The Warning by James Patterson Robison Wells

Author:James Patterson, Robison Wells [James Patterson, Robison Wells]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

Jordan

I WOKE UP with a splitting headache, which I guess shouldn’t have been surprising, given all I’d been through, but that didn’t make it any less painful. That shard-through-my-skull sensation made me forget about my nasty leg wound—at least until I tried walking and felt like a hundred bees were sticking their stingers into it. All in all, I felt topsy-turvy and upside-down and discombobulated and any other built-fora-fun-house phrase you could think of. I wasn’t having fun, that was for sure.

I eventually determined that it was latish afternoon. (This wasn’t great deductive reasoning. I looked at a clock, and it said 3:47.) I found Maggie sitting out back reading a library book, Radioactive Contamination for Dummies, which made me realize I’d underestimated the reach of that series.

“Learning anything useful?” I asked.

She gave me a concerned look that reminded me of my mom when I would come downstairs the morning after getting the flu.

“C’mere,” she said, and after I limped over there, she lay her palm across my forehead and said, “Better.”

“Tell me something that I don’t know,” I said, nodding toward the book.

“Overexposure to radiation can cause cancer,” she said.

“Duly noted.”

Soon we were back in her car with her once again behind the wheel. I’d asked whether we could return to my house and see whether anything was salvageable now that the place had cooled off. I also was curious whether my note for my dad was still there.

As I gazed out the car window, though, everything suddenly looked … wrong. It was as if a haze had fallen over everything, or some Instagram filter had been activated to give the world an old-timey sepia tone. The grass was brown, and most of the trees were bare, and the few leaves that remained were twisted and gray. The white paint on the Baptist church was dirty, cracked, and peeling; the road was lined with potholes; and cracks in the asphalt were springing up with weeds.

My head throbbed all the way in the back, by my spine.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Huh?” Maggie said.

“What’s going on?”

“What are you talking about?”

A dead cat lay on the sidewalk while a flock of jet-black crows closed in on it from a leafless branch. City Hall’s windows were cracked, and its stone walls were streaked with black as if there had been a fire, even as I could see people inside. The Mount Hope, South Carolina, and U.S. flags flying in front were tattered, almost in ribbons.

“The town had been looking so great and now … this,” I said.

“Now … what?” she responded.

On the street ahead of us crept some creepy animal: short, maybe the size of a large porcupine but without quills or fur. It looked more like an oversize bug, a beetle on steroids with a hard, shiny exoskeleton. It was snuffling in the gutter.

“Okay,” I said. “What the hell is that?”

“What the hell is what?” Maggie asked, exasperated.

“Are you not seeing any of this?” I asked.

“Jordan, I don’t know what you’re seeing these days.

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