“Grandpa Joe?” Kendrick whispered. Grandpa Joe’s black face shone with sweat, and he was chewing at his lip hard enough to draw blood.
Grandpa Joe’s fingers gripped at the wheel, and the corners of his mouth turned upward in an imitation of a smile. It’s gonna be all right,” he said, but it seemed to Kendrick that he was talking to himself more than to him. “It’ll be fine.”
Kendrick stared at him, assessing: He seemed all right. He was sweating and bleeding, but he must be all right if he was driving the truck. You couldn’t drive if you were one of them, could you? Grandpa Joe was fine. He said he was.
Mom and Dad hadn’t been fine after a while, but they had warned him. They had told him they were getting sleepy, and they all knew getting sleepy right away meant you might not wake up. Or if you did, you’d be changed. They’d made him promise not to open the door to the safe room, even for them.
No matter what. Not until you hear the danger word.
Kendrick felt warm liquid on the seat beneath him, and he gasped, thinking Grandpa Joe might be bleeding all over the seat. Instead, when he looked down, Kendrick saw a clear puddle between his legs. His jeans were dark and wet, almost black. It wasn’t blood. He’d peed on himself, like a baby.
“Are you sleepy?” Kendrick said.
Grandpa Joe shook his head, but Kendrick thought he’d hesitated first, just a little. Grandpa Joe’s eyes were on the road half the time, on the rearview mirror the rest. “How long before your mom and dad got sleepy?”
Kendrick remembered Dad’s voice outside of the door, announcing the time: “It’s nine o’clock, Cass.” Worried it was getting late. Worried they should get far away from Kendrick and send for Grandpa Joe to come get him. Kendrick heard them talking outside the door plain as day; for once, they hadn’t tried to keep him from hearing.
“A few minutes,” Kendrick said softly. “Five. Or ten.”
Grandpa Joe went back to chewing his lip. “What happened?”
Kendrick didn’t know what happened. He’d been in bed when he heard Mom say their neighbor Mrs. Shane was knocking at the window. All he knew was that Dad came into his room, shouting and cradling his arm. Blood oozed from between Dad’s fingers. Dad pulled him out of bed, yanking Kendrick’s arm so hard that it popped, pulling him to his feet. In the living room, he’d seen Mom crouching far away, by the fireplace, sobbing with a red face. Mom’s shirt was bloody, too.
At first, Kendrick had thought Dad had hurt Mom, and now Dad was mad at him, too. Dad was punishing him by putting him in the safe room.
“They’re in the house, Kendrick. We’re bitten, both of us.”
After the door to the safe room was closed, for the first time Kendrick had heard somebody else’s footsteps. Then, that scream.
“They stayed for ten minutes, maybe. Not long. Then they said they had to leave. They were getting sleepy, and they were scared to come near me. Then they went away for a long time. For hours,” Kendrick told Grandpa Joe. “All of a sudden I heard Mom again. She was knocking on the door. She asked me where my math homework was. She said, ‘You were supposed to do your math homework.’”
Kendrick had never said the words before. Tears hurt his eyes.
“That was how you knew?” Grandpa Joe said.
Kendrick nodded. Snot dripped from his nose to the front of his jacket, but he didn’t move to wipe it away. Mom had said not to open the door until Grandpa Joe came and said the danger word. No matter what.
“Good boy, Kendrick,” Grandpa Joe said, his voice wavering. “Good boy.”
All this time, Joe had thought it was his imagination.
A gaggle of the freaks had been there in Cass’s front yard waiting for him, so he’d plowed most of them down with the truck so he could get to the door. That was the easy part. As soon as he got out, the ones still standing had surged. There’d been ten of them at least; an old man, a couple of teenage boys, the rest of them women, moving quick. He’d been squeezing off rounds at anything that moved.
“Daddy?”
Had he heard her voice before he’d fired? In the time since, he’d decided the voice was his imagination, because how could she have talked to him, said his name? He’d decided God had created her voice in his mind, a last chance to hear it to make up for the horror of the hole his Glock had just put in her forehead. “Daddy?”
It had been Cass, but it hadn’t been. Her blouse and mouth had been a bloody, dripping mess, and he’d seen stringy bits of flesh caught in her teeth, just like the other freaks. It hadn’t been Cass. Hadn’t been.
People said freaks could make noises. They walked and looked like us. The newer ones didn’t have the red shit showing beneath their skin, and they didn’t start to lose their motor skills for a couple of days—so they could run fast, the new ones. He’d known that. Everybody knew that.
But if freaks could talk, could recognize you…
Then we can’t win.
The thought was quiet in Joe’s mind, from a place that was already accepting it.