The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,143

but when I asked my daddy about that and showed him the pictures he told me no, vampires were just something in a made-up story, nice-looking men in suits and capes with good manners, and this here’s real, Ida. Ain’t no story about it. There’s lots of names for them now, of course, flyers and smokes and drinks and virals and such, but we called them jumps on account of that’s what they did when they got you. They jumped. My daddy said, no matter what you call them, they are some mean sons of bitches. You stay inside like the Army says, Ida. It shocked me to hear him speaking such, because my daddy was a deacon of the A.M.E., and I’d never heard him talk like that, use words of the kind. Nights was the worst of it, especially that winter. We didn’t have the lights like we do now. There weren’t much food except what the Army gave us, no heat except what you could find to burn. The sun went down and you could feel it, that fear, snapping down like a lid on everything. We didn’t know if that would be the night the jumps got in. My daddy had boarded up the windows of our house and he kept a gun, too, kept it with him all night as he sat at the kitchen table by candlelight, listening to the radio, maybe sipping a bit. He’d been a communication officer in the Navy and knew about such things. One night I came in and found him crying there. Just sitting with his face in his hand and shaking and weeping, the tears all running down his cheeks. Don’t know what it was that woke me except maybe the sound of him. He was a strong man, my daddy, and it shamed me to see him in such a state as that. I said Daddy, what is it, why you crying like you are, did something scare you? And he shook his head and said, God don’t love us no more, Ida. Maybe it was something we did. But he don’t. He’s up and flown the coop on us. Then my mama came in and told him to hush up Monroe, you’re drunk, and shooed me back to bed. That was my daddy’s name, Monroe Jaxon the Third. My mama was Anita. At the time I didn’t know it, but I think maybe the night he was crying was when he heard about the train. It could have been something else.

Only the good Lord knows why he spared Philadelphia long as he did. I barely remember it now, except the feeling of it, time to time. Little things, like stepping out with my daddy at night to get a water ice up the corner, and my friends at school, Joseph Pennell Elementary, and a little girl named Sharise who lived down the corner from us, the two of us could just keep each other going for hours and hours. I looked for her on the train but I never did find her.

I remember my address: 2121 West Laveer. There was a college near there, and stores, and busy streets, and all sorts of people going to and fro in the day to day. And I remember a time when my daddy took me downtown, out of our neighborhood, on the bus to see the windows at Christmastime. I couldn’t have been much more than five years old at the time. The bus carried us past the hospital where my daddy worked, taking X-rays, which were photographic pictures of people’s bones, he’d had that job since he’d gotten out of the service and met my mama, and he always said it was the perfect job for a man like him, how he got to look at the insides of things. He’d wanted to be a doctor but taking the X-rays was the next best thing. Outside the store he showed me the windows, all done up fancy for Christmas, with lights and snow and a tree and moving figures inside them, elves and reindeer and such. I’d never been happy like that in all my life, just to see so beautiful a sight, standing in the cold like we were, the two of us together. We were going to pick up a present for Mama, he told me, his big hand on my head like he did, a scarf or maybe gloves. The streets were all