Dust (6 page)

“Easy now,” Florian said, still sitting and watching, but he didn’t try to rescue her. Gotta happen. Toughen them up. Linc frowned, took a step forward, but when Florian shook his head Linc didn’t push it. Renee, now crawling trying to get away, flung herself recklessly at Sam’s feet and nearly got her cheekbones kicked in for the trouble. Someone could’ve fed her first, at least, but it wasn’t gonna be me.

Mags poked her fingers at Renee’s eyes, getting within millimeters so Renee kept whipping her head back and forth to escape them; that let Billy get in punches on her left side, Ben on her right. Jab, whap. Jab, smack. Florian and Sam and Linc sat in a cross-legged choral row, just watching. Teresa turned to me, all hostility vanished. “Why don’t you go have some fun?” she said, motioning toward them. “The little squirt’ll thank you in the long run, for giving her a spine.”

Run along and play, kiddie. No thanks. I shrugged, watching Renee get beaten, watching the watchers, remembering the meaty smack of fists and crack of bone when Joe and I first met. This little bitch wasn’t even trying to defend herself, what the hell did Fearless Leader want with something so useless? Maybe just some fun. I closed my eyes, taking in the odors of dry musty tree bark and old possum tracks and peeling rain-softened paint, and that’s when I caught it.

The smell, that strange chemical smell that I’d sniffed in the air earlier and thought was Renee. I could smell Renee too, the stench of formaldehyde and dyes and fixatives and cosmetics smeared over and shot through dead skin, but this was something different: just as sterile and alien but without a pedigree of its own, an orphan smell I couldn’t place but knew was from nowhere in nature. It was coming from Teresa, emanating from her skin as she lolled under the rotting gazebo roof, and over the dull patina of her decay was a layer of soft, shiny dampness, marinating her in a pungent little sweat bath. Not rain, it’d been dry for days. Sap, it looked like, beads of it oozing up from freshly cut wood. I listened, not knowing what I thought I’d hear from her, but got only the same everyday brain music and wordless hum of thought I heard from everyone else. She was perfectly normal, except she wasn’t. The more I stared the more she stank, of vinegar and varnish. Nothing dying, and nothing ever alive.

Teresa caught me looking. She just smiled.

Dizzy and punch-drunk, Billy reared back and let fly, intestines playing a symphony of farts, gurgles and sickening wet explosions like air ripping out of a balloon. Clouds of pure stink welled up from his gas-bloated guts, making us groan with laughter and shout “How’d you like it, little Renee, how’d you like that,” but our new baby sister had long since passed out.

The small, stifled sobs grew louder and harsher until they crested into a single sorrowing wail. The thud of a fist followed, and Joe’s voice snarling, “Goddammit, bitch, go to sleep!”

So much for his sulk in the woods doing him any good. I winced as Florian and I crossed the footbridge and headed across the open park field. I wasn’t feeling so good today, off-kilter and fuzzy-headed like a hoo catching a cold—Billy threw all my sleep right off, tooting Teresa’s triumphant homecoming—but still more than glad to be on watch and getting out of earshot. They should’ve fed Renee first: It was the hunger pangs killing her, not any memories of Mommy and Daddy, but everyone had decided they were too tired to throw her a bone. I’d bring her back something, a rabbit or two. Florian was off in his own world as usual, humming some century-old song to himself as we went past the sugaring shack, crossed the second footbridge and another, handkerchief-sized parking lot and reached the welcome shadiness of the overgrown nature trails.

It was hot this morning, too hot for barely spring. We headed east toward the riverbank, passing the weed-smeared signpost for the Sullen Trail (a settler’s name, John or Jim Sullen of years past, or someone’s stupid idea of funny?), and began our ambling walkabout of watching, listening, sniffing for hoos. There was no way two slow-moving undeads could cover the whole park in a day, there could be a platoon of Marines camped on the other side of the forest for all we knew, but Teresa insisted.

“She does this just to keep us busy,” I muttered.

“That’s no news, pet.” Florian called everyone pet, even Teresa. “But also for some make-believe excitement—what if there are
hoos
in the woods, with
guns
? Or worse, matches? What if we’re all in their sights?” He spat: not from a swampy mouth, he’s barely got any coffin liquor left, but from long force of habit. “Hoos, hah. They started packing up and running away from here long before you were born—before Teresa was born, but she still sees ’em everywhere. Behind every tree.” He pulled a jay from its hiding place in a bush, snapped it dead in his fingers and crunched it down feathers and all, not faltering a step. “Gives Billy and them something to think about, though, other than dethroning her.”

This was true. Billy and Ben never said no to watch duty, always shouting about how if they did find a goddamned hoo then by God they’d make it sorry (unless, like always, they’re so lazy or stuffed full of deer they can’t be bothered). I didn’t mind either; really, it got me away from her. And I liked trees and riverbanks now, in a way I never had when I was alive; I’d wanted to save all the animals, but nature bored the piss out of me. This way was better.

“You still gotta wonder where she goes, when she takes off.” I rubbed my shoulder socket against some tree bark, getting in a good scratch. “I don’t see what’s so special and secret about—”

“You ever miss your folks?”

Florian loved to do this, pretend he was listening and then interrupt with some dispatch from Pluto—like I said, he was old—but the question made me tense up. “Why’re you asking now?”

“’Cause I wondered, that’s why. Do you miss your folks?”

I thought about the first few weeks after joining the Flies, how I would lie awake mornings waiting to hear their brain-sounds getting closer—those nervous strings, furious drums. Waiting for them to find the gang and get joined up too. But they never did. No other gang I knew of either. They just disappeared. It happens. Would definitely have happened to that Renee, if Teresa hadn’t dragged her back. But it didn’t matter; we always pretended we’d never had any other family. “No point,” I said. “Gone’s gone.”

Florian watched me, one sunken eye moving independently of the other. “Gone may be gone, but that don’t make gone fun. Just asking.”

“And I just answered, so can you find a new useless question?”

He shrugged and pushed his walking stick—the branch Joe had torn away in his fall—against the softening ground as we headed forward. The birds twittered and screeched overhead in two-note complaints, rising to a roar of mass discontent as the river snaked through a clearing and past a wall of oaks; this was a migration stop-off, and twice every year that sea of bird sound up high signaled autumn turning to winter, then winter to spring. We paused to listen.

Fighting, they were always fighting. Fighting to the death, the last I ever saw them. That’s all I really keep with me about my parents. They must’ve loved me, I suppose. I don’t know. When I needed help with a science project, or a ride somewhere, or someone to yell back on my behalf, I went to my brother, Jim. Lisa, my sister, for everything else. I don’t blame them for clearing out like they did—I was counting the hours myself—and I could call them whenever I wanted. And Lisa, whose college was closer, would come visit sometimes just to get me out of the house, but it just got worse and worse after they were gone.

“I still miss my children,” Florian murmured, as the birds squawked and cried. “Sometimes. Two daughters and a son. Grandkiddies. Don’t know what became of them. If they ever tunneled up too.”

And even if they did they might just turn their backs on you for half a rabbit, old man, so what the hell do you want from me? They were always like that, since I could remember, my mom and dad. “Ma” and “pa,” I guess Florian would say. I wonder why people say “mom” and “dad” now, instead. Language evolves, my English teacher said. He’d intone it all solemn like a Bible verse, lann-guaaage evolllves, but never explain how or why it did. Always shouting. Always fighting. Absolutely anything could set them off. When I got scared I’d go sleep in Lisa’s room with her.

“I hate it here,” she would whisper, not to me but herself, when the crash of something thrown downstairs made us both jump. She’d have her arms wrapped around me and I’d feel the sudden tensing twitch in the muscles, almost more startling than the noise that caused it. “I hate it here so fucking much.”

I’d hear Jim sometimes too, shouting at them to shut up, control themselves.
You wanna know why you can’t pay Jessie to talk to you and Lisa’s scared of her own shadow why don’t you both look in a mirror, get a goddamned divorce if you’re that miserable, we’ll all throw a fucking party
. He’s right, we would have. The little martyrs, he’d call Lisa and me sometimes, he hated that we’d both hide in her room. What’d he expect us to do, take a hurled paperweight in the face for the team?

But he didn’t take their shit and I liked that. One really terrible Thanksgiving he just said, “Screw this,” right there at the table, and loaded me and Lisa and Grammy Sullivan into his car and we all went to the turkey buffet three toll stops down the road. They’re entitled to ruin their own holiday, he said, but not ours. I liked that. We each had our own holiday, it wasn’t theirs to keep inflicting on us their way. Grammy Sullivan, who’d looked ready to walk all the way back to the nursing home, cheered up and handed out chocolates. I’d already given up meat and all the vegetables looked butter-soaked so there wasn’t much else for me to eat except plain bread and cranberry sauce, but it was still the best Thanksgiving in forever.

No, Florian, I do not miss my folks. It’s just that sometimes I’m still listening for them, even now, and I don’t know why. That’s force of habit for you.

“Why’s it so hot today?” I said, stomping my feet on the soil like I could force the coolness up through my legs. “It can’t be later than March. I’ll rot like a Florida feeder.”

“It ain’t hot at all.” Florian sounded puzzled. “That wind coming in is—”

“—way too warm. It can’t be later than March, there’s barely any violets yet—”

“Ain’t trying to be difficult, you know,” Florian said, face still tilted upward. “I never thought much about old times when I was your age either, but it’s different lately. Can’t think about much else.” He turned to me. “Thinking about the human days, of all the useless things. I knew my last times were on me anyway, and this about settles it—”

“You’re not going to die,” I said. It happened to be a fact: The sun would never come up in the west, Florian would never die. He was already a dried-up shrunk-down remnant when I first met him, had died in his sleep as an older-than-hell hoo back when this was the Northwest Territories, all Indian tribes and a few trading outposts. He remembered the Revolutionary War. (He was a Tory.) And the Civil War. (He was dead, no need to take hoo-sides anymore.) He remembered when Lepingville, where I grew up, was just a giant farm field (which it might as well be now anyway, if you ask me). He’d survived the Pittsburgh Uprising of ’68, all the young undeads turning on the dusties when they got sick of killing and eating hoos; he’d survived fights, forest fires, starvation, hunting teams, the hoos deciding again and again that we didn’t really exist and crowding into our living space like nasty little gerbils grabbing a new cage. You didn’t see all that, live through all that and then just . . . vanish, like all those reserves and survival skills meant nothing in the end. I wouldn’t accept it.

Florian smiled. His skin in the strengthening sunlight was jaundiced and tissue thin, sagging at every joint like a collapsing awning. “Don’t be silly, pet.”

I got sillier. I threw my arm around him, letting him laugh and pat my shoulder. We didn’t hold with mushiness, but I didn’t care. Things were easy between him and me like they weren’t with anyone else but Joe. “You’re not going to die.”

“Course I will, I’m—” He frowned. “Well, hell, I got no idea how old I am now, but damned old, I know that. It’s long past time. Sick of being sent on watch rounds, just so she can get rid of me. Sick of everything.” He sighed, studying himself, the crumbling silhouette of his bones. “You’d never believe it now, pet, but this arm”—he made a joking flex of the biceps he didn’t have—“this arm could bend an iron streetlamp post barely trying. These legs could kick through concrete, just like yours. That’s why they wanted me. Now they’re just waiting to be rid of me. So I’ll go.” His voice was light and pitiless, almost reveling in the pronouncement of death, but his face grew wistful. “All I wish is I could see my beach again.”

“It wouldn’t be the same.” Florian had lived for a while, a long while, in the woods around the Indiana Dunes, way back when they were just unprotected piles of sand and not a park. “I know nobody’s
supposed
to live out near there, but you hear stories sometimes about—”

“There was always hoos out there making one kinda trouble or another, that ain’t nothing new. I remember when some damned fool company just took one of the biggest sand dunes away, two hundred feet high and they hauled it all off in boxcars to melt it down, make glass jars out of it—I said I miss my beach, not their beach. Hasn’t been my beach in forever.”

He stopped to rest near the shell of a dead tree, a blackened stub that made me imagine a long-ago lightning bolt. “That sand could hurt a rotten foot, all gritty, but there was still something about it, you lay down in it to sleep and woke up every night feeling good. All those woods, barely a soul in ’em, and that big long slope down to the shore and the shore was nothing but waves that kept rolling in, real soft. Like a lot of drowning people’s hands laid all in a row, touching the sand and then getting pulled under all at once. All kinda flowers to look at, stuff you never seen anywhere else, and too many birds to count.”