“It’s like I told Emma.” Lizzie’s cobalt eyes dropped to her hands. “I need you to get my dad. If we can, then I think he can help us.”
“What do you mean, help us?” Bode said. “We were fine until you got it in your head to put us in this mess!”
“Oh yeah,” Eric said. “Shot at by Vietcong and crawling through tunnels full of booby traps. You were doing great.”
“How can we get your dad, Lizzie?” Casey said. “He’s dead.”
“No.” Lizzie shook her head. “Not really.”
“Dead is dead,” Bode said. “Gone is gone. You just said …”
“Like I don’t know that.” Lizzie’s expression darkened with anger, and her eyes deepened to that odd and smoky sapphire glimmer Emma had trouble reading. “He’s gone from that Wisconsin,” the little girl said, “but he was tangled up in the whisper-man, and the whisper-man’s in my special Now.”
As are you, and yet … Putting aside how bizarre this all was, Emma felt this tickle of uneasiness along her neck. Lizzie could obviously leave this place long enough to grab them. Yet if she and her dad and the whisper-man and the leftover energies from every Peculiar are tangled together … She could feel her brain inching toward something else she could sense but didn’t quite know yet.
“So, your dad’s here?” When Lizzie nodded, Bode said,
“Where?”
“He’s the barn,” she said.
“The one outside?” Bode turned a frown to them before looking back at Lizzie. “So what’s the problem?”
“I can’t find him. Whenever it sees new people, it adds rooms and I get lost.”
“What? A barn can’t make more rooms.”
“Sure it can,” Lizzie said, “if it’s alive.”
ERIC
What Does That Make Us?
“SO WHAT ABOUT the snowmobile?” Yanking open another cupboard, Bode stared at the shelves crammed with Kraft macaroni and cheese. “Man, I see one more Blue Box, I’m gonna pound somebody.”
“There’s a loaf in the bread box,” Eric said. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, with his right leg propped on another. Emma had eased up his bloody jeans to the knee, exposing an ugly eight-inch rip in the calf he’d snagged on that ruined guardrail … God, hours ago, from the feel of it. Days. The deep gash was ragged and crusted with old blood. Emma had dug up both a first aid kit in a downstairs bathroom and a half-bottle of antibacterial soap under the kitchen sink, which was, Eric thought, a little odd. Almost like the house knew we might need it. “Couple jars of peanut butter in the pantry.”
“Christ no,” Bode said. “Only thing peanut butter’s good for in Charlie rats is stopping you up if you got the runs.”
“Charlie rats?” Emma looked up, a crumpled gauze, spotted with bright red blood, in one hand. “What is it with you guys and rats?”
“What?” Bode looked confused. “No. It’s short for C-rations. Rations. Rats?”
“You mean, MREs?”
“No … ah … you know, MCIs.” At her blank expression, Bode said, “Meal, Combat, Individual? Canned food? It’s what the Army gives us for chow.”
“Cans?” Emma said.
“We use plastic now, and they have a different name,” Eric said.
“Really?” Bode’s eyebrows arched. “Cool. How do they taste?”
“Uh … well, you know …” He bit back a grunt as Emma touched moist, soapy gauze to the torn meat of his wound. His mangled muscles twitched as if jumping out of the way. Between the pain and the gasoline reek from his and Emma’s parkas, which they’d draped over some spare chairs, he was starting to get a little woozy, too. He cleared his throat, grimacing at the faint chemical taste on his tongue. “I’ve only had a couple, in basic, but they’re okay, I guess. Although they still put in peanut butter, so you’d probably still hate them.”
“Naw, nothing’s worse than ham and motherfu … uh, lima beans,” Bode said, with a sidelong glance at Emma. “Anything else in this place?”
“Oreos in the cookie jar and bags …” His thoughts derailed at another jab of pain. “Bags of M&Ms in the pantry,” he finished in a gasping exhale. To Emma: “Go easy. Feels like you’re scraping bone.”
“Maybe because it’s deep,” she said. “Hold still. I’ve got to clean it.”
“That’s it for food?” Bode said.
“Stop complaining. Those are all the important food grou—aaahhh.” At another knifing hack of pain, he gripped his chair seat with both hands. “Jesus.”
“Stop being such a baby,” Emma said, adding the soiled gauze, now the color of a cranberry, to a growing pile. “Just a little bit more, and then I’ll rinse it out, smear on some ointment, and bandage it up.” Tearing open another pack, she dipped the gauze into a small bowl of warm, sudsy water, then carefully spread the wound with the fingers of one hand. From where he sat, Eric saw pink muscle and a minute layer of yellow fat curds just under the skin. “You really could use some stitches, though.”
“I could do that, no sweat,” Bode said.
“No thanks. I know where you got your training.” He smeared pain-sweat from his forehead with the back of one hand. To Emma: “You seem like you know what you’re doing.”
“Mmm. Lots of practice.” The corner of her mouth quirked in a grin. “My Uncle—well, guardian—Jasper was always getting dinged up on his boat. Once he hooked himself with this big old nasty barb right here.” She pointed to her left cheek. “Just missed the eyeball. That was fun. He blamed it on the group he took out that day; said they brought bananas. If he’d known, he’d never have let them on.”
“What’s wrong with bananas?” he asked.
“Bad luck for boats.” Emma shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Anyway, he wouldn’t go into the emergency room. Made me take it out right there at the kitchen …” She suddenly straightened, the grin slipping off and a look he couldn’t decipher creasing her forehead and cutting small lines at the corners of her narrowed eyes. “At the kitchen table.” She paused. “Just like now.”
“Hey.” Leaning forward, he touched a finger to her right forearm and felt her shiver. “You okay?”