Prologue

          Tonight would be one of the darker nights.  It is darker now than it ever was before the…. Episode?  Outbreak?  Event?  Wrath of God?  Maybe one of those is the right word for it, but maybe not.  Either way, the word for it doesn’t matter since it doesn’t make it darker.  Evil doesn’t explain the deeper shadows or the all the places for monsters to hide, but plain logic does.  The little ones don’t understand logic, but Lollie does.  Lollie’s logic is simple and easy to follow:  It is dark because adults do work to make streetlights light stuff.  No adults means no streetlights means dark shadows where anything can be. 

           The last few months have given Lollie a whole new take on logic.  For example, if all shadows look just as dark as each other, how many kinds are there?  If you ask her she will tell you two kinds.  First, you have the good kind, but where the good kinds are changes.  The only good kind is the one where she is, so whichever she in is good.  The second kind, logically, are the bad kind and they change the same way.  The bad kinds are the ones she isn’t in.  The reason they are bad is because if she isn’t in them then anything can be.  She still thinks of them holding monsters, but deep in her mind she has finally started accepting the fact that monsters have changed just as much as shadows have gotten darker.

            Behind her she can hear slow, deep breathing.  Sometimes she even hears the shift of a make-shift blanket or a small sound made by a small person.  When the sound is in her shadow she isn’t afraid because she knows what is there.  It can only be a sound made by one of her own group that got luckier than her in the shut-eye lotto.  Sometimes she wins.  She feels safe enough and finds a shadow deep enough that she can sleep.  Sleep might come, but even if she wins the chance to rest it won’t be restful.  Lollie has nightmares because that is what children have when they are scared of dark shadows that can’t be escaped because there are no lights.  Her dreams are so awful that she thinks winning the sleep lotto looks a lot more like losing the not-crazy person lotto.

           She knows she will go crazy, maybe even crazy like the new monsters, if she dreams too much.  It isn’t the voice of experience that tells her so, just some more logic.  If dreaming is always bad it makes you wish you never had to dream again.  Too much of that and you might do what you have to just to make sure you can’t.  All living things dreams, so to stop you can’t be alive.  She wishes she wouldn’t ever have to sleep again, but she will if that is what it takes to make sure she still wakes up again.  Besides, now she shouldn’t sleep.  The baby, so small and helpless, has a cough. 

           Babies are wonderful things and Lollie loves them.  She got a doll on her last birthday, 7 pink candles on a pink cake with pink paper plates and a pink princess dress, and she loved that doll more than any other toy.  She loved it because it was almost real.  She did have to be extra careful.  She knew that her mother’s big belly would get small again soon and that she could even maybe hold her new brother or sister (fingers crossed for sister) if everyone saw how careful she was with the doll.  She took perfect care of her baby and everyone said she was a perfect little mother.  Now, there was no doll, but with a real baby who needs one?  The only problem was that cough.

            If she went to sleep the baby might cough.  If there was anything hiding in the bad shadows they might hear it.  If a kid gets a cough and knows how dangerous the shadows are they can always try to at least muffle the sound with their hand or a blanket, but babies don’t do that.  When a baby coughs it coughs as loud and long as it wants to.  If their coughs are going to be muffled someone has to do it for them.  The worry brings little flashes back behind her eyes.  It is starting to be cold outside again, so maybe Lollie is 8 years old, but she can’t be more than that.  8 year old children can’t stay awake forever, no matter how much they want to….

      ….. Joseph was such a beautiful baby.  They knew his name because he was three and he could tell them so, but he talked less as his sore throat got worse and his little cough turned into a hacking thing that shook his whole body.  More and more often he would cough and even when the older kids tried to muffle it there was no hiding the sound.  In just a few days there was no way to hide.  The monsters would come and find them.  The monsters came to the sound and caught Lisa coming up the walk to the ladder.  They would probably all remember how she had cried, then screamed as her bones broke.  None of them came forward or tried to help, how could they?  All they could do was try to keep Joseph’s cough quiet with their hands over his mouth while he struggled and looked at them with panicked eyes.  He went to sleep with their hands over his mouth.

            After that Dylan said they had to do something.  He was bigger and knew more.  He even said that he was 13, but Lollie thought he might be lying.  He told them his mom always gave him cough medicine and that way Joseph would stop coughing.  Jessie spoke up and said it was dangerous.  She said she was 10 and her mom always said never to take medicine unless a grownup says to.  They all found out that Jessie was right, but Dylan said if he was going to cough Joseph couldn’t stay.  He said it was too dangerous for everyone because it brings the monsters.  Joseph probably couldn’t understand all of it, but he knew to be afraid enough to start crying.  The sound started low, but it was soon a hysterical shriek.  Dylan started dragging him to the trap door and only inches before Joseph would have tumbled down onto the tree roots Jessie said they could get the medicine.

           The trip to the store with the medicine was pretty nerve wracking.  Dylan wasn’t a bad kid.  He might have even been the best.  He was the one that saved Joseph to begin with.  He saved them all, and now he knew it was his job to protect them.  He went alone for the medicine and came back with his arms full.  Some things were hard to find now, but not that.  You might search the stores all day with your heart thumping out of your chest and come up empty on candy bars, but not cough medicine.  As soon as Joseph had it in the sippy cup, grimy and dirty as it was, the cough eased. 

           He even liked it.  That yummy red flavor that claims it is cherry is exactly why it was so easy to get it inside of him, but it turned out to be the problem, too.

            They had all given it to him.  They told him it makes him not sick, so drink some if he felt like coughing.  He said he had to cough.  He said it a lot.  He drank bottles of the red, sweet smelling stuff.   Then he got a whole different kind of sick.  The throw up wasn’t good, but it wasn’t that bad either.  The bad part was when he stiffened and shook and drummed his feet against the boards.  No one knew what to do.  When he stopped shaking he seemed to be asleep.  If it was daylight the others would have noticed how blue Joseph’s lips seemed, but it wasn’t.  They noticed that his breathing was not the loud, audible rattle it had been for days, but wasn’t that what the medicine was supposed to do?

            The next day Dylan knew.  Everyone had something to say about what should be done, but no one could bring themselves to carry the cold body down the ladder.  Soon enough Dylan did it.  That was when it was warm and in the daytime the kids sat sweating in that tree house even being still.  After a few days the smell was undeniably bad.  In a few more it was unbearable.  Little faces huddled around the trapdoor as Dylan carried Joseph down.  Dylan was the one that couldn’t stop looking down.  He didn’t go far with Joseph.  Jessie insisted that Joseph was fine, just sleeping.  She asked to keep him close so that when he woke up they could see and bring him back up.

            The most terrible thing was watching the monster come.  The monster picked him up and held him close and the soft tune of the hummed song floated up.  Even in her 7 year old mind Lollie was more afraid watching the monster sing to the dead baby than she had been listening to Lisa scream for help.  It was even worse than when Lisa stopped screaming…..

            The echoes of Lisa’s scream brought Lollie out of her doze again.  She could feel wetness on her cheeks.  Even awake she could hear the soft lullaby floating to her.  Maybe it was a memory, but then maybe it wasn’t.   Maybe even now the monster was cradling her found baby somewhere in a shadow, tenderly tucking in a corpse oblivious to the reek that must emanate.  How long does it take for a body to stop smelling? 

          Would just the summer months have been enough to reduce Joseph to scentless, naked bones?  Lollie couldn’t know for sure, but she doubted it.  She tried not to think about it, but she couldn’t help remembering when her family had gone on vacation accidentally leaving a trash bag in the kitchen trash while they visited Nan Katie for two weeks.  They returned to an unforgettable reek that had filtered through their entire home.  Lollie would guess that if a few dinner scraps made that smell it would take longer than just a few months for a whole person, even one as small as Joseph, to waste away.  She wanted to be wrong.

She wrapped her arms around herself and put the memory out of her mind.  Joseph didn’t matter anymore, anyway.  Now, she had Sarah to think of.  Sarah didn’t have blue lips yet or smell like rotting trash.  Sarah wasn’t 3 years old, although she could walk.  The only thing that Sarah and Joseph had in common was coughing.

      
       Sarah had learned to walk in the tree house, having only been able to crawl when everything fell apart.  That alone made her the baby of the group, but most important she was Lollie’s baby.  Lollie knew that she saved Sarah on the day she decided to take Sarah from her crib. 

Now that she was coughing Lollie was afraid.  The medicine could be dangerous, but she wondered how much worse Sarah’s cough could get.  Lollie also wondered how much worse it would get before Dylan insisted that they either try the medicine again or drag Sarah down the ladder and leave her to fend for herself.  If that happened, what could Lollie do?  She could always leave with Sarah, but she was afraid of that.  She wanted to stay here in safety, but she knew that Sarah wasn’t like the doll she had replaced. 

       
      Could she leave Sarah outside by herself?  Sarah couldn’t feed herself.  Lollie knew that she didn’t do a great job keeping Sarah clean, especially since she couldn’t use the bathroom bucket, but she at least did better than Sarah could do alone. 

       
     Lollie watched the sky get lighter and lighter, face set in an expression too serious for any 7 (maybe even 8) year old kid.