Bits & Pieces (10 page)

So when we heard the scream, we all looked around. We all got up right away. There are a lot of things a scream might mean, but as far as I know, none of them are good.

That's when we saw Jazz Patel.

She was walking really weird. Half running, half stumbling, and she kept slapping herself. Slapping her face and arms.

And she kept screaming.

We all ran. Everyone did.

Everyone in the school yard.

When someone's in trouble, you have to do something. You have to find out what's happening.

I heard someone say it before we even reached her.

“Fire ants! Fire ants!”

That's when we saw it. Saw
them
.

Jazz was covered with them. Hundreds of tiny red ants. I could see the bites on her arms and her face. Dozens and dozens of bites.

We could all see what those bites were doing to her.

She was swelling up.

“God,” said someone, “she's having a fit.”

Chong knew the word for it. Chong always knows the word. “Anaphylaxis.”

An allergic reaction.

Most kids aren't allergic to fire-ant bites. It's the same with bee stings and tarantula bites. But you never know until you get bitten.

Mr. West-Mensch came pushing through
the crowd and told us all to get back. He picked Jazz up and ran with her—actually ran—across the school yard and inside the school. A bunch of kids followed. Her friends, mostly. And some of the kinds of kids who need to see stuff like this.

We didn't. Chong, Benny, and I stood there. Morgie came up holding the grapes in a pouch he'd made by pulling out the bottom of his T-shirt. He stared at Mr. West-Mensch as he took Jazz away. Morgie's mouth hung open.

“Jazz—?” he asked.

We told him what happened.

Morgie looked sick. “She looked really bad.”

We didn't say anything because it seemed mean somehow to say it. But we thought it. Jazz looked really, really bad. Like she could hardly breathe.

“My cousin DeeDee used to be allergic to peanuts,” he said. Again, none of us said anything. We all remembered DeeDee.
She'd been a house painter and sometimes did face painting at the fair.

That was then.

DeeDee ate something that she didn't know had peanuts in it. Only a little bit, too, from what everyone said. She ate it and she had anaphylaxis too.

That was a bad night. I didn't see it. Neither did Benny or Chong, but we all knew that Morgie had.

Sometimes Morgie goes and puts flowers on her grave. He was close with DeeDee. He loved her. And for a long time he hated his dad because of what had to be done.

The dead don't stay dead. We all know that. Everyone knows that.

Ever since First Night, anyone who dies, no matter how they die, comes back.

We make jokes about it. We call it “zomming out.” They're bad jokes, but sometimes that's the only thing you have to keep from screaming.

Morgie's dad had to use a sliver on DeeDee.

A sliver.

It sounds like something nice. A sliver of cheese. A sliver of turkey on Thanksgiving. A sliver of chocolate when you get an A on a test.

Not the same thing.

Slivers are little pieces of metal. Flat on one end for pushing. Sharp on the other end. You have to stick them in the back of the neck, right where the spine enters the skull. We all learn about it in school. We all have to practice with slivers on cantaloupes and on dummy zoms made from straw.

Everyone in town—all the adults, anyway—carries at least one sliver.

Morgie's dad had to use his. Morgie understood. I mean, he's a little slow sometimes, but he's not stupid. He understood. But just because you understand something doesn't mean you can deal with it.

For a long time Morgie couldn't deal. He treated his dad like he'd done something bad to DeeDee. Like he'd
hurt
her.

It was a while before they could even talk about it.

Then one day Morgie sat on a rock down by the creek and cried harder than I ever saw anyone cry. He cried so hard I was scared for him. He kept punching his thigh, over and over again. Sometimes he punched himself in the side of the head. And cried. I tried to help him, but he screamed at me so loud that I got scared.

So . . . I went and told his dad.

I don't know what happened exactly. Morgie's dad went running down to the creek and told us to stay away. He and Morgie were down there for a long time. A couple of hours.

Morgie didn't go to school for two days, and his dad didn't go to work. Tom said that he saw them down at the creek again. Fishing.

That was a couple of years ago.

The thing with Jazz was today.

We're all taught what to do with a fire-ant bite. You have to elevate the spot where the bite was, then wash the area to reduce the risk of infection. Then you place a cool compress on it. As soon as you can, take an antihistamine.

We even have some old epinephrine pens one of the traders found in a hospital. They used one on Jazz.

It didn't work.

She went into convulsions.

And then she died.

Just like that.

No long disease. Not the flu. No zom bite.

Ants.

Little red ants.

Ordinary stuff.

When you live in a world where there
are seven billion zombies, you think about death coming for you with hands and teeth.

Not ant bites.

Somehow it feels worse.

They sent us home early from school. No one was allowed in the nurse's office after they brought Jazz in. Just teachers.

Teachers all carry slivers.

I barely even knew her, and I'm not really sure I liked her all that much.

But I can't stop crying.

Coldwater Creek, California

(On First Night, fourteen years before
Rot & Ruin
)

Hannahlily Bryce was pretty sure that Tucker Norton was it.

The actual
it
. As in
the
one.

If she had made him from parts she special-ordered, he could not have been more perfect. Six feet tall with straw-colored hair, perfect teeth, and eyes that were a stormy swirl of blue and gray. Like Hannahlily and unlike a lot of other farm kids, Tucker took a good tan that lasted well into the winter. And like her, he was fit. They loved to run together down the country lanes in Coldwater Creek. They rode horses together in the state forest. And they spent a lot of their time laughing.

He was everything her last boyfriend, Kyle Hanrady, wasn't. Actually, her last three boyfriends combined couldn't stack up to Tucker. So as far as she was concerned, he really was it.

She wanted to tell him that. Hannahlily wanted to tell Tucker that she loved him.

But . . .

After Kyle, Hannahlily had become very cautious. Kyle had been good-looking and all, and he had a bit of the backcountry bad-boy vibe that Hannahlily knew she was a sucker for. But Kyle was also a bit grabby and seemed to
have a difficult time grasping the concept of “no.”

Tucker was a gentleman. Not that he was unromantic, but he respected boundaries. As far as Hannahlily could tell, he was the last of that breed, and she didn't want to let him get off the reservation. No way, José.

Today was going to be a special day for them. Romantic and dangerous, and Mother Nature was cooperating. The storm was huge, and everyone in town had been going nuts about it. How could they not? The TV weathermen were all but predicting the end of the world with this thing; and storms like this were so rare in central California. Hannahlily figured school would close early and everything would get a little confused after that. She told her mom that she was going to go to her friend Amber's place if they let them out early. Amber lived near the school, and her house was on high ground. Hannahlily had ridden out a couple of snowstorms there already, and her mother was cool with the arrangement. Amber, of course, was in on everything from the jump. She could lie like a politician, and she was so sweet-natured that everyone always believed her.

Tucker lived with a father who worked two jobs and a mother who was always drunk. Hannahlily knew that sadness was part of what made Tucker so sensitive, and it added a nice layer to his brooding nature. Hannahlily liked brooding guys, especially if they looked like Tucker. She didn't like that quality about herself, but she was pretty sure she'd date a serial killer if he looked like Tucker. You could crack walnuts on those abs.

The plan was to go to school, swipe their student IDs, wait until the storm emergency got rolling, and then duck
out while everyone was heading for the buses. Tucker's truck could slog through any amount of mud. His uncle Slim had a farm at the edge of town, and Slim was currently in the VA hospital for lung cancer. She felt bad for him, but at the same time, it left the farm empty.

The farm, and the farmhouse.

Outside, the storm hooted and howled and pounded away at the sprawling old house. Shutters banged and timbers creaked. Inside, there was a noisy fire burning brightly in the stone hearth. Pine logs popped and shifted. Firelight glinted on the tall glasses of sweet tea. And in Tucker's eyes when he smiled at her.

They were wrapped in a huge fleece with a pattern of autumn leaves, pinecones, and acorns. They were still fully clothed, but the option to change that was on the table. Hannahlily's iPod was playing a moody mix of the kind of slow-groove R & B they played on late-night radio. The iPod and speakers were on batteries now that the power was out.

“Listen to that wind,” she said, snuggling close.

“Fierce,” he agreed. “I like it, though.” He took a lock of her long brunette hair between his fingers, smelled it, smiled, and kissed it.

Hannahlily closed her eyes and smiled. This was exactly the moment she'd painted in her mind. Real romance. Not just grunting and kissing and trying to keep Kyle's twenty-five hands from pawing her.

Tucker was gentle, and even when they were this close and this alone, it was clear that he respected her. Boundaries meant something to him. Not that he wasn't standing right there at the edge of the safe zone, but he was waiting with
true respect and patience for a signal to cross the line.

Neither of them were in too much of a hurry for that moment. Waiting, drawing it out, taking time somehow made it sweeter. It made it nicer.

So they sat together, her head on his chest, listening to the storm.

The warmth of the blanket, the calm patience of Tucker, and the crackling fire were all pulling her gently down into a semi-sleep.

Three rooms away, unheard by either of the young lovers, the back door opened. The sound was smaller than the groans of the old house and the moans of the line of slow, shambling, hungry intruders.

The woman in the wedding gown shuffled forward, her dirty white shoes scuffing on the back porch floorboards of the old house. She had lived all her life in Coldwater Creek and had planned to live out the rest of it here on the fringes of Yosemite Park. She wanted to grow old and die here.

That had already been accomplished. Not the growing old part. Just the dying. It hadn't happened in the way she had imagined through girlhood and young womanhood, through high school, college, and her first years as an apprentice ranger in the big national park.

She had expected to be married that afternoon to another ranger, a big, bearded, gentle man named David.
All their friends and family and coworkers were there at the chapel waiting for them.

Then the world tilted enough to let everything that mattered slide off the edge. Her dreams and hopes, her expectations.

Her plans.

Her life.

The last memory she'd had before the plague took her was of David standing over her, eyes streaming tears, body streaked with blood that was not his. Nor hers. A big wooden cross in his hands, raised above him, poised to smash down.

Ready to kill her.

To end her.

As he had ended others as the madness swept through the congregants and guests and sanity devoured the world.

But as the darkness closed around the bride's mind, David had paused on the very brink of commission. Horror and grief and shock and pain and ten thousand other emotions warred on his face.

It was clear that he had wanted to kill her, needed to. Had to.

This was the plague, and it took only a few moments for anyone to understand its rules. The infected bite people. The bitten die. The dead rise. The cycle continues until no one's left alive. They'd all heard the news stories about this, but those stories were all back East. In Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. In New York and Atlanta.

Not here.

Not in California.

Not in Coldwater Creek.

Not in this little church.

Not today.

Not now.

Not . . .

God.

David had knocked her down after she'd bitten her own mother. After she'd bitten David's sister.