Free Bits & Pieces by Jonathan Maberry Page A

deafening Jack and Jill as they collapsed onto the stairs and crawled like bugs onto the plank floor. The front door was wide open, the glow from the Coleman lantern showing the way.
    â€œJack,” Jill mumbled, slurring his name. “I feel sick.”
    The monsters in the rain kept coming, and Jack realized that they had ignored him time and again. These creatureswere not chasing him now. They were coming for Jill. They wanted her.
    Her. Not him.
    Why?
    Because they want life.
    That’s why they went after Mom and Dad and Uncle Roger.
    That’s why they wanted Jill.
    Not him.
    He wasn’t sure how or why he knew that, but he was absolutely certain of it. The need for life was threaded through that awful moan. Toby had wanted more life. He wanted to be alive, but he’d reached the point where he was more dead than alive. Sliding down, down, down.
    I’m already dead.
    Jill crawled so slowly that she was barely halfway across the porch by the time one of them tottered to the top step. Jack felt it before he turned and looked. Water dripped down from its body onto the backs of his legs.
    The thing moaned.
    Jack looked up at the terrible, terrible face.
    â€œMom . . . ?” he whispered.
    Torn and ragged, things missing from her face and neck, red and black blood gurgling over her lips and down her chin. Bone-white hands reaching.
    Past him.
    Ignoring him.
    Reaching for Jill.
    â€œNo,” said Jack. He wanted to scream the word, to shoutthe kind of defiance that would prove that he was still alive, that he was still to be acknowledged. But all he could manage was a thin, breathless rasp of a word. Mom did not hear it. No one did. There was too much of everything else for it to be heard.
    Jill didn’t hear it.
    Jill turned at the sound of the moan from the thing that took graceless steps toward her. Jill’s glazed red eyes flared wide, and she screamed the same word.
    â€œNO!”
    Jill, sick as she was, screamed that word with all the heat and fear and sickness and life that was boiling inside her. It was louder than the rain and the thunder. Louder than the hungry moan that came from Mom’s throat.
    There was no reaction on Mom’s face. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish.
    No, not like a fish. Like someone practicing the act of eating a meal that was almost hers.
    There was very little of Jack left, but he forced himself once more to get to his feet. To stand. To stagger over to Jill, to catch her under the armpits, to pull, to drag. Jill thrashed against him, against what she saw on the porch.
    She punched Jack and scratched him. Tears like hot acid fell on Jack’s face and throat.
    He pulled her into the house. As he did so, he lost his grip, and Jill fell past him into the living room.
    Jack stood in the doorway for a moment, chest heaving, staring with bleak eyes at Mom. And then past her to the other figures who were slogging through the mud and water toward the house. At the rain hammering on the uselesstruck. At the farm road that led away toward the River Road. When the lightning flashed, he could see all the way past the levee to the river, which was a great, black, swollen thing.
    Tears, as cold as Jill’s were hot, cut channels down his face.
    Mom reached out.
    Her hands brushed his face as she tried to reach past him.
    A sob as painful as a punch broke in Jack’s chest as he slammed the door.

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    He turned and fell back against it, then slid all the way down to the floor.
    Jill lay on her side, weeping into her palms.
    Outside the storm raged, mocking them both with its power. Its life.
    â€œJill,” said Jack softly.
    The house creaked in the wind, each timber moaning its pain and weariness. The window glass trembled in the casements. Even the good china on the dining room breakfront racks rattled nervously as if aware of their own fragility.
    Jack heard all this.
    Jill crawled over to him and collapsed against him, burying her face