"He's sick, Del."
Del put his spoon down. He looked at the cat for a long time.
"Yeah," he said finally. "I know."
At ten they watched Miami Vice, or Del watched it and Janet sat on the couch beside him with a magazine open on her lap, not reading it. The wind moaned in the eaves. At eleven Del got up and checked the front door and the back door. He went to the garage door, opened it, looked at the kitchen chair still wedged under the side door knob, looked up at the plywood nailed over the scuttle. He closed the door again and turned the button lock.
"I keep thinking," he said, and stopped.
"What?"
He shook his head. "Nothing. Come on. Let's go to bed."
She was asleep before midnight. She hadn't expected to be. She'd lain down thinking she would stay awake, listening, but the headache had come back with the cold and sat like a weight behind her forehead, and the dark pulled at her, heavy and warm, the way it did after a double shift when you could barely make it from the car to the door.
* * *
She woke to Milo screaming.
Not the mrrp. Not a yowl. A sound she'd never heard come out of him, a long, raw, rising cry, almost human, the sound a cat makes when it's fighting or when it's hurt. He wasn't on her chest. He was in the doorway, his back arched, his tail bristled out to twice its size, and he was making that sound at the hallway, over and over.
The clock flipped. 3:07.
"Milo—"
He stopped. Abruptly, completely, as if someone had pulled his plug. He sat down in the doorway, and his tail went still, and he stared out into the black hall, his head tipped back, looking up.
Janet lay frozen. Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth. The headache was a vise. The room seemed to tilt very slightly and then come back. She listened. The wind. The furnace. And under it, faint, from somewhere above the hallway ceiling—
A cough.