needling tweezers she used to pop a pocket of pus and lift a piece of something out of it (which she thought was a fragment of one of the Pack’s teeth, and which she would have loved the chance to examine in greater detail, but which she didn’t mention to Wayne, since he’d only remind her that she was a Biology student, not a world- renowned scientist who might be able to learn something helpful from the sample), after which she rinsed the pus out, surveyed the arm one more time, was satisfied, squeezed a heavy stream of antibiotic cream over the wound, and began bandaging it—Jackie had done her best not to look at Wayne’s face as she was working, not wanting her focus to be compromised by the pain she knew she’d find twisting its features, but with his arm cleaned and tended to the best of her ability, not to mention enough drugs to knock out any lingering infection, she relaxed and glanced at him, smiling—to leap back with a shriek at what she saw: Wayne’s face gone from the mouth up, shrouded in heavy oily blackness, as if someone had dumped a can of black paint over his head; except that, instead of running down his skin, this was staying in place—Jackie backpedaled out of the room, into the hall, colliding with one of the walls, Wayne following, saying, “What? What is it?” pointing the flashlight at her, then up and down the hall, then back to her, the glare dazzling, reducing him to a silhouette; despite which, she could see something behind and above him, a cloud of blackness, billowing out like a cape or a pair of wings—she held one hand over her stomach, the other over her eyes as Wayne finally lowered the flashlight beam to the ground, still asking what it was, what was wrong, and when she risked a look at his face, it was clear of whatever she’d witnessed (if it had been there to begin with), nor was there anything behind him—she dropped her hands, waving his continuing questions away with, “Sorry—I just freaked out,” a response she knew didn’t satisfy him but that he was willing to let stand in the interest of maintaining their lead on the Pack—so far as she could tell, he didn’t suspect she’d seen what she had —whatever it was—].
In the early morning, three thirty, Wayne woke her for the second watch which Jackie spent sitting close to the fire, died to a heap of embers, wrapped in her sleeping bag, because the night had turned colder than she’d expected, colder than any recently (forecast of an early winter?), the rifle whose name she had meant to ask Wayne, to satisfy her curiosity, on the ground beside her; although every fifteen minutes or so she’d pick it up and sweep the end of the Bridge with the telescopic sight, Wayne’s rope trap jumping into focus, but all she saw were the couple of cars beyond the trap on the Bridge, whose lights continued their climb up and down the spectrum, blue to red to blue again—she checked Wayne, too: asleep, so far as she could tell, in his sleeping bag—her dreaming still clinging to her, Jackie found herself, not for the first time, trying to imagine what had happened to him, speculating on the tectonic shifts in his psychic geography—he had refused to narrate what had taken place before he fled to her house, whose blood and gore had been spattered over him, but she knew that his mother stayed at home, and chances were good that his father and younger sister would have been there with her; since he wouldn’t answer her questions about any of them, it seemed likely that they were dead, that the Pack had burst in on Wayne and his family and torn them to pieces in front of him—which begged the question, How had he escaped? (not to mention, Where had the Pack come from in the first place?)—she suspected the answer was some variety of chance, dumb luck: maybe the Pack had come in through the back of Wayne’s house, allowing him to run out the front door; maybe he’d fallen down the basement stairs and been able to sneak out the garage; it was possible his father or mother had created a diversion, sacrificed themselves to allow him to reach his car—kind of trauma, combined with another close brush with the Pack in the form of the one that had killed Glenn, must have inaugurated some compensatory process, jury-rigged the freshly fractured fragments of his mind into an arrangement that would let him survive; and yes, she was aware that she was describing the un-plot of any number of super-heroes’ origins, the grievous psychic wound that gives rise to the costumed alter-ego, both answer to and continuing symptom of the trauma, but perhaps Wayne had reached for that template to keep what was left of his consciousness from flying off in all directions—how she wished she’d taken that class in Abnormal Psych this past semester, instead of putting it off for a future that hadn’t come; although, would anything she would have covered in an undergraduate class have equipped her for this? and, more to the point, what was she looking for? to understand Wayne, or to try to cure him, which would consist of what, exactly? returning him to the calm, talkative guy she’d known half a million years ago?—could she afford that? would that Wayne be able to help keep her and her baby safe the way this Wayne (whom she thought of sometimes as Batman and sometimes as the Shadow; although she mentioned neither name to him), who apparently remembered every trick and trap he’d read in Soldier of Fortune and the Getting Even books, had proven he could?—the question was rhetorical; though how much safer was she with someone whose personality continued to drift in darker directions (or whose secondary personality seemed to be subsuming his first)? someone who; what was the right word? possessed? was possessed by? whatever the oily shadow that had masked his face, stretched behind him like a cloak, was, because however much she’d done her best to convince herself that she’d undergone some variety of hallucination, she knew that wasn’t the case: she had seen what she’d seen, which she thought might have been drawn out from wherever it hid by his pain, by the stress of having to hold the flashlight on the wound Jackie had reopened and picked through—in the two and a half weeks since, she’d kept on the lookout for it, but the closest she’d come to seeing it again had been last week, when she’d awakened from yet another dream of Glenn’s dying scream to see Wayne leaning against the wall opposite her, an enormous shadow sprawling behind him—she’d sat up, heart jolting, only to discover it was a trick of the light (she thought)—so far, Wayne hadn’t shown the slightest sign that he knew that she knew; although, how could she be sure? and she wondered if he were even aware of the darkness shadowing him—it was funny: you would have thought that here, now, in the country of fundamental things, she would have been able to turn to Wayne and ask him what was going on, and he would be able to answer her as directly, but no, she couldn’t risk alienating him, making him feel she’d discovered a secret he wished to keep concealed, because what would she do if he abandoned her?—it was like when she’d learned definitely that she was pregnant, a pale blue plus confirming what her stomach had been telling her for weeks: you would have expected the gravity of the situation to have compelled her and Glenn, her and her parents, to talk about what mattered, but the opposite had been the case: Glenn hadn’t been able to bring himself to say anything, as if he were afraid that putting words to their situation would be an irretrievable admission on his part, and so had retreated behind vague assurances and trying to have sex even more, since there was no point in worrying about protection now, which she had gone along with, even if they were in his car in the parking lot of the community college, because at least it was contact—as for her parents, they had refused to follow their initial expressions of dismay and (reluctant) support with anything— ironically, it had been Glenn’s father, who had gone up one side of them and down the other, leaving the two of them in tears before ordering them the hell out of his house, and who had called at least once a week demanding to know what was going on, who seemed, in retrospect, the most honest of them all, the best able to express his feelings—no, the pressure of events didn’t make conversation any easier; if anything, it made significant communication almost exponentially more impossible—all Jackie could say with any surety was that Wayne’s shadow was connected to everything else, to the plague(s), the purple flowers, the Pack (which, to answer that other begged question, she had no explanation for: what they were, let alone where they’d come from; how they’d arrived in upstate New York pretty much overnight—in too many ways to count, they didn’t make sense; she had watched enough specials on Nature and Nova to know that predators this size and activity would require an enormous amount of food, which, as far as she could tell, was not available: she and Wayne had encountered only a handful of bodies in their travels [everyone else, she assumed, consumed by the virus she’d seen melting people’s faces on CNN, which must have continued its work right down to the bones; although that was another problem], hardly enough to sustain even the Pack’s reduced numbers, and they certainly didn’t appear to have much interest in vegetation; though it was possible, she supposed—nor was there much sense in them pursuing her and Wayne for as long as they had: neither of them would make much of a meal for the Pack, and surely the animals [?] should have learned to associate following them with pain and death—it was like being caught in one of those z-grade science fiction movies where spectacle and suspense trumped logic and consistency: Last Stand Against the Pack or somesuch), all of them pieces to a jigsaw they’d lost the box to—during the second to last day of the week of rain, when the sky had delivered itself with such force it had been impossible to see anything out of the windows of the house they’d sought shelter in (whose driveway was occupied by a minivan filled with the largest example of the purple flowers they’d encountered yet), and the roof had creaked ominously with each gust of the wind, she and Wayne had diverted themselves by inventing explanations for what had befallen the world, the more fanciful, the better: God had decided that the apocalypse proposed in Revelation wasn’t sufficiently au courant and so had pillaged paperback thrillers for something with more panache; monsters had broken through from the other side of the mirror, Alice’s Looking-Glass Land on acid; this world had intersected some other dimension, another Earth or even series of Earths, each of them radically different, and everything had become tangled (Wayne had coined the term “quantum rupture” for this scenario); the collective unconscious, the Spiritus Mundi, had burst, disgorging
