Dust (31 page)

“Any place you won’t be,” I said, a little steadier on my feet. “Nobody’d blame me.”

“Fucking zombies,” he snarled, hand groping around for something else to throw and not finding it. “Still sticking together whispering your little plans with your own kind, even now, fuck the rest of us we can all just go to hell—”

“You’re already there,” I told him, swaying like a sapling in a hailstorm and grabbing for the stones in my pockets. Keep me upright, keep me moving, just a little bit. Please. Just a little bit. Linc, Renee, Lisa hadn’t stirred. “So congratulations. Send a postcard when you get a chance—”

“Bitch,” he spat out, as I turned my back on him. “Crazy rotten chewed-up dead bitch.”

Probably, yeah. More than likely. But the beach, the sands, the rocks. Get there, and we’d live. Florian said so. Jim. Rommel. Ron. They couldn’t all be lying.

Everyone lies, about everything, that much I should’ve learned by now. After all this. Everyone alive including me just lies and lies and lies. Lies like a rug. Stop all this craziness and just get ready to die. It’s not hard. You’ve done it enough before.

I pushed through the torn-up trees and started walking.

The moonlight was dim and watery and the roadside dark; the store signs’ neon, the sulfurous road flares, all extinguished by the breath from some great invisible mouth. The grass was scratchy-dry and the dirt a soft mealy itch against my bare feet and it was so quiet out here on the roadside, so still, I hadn’t realized until now how much noise we’d all made there on the prairie preserve: the crying, mumbling, praying, groaning, puking, cursing, the continuous sound of the breaths of the dying growing louder and faster and then, with long low gasps, stopping forever. All switched off now, like a bulb shorting out in a lamp.

I grabbed at the edges of the safety fencing swinging open and useless around abandoned homes, dragging myself along, the deep slicing cuts from the fences’razor-edged metal healing within seconds, such a worthless new bit of superhumanity, we’re all dying anyway so what’s a severed artery or two even matter? Keep walking. Keep walking. My balance veered and everything crashed and tilted inside my head and my lung-breaths were tight painful gasps, I was going to be sick, I got sick all over someone’s lilacs and crouched moaning on the ground for far too many minutes but I had to keep going, moving, force myself north. The beach is where this started. The beach is where it ends. Where is everyone? Was Linc right, and it really is just us remaining now, all of us dying on that patch of prairie? I hope this is still north, no compass, no company. Other than a raccoon darting back into the ruined foliage quick as it emerged, no sign of life.

My head hurt so much. Dazed heavy-lidded exhaustion pinching the bridge of my nose. Throbbing in the temple. Tightness at the back of my skull like I was tensing myself for a high hard blow from out of nowhere, like when I’d hit Linc with that shovel. I wanted Linc back, Renee, I just found them again and they wanted me there with them and now I’d die alone, lost. My own damned fault. The air was wet and cool and the tree branches swung, a susurration against the dark gray night and I was so thirsty, I lay down with my cheek to the damp sandy dirt and licked at a little divot in the ground full of rainwater. All around me remnants of dead bodies, chewed-up tossed-away bones I’d have scrambled for just days ago, half a corpse right there with one arm still stretched out, pleading—

Joe. My poor, unhappy, angry, fucked-up, sweet, hard-hearted, treacherous—if I just hadn’t let my sister see I still lived, you might be alive today yourself. Or maybe not. You always wanted to die just as much as Sam but I wouldn’t see it, I didn’t want to know. But you wouldn’t ever really look at me either, now would you? Guess we’re even. Come back, baby, I miss you. It makes me feel horrible how much I liked Linc handing out kisses and putting his arm around me because that’s not right when I just lost you, Joe, come back and set my head straight, you knew how to do that, you found me first, way back when—

COMMUNITY GARDEN. That’s what the sign says, here on another wrecked-up fence. Snarled knots of ripped chicken wire, everything eaten down to the roots. Sorry, rabbits, none left for you. So damned sorry.

Crawl. Stumble. Crawl. Push through grass, gravel, leaves, underbrush. Stop to lean against another tree, don’t dare lie down again, you’ll never get up, hold on to those stones you brought with you like they’re your last chance. Burning, tingling, almost twitching like big lumbering jumping beans as they press against your fingers. They made you what you are. Them and Jim. You don’t look like a monster, not anymore, but you are one. All because you couldn’t stay hidden in the trees where you belonged, where all monsters belong, hidden in the dark and the tangled thickets. No sense of shame. Thinking you actually have a right to the sunlight, to the roadside, to look at your own grave, to hold out your rotten diseased hand to someone living and intact like they shouldn’t scream at you, run away, tell all their friends they just found another one for the fire—

Chicken and shrimp shack. One of those signs in front where you slide the letters onto little wire brackets, the brackets all rusty now, the peacock blue shack paint peeling right off. Sitting here in the middle of nowhere. Where the hell was the beach? Ten miles, maybe more, I had to have gone at least two or three, my whole body was shaking like Florian’s in death when he finally gave up and flew apart, no fucking stones could help him then. Joe, Linc, Renee, Sam, Lisa, somebody, get your asses over here for Christ’s sake, I don’t want to die alone. Florian. This is your fault I’m stuck here. I started crying as I hung on to that rusty sign, clear human tears rolling down my face. Let’s all just stop being sick and dead and dying and go eat chicken and shrimp, how about it? I’ll have a hush puppy, some pie, all you can get here if you don’t eat meat—no, not the pie, bet anything the crust’s made with lard. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. Let’s just
go.

Keep going.

Sit down for a minute. Lie down. Just for a minute. No more.

The buzzing like flies, all in my ears. I remembered that sound, from dying.

I was lying in someone’s deserted yard, under a sky awash in moonlight; no bodies here, just piles of rusted, broken farm equipment. An abandoned farm out by the county park, one I remembered well for its pear trees clustered near a weed-choked former vegetable garden, its ruined henhouse with the collapsed roof a faded, but still incongruously vivid peacock blue. How the hell did I get here, from the shrimp shack so many miles north?

I pulled myself to my feet and stumbled toward the henhouse, confused and a little afraid, and night suddenly became day and the farm stood beside a highway, near a rolling green expanse of beautifully tended gravesites. The graves yawned open and blurred figures jumped in and out, laughing, voices rising to children’s playground shrieks. Clusters of trees, thick with ripe berries and farmhouse pears and the frothy pink-and-white blossoms of early spring. A soft rushing sound behind me alerted me to the water, choppy Lake Michigan waves swirling against a distant, wavering shoreline. The farm was part of the graveyard was part of the sandy-soiled forests sitting on a dune crest above the lake; I could walk to any of them, easily as crossing a deserted small-town street. Other than a deer wandering placidly through the dune trees and the laughter of flitting ghosts, I was alone.

God, I thought, stomping rotten pears underfoot as I walked closer to the shoreline, this must be it. Dead. All alone now, just like Florian on his beautiful beach. I didn’t want to be alone. Where were my parents, my friends, the other dead/ living dead/undeads wanting to fight for my turf, was I stuck here now myself, by myself, forever—

Behind me came a soft, quiet
click
, a disapproving tongue against the roof of a hoo-mouth, the cocked trigger of a gun. One foot in farmhouse dirt and the other in beach sand, I turned, very slowly, and when I saw him I threw my head back and started to laugh. He just shrugged, like he understood.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked, holding up the ignited lighter.

I shook my head. Jim or the thing that looked like him lit up, inhaled with a deep sigh of pleasure and slipped the lighter into his pocket.

“Is this real,” I asked him, “or am I just dreaming it? Lately I’m never sure.”

“You’re dreaming me,” he said, with another deep breath of smoke. “In a way. But I’m still real.”

“Am I dead?” I asked.

Jim took another, unnaturally long draw on his cigarette, looking me up and down with the easy, wary, arm’s-length nonchalance I remembered well from when we were all alive. It drained out of him like blood from an embalmed body after I died, Mom and Dad died, Karen my niece died, Lisa got sick, he dragged himself and all of us with him over the edge. So am I dead? How many kinds of living and dead and living dead and dead living had I been in just these few months, these few days, after the stasis of plain old human living and dying? I deserved some kind of existential medal.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “You’re definitely not talking to me for your health.”

“So what’d it feel like, when you first got sick too?” I reached up to one of the pear trees, plucking a ripe fruit. “I would’ve given a lot to see your face, when you finally realized you’d screwed yourself just like you did the rest of us.”

Jim, or this thing, creature, entity that looked like him, thought that one over. “You’re not fooling me, you know,” he, or it, said, still puffing away. “Losing me and Lisa hurt. A lot. And finding us again hurt even more. I know you missed me. Just as much as I missed you, however much you shoved it deep down inside because undeads aren’t meant to see humans as anything but meat. Just like humans must only see the undead as monsters. Doesn’t always work that way, though, does it?”

“You killed me,” I said. “You took what I was, the way I knew myself, and you destroyed it.”

“I was a good man,” said Jim, the cigarette poised in his fingers as though it hovered, untouched, in the air between them. “That’s the thing, Jessie. I started out as a very good man. I missed you. I loved you. I wanted to help you. I wanted to give you back the life you’d lost.” A hollow, abrupt little laugh. “And just look how that turned out, eh?”

My fault then, I guess. Always my fault. After I never asked for this, any of this, would have thrown it back at him and snapped his neck if he’d ever dared propose it to my face. And of course, that’s why he hadn’t. Coward. Coward. Every fucking hoo alive nothing but a miserable self-centered coward.

“I don’t have time for this,” I said, turning back toward the dune crest. “I have to get to the lake shore.”

“Good luck on that.” Jim rolled the cigarette between his fingers, this way, that way, and smiled. “I’d say you’ve got about half a mile left in you before you fall over for good and the rats get another meal, so you might as well just stay here, get to know the place, talk to me like a civilized human being—”

“I’m not human,” I said, hard and cold. “No matter what you’ve tried to do to me, I’ll never be human again. And I’m so goddamned glad of that, you have no idea, so don’t you stand there after all this and whine about how you wanted to ‘help’ me. One lie after another.”

“Well, of course I lie.” He shrugged. “All the time, it’s my main source of fun. Only about the trivialities, though. The bigger things . . .” Another draw on the cigarette. “The thing is, there really are some big, stonking, undeniable, universal truths that human consciousness, any sort of consciousness, just can’t wriggle out of facing. And guess what?” He leaned forward, confiding and quiet. “I’m one of them.”

Jim’s smile grew wider and wider. The flesh on his face split bloodlessly open so I stared into grinning skull-like jaws and eyes grown dark and hollow and wide like corridors to another universe, hallways you could walk down forever without reaching your destination. The face of Death, which was really the face of Life, which were both sides of Eternity and I should have known all along, I should have known—but that there really was
a
Death like in all those movies and books, that was new. I tried to rustle up some legitimate awe and fright, for politeness’ sake, but sheer dearth of energy made me fall back on confusion. He, it, just smiled, utterly unruffled, still sitting there in the split-open shell of Jim’s dead body.

“Were you ever really Jim?” I asked, resisting the urge to touch him. Touch it. “I mean, was it him I was talking to, back when we first met, or—”

“Oh, that really was your brother. All full up with plans and schemes and crazy delusions, thinking he could turn what I was already putting into motion to his own advantage. And to yours. He really did want to help you, you know. No lie.” It, he, crushed the cigarette underfoot and lit another. “Ridiculous little nutter, playing at the eternals, imagining he mattered—I’m not crying hubris here, you understand, I don’t judge or condemn. It was just embarrassing to witness.”