Marie came up later, alone, finding him sitting at the foot of their bed, his head in his hands like a fragile egg. “You should sleep,” she said.
He gripped his hair like the reins of a mad horse and fought down the urge to berate her. Something was wrong in his throat, and whenever he lay down for any length of time, his epiglottis seized up, cutting off his airway, suffocating him until he choked himself back to breathing. He was terrified now of dying in his sleep.
“What do I do?” she asked, remaining in the doorway, her palm and fingers pressing against her own forehead.
“Get me some water,” he said. His voice hissed through his raw throat, burning like steam. “Lukewarm. Dissolve some Advil in it, ibuprofen—anything.”
She didn’t move. She stood there staring, worrying. “Aren’t you even a little better …?”
Her timidity, which normally aroused strong protective instincts in him, now moved him only to rage. “Ann-Marie, get me some goddamn water, and then take the kids outside or something but keep them the hell away from me!”
She scurried away in tears.
When Ansel heard them go outside into the darkened backyard, he ventured downstairs, walking with one hand clamped on the handrail. She had left the glass on the counter next to the sink, set on a folded napkin, dissolved pills clouding the water. He brought the glass to his lips two-handedly and forced himself to drink. He poured the water into his mouth, giving his throat no choice but to swallow. He got some of it down before gagging on the rest of the contents, coughing onto the sink window overlooking the backyard. He gasped as he watched the splatter drip down the glass pane, distorting his view of Ann-Marie standing behind the kids on the swings, staring off into the darkened sky, breaking her crossed arms only occasionally to push low-swinging Haily.
The glass slipped from his hand, spilling into the sink. He left the kitchen for the living room, dropping onto the sofa there in a kind of a stupor. His throat was engorged and he felt sicker than ever.
He had to return to the hospital. Ann-Marie would just have to make it on her own for a little while. She could do it if she had no choice. Maybe it would even end up being good for her …
He tried to focus, to determine what needed to be done before he left. Gertie came into the doorway, panting softly. Pap entered behind her, stopping near the fireplace, settling down into a crouch. Pap started a low, even growl, and the thumping noise surged in Ansel’s ears. And Ansel realized: the noise was coming from them.
Or was it? He got down off the sofa, moving over toward Pap on his hands and knees, getting closer to hear. Gertie whimpered and retreated to the wall, but Pap held his unrelaxed crouch. The growl intensified in the dog’s throat, Ansel grasping his collar just as the dog tried to back up onto its feet and get away.
Thrum … Thrum … Thrum …
It was in them. Somehow. Somewhere. Something.
Pap was pulling and whimpering, but Ansel, a big man who rarely had to use his strength, curled his free arm around the Saint Bernard’s neck, holding him in a canine headlock. He pressed his ear to the dog’s neck, the hair of its fur tickling the inside of his auditory canal.
Yes. A thrumming pulse. Was it the animal’s circulating blood?
That was the noise. The yelping dog strained to get away, but Ansel pressed his ear harder against the dog’s neck, needing to know.
“Ansel?”
He turned fast—too fast, a blinding shot of white pain—and saw Ann-Marie at the door, Benjy and Haily behind her. Haily was hugging her mother’s leg, the boy standing alone, both of them staring. Ansel’s grip relaxed and the dog pulled away.
Ansel was still on his knees. “What do you want?” he yelled.
Ann-Marie stayed frozen in the doorway, in a trance of fear. “I’m … I don’t … I’m taking them for a walk.”
“Fine,” he