Dust (33 page)

Meteoric. Metamorphic.

As I thrust the stone pieces and sand traces into my filthy pocket I heard a soft quiet
click
behind me, like a flicked cigarette lighter. I turned, a rabbit scuttling swiftly into the underbrush at my movements, and saw facing me something small and recognizably human but covered in a greenish tinge, the verdigris of rot, bits and pieces of her swollen tight with decomp gas. One side of her face was smashed beyond repair, the intact eye staring out from a fistful of crushed bone; the right arm dangled useless by her side, held fast by the thinnest possible strands of tendon and luck. Limp auburn hair with faded pink streaks, greasy and stiff with layers of dirt. Bare, swollen, blackened feet. An old T-shirt and jeans gone to soiled rags.

I gazed at myself, my old lost self with her gas-bulging eyes and wary, moldy, unreadable face, and then she bubbled, warped like a fading mirage and the thing that looked like Jim took her place, calm, smiling, flicking cigarette ash at a moth wheeling overhead. The moth seemed to freeze in midair, dropping dead on the dry, brown grass; he picked it up, breathed on it and it twitched, walked across his palm, flew swiftly away.

“Guess you weren’t as sick as you thought,” he said. Cheerful, serene as the clear night sky. “My mistake. But we’ll just wait and see how that all works out.”

He picked up a heavy, battered rucksack lying on the ground between us and slung it over his shoulder like he had all the places in the universe to go, endless countless corn-fields of dead and dying to try to comfort and feed.

“Later days, Jessie,” he said. “Much, much later.”

He turned and strolled off, whistling tunelessly as he lit up another cigarette, and disappeared. Didn’t vanish, didn’t dissolve like a ghost, just kept walking in the opposite direction like any other living creature until he’d become a flyspeck in my vision, until I lost him.

I slid my hand into my other pocket, finding the intact lake stones I’d brought with me; I pulled one out, curled my fingers around it and squeezed, hard as I could. It didn’t break. Or crack. Or crumble. It just sat there, smooth and impenetrable, tingling faintly against the skin of my palm. A magnet, shivering at the touch of iron filings. I held it to my ear. Heard nothing, nothing at all, for many moments, then finally picked up the smallest note, fainter and more elusive than any sea sound from a shell: that same low, quiet humming of the sands. The echo of a meteorite hurling through space, about to hit a glacier-scooped lake bed and split open and change the earth’s history forever. The background sound of eternity.

I put it back in my pocket and headed for the waters.

 

 

 

 

Overgrown trees and brush. Waist-high unmowed grass, just like our county park. Billboards, some looking decades old and worn to flapping paper scraps, for gas stations, restaurants long since closed, a car wash, a radio station, fast-food places, all the detritus of hoo-life. More broken security fences, torn-up barbed wire, an abandoned guard post with a spent flamethrower cartridge, all the evidence of what had once been us. My hands were steadier now, the tremors fading; the bluish tinge starting in my skin was gone, beneath all the dirt it was pink again and moist with sweat. My scalp itched, I reached up to scratch, and pulled at some of the remaining strands of hair: thin and brittle, but they didn’t fall out. I still had to stop every quarter mile or so to rest, retch, yield to aching muscles and queasy stomach, but getting up again was mere torment instead of agony. Keep going. Keep walking. The sky was slowly lightening, from charcoal to iron. How much longer? How many hours more?

A set of railroad tracks, the ties split and broken. Someone had tried gnawing at the wood beneath the metal, it had all splintered. The death stench everywhere around me seeped into my pores like a noxious steam; I was no longer inured to it, it was no longer the alluring aroma of food or the comfortable stink of my own flesh. Which truly, desperately needed a bath, shower, decontaminating scrub. Joe and Ben used to walk this far every goddamned time the spirit moved, they never fell on their asses like whiny little kiddies. Keep going.

A warped, broken metal gate higher than my head, trying to block the road forward. Guard posts with the doors swinging wide open. NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. Florian could bend an iron streetlamp post in half when he was young, did they really think we couldn’t tear through something like this without trying? But of course it was to keep other hoos out, not us. We came and went as we pleased, and they wrote each other little “scientific” papers about what they saw of us. Guess it helped pass the time. A lone body in one of the guard booths, swollen with gas and buzzing with flies. Not diseased; from the look of her, she’d been shot.

Not chewed on either, not at all. One of the first ones I’d seen in a long time who’d been left alone. Whether that meant anything, other than there were too few of us left alive and hungry to scavenge her, I didn’t know.

The sky overhead had faded to pewter, suffused with a dim, dull but gaining light. The dawn’s early light. As I pushed through the gate my legs hurt horribly, the muscles like rubber bands snapping hard and brutal against my skin with every new step. The road past the gate grew narrow, winding, the tree limbs and underbrush crowding in from all sides. Apartment buildings, a restaurant or two, a pharmacy, a tiny supermarket trashed to its foundations and a pile of broken glass, then nothing but the greenery, the bodies and me.

I could smell it now, beneath the stink of all-encompassing death. The lakeshore. The dampness all in the air like expectation, a pregnant pause before the cries and whispers of the tides. The stones and broken bits of stones in my pockets vibrated, buzzing against the cloth, then started letting out a steady, audible hum. The road turned again and the overgrowth opened up, and with no warning I stood before a long, clear, endlessly wide expanse of sand and sky. Tall, waving beach grasses on either side of the road, a pale gray and softly glowing sky that seemed to run toward the water and then fly up higher and higher taking with it all the stink of decay and disease and sickness and horror; even the bodies strewn on the roadside looked calmer, quieter, like they’d all just fallen asleep.

The Octave Chanute Lakeshore Park. Says so right there on the sign. My beach. Finally. Snuck right up and ambushed me, there in plain sight. All I had to do was—

Sit here and cry again. Just for a second. It felt almost like the stones were crying alongside me but that was just knowing I was going to die alone after all: There was no way I could ever get back to the nature preserve, much less try to drag Linc and Lisa and all of them here, I had no more strength, I’d used up my whole fever-break on this wild life-chase and now—

I stumbled past the shell of a small Greek-columned, open-air building, built from blocks of worn sand-colored concrete. The old bathhouse, a Prairie School architectural landmark from back at the turn of the century before they started restricting the beaches to the researchers and us. I’d seen pictures of it. Stand up on the second floor, all open columns and roofed-in balcony space, and you got a sweeping view of the water. Past that, maybe a hundred yards away up on a high ridge, another, far bigger building. The same rosy-sandy concrete brick, Greek columns, lines boxy and graceful all at once, except this building was as closed and forbidding as the bathhouse was open: narrow half-hidden doors, tiny windows too high to reach, towers on either side of the sprawling main building with dark, slanting, overhanging roofs like arms stretched out to protect something fragile, signal the world to stay away. For all that it sat defiantly approachable there in a large patch of tree-covered parkland, no fencing around it, no guard posts. No signs.

I didn’t need a sign, I was certain what I was looking at. The lab. The thanatological lab where Jim had worked, where he had dragged our dead back and cut them open. Where they spent all their time trying to figure out how to kill us, where they first sprayed the grounds, the trees, the dirt, the air with a mutated pesticide that did them all in. Where I was born times three even though I didn’t know it—no. That was the doing of the rocks, the sands, the remnants of our long-ago meteoric mother.
Our
Mother Earth, just like Rommel said, when all this time I’d thought it was the dirt where I’d been buried. Right here. My real parentage, my family. The sound of the water shushing against the sands came up soft, insistent, faint in the distance.

Was anybody alive in there? Anybody at all? Quiet, everything still closed off and shuttered when every other house and building I’d seen was—no. One of the lab’s front doors was open and looked bent on its hinges. A couple of those little second- and third-story windows were nothing but dark holes. A body or two, lying there on the walkway, rotted, forgotten. Another fortress turned mausoleum. My questions might all be there, but none of my answers.

I turned my back on it and stood facing the water. Expanses of tall waving beach grasses, a tree or two outlined stark against the sky, and in the middle a narrow path of foot-beaten sand leading straight down the long, sloping duneface to the shore. If I was wrong, if it wasn’t here I was meant to be, then I belonged nowhere.

Why hadn’t I made Linc and Renee and Lisa come with me? Insisted, while I still had the chance? Too late to go back, to retrieve them. They might already have died. I didn’t want to belong here alone—

The sand underfoot was thick-layered and heavy and the grass stems, as I grabbed at them for balance, cut and sliced at my skin. The pearl gray sky and dark blue water met at a horizon line so straight and sharp it looked drawn with a ruler; the waves rushed in, the tide rushed out, with the endless repetition of a heartbeat, the gulls circling in constant call and response. I half-walked, half-slid down the duneface, resisting the strange urge born of exhaustion or sadness or some newer, unnameable impulse entirely to start crawling through the sands, let them get against my skin and in my nose and mouth and bury me, take me back underground. The stones in my pocket had gone suddenly, abruptly quiet.

As I reached the bottom of the ridge and the trail gave way to the wider beach, the sand strewn with old cigarette butts, dead twigs, bits of driftwood, I saw them. They were curled up and burrowed down in the sands, like Florian and I had both done in my dreams, lying with their backs, limbs, faces all covered; their fingertips clutched and bore down, holding on to handfuls of grains and sinking in past the wrists. Thirdborns just like me, dazed, half-bald, blue-tinged and exhausted and wasted-thin despite all our obscene feasts of dead flesh, trying to bury themselves alive, get back underground. Dozens of them, all over the shore sands like burial mounds, like a cemetery full of undeads all tunneling up and breaking through.

I stared at them and the sands beneath my feet seemed to rise and fall with the strange lung-breaths they, we, all took like the humans we weren’t, with the sounds of our newfound heartbeats regular as the tides. My heart had started again too when this plague changed me, just like my breath, I hadn’t even thought of that until now. I put a palm to my chest, to feel it, and the others squeezed their eyes shut and moaned in pain or just stared up at me, incurious, so calm. One of them held up a hand, gaunt and withered, like Florian’s before he went fully skeletal.

“You’re still sick,” he said. His voice was trembly and soft but had an undercurrent of steel; pale sands matted the lenses of his glasses, his dark brown skin like a half-frosted cake. “I can smell it on you. Come lie down.”

I wanted to lie in those sands and sleep and sleep so badly my whole body ached, but I had to know first. “Will it make me better?”

“I don’t know.” He turned onto his side, trying to push himself in farther, feet pedaling at the sands to make his sleeping hole, or his grave, that much deeper. “I just had to be here. Had to get here, somehow, before I died.”

A few yards away another one was digging a hole for herself, stopping every few moments to be sick, arms trembling and spasming with the effort but bringing up only pathetic handfuls of sand every time. I wanted to go help her. I had to lie down.

Bodies were everywhere, actual corpses, gull-shredded and swelling up with gas. Other figures wandered aimlessly over the sands, human, third-born, I couldn’t tell, some the ghastly blue-black of the actively dying. Nothing I could do for them now. Or Linc. Or Renee, or Lisa, or Sam, or Joe, or anyone at all, but there was that woman trying and failing to tunnel underground and I had to help her, after I’d caused all this without ever intending to I had to help someone other than my own damned self—

She fell to the sands before I could reach her, no more digging, hands still trembling as she lay there. One of the bruise-colored dying, his breath an uneven, rasping moan like the singing sands in pain, came up to her and kicked her, hard in the head again and again, like undeads skull-stomping after a fight; she made a horrible sound, an almost indignant gurgle twisted into a wet, choking scream, and crumpled up unmoving and silent.

The buried ones just lay there, unmoved, as if they’d seen it all before. They probably had. The one at my feet turned his head away.

I took a step forward. Her attacker pulled a small knife from his pocket, hands shaking worse than hers had. Still human, then, a sick human: no undead’s or third-born’s good sharp teeth. He sawed pieces off her, his pound of flesh, but as soon as he’d crammed them in his mouth he spat them out again, moaning, the same shame and revulsion and uncontrollable hunger I’d seen in Lisa, killing that squirrel in the forest, in the cornfield people retching up everything they ate. His breath grown louder and keening, he pulled himself upright, licked at the knife’s edge, coughed wetly, threw it down next to her body like it’d bitten him.

He turned and stared at me, his mouth a rictus of false cheer, his eyes full of despair and madness and silent begging to be kicked dead himself, thrown clear of his own misery. He was almost bald now, thick thatch of prematurely gray hair reduced to bitten-away threads, his cheeks concave with the plague’s starvation and his lips gone black beneath the smear of bright red blood. He stretched out a hand, his whole arm convulsing, and the loosening nails curved backward, sank deep into his sand-caked palm.