F. Paul Wilson - Reborn

"He was never gone," Carol said.

"Seriously, though," Jim said, leaning forward, "I just don't trust one-issue candidates. In fact, I don't trust candidates, period . The political process seems to corrupt everyone who gets involved. The people who'd make the best candidates lack sufficient bad taste to run for office."

"I believe Eugene McCarthy's an exception," Bill said. "And I believe he's got a damn good chance of winning in New Hampshire. The Tet offensive turned a lot of the country against the war."

Jim shook his head. "We should clean up our own yards and tend to our own neighborhoods first, then worry about the rest of the world. If we all did that, maybe there wouldn't be so much in the world to worry about. Want another beer?"

Bill said, "I'd love one."

"Okay. We'll see what the next band sounds like. If they're awful, I know a quieter place we can go."

5

Monroe

Emma Stevens was roughly yanked out of sleep by the sudden movement beside her. Jonah had bolted upright in bed.

"What's wrong?"

"I have to go out!"

His voice sounded strained, upset. And that frightened her. Jonah never made an abrupt movement, never showed alarm. Everything he did seemed calculated. He seemed to have nerves of insulated copper wire.

But he was tense now. She could see him sitting there in the dark, his hand cupped over his good right eye, staring into the night with his blind eye as if he were seeing something with it.

"You've had a vision?"

He nodded.

"What's it about?"

"You wouldn't understand!"

He leapt from the bed and began to pull on his clothes.

"Where are you going?"

"Out. I've got to hurry."

Emma threw the covers back. "I'll come with you."

" No !" The word cracked like a whip. "You'll only get in the way! Stay here and wait."

And then he hurried from the room.

Emma pulled the covers back over her and shivered. She could not remember the last time she had seen her husband hurry. Yes, she could. It had been back in the winter of 1942… rushing to the orphanage.

6

Jonah raced down Glen Cove Road toward the LIE.

Something terrible is going to happen!

He wasn't sure how exactly, but the One would soon be in deadly danger. Whether through pure earthly happenstance or through the machinations of the other side, he could not say. He had to hurry, or all his life until now would be made meaningless.

He pressed a hand over his right eye. Yes… there, to the west, a red glow of danger in his left eye.

All my life made meaningless…

It seemed as if he had been preparing for this, for what was happening these days, forever. But it hadn't been forever. Only since he was nine. It was then that he had learned that he was different from others.

He remembered that day in 1927 when the floodwater had come roaring through their town in what the history books would later call the Great Lower Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster. Up until then he had thought of himself—when he thought of himself at all—as just another normal everyday farm boy. He had burned alive his share of beetles, torn the wings off his share of butterflies, tortured and killed his share of kittens, and enjoyed it all. His folks had been upset with him, and maybe even a little scared of him, but wasn't that what childhood was all about—learning, testing? He assumed all kids experimented as he did, but he didn't know for sure, because he had no brothers and sisters—and no real friends:

The Great Flood changed all his perceptions and preconceptions.

Luckily for him, he had been out by the barn when the water hit. The yard had been a sea of mud after days of heavy rain. He heard a roar like a great train rolling on a downgrade, looked up, and across the field he saw the onrushing wall of dirty brown water, swirling madly with debris as it raced toward him.

He had been able to make it to the giant oak tree that stood in the center of the yard just in time. With the water surging and lapping at his heels, he scrambled up through the lower branches. The thick trunk swayed and groaned at the onslaught of the surging water, but its roots held.

He heard an explosive crack and turned toward the house. As he watched from his high perch he heard one sharp, high scream from his mother and nothing from his father as his home was flattened and broken into kindling by the wall of water. The barn collapsed and was swept away along with the livestock and the splintered remnants of his house.

He did not escape unscathed, however. A particularly powerful wave caught his legs and knocked them from the branch that supported him. As he fell, clutching frantically at another branch, a protruding twig pierced his left eye. The pain was a jab of lightning into his brain. He howled in agony but held on, finding new footing and pulling himself beyond the water's reach.

He reached a high branch and straddled it, cupping the socket of his bloodied, ruined eye, rocking back and forth and retching with the pain that throbbed like a white-hot coal.

The water rose higher but the tree held firm. As the day faded toward night, so the pain in his eye faded to a dull ache. The torrent slowed to a steady southward current.

Things, living and otherwise, began to float by: a child screaming in lonely terror as it clung to a rooftop, a woman wailing from a log, drowning cattle, bellowing and gurgling, a man leaping from some floating debris and swimming for Jonah's tree, only to miss it and be carried away out of sight.

Young Jonah, high and dry, watched them all with his good eye from the safety of his perch in the oak. By all rights he should have been terrified, should have been racked with grief and horror at the loss of his home and parents, should have been speechless and near catatonic with his own injury and the scope of the death and destruction around him.

But he was not. If anything, he was just the opposite. He found himself energized by the disaster. He clung to the branches and avidly watched as each corpse, each struggling survivor, passed by. And when dark had fallen completely, he hung on to the sounds of the night, each cry of misery and pain, each howl of terror, drawing strength from them.

The hurt and fear of others was like a balm to his own pain, draining it away. Never had he felt so strong, so alive!

He wanted more.

To his dismay, the waters receded too rapidly. Soon a boat came by and the soldiers upon it picked him from his branch like a stranded kitten. They took him to a church in the highlands that had been converted to a makeshift hospital where they patched his left eye and laid him down to rest.

But he couldn't rest! He had to be up and about, had to roam, had to drink in all the destruction, the loss, the death. He wandered the ruins along the edge of the slowly receding waters. He found children crying for their parents, for their brothers and sisters, grown-ups weeping for their mates, for their children. He found hundreds of dead animals—dogs, cats, cows, goats, chickens—and occasionally a dead person. If no one was in sight, he'd poke the dead folks with a stick to see if he could puncture their bloated remains.

The air was so heavy, so oppressive with misery, it was all he could do to keep from screeching with ecstatic laughter.

But he knew he had to keep quiet, had to look glum and lost like everyone else. Because he knew then that he was different from the people around him.

Different from everyone.

After that it took him years of trial and error, but he learned to hide his differentness from the world. Eventually he found legal, even productive ways to keep his hungers in check. And over the years he came to learn that he had traded one sort of sight in his left eye for another. It was that sight that had wrenched him from his sleep tonight.