Her hands grasped my elbows, and she drew me down to the bed. “Did you go Outside?” Her gaze was fever-bright.
I swallowed and nodded.
“What did you see?”
I remained mute.
She squeezed my arm. “What did you see?”
My lip trembled, but I couldn’t shape my voice around horror that I’d witnessed.
“Were there people?” Her fingernails dug into my arms like claws. “Did you see people?”
I shook my head. “No. Not people. Monsters.”
I could see the whites of Mrs. Parsall’s eyes widening in the dark. “What do you mean, monsters?”
A tear trickled down my face. “Ravenous. Bloodthirsty. Inhuman.”
Her hand flew to my cheek, smearing the tear. Her brow wrinkled, in shadow. “I don’t understand.”
“They are like . . . like vampires.” I told her, haltingly, of the terror I’d seen at the Laundromat, keeping my voice to a whisper so Sarah wouldn’t hear.
When I’d finished, Mrs. Parsall threw her arms around me in a hug while I sobbed into her shoulder. She stroked my hair and muttered soothingly. “It’s okay. Shhh. You’re okay.”
Spent, I drew back and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, as if the pressure could drive away what I’d seen. “You can’t tell them,” I whispered fiercely. “If they knew, they’d shun me.”
Mrs. Parsall brushed a soggy strand of hair off of my face. “I won’t.”
Her gaze crept to the phone batteries, and I saw the twitch in her fingers.
“Call your family,” I said, hiccupping back tears.
Behind me, I heard Sarah stir and mutter: “Katie?”
I went to her bedside, pulled the blankets up to her chin. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”
Her sleepy eyes watched me, though, watched me until the weight of her lashes pulled her eyelids down.
I looked back to Mrs. Parsall, laid my finger on my lips.
She nodded, gathering up the phone and batteries, and tiptoed from the room.
I followed her, creeping past my parents’ door, down the steps to the kitchen. All the lamps had been doused, and the only light in the room came from the moonlight streaming in and the pilot light in the stove. It was all cold, blue light, and I shivered in spite of the warmth.
Mrs. Parsall reached for the doorknob of the back door. I grabbed the sleeve of her nightdress. “Don’t,” I whispered. “They love the dark.”
Her mouth was set in a grim line. “I have to talk to my family.”
I knew that there was no stopping her; I had just given her hope wrapped up in a plastic bag.
She pulled away from me, opened the door to the night, and slipped out the back step.
I paused on the threshold, listening. I heard the sounds of crickets chirping, bullfrogs in the pond. In the distance, I could make out the sketchy figures of deer in the fields. A larger, lighter shape grazed among them: a white horse. My heart fell when I saw him. The white horse wasn’t leaving. He was still in danger. But at least he had the sense to graze at night, with the deer. Maybe he could evade discovery until this whole mess was over. I dared hope that much for him.
My gaze swept the darkness for threats. I spied a light burning in the window of the Miller house. Elijah’s room. My chest tightened. I wondered if, behind that light, he was reading his Bible. Brooding. Maybe masturbating for the last time. It was hard to tell.
I turned away from the light. Reaching for the knife block on the kitchen counter, I pulled out my mother’s serrated bread knife. I put my bare foot on the cold stone of the step, hissing at the chill, and followed Mrs. Parsall out to the yard. The dew of the grass was cold on my feet, dampening the edge of my nightgown. I found her, sitting on the bumper of her car, out of sight and earshot of the house. They wouldn’t be able to hear our conversation.
Maybe not even hear us scream.
I sat beside her on the bumper, watching as she removed the old battery and fitted the new one in with shaking hands.
The phone lit up when she hit the power button.
“It has a signal,” she said.
“Does that mean there’s still someone at the cell phone company?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It just means that the satellites haven’t fallen out of the sky.” She punched numbers into the phone, and I could hear it ringing against her cheek.
I stared out at the horizon, my hand sweating on the wooden grip of the knife. I knew that those creatures of darkness were out there . . . but I hoped that God had mercy on Mrs. Parsall’s husband and children, even if they were English. I hoped that he showed them even a fraction of the mercy he’d shown us.
The phone stopped ringing when Mrs. Parsall hit the disconnect button. She tried another number that rang forever into silence. She sat huddled on the bumper, curled over the phone.
I looked up at the stars. I knew that we were never to ask God for anything, but at this moment, I thought at him:
Please have mercy. Please save her family.
And the horse.
And the man in the barn.
And my family.
And take Seth and Joseph to Heaven . . .
I cut off my thoughts that tumbled over one another. It was a slippery slope. I was beginning to treat God as a vending machine.
“Dan?” Mrs. Parsall cried into the receiver, cupping her hands around it. My heart lifted to hear her sob: “Yes, yes, I’m okay. I’m with the Amish. What about the kids?”
I could hear a voice at the other end of the line, going on for several minutes. Mrs. Parsall pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead and sobbed. I put my arm around her, the arm without the knife.
“Can’t they search?” Her voice lifted in pitch. “Can’t they do anything?”
I held her shoulders tighter. The voice in the background buzzed against her ear.
“Okay.” Her eyes were squeezed shut. “I love you.”
The voice rumbled something more, then fell silent.
Mrs. Parsall turned the phone off. She cradled her head in her hands.
“Dan’s all right?” I asked.
She nodded. “He’s on a battleship off the coast of North Carolina.”
I didn’t ask about her children. I was afraid to.
“The kids . . .” Her voice broke, and she tried again. “He found Julia. She’s okay, okay for the moment. She’s at a kibbutz, of all places.”
“What’s a kibbutz?”
“It’s a Jewish community, usually an agricultural thing. Her roommate grew up at one in California and took Julia back with her. Dan spoke with her this morning.” Her voice lowered to nearly a whisper. “He hasn’t been able to find Tom.”
I hugged her hard, kissed her cheek. “He will be all right.”
Mrs. Parsall rubbed a string of snot and tears from her nose. “I don’t know. Dan said that the contagion creates . . . monsters. Like what you saw.”
“The military is working on it?”
“They are trying, with what they have left. There aren’t many people remaining here.” She covered her mouth with her hand, holding back fear and terror and sobs. “Dan says the military thinks that more than two-thirds of the world’s population is gone. It spread on planes so fast that . . . and they’re gone.”
It was hard to comprehend, a number that large. “Gone?”
“There are some who’ve survived. Some fled to the sea, like our military. Vatican City is untouched, and what’s left of the UN is using that as a base. There are pockets of people still holding out in kibbutzim and temples . . . even Stonehenge. The Japanese at Mount Fuji have set up a makeshift lab, are trying to find a solution. In New Orleans, people have taken over the Cities of the Dead, and he says people are living in the catacombs under Paris.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We have someplace to retreat. There are nuns in Britain who are sheltering thousands in convents, monks in Thailand holding these monsters at bay with fire. Mosques still standing. Dan said that there’s even a coven of witches in New Jersey who’ve raised an army of pagans based out of a temple to Bast in a strip mall.”
My mind chased that idea. Mrs. Parsall’s daughter was safe in a religious community . . . one that wasn’t a Plain community. I thought back to what Alex had said, about religious barriers being the only ones against the vampires. But there had to be a line that such things could be of God. I refused to believe that everything of human imagining could be the correct interpretation of God’s word. It was simply not possible.
We Amish were taught to be respectful of others. I didn’t not believe that other Christians went to heaven, only that their way of life made it more difficult to get there.
“How can they be safe?” I struggled to understand. “How can . . . witches fight off the darkness?”
“These places are sacred. Sacred to someone.”
I shook my head. “But they are not . . . not of God.” It didn’t ring true to me. Didn’t feel true. “They will not stand.” I had no doubt that Mrs. Parsall was reporting what was told to her. But I did not blindly accept what she said, just as I did not blindly accept the Ordnung.
I rubbed my temples, confused. “If this is a disease of science . . . I don’t understand how something spiritual could stop it.”
“I don’t think that anyone does. Not yet.”
The thought gave me hope. It gave me hope that we might be able to hold out, to fight back against the monsters.
“But I’m afraid of what they might do,” Mrs. Parsall whispered.
“Of who? The New Jersey witches?”
She let out a laugh, though tears still streamed down her face. “The military. If they can’t stop this anyway else . . . they’ll do what they have to do to keep the last third of the population safe.”
My brow wrinkled. “What does that mean?”
Mrs. Parsall stared up at the sky. “Nukes. Missiles. Chemical weapons. Whatever they have left in sealed-off bunkers. They will sacrifice the few to save the many.”
“What does that mean?”
She smiled darkly at me. “The United States and Russia have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth five times over. If they can’t find a cure, they will decimate all the contaminated land to allow the human race to survive.”
A shudder traced down my spine as I remembered the planes flying overhead days ago spreading that metallic-tasting dust. “But . . . they know that people on . . . on holy ground are safe! And will the nuclear weapons not poison those who remain?”
She sighed. “They will run their figures and calculate the acceptable losses. Like Spock said in Star Trek: ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’”
I began to protest. Mrs. Parsall seemed to have as much faith in the military as my people had for the Ordnung. And that was just as dangerous. Moreover, I didn’t know who Spock was, but he had no moral authority over—
Something rustled beside the car. My head snapped up, and my grip on the bread knife tightened and quaked like a car antenna in the wind.
I saw nothing but heard scratching near the left fender. The hair stood up on my neck. The sound echoed in the undercarriage of the car.
Mrs. Parsall and I both scrambled back on the dew-slick hood.
“Oh God,” she cried.
The sound seethed and scraped below us. A whimper escaped my teeth. I knew with all my heart that the vampires had found us. That we were finished.
I held the knife in front of me as the noise slithered under the engine. Mrs. Parsall wound her fingers in the sleeve of my nightdress, pushing me behind her with the protective instincts of a mother. I resisted, squirming forward. We may be finished, but I would not go without a fight.
A pale, writhing form crept out from beneath the car, and I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a shriek.
It was just an opossum. A mother opossum with babies clinging to her, their tails woozily moving like the tentacles of some undersea beast.
She glanced back at us with a weary eye and shambled away into the darkness.
I began to murmur the Lord’s Prayer in thanks.
“Shit,” Mrs. Parsall said.
Chapter Twelve
I did not speak to my family of what I’d learned last night from Mrs. Parsall.
Neither did she.
I carried my silence with me, that heavy curtain of secrets, throughout my minimal chores of the morning. Mrs. Parsall stayed behind when we went to church, and I was forced to carry that silence alone, as my fingers knitted in my apron while I sat on a wooden pew at the Miller house. My mother sat on my left, Sarah on my right. My father sat across the aisle with the men.
It was church Sunday. Plain folk did no more chores than absolutely necessary, beyond caring for their animals, and spent the day in prayer, fellowship, and sharing food. Church services were held on a rotating basis at each house in the community. A wagon would arrive early that morning or the night before with pews and tables, and the women would descend upon the house to begin cooking.