Dust (7 page)

He watched the Great River meander past us, all slow-moving liquid mud. “The Indians left us alone. Well, they’d get mad when we raided their muskrat traps, but a body’s gotta eat. Then they made ’em all leave. Built railroads and steel mills right there on the sand. Beach houses. Couldn’t make us leave, though. They only thought they got rid of the Indians, the ones that tunneled up all came back too. Dozens of us, and we never had much of any fighting, ’cept when we got bored. Time just kinda stopped there. Every day the same as the next—”

“Yeah, not at all like being out here.”

“Every day just like the next.” Florian was long gone now, that look on his face old people get when they’re all excited about something that happened before you were born. At least he didn’t expect me to act excited too, like Grammy Sullivan would. “All flowing together, just one big day and one big night. All peaceful. And I don’t know what it was, but you broke down so slow there, your body did. Took a good thirty, forty years before I found even the first bug on me. Hoos would see us and think we were still them, before they saw how we walked. Seemed like we all barely rotted at all.”

He sighed. “If you ever get there, pet. I won’t say heaven, but it was more beautiful than anything else.”

I’d never seen the Dunes except in photographs, growing up. Too dangerous, though sometimes kids would go to the unincorporated areas on a dare. A few from the class a year ahead of mine did that and never came back. I knew I was meant to feel sorry for them, but it was kind of hard when all it meant for the rest of us was more goddamned safety drills and this was after we’d already suffered through it all in Safety Ed: endless variations on Don’t Go Out There, You Idiots. Nothing stopping me now, of course, though no swimming unless I wanted to be reduced to a skeleton within minutes. Decaying flesh plus a steady water bath, it’s like parboiling.

There were rumors of government facilities out on the beaches, research labs, in the Prairie Beach part of Gary and Burns Harbor and the other lake coast towns. Some out in the prairie preserves too. Thanatology labs, studying us in the belly of the beast. I knew a girl whose dad supposedly was a guard out there, though you weren’t meant to know about it. Or that they were out there at all. He made way too much money, everyone said, for any ordinary security guard. There were rumors that my kind never killed the kids that disappeared, that they stumbled into a restricted lab area, got shot, left out for us or the birds and coyotes. Who knew. I’ve never heard much tell of it, but then it’s not like I go out looking.

“So why’d you ever leave?” I asked. “If it was all so great.”

Florian just shrugged. He reached into the little leather pouch he kept looped around his waist, as creased and worn down as Joe’s jacket, and shook out a couple of old stones: Lake Michigan beach stones, flat and smooth and soft greenish-gray, pale pearl. He had more of them he’d dragged with him everywhere he went, hidden somewhere in the woods. Another old person’s eccentricity.

“Can’t stay in any one place forever,” he said, running the bones that had once been fleshy fingers over the stones’ surfaces. “No matter how much you like it. Gotta keep moving. I been everywhere. Everywhere I could walk.” His fingers curled around the pearly gray stone. “And no matter where I been, no matter how bad things was there, if I had these with me I always felt like I was safe, that I’d come out of it alive and fighting. Even in Pittsburgh, back in the uprising. I got bit hard by a young feeder, I shoulda lost my arm. Didn’t. So much damn luck. And these, right here, they’re my lucky tokens. Ain’t never been without them.”

He put the stones back in their pouch with a happy little look in his eyes, like he’d just had a private conversation with them I didn’t know anything about. I guess when you’re verging on your three-hundredth birthday or so you’ve earned the right to be loopy. I nudged a clump of snowdrops with my foot, fresh salady green against twenty shades of dirty brown. The tree leaves were just coming in, lighter greens tinged with yellow.

“This is pretty beautiful too,” I said. “Just like your beach.”

No answer. I poked around an old duck’s nest, found nothing and was set to head another mile down the river when the smell hit me. Florian caught it too, raising a hand for silence though there was no sound but birdsong. Human flesh, definitely, but also a note of something chemical that I couldn’t place: like deodorant gone stale, cheap lotion turned metallic with sweat, but stronger and stranger than that. We kept staring and sniffing and finally saw a shadow zigzagging through the spindly trees, too fleet-footed to be an undead. Every now and then you see a few vagrant guys out on the forest edge, though if Ben or Billy or Joe’s feeling hungry you never see them for very long. This one, though, was female, lolloping fast toward us, all hunched-over nervous speed like a little ape; she paused, raising her blond head to sniff, came stumbling barefoot along the riverbank and, just yards away from us, smacked straight into a linden tree and clung to it stunned. Her breath rattled, lungs fighting each other for the last gulp of air, and drool snaked from her open mouth.

It was the hoocow from last night, the one who’d come on a drunken tear through the parking lot. Her skin had gone from blue-tinged to outright blue, one huge fast-spreading bruise:
Cyanotic,
I thought, a word I remembered from health classes. There was a weird sheen on it too, like sweat if sweat was beads of tree sap, and she stared at us without fear or any other human look in her eyes. Nothing human about her smell, the chemical stink pouring from her skin, and nothing undead either, nothing I could call hoo or not-hoo and I shivered, smelling it.

“Hey!” Florian shouted, waving his skeleton arms, baring his yellowed teeth to try to scare her off. “We know you. This ain’t no camping ground, you better get out of here. There’s lots more of us and the rest won’t help you. You understand?”

She just stood there. “You understand me? Those old park bums ain’t your friends either. Get out!”

Of course everything we said was so much
hrruhhh ugggh muhhhhh
to anyone but us, but if she hadn’t got the gist she really was too stoned to live. I snarled at her, spitting a mouthful of black blood, and when it spattered her bare feet she gazed up at me in something like wonder. Her eyes were glassy and smudged and shadowy like she had cataracts, marbles smeared with greasy fingerprints, and as I stared back something about the angles of her face, the tilt of her chin flowed into a falsely familiar shape, some strange foreign substance poured into a well-worn mold; then the shape melted away and left only her, nobody and nothing, standing there gripping the bark for dear life. Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t know you. I’m not your friend.

“No . . . camping ground,” she repeated, in a croak, holding the words in her lips like little bits of sugar. Not the way humans said them, but the way we did. “The old bums . . .”

Imitating, I thought, as the chords pounded fast and feverish through my brain, she didn’t understand us, hoos couldn’t understand anything we said. Like a babbling baby. The old bums. Maybe she’d just learned the hard way they weren’t her friends.

“What about ’em?” I gave her a shove, making myself go gentle because a hard push would snap her shoulder. If she really were the hoo she looked like. “What do I care for some old bums, some dead-meat eaters? You like ’em so much, go—”

She moaned, a high, scared horse’s whinnying, and her little sob sounded so much like Renee’s hunger pangs that I grabbed for Florian’s hand. Her chin lolled back and she swayed, seizing the linden bark harder, and reached one shaking arm up to where a squirrel was splayed frozen and praying to be invisible. He went crazy, thrashing and biting in her grip, and she bit down. Her head jerked left, right, trying to pull off a piece, and he let out a horrible shrill scream of terrified pain and held it and held it until her teeth found his neck and wrenched it apart.

Mesmerized, we watched her. Her teeth seemed long for a hoo’s but they were white and squarish like any human’s, and just as bad at tearing through hide and thick bones. She gnawed at the little bit of meat she could get, licked fresh blood from her hands, and then I heard a gurgling sound and she was looking up at me trembling in fright, dark bubbles of spume oozing from her ash-colored lips. She stared down at the torn-apart thing in her hands, warm and dripping blood and viscera and tufts of gray fur, and let out another moan, not of starvation but shame and horror; meat and bile rocketed back up, splattering the linden tree and the soil below, and she sank to her knees and doubled over, shaking and shriveling into a wracked little ball. Florian, forever too soft-hearted, must have decided she was one of us after all because he reached down and touched her hair.

“Squirrel ain’t no good,” he said, conciliatory. “Always hated it. If you come with us, we’ll find a duck or two, some deer—”

She howled, fists drumming on the linden bark until her knuckles split and bled. Her body arched, jerked backward, and she made horrible gasping sounds pulling in air she could no longer breathe; her fingers loosened and she almost fluttered back to the ground, curling gentle and womblike around herself as her breath softened, slowed and stopped. There was a shudder that seemed to come from somewhere else, an invisible boot kicking her in the chest, and she lay still.

I touched her skin. It was sap-sticky, covered in congealed ooze, and cold.

Florian bared his teeth, snapping them shut on invisible flesh. “Blessed hell,” he muttered, and turned her over and shook her and shouted at her trying to figure out if she were alive, dead, unconscious, what the hell had happened. I rubbed my fingers against the linden bark, scrubbing away that awful sweat; I didn’t want her stench on me. She didn’t move.

“No heartbeat,” Florian said, pulling himself upright. “But she was trying to take in air. You think she’s one of us? You think there’s some . . . sickness out there, and she got it? That smell.”

There isn’t a disease that gets us other than rot, even with those hoo-scientists out on the beach, supposedly, trying their best, allegedly, to create one. “One of us? She was trying to breathe, you just said so. And you saw her yesterday, nobody dies, wakes up and goes under again in less than a day—”

“No hoo’s out eating squirrels with their bare hands and teeth. This isn’t nothing human.”

“It’s nothing
us
either!”

Florian stared down at her, confusion turning to anger, and let off a muttered epithet of good riddance as he kicked her. I held back. Whatever she was, whatever had killed her I didn’t want to touch her or know her, I just wanted her gone.

The way she looked at me, just for that split second, staring like she knew me. Like I should know her. Nobody and nothing. That’s all hoos are to me. Not even meat.

“So are we tellin’ Teresa?” Florian asked.

For an answer I reached down and hoisted up the body, an awkward job working one-handed. Florian helped me get her slung over my shoulder, and we walked until the woods got thick and the ground hilly and we’d reached the concrete tunnel beneath the old highway underpass; we left her there, skull intact, a good warning for any of those old bums sheltering from rain. If Billy or Ben or whoever came this way, let them figure it out.

By the time we retraced our steps Florian was pinched with exhaustion; he curled up and dozed all day in the grass while I hunted. I still wasn’t feeling so great either, hot and all tired, but I needed a good meal to distract myself from the nastiness I’d just seen and smelled. I didn’t spot any rabbits but I surprised some raccoons, a badger, a couple of ducks, there were still leavings fresh to eat when we got back, and Renee wept so much when I gave her some it was disgusting, she cried and ate and ate and cried and moaned about how wonderful I was, I was her best friend now, and when I punched her she still followed me around, mooning, like a groupie at a hotel room door. Joe couldn’t stop laughing. Neither could Teresa, who accepted the rest of the meat with the graciousness of a tsarina who’d finally got her serfs back in line. Florian, like he’d been doing so much lately, turned away and slept some more without offering a word.

No, we weren’t telling Teresa. Because she had that same smell on her skin too, that dead hoocow’s awful sterile rot, and until I had some answers to throw in her face I was pretending everything was fine.

Renee’s grave was already pristine, the birthing hole filled in and covered with grass too even and green to be real. There’s no gate guards, the alarm systems are defunct, the barbed wire’s busted full of holes, weeds everywhere, but by God they still get those gravesites looking swank and undisturbed as soon as they humanly can. Maybe it’s all people really care about, the handful that still come to visit. I hope the pay’s good, if you’ve got that job. I bet it is. Nearly as good as a thano lab guard’s. We crouched in a patch of woods above Calumet Memorial, waiting.

I gave Renee a shove. “Why are you so sure they’re coming? And why today?” Why the hell I’d agreed to sit with her, of course, was another question.

“I just have a feeling,” she said, a stubborn twist to her mouth.

“Nobody’s coming. You’re just lucky you got buried instead of burned, and they never like it when people come out to visit, they don’t want the publicity if someone gets—”

“I just have a feeling.” Her voice was a high, breathy singsong, air whistling through the space where I’d knocked out her teeth. “I just know.”

You just know. That’s about the only thing you know, other than how to cry for food someone else hunted for you. Infant. “So what are they, stupid, drunk or suicidal? Because that’s the only kind of humans who come out here now, even in dayli—”

“Oh my God, that’s them. That’s them. I knew it. There they are.”

A blond woman, a tall balding man, a blond girl maybe ten or twelve came down one of the weed-choked walkways, looked cautiously behind and around them and clustered around the gravestone. The man knelt, crossing himself, then got up and clutched his wife’s hand, shoulders heaving. The girl wiped her eyes, put a pink spray of flowers in a little vase attached to the tombstone.