Then, it’s all just too much. A third wave of nausea hits and Malorie, standing, stumbles. Jules appears, suddenly, by her side. He is helping her up the stairs. As she enters her bedroom and lies down, she sees the others are in the room with her. All of them. Don, too. They are watching her, worried about her. Staring. They ask if she is okay. Does she need anything? Water? A wet cloth? She says no, or thinks she says no, but she is drifting. As she falls asleep, she hears a sound, coming through the vent, the sound of Victor again, growling, alone, in the kitchen.

The last thing she sees before closing her eyes are the housemates in a group. They are watching her closely. They look to her belly.

They know the moment has come.

Victor growls again. Don looks toward the stairs.

Jules leaves the bedroom.

“Thank you, Tom,” Malorie says. “For the bicycle horns.”

She thinks she hears the bird box, banging lightly against the house. But it is only the wind against the window.

Then she is asleep. And she dreams of the birds.

forty-one

The birds in the trees are restless. It sounds like a thousand branches shaking at once. Like there’s a dangerous wind up there. But Malorie doesn’t feel it down here on the river. No. There is no wind.

But something is disrupting the birds.

The pain in her shoulder has reached a level Malorie has never experienced before. She curses herself for not paying more attention to her body these last four years. Instead, she spent her time training the children. Until their abilities transcended the exercises she came up with.

Mommy, a leaf fell into the well!

Mommy, it is drizzling down the street and it heads our way!

Mommy, a bird has landed on the branch beyond our window!

Will the children hear the recorded voice before she does? They must. And when that happens, it’ll be time to open her eyes. To look at where the river splits into four channels. She’s to pick the second from the right. That’s what she was told to do.

And soon she’ll have to do it.

The birds in the trees are cooing. There is activity on the banks. Man, animal, monster. She has no idea.

The fear she experiences sits firmly upon the center of her soul.

And the birds in the branches directly above them are now cooing.

She thinks of the house. The last night she spent with the housemates, all of them together. The wind was loud against the windows. There was a coming storm. A big one. Maybe the birds in the trees know it. Or maybe they know something else.

“I can’t hear,” the Girl suddenly says. “The birds, Mommy. They’re too loud!”

Malorie stops rowing. She thinks of Victor.

“What do they sound like to you?” she asks both children.

“Scared!” the Girl says.

“Mad!” says the Boy.

The closer Malorie listens to the trees, the worse it sounds.

How many are up there? It sounds like infinity.

Will the children hear the recording beneath the cacophony above?

Victor went mad. Animals go mad.

The birds do not sound sane.

Slowly, blindly, she looks over her shoulder toward what follows them.

Your eyes are closed, she thinks. Just like your eyes were closed every time you got water from the well. Every time you attempted to drive to fetch the amplifiers. Your eyes were closed when Victor’s weren’t. What are you worried about? Haven’t you been in close proximity before? Haven’t you been so close to one that you believed you could smell it?

She has.

You add the details, she thinks. It’s your idea of what they look like, and details are added to a body and a shape that you have no concept of. To a face that might have no face at all.

The creatures of her mind walk horizonless, open fields. They stand outside the windows of former homes and gaze curiously at the glass. They study. They examine. They observe. They do the one thing Malorie isn’t allowed to do.

They look.

Do they recognize the flowers in the garden as pretty? Do they understand which direction the river flows? Do they?

“Mommy,” the Boy says.

“What?”

“That noise, Mommy. It sounds like someone talking.”

She thinks of the man in the boat. She thinks of Gary. Even now, so far from the house, she thinks of Gary.

She tries to ask the Boy what he means, but the voices of the birds rise in a grotesque wave, nearly symphonic, shrieking.

It sounds like there are too many for the trees to hold.

Like they make up the entire sky.

They sound mad. They sound mad. Oh my God they sound mad.

Malorie turns her head over her shoulder again, though she cannot see. The Boy heard a voice. The birds are mad. Who follows them?

But it no longer feels like something is following them. It feels like that something has caught up.

“It’s a voice!” the Boy yells, as if from a dream, his voice penetrating the impossible noise from above.

Malorie is sure of it. The birds have seen something below.

The communal birdsong swells and peaks before it flattens, twists, and the boundaries explode. Malorie hears it like she’s inside of it. Like she’s trapped in an aviary with a thousand madcap birds. It feels like a cage was lowered over them all. A cardboard box. A bird box. Blocking out the sun forever.

What is it? What is it? What is it?

Infinity.

Where did it come from? Where did it come from? Where did it come from?

Infinity.

The birds scream. And the noise they make is not a song.

The Girl shrieks.

“Something hit me, Mommy! Something fell!”

Malorie feels it, too. She thinks it’s raining.

Impossibly, the sound of the birds gets louder. They are deafening, screeching. Malorie has to cover her ears. She calls to the children, begging them to do the same.

Something lands hard against her bad shoulder and she yelps, wincing in pain.

Wildly, her hand grasping her blindfold, she searches the boat for what struck her.

The Girl shrieks again.

“Mommy!”

But Malorie’s found it. Between her forefinger and thumb is not a drop of rain but the broken body of a tiny bird. She feels its delicate wing.

Malorie knows now.

In the sky above, where she is forbidden to look, the birds are warring. The birds are killing one another.

“Cover your heads! Hold on to your blindfolds!”

Then, like a wave, they hit. Feathered bodies hail from above. The river erupts with the weight of thousands of birds splashing into the water. They hit the boat. They plummet. Malorie is struck. They hit her head, her arm. She’s struck again. Again.

As bird blood courses down her cheeks, she can taste them.

You can smell it, too. Death. Dying. Decay. The sky is falling, the sky is dying, the sky is dead.

Malorie calls to the children, but the Boy is already speaking, trying to tell her something.

“Riverbridge,” he is saying. “Two seventy-three Shillingham . . . my name is . . .”

“What?”

Crouched, Malorie leans forward. She presses the Boy’s lips hard to her ear.

“Riverbridge,” he says. “Two seventy-three Shillingham. My name is Tom.”

Malorie sits up, wounded, clutching her blindfold.

My name is Tom.

Birds strike her body. They thud against the boat.

But she is not thinking of them.

She is thinking of Tom.

Hello! I’m calling you from Riverbridge. Two seventy-three Shillingham. My name is Tom. I’m sure you understand the relief I feel at getting your answering machine. It means you still have power. So do we . . .

Malorie starts shaking her head.

no no no no no no no no no no no

“NO!”