Dust (35 page)

He tugged hard at the knife, yanking it from my throat. As the blade slid free my eyes flew open and I grabbed him around the neck, shoved him into the sands and punched hard, again, again. Congratulations, Jim, you pulled it out, do you get to be king now? How about now? He thrashed and gasped like a fish on a boat deck and his flesh slid off in thin, frayed ribbons beneath my fists as I struck him, more, again. You lied to me, you hurt Lisa, you used her like one of your poor fucking guinea pigs lab rats cats dogs monkeys you can’t leave anything alone, you couldn’t leave me alone, everyone’s gone thanks to you and I’m stuck here myself, all by myself, forever—my torn throat had closed itself up tight and all that came out was muffled sounds like screams and I couldn’t stop, he was screaming now too, crying—

Break his back,
a little voice inside me whispered.
His spine. Take his eyes. Do it. You know you wanna. What good is he to anyone?

I pulled back, panting. Jim lay there, torn up, used up, trying to breathe and wasting it all on sobs. That little voice, still whispering incessantly, was thin and anemic and so tired, the ghost of someone I wasn’t anymore; that bloodlust, that unceasing need to feed on flesh, on fear, on fury, it was nothing but the light of someone I’d once been streaking blindingly bright across a ghostly windshield, fading, now gone. The crashing synaptic drums, pounding piano, hard screeching electric guitar that had thrummed inside my head, kept me running for nine constant years, all gone silent while I wasn’t even listening. My ears rang with the lack of noise. The burial mounds around me were all quiet too, only the gulls and the water and the faraway-seeming sounds of the few other humans wandering the beach, dying.

I’d loved him, once. That, now, was enough to make me stop. He was gone anyway. Out of my hands. And I was just so tired.

I let him go, gripping the knife he’d dropped. Lay there on the sands, exhausted, unmoored, as he tried to pull himself upright, only got to his knees. My fists had stripped his face, the wet tissue paper of his flesh nearly down to the skull; he snuffled away tears and glared at me with eyes that were Jim’s, then a mad terrified stranger’s, then his once more. Flickering and changing too many times to track. Jim comes in. Jim goes out. He shoves a knife through your snout, your spout.

“This all started because of you.” The words were squeezed from his throat, congealing into low groans like dried-out glue from a half-spent tube. “Long as you live, maybe you’ll live forever, thanks to me, just never forget that, Jessie. All this happened, all of it, because I tried to help you—”

“I never wanted your help.” My voice was the spent, hollow shell of a snarl. “Never. I knew what I was. I was making my own way. It’s because
you
couldn’t stand the thought of how I looked, and sounded, and smelled—”

He fell forward, curled onto his side, laughing at nothing as he lay there with his limbs clenched tight and trembling. Like Florian, in his final minutes.

“You couldn’t leave it alone. You couldn’t just let me live it out, go to dust and die again like I was meant to—” I was close to crying again, choking it back into harsh, shallow breaths.

“I wanted to help you,” Jim repeated. “And I did. But they’ll get you now.” He’d buried his head in his arms, rocking back and forth where he lay. “The lab. Couldn’t all have died. Some of them lived through this, passed through it. All their research—figure it out—they’ll kill you. They’ll find a way—kill all of—”

His words twisted into a long, low moan and his body contorted, convulsed. Get up. Stab him, kill him, like you did for Sam and Ben. A mercy. Don’t leave him like this. Do it.

I couldn’t move. The sands had me now and I was drained of energy, anger, cradling the knife in my hands like it could actually protect me and too spent to dig myself into the dunes. Somebody help me. Help me go to sleep. Jim cried out, wordless, again. I stared past him, at the corpse of the woman who’d been his last attempted meal.

“You were right,” said a soft, steady voice close to my ear. The man who’d told me to lie down, there in his own proper burial mound a few feet away. Unmoved by my plight, or Jim’s. “The whole world got away from humankind. There’s nothing you can do for him now. Not for any of them.”

“Help me!” Jim was up in a crouch now, trying to crawl, skin peeling from his arms and legs as he infant-crept, shaking, retching, over the sands. Every syllable was pain twisted into speech. “Please! Somebody—”

“Ain’t nothing you can do for him, Jessie. Not a blessed thing.”

Florian’s voice. I knew Florian wasn’t here, that I’d just conjured him up in my head because I was so worn down and afraid and lost and watching my last family die, surrounded by strangers beyond caring, and that made me curl an arm over my face and let tears drip onto my dirt-stiff sleeve. I wanted Florian back. I wanted everyone back. I wanted to wake up back in the woods with Joe and Sam and Billy and everyone all laughing at me, getting on my ass about my shit-crazy dreams, and if that couldn’t happen I didn’t want to wake up again at all.

“Somebody help me! God—”

Who did Florian want back? His children, of course. Who else? What about the man buried next to me? Was he here all alone too, a burial mound with no family, no visitors? Nothing you can do. Maybe he was talking to himself, as much as me. Trying to let himself off the hook for still being alive. But then none of this was his fault, was it. Not like with me.

I felt better, lying there. Still sick, still tired unto death, but better. Like I really would get up, fullness of time, brush off the sands, start walking again to God knows where. I didn’t want to. So damned much walking. Where would I go? What would I do? I already went through this once, back at the cemetery, and I didn’t like it—

“Jessie!” My name, shaped into a scream.
“Help me!”

Another knife jab to my gut, my heart. Stuck in my throat so I can’t even cry. Go away, Jim. Please. I can’t help you.

Stop, Jim. Stop. Just stop.

“Jessie! Are you out there?”

Something wrong with his voice, suddenly. Didn’t sound right. Didn’t sound like his at all.

Dying did a number on you, I should know. But I was pretty sure it wouldn’t make a man sound like a woman.

I forced myself up, swaying on my own hands and knees there in the duneface. I saw people a few yards away down the beach, a man and a woman, some sort of motionless burden slung between them with arms and legs dangling and strands of half-fair, half-dark hair covering its face. Another illusion. I’m quite the conjure woman, these past few weeks. I watched it in silence.

“Jessie!”

My tongue felt thick suddenly, unwieldy. Dried up with sand and tiredness and the fear it really was all just a mirage. The words came out in a croak:

“Renee?” I waved an arm, the knife blade glinting in the early sun. “Linc!”

Linc. Renee. Renee made a sound like a sob and they were staggering toward me now, overwhelmed by the weight of Lisa’s body, not losing but gaining substance and fleshy solidity as they came closer. I tried to get up, walk toward them, but all I could do was keep reaching out my arms as they stumbled over the duneface, skirting corpses and burial mounds with their feet sliding back and forth like they were negotiating winter ice. What would these beaches be like, in the winter? Freezing weather had been our friend once, preserving decaying flesh, making the chittering crazy-itching bugs all slow and stop their feeds to hibernate, but if fire couldn’t kill us now maybe ice would do the trick. Linc was shaking violently, every muscle clenched and twitching, and with each step Renee’s entire face closed up with pain. Lisa was unconscious, each breath a scared skittering cry, her skin gone fully blue. They collapsed on their knees before me, Lisa dropping facedown like a bundle into the sands.

“I had—this dream,” Linc managed, out of breath, gulping like he was fighting off being sick. “Florian. The beach, it, the sands are—”

“I know,” I said, to try to spare him the effort of talking. Renee was doubled over coughing, a wet nauseous sound. “Florian said—”

“Renee had it too.” He coughed like she was coughing, quickly turned his head away, but nothing came up. “Same dream. We woke up, you were gone. You were right. Should’ve listened to you, but—had to follow.” He took another long breath, his face gray. “Lisa wouldn’t stay behind. Brought her with us. She’s dying, Jessie.” He touched her hair, not flinching when a hank of it came off all over his fingers. “Humans can’t take this disease like we can—”

We can’t take it either, Linc, not if that woman Jim tried to feed off is any sign. This is our last chance right here. I tugged at Lisa’s shoulders, Renee helping me roll her over, saw peeking from the knuckles of Lisa’s fist clenched tight as rigor mortis the smooth, green-gray surface of a lake stone.

“She wanted one,” Renee explained, looking guilty like she’d filched it from me. Still coughing. “She said—it felt good in her hand—Jessie, you’ll think I’m nuts but I swear there’s something about those things, it’s like they made us stronger or less sick or—”

“You’re nuts,” I assured her. No time to waste on what Florian, Jim, Rommel all told me, what was sitting there in my own pockets. “Help me dig her in. Hurry.”

“What are you—” Linc and I were already raking aside armfuls of sand, scrabbling with what energy we had, while Renee watched in consternation. “Don’t cover her face like that, she’ll suffocate!”

“No, she won’t!” I reached over and gave Renee a shove, just like the old days, I had no time for this, she and Linc didn’t have time for this. ”You said I was right about the beaches, are you gonna just sit there now? The sands are what—Jesus Christ, Renee, will you get off your ass and help us!”

“Help me!” Jim screamed, crawling in a circle, limbs spasming and blackened with encroaching death. “Jessie!”

Linc got Lisa’s shoulders under a layer of sand, worked on a deeper pit for her legs. He gave me a wary glance. “That sounds like—”

“Jim,” I said, and didn’t elaborate. The sands I was digging in warped and wavered suddenly, like someone had tossed a grainy handful at my eyes, then it passed. Linc stopped for a moment and hugged me hard.

“Please, God!” Jim was slowing down now, the circle contracting. “God! Help me!”

A little cluster of hoos, blue-tinged, rotten inside and out, stood a few feet removed, shaking, shuffling. Watching him in anticipatory silence. I dug and dug like a mother rabbit, a dog in a garden, getting Lisa farther down. Safe, from all of this.

“The sand,” Renee said, pushing more of it over Lisa’s arms and, still with some hesitation, her face. “And the stones. Is that why Florian wanted—” She looked up at me, stricken. “We could have saved him.”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t sickness, just being old. He was ready to go.” Lisa still had a faint, wavering pulse but her wrist, her palm were growing cold. “No matter how long they’d kept him alive before.”

But he still wanted them. Because they were something he loved. Something that kept him safe, all those years. I brushed some of the sand away from Lisa’s lips and, crazy wild hair of a notion, dug into my pocket for the broken fragments of stone. Slipped a few of them into her mouth. Covered her up again, to let her keep breathing it all in.

Would we all be able to die, still, even after all this? If one day we just decided, like Florian, we were ready to go?

I lay there next to Lisa, half-buried myself, an arm flung over her pile of sand.
Go on along, pets. I’m tired.
Linc and Renee lay next to me, all of us cradling Lisa against ourselves, holding on to each other.

“I’m sorry,” Renee said, watching as Jim hauled himself upright one final time. Each limb stretched, agonized, on an imaginary rack. His body trying to blot out the rising sun.

“Nothing we can do,” I said. Another shadow passed overhead, a gliding gull. “Nothing.”

Jim let out a sound, a low yowling noise like a cat about to be sick, and then the yowling became a long, high, enraged scream and he collapsed where he stood, crumpling slowly to the sand, screams cut dead as suddenly as a radio snapped off in mid-broadcast. His feet, his hands twitched, jerking away from the heat of some phantom fire, and then he was still and silent.

More shadows. Those hoos, as once were, days or hours or minutes from death themselves, slowly staggering toward his remains. One of them gazed down at me, staring straight into my eyes, desperation and remorse and the feverish, overpowering urgency of famine turning her eyes to dark dank holes. What the hell did she want, forgiveness? Permission? Don’t look at me, bitch. I’ve got problems of my own.

“Get out of my face,” I whispered, and held up the knife. “Just get out.”

Drool snaked from her blackened lips, gleamed on her chin, then she and the others had Jim by the limbs, trying to work up the strength to drag him away. Linc reached out a hand, actually trying physically to turn my head from the sight. I shook free, and watched.

“Was anyone still alive back there?” I asked. “When you left?”

“Some,” said Renee. She’d closed her eyes, her face now pressed into the sands like they were the mound of a use-worn pillow. “Not many. Not very.”

“We have to get back.” I tried to sit up again, only managed to balance on an elbow. “Bring them here. They might get better. Like these others.”

So many burial mounds, all around us—so many? Not so many. A few dozen, at the most. Two dozen, more like. That was all. All that was left. Assuming they all lived.

“We’ll get back,” Linc assured me, fingers curling around mine. “As soon as we get some rest.”

“It’s actually not that far to walk,” Renee added. Her face was chalky pale, her hands shaking with fatigue; the sand covering them roiled and sifted like little beetles were crawling underneath. “We can get back there, bring them with us. In a few minutes.”