Suffer the Children (15 page)

I’d much rather work on the living.

He took a deep breath and prepared to cut. His mind flashed to the cough trick. He used to ask his young patients to cough when he gave them a needle. It often worked to distract them from the sting.

His phone sang the opening bars of the
1812 Overture
. Nadine’s ringtone.

“Saved by the bell, Jon.”

He set down the scalpel, peeled off his gloves, and retrieved his phone from his bag.

“Yes? Nadine?”

“David!”

He broke out in a nervous sweat. “Nadine! What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“It’s incredible!”

“What? I can hardly hear you!”

“I’m at the vigil at the park.”

“Okay . . .”

“Shannon Donegal is with me.”

“Oh. Did she see her obstetrician?”

“Yes. He confirmed your diagnosis with an ultrasound.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. Is she okay? How is she coping?”

“No, it’s not bad. I was going to say the diagnosis is wrong. The baby is
alive
.”

“That can’t be possible. I would trust the ultrasound.”

“I felt it kick myself.”

“Really,” he said. “Are . . . are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” She laughed. “I felt Liam kick. Multiple times. It’s a miracle!”

How? Could I have been wrong?

For a moment, the overwhelming sense of doom lifted.

If she was right, he was in the presence of a genuine miracle.

Things were bad. Real bad. But maybe this wasn’t the end.

Of the human race. Of him and Nadine as well.

Jonathan Ford’s eyes snapped open and turned to gaze at him. The boy’s mouth opened.

David dropped the phone and retreated until his back met the wall.

“OH JESUS CHRIST.”

The boy rasped,
“You’re not my daddy.”

Screams rolled across the recovery ward as Jonathan and about a third of the other children in the room sat up and looked around. The remainder, already cut open, didn’t move.

“You’re alive,” David said.

The boy sucked in a rattling lungful of air and said, “
Home.
”

Two of the children hopped down from their beds. The rest followed. They formed a grisly parade toward the exit. David saw a pathologist gripping a girl’s wrists and struggling to hold her down, another screaming against the wall, another with his hands in the air as if surrendering. Most stood at their tables in shock, still holding their bloody instruments.

David couldn’t believe his eyes. The children certainly looked dead. Their bodies were discolored and bloated with gas. They moved stiffly, dark fluid leaking down their bare legs. But they walked. They
talked
. It defied comprehension.

They’re alive and woke up to an environment out of a medieval torture chamber.

“Don’t let them go!” David called out.

His words unlocked a transformation among the stunned pathologists. Instead of seeing the children as the dead walking, they saw them as David did—sick children about to wander naked and lost in the freezing night.

Sam shut the doors as the children approached. He blocked it with his body.

The children didn’t stop.

“
Move
,” they said.

“You’re safe here,” Sam told them. “Everything’s okay—”

They swarmed against him.

David watched in horror.
Somebody help him!

They were
climbing
him.

Sam brushed them off. He picked up a tiny naked boy, who kicked his legs and swiped at the man’s face with his fingernails, and tossed him away in blind panic. The boy got up immediately and resumed his unblinking advance.

“Somebody help me!” he screamed. “I can’t do this myself!
Shit!
”

The children closed in. They latched on to his arms and legs, scratching and biting. The man howled and backed out through the doors.

The children followed, ignoring him now. They flooded the hallway and continued their lurching march toward the exit.

Jonathan Ford turned to give David one last blank stare and then left with the others.

Going home.

Hour of Resurrection

Doug stumbled among the mourners at the park.

The snow rustled to his left. Several people ran past, moaning like cattle, their eyes wild.

“No, no,
no
,
no
,
no
,” a woman wailed. She clutched her head with her gloved hands, as if fearing her brain might explode at any second.

Distant screams pierced the dark.

Doug didn’t care. He was screwed. He could take any amount of pain, but not for long, unlike Joan, who couldn’t take as much as him but had much greater endurance. His strength had drained out of him over the past few days. He had nothing left.

Everything he’d thought would help him face what had happened had instead undermined him. The loss of his children offered him a million choices, but he wanted none of them. He wanted his family back. The alcohol, which had buoyed him for the past few days, now magnified his grief.

More people ran past with shouts. Panicked faces flashed by.

He was ready to give up. He stood blubbering in the dark, hands at his sides, shoulders quaking.

Somebody ran into him. Doug growled and clenched his fists. The idea of beating somebody with his fists sounded very appealing right now.

“What’s your problem, buddy?”

“My kids!” the man yelled back, and ran off into the dark.

More screams. Screams of genuine terror. Something terrible was happening at the edge of the crowd, where the park met the woods. He saw vague shapes seething in the dark near the gazebo.

This is how all the kids died
.
In a blind panic.

Must be our turn. Old King Herod has come for us all.

“Good,” he said.

The idea of dying now didn’t bother him. Dying alone did.

“Joanie!” he called.

People collected into a stampede. They flooded out of the dark. Their fear infected him. He felt sick with it. Then the alcohol that had made him sluggish moments ago provided a burst of energy. He shoved into the throng.

“JOANIE!
”

He searched the frantic faces for his wife. She’d told him to meet her at their favorite sledding hill. He pulled out his cell phone.

“Doug!”

He put the phone back. “Joanie?”

“Doug, I’m here!”

She ran into his arms. He held on for dear life. “I’m sorry.” He felt her warm body against his and remembered how much he loved her. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She struggled against his embrace. “The children, Doug! The kids!”

“I’m sorry. I love you. I just wanted you to know.”

Now I’m ready. Do it. Take us all.

“Doug, the children are back!”

He held her at arm’s length. “What?”

“The children are
coming back
. I saw them!”

Doug wiped his eyes. “What do you mean?”

Then he saw.

He and Joan stood on a path cutting through the park, illuminated by light poles. Around them, people swirled and ran.

Children streamed through the crowd, walking stiffly with their arms at their sides, like sleepwalkers.

“Holy shit,” Doug said.

“It’s a miracle,” Joan murmured.

The sight filled him with primitive fear. Fear and awe.

The crowd began to thin, leaving clumps of bodies—sobbing parents hugging their children.

Joan pushed Doug away and ran into the dark, calling for Nate and Megan. Doug caught up to her and grabbed her arm.

“Let go of me!”

“Joanie—”

She squirmed in his grip. “I need to find them!”

“They’re not here!”

“Where?” Her eyes blazed at him.
“Where are my kids?!”

“There are two burial grounds. One is close to here; that’s where these kids are coming from. They’re heading into town through the park.”

“
Where
, Doug?”

“The other site! I’ll take us there.”

Joan looked around. “Wait, Mom and Dad are—”

“They’ll find their own way. Come on!”

They ran through the snow.

The parking lot had snarled with honking cars and shrieking people. The children marched across the beams of the headlights, calling for their mommies and daddies.

“We’ll never get out of here,” Joan told him as they got into the truck.

Doug started the engine. “Yeah, we will.”

He’d parked on the side of the narrow roadway leading into the parking lot, where traffic had created a choke point. He threw the transmission into gear and stepped on the gas. The truck roared onto the snowy field next to the road.

“We’re going to get stuck!”

“We’ll make it,” Doug said, praying they would.

A wave of other drivers had followed his lead and was now gaining on him.

They just had to cross the field and navigate the drainage ditch to get onto Stuyvesant Road.

We might make this.

He swerved to avoid a tree. They reached the road. He stomped the gas, hoping they had enough momentum to jump the drainage ditch. The truck lurched across the gap and slammed into the other side. The tires pulled them up onto the road.

A small girl appeared in his headlights. He yanked the wheel just in time.

“Jesus, Doug!” said Joan. “Careful!”

He handed her his pack of Winstons. “Light one for me, will you?”

“Where’s this other site?”

“The other side of—
shit
!”

He wrenched the wheel, missing a crowd of children walking hand in hand in the glow of the streetlights. The sight put a shudder through him. Dead people were not supposed to walk. Just what the hell was going on here?

They flew through the downtown commercial district, ignoring the red lights.

“Why is the truck shaking like this?” she asked him.

“Must have hit something in that field,” he shouted over the rattle. He didn’t feel like explaining the problem with the alignment.

“Well, is it going to get us there? It feels like it’s falling apart!”

“Yeah,” Doug told her. “We’ll get there.”

The truck’s lighter ejected. Joan lit his cigarette and took a deep drag before passing it over. They drove in silence for several minutes.

“Doug? Is this really happening?”

“Yeah. As far as I can tell.”

“Those kids we saw. How did they dig themselves out?”

“They didn’t. They weren’t buried yet.”

“Were Nate and Megan . . . ?”

“No. I know exactly where they—”

“Watch it!”

A minivan skidded around the corner ahead as a speeding car plowed into it, sending both spinning into a storefront with a crash of glass. A piece of metal banged off Doug’s windshield and cobwebbed it. He leaned on the horn and flew past the wreckage. It didn’t even occur to him to stop and help.

He took a quick swig from his flask and cranked the wheel. The truck fishtailed before rocketing onto the highway ramp. A police cruiser caught up to him. Its siren blared as it passed at incredible speed.

“Jesus,” said Joan. “Oh, Jesus. It’s really happening.”

They passed a billboard that read, S
PANKY’S
P
LAY AND
S
TAY 3
M
ILES
, showing a giant photo of laughing kids over which somebody had sprayed RIP in black paint. For Doug, it was an important landmark. The burial ground was just ahead.

He jerked the wheel again. The truck roared onto the dirt road and passed the National Guard checkpoint. They saw taillights ahead, other parents come to find their children.

They topped the rise. The sprawling burial ground, lit up with work lights, spilled into view.

“Oh my God,” she said, taking it all in. “I didn’t know it was so big.”

“There are thousands of kids out there.”

He drove the truck onto the frozen fields.

“How are we going to find Nate and Megan?”

“I brought them here. I know where they are.”

He stopped in front of a line of body bags laid out along the lip of a trench.

“This is it.”

For several moments, they sat in the warm interior of the cab while the truck idled.

He cut the engine. His nerves tingled. He pulled a flashlight out of the glove compartment and gave it to Joan.

The digging machines had ground to a halt across the barren field. Men in hazmat suits ran between the trenches. Tiny figures wandered across the scarred landscape.

Doug left the headlights on as he got out of the truck. Joan knelt in front of the body bags.

The bodies squirmed in the bags like larvae trying to hatch.

“They’re in this row here,” he said.

“Which ones?”

Doug frowned. He couldn’t think. “I’m not sure.”

“Let’s start from the outside in,” Joan told him. “We’re going to let all the kids out.”

They moved to opposite ends of the row. Doug opened the first bag and recoiled from the stench.

Eyes clicked open on the dead face and regarded him with a flat stare.

“I don’t know you,” the girl said.

Doug fell on his ass in utter shock. He yelped and crab-walked away from her. The girl sat up and finished unzipping the bag. For the first time, he wondered if they were doing the right thing letting these kids out.

“Thank you, mister.” The girl stood and marched stiffly into the dark like a wind-up doll.

This can’t be happening. You’ve gone off the deep end, brother.

“So be it,” he said. He moved on to the next bag and unzipped it.

“Daddy?” the little boy said.

“Sorry, kid,” Doug said. “You’ll see your folks again soon, I promise.”

Police cruisers and ambulances roared onto the works. More children wandered past. Doug unzipped a third bag and found another little girl who wasn’t his.

“Hurry!” he barked at Joan.

“Dad?”

Next.

“Daddy!”

“Megan?” Doug fell to his knees, taking long shuddering breaths, trying to keep control. He didn’t know what he would do if he lost it right now and didn’t want to find out. He became aware of his sanity as a separate, fragile thing. “Hey. Hey, princess.”