The Night Parade(50)

In the kitchen, Pauline was preparing a strange assortment of food on a single plate—chocolate chip cookies, a single slice of white bread slathered in peanut butter, apple slices, and a powdered doughnut.

“Healthy food for a healthy body,” he joked.

Pauline smiled at him, but there was no humor in it. David couldn’t help quell the feeling that whenever Pauline looked at him, it was with an odd mixture of appreciation and pity. She turned away from the plate and retrieved a plastic cup with Transformers on it from the cupboard. From the fridge, she pulled a jug of chocolate milk. She filled the cup with it.

“Turk says you met Jimmy.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

Pauline set the plate of food and the cup of chocolate milk on a tin tray with the NASCAR logo on it. “It happened after the evacuation, you know.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke. “Turk says there’s no way to be completely sure, seein’ how there could be an incubation period and all, but, well . . . a mother knows.”

“So he was healthy after the evacuation? And he hadn’t been around anyone else who was sick?”

“No one else,” she said.

He heard Turk speaking in his head, the same words he’d said upstairs, on the other side of his son’s locked door: Some think it’s airborne, others say it’s in the water. Even the government’s come out and said it might just be hanging in the air and absorbed through the skin. Heck, who’s to say it ain’t genetics?

“Maybe the rest of us ain’t gotten sick because we don’t got the gene in us,” Pauline said, eerily echoing her husband’s sentiment. “Or maybe it’s for other reasons.” For the first time, she looked up at David and held him in the gaze of her dark, hypnotic, almost childlike eyes. “Turk thinks there could be other reasons. Like, maybe this ain’t something science can explain. Turk’s found religion.” She fingered a tiny silver cross on a chain around her neck. “We all have.”

“It’s good to have faith,” David said. “I wish I had something I could believe in.”

“You can.” She smiled at him, a gentle easing of her features that never quite reached her eyes. “Maybe you already have. It’s been working for us.”

“You mean with Jimmy,” he said.

“Ain’t no one else but God could keep Jimmy with us for this long,” Pauline said. “That’s my belief, anyway.”

He returned her smile, but something about the falseness of it on his face made him feel cold.

“Turk’s on the porch drinking a beer,” she said, picking the tray up off the counter. “Help yourself to one. They’re in the fridge.”

When she left, he got a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator and joined Turk on the back porch.

“Hear that?” Turk said, not bothering to look at him.

David listened. He could hear nothing. After a time, he said, “What?”

“Bugs,” said Turk. “Crickets. Cicadas. What-have-you. Millions of bugs out there. You know why?”

“Yes,” David said. “I do.”

Turk craned his head around to face him. His eyebrows arched.

“No birds,” David said.

“It’s the rapture,” Turk said. “Signs of the plague. Birds die, bugs propagate, start growing, multiplying. Hell, they already had us outnumbered on the planet about a million to one. And that was before the Folly.”

David thought about the monstrous spider that had crawled down the lamppost in town, the spider that was preparing to feast on a mouse. He could imagine the chain reaction such events would have—birds die, bugs propagate, just as Turk said. Bugs grow, eat larger prey. Mammals vanish. Larger bugs are eaten by fish—by serpents—and those terrible things grow in size, too. Meanwhile, people vanish from the planet, giving way to a whole new caste of creature that then inherits the earth.

“Where you think them birds went, anyway?” Turk said.

“I don’t know.” David sat in the empty chair beside Turk. “People have been asking that for some time now.” He thought of the geese dropping like anchors out of the sky, pulverizing automobile windshields and leaving cracks on the asphalt.

“If they were dead—if they all got sick and died—their little bodies would be all over the place. But nope. Not a single bird. Not even a dead one. Not anymore, anyway.” Turk swigged some beer. “For a while, U.S. Fish and Wildlife were tracking ’em, and you could pull up info on the Internet from the Department of the Interior. But then they stopped tracking.”

“There were early reports of birds migrating out over the oceans,” David said. “Some were being tracked. But then the tracker signals went dead. Scientists on TV and in the newspapers said they probably died during the migration and fell into the oceans.”

“Could be,” said Turk. “But you don’t much hear about it anymore. Pauline says maybe they’re focused on more important things, given all that’s going on now, but I think maybe we don’t got the people to do all these things anymore. Let me ask you—when was the last time you saw the president on TV? Or heard a live briefing on the radio?”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Sure, the White House releases statements to the media, and every once in a while there’s some pencil-neck in a bow tie standing behind that podium with the seal on it to give us a rundown on the situation, make us feel like they’re wrangling things under control, although even then they’ve got no real news for us. But nope, you don’t see the president. Or even the vice president. Nobody of any importance, I mean. They said they’re holed up in some undisclosed location somewhere, healthy as thoroughbreds, but I ain’t so sure about that. They’ll play some old recordings of him to make us think that he’s still there toiling away behind the scenes, but for my money, I think something bad has happened. Real bad.”