Frail (14 page)

Something came swift and panting through the forest of legs, like a rabbit fleeing across a lawn, and a little girl of six, maybe seven, dark brown hair chopped off raggedy short around her ears, came skidding to a wide-eyed stop in front of Billy. He grabbed her by the collar, baring his teeth.

“What’re you doing in there?” he demanded, voice all sweet and his mouth frozen in a smile like a clean, exposed blade. “Sitting in the kitchen with your thumb up your ass hoping someone throws you a few more bites? You ain’t no pet dog. Get the table set
now
.”

Lisa had half-risen from her chair but the little girl was gone again, shoving through the crowd back into the kitchen like her life was at stake and it probably was. The auburn-haired woman, Mags, she just smirked and lolled her head backward so we all got a better look at her cleavage, damp and dimpled like a bruised fruit from the back of the fridge. Naomi came rushing back, silently setting out stained paper and cloth napkins, china and plastic plates, and in Lisa’s eyes watching her there was this full, quiet hunger, like a rain droplet on a leaf tip growing rounder and fatter until you almost held your breath for it to fall. You just didn’t see many small children, not anymore, just like you almost never saw anyone truly old: They got sick first, they had less to get them through the first winter. The smallest babies, good as wiped out. Some of the humans, waiting for their rations, they had the same look in their eyes too.

When she was done Naomi stood behind Mags’s chair, dead quiet; Lisa gave her a friendly little glance but Naomi just ducked her head. The table was filling up: Don and Janey next to Billy and Mags, Phoebe next to Kevin, because this wouldn’t have been a shitty enough meal already. The seat on my other side was empty until a thin tall boy—a little older, maybe twenty—came in hauling a huge tray steaming with food, his arms almost buckling under the weight; he slammed it down before Billy so hard that meat juices slopped everywhere, running over the table in rivulets like dirty puddle water, then threw himself into the last empty chair with a loud sigh. Phoebe squirmed on her cushion and rubbed her hands together, working herself into a paroxysm of put-on delight.

“Well!” she cried, beaming at us all like Bob Cratchit over the Christmas goose. “Isn’t
this
another legendary spread, Stephen, you kids in the kitchen have outdone yourself yet ag—”

“Shut up, you stupid little frail hoocow bitch,” Mags said, her voice rich and rolling like a cool spring fog, and flung her shoulders back in another burst of sweat. “For what you are about to receive, you should all be goddamned fucking grateful. Everyone eat.”

She dug her bare hands into the bowls and platters, Billy eagerly following suit, and us handful of humans waited our turn; Don doled out a plateful for Janey, Lisa did the same for me. “Naomi,” she called out, quite deliberately. “Aren’t you going to sit with us and eat?”

Naomi shook her head, still staring at her shoes. What had happened to her parents? Had Billy, this Mags, been part of it? Mags gave Lisa a tilted little smile, then made a show of passing Naomi a huge slice of meat; Naomi gobbled it down so fast I wondered about her for a moment, but no, she was human, you just knew it. Human, and kept constantly hungry.

“There’s corn too, Naomi.” The boy next to me, presumably Stephen, held out a ladle overflowing with neat, toothlike kernels. Human too. “You like corn, don’t you?”

“It’s none of your damned business,” Billy spat, the other side of his jaw still frantically working at his meat, “what she—”

“I bet you do,” Kevin said, and took the ladle from Stephen. “Have some.”

Billy stared at Kevin, at Stephen in hard, glassy-eyed malice. Naomi dipped her small head right into the ladle, pecking like a scared, starving bird. Canned corn, canned green beans, white rice, venison, rabbit. Glasses and cups of water to wash it down. All around me rose a chorus of raggedy sighs and smacking lips and wet air-sucking gulps as the exes shoved it all in, fistfuls of rice, whole slices of venison, spilling cornucopia-spoonfuls of corn; I concentrated on my plate, on taking calm, reasoned, slow mouthfuls.

“This is
wonderful
, Stephen,” Phoebe sighed, giving him a wide, happy smile studded with stuck kernel skins. “Every time it just amazes me, how—”

“So what trash heap’d she pluck you from, frail?” Billy said, leaning forward with eyes dancing like he was about to laugh. Laugh at me, hard and mean. “Lepingville crest on that jacket, that’s right down the road from where Mags and I used to like to hunt. Looks like we were neighbors, don’t it.”

My jacket sleeve. Which is how Phoebe knew I was lying, about Leyton, because I’m just that much of an idiot—Lisa was quiet, waiting to take her cues. Kevin glanced from Billy to me, big round blue eyes tense and wary like he’d seen this before, like it’d been him on the hot seat before. “So what if she’s got a jacket?” he said, glancing down at his Bears jersey. “I never played football. I found this in someone’s closet, last winter.”

“I got it off someone dead,” I agreed. Following his cue. “I don’t come from—”

“Uh-
uh
,” Phoebe singsonged, with the dancing, gleeful expression of a kid getting a bigger sister in trouble.

“Phoebe,” Kevin closed his eyes in exasperation. “Don’t.”

“Well, she said she did,” said Phoebe, sulky and put-upon, as she stabbed hard at an errant bean. “I heard her, Kevin, you didn’t. Lepingville, by way of Leyton, or was it the other way around—”

“And only a human would care,” Don interrupted, serene and half-sated, putting thin little bits of rabbit on Janey’s plate. “Human towns, human cities—all dead, all gone.” He gave a tight half-smile to me, to Stephen, the convulsive mouth of a salesman forcing himself to grin at the boss’s awful jokes. “Our undead turf too, all the old forests, nature preserves, little hived-off bits of prairie, abandoned farmland, dead subdivisions—remember how we used to think that made us something, Billy, decades spent stumbling aimlessly from tree to bush, marinating in our own squalor and rot, and if we managed to jump a careless human every other month or so it made us queens and kings? Here lurks Ozymandias, right behind the dung pile! Look on, ye frail-fleshed and shallow-boned, and pretend you saw nothing!”

He laughed, thrust his fork into another slice of meat. “A nasty, brutish, vermin-riddled farce disguised as living. Stray dogs had more dignity. And then, suddenly, by utter accident—life! Actual, inexhaustible life!” His eyes narrowed as he studied Janey, Stephen, me, and he grinned in earnest. “The only true life there ever was, the only life that isn’t slow nonstop rot. And we have it. And I mean to make the most of it. Doesn’t it make you want to dance, Billy? I mean, really dance, not just that pathetic fall-over psychic two-step we used to think was cutting a rug?”

Billy frowned and chewed his beans with a funny, lost look on his face, like a senile old man at his own birthday party who’d couldn’t fathom why total strangers were handing him cake. Janey sat looking at her meat, nonplussed, like it was some strange art display, and then Don waved a hand and she let out a murmur of surprise, shook her head, quickly ate the slices all up and looked to him for a nod of approval. She only ate when he said she could, then, just like with Naomi. Maybe he punished her if she disobeyed him, no driving privileges. No lipstick.

Don was gazing at me now, with the same grimace of distaste he’d given me on the roadside. “You never answered Billy’s question,” he noted. “Did you.”

“She doesn’t have to answer anything,” Lisa said, her voice tight. “Or was that all just more crap you fed me, about ‘respecting family ties—’ ”

“You’ve been fed half the day and your frail don’t stink anymore, you can let her pony up when she’s asked.” Mags’s voice was drawling and singsong like she was beyond bored. “You have any more family here, kid? Mother, brother, other—”

“You already know she doesn’t,” said Kevin. Gripping his plastic picnic spoon like a weapon. “They’d be here. Just—”

“They’re not here,” I said, just so Mags would stop talking. My mother wasn’t dead. They kept telling me that, saying it for years now and they were wrong, but I didn’t say “my mother” and I didn’t say “dead.” You don’t confirm lies out loud, that’s dangerous. My stomach twisted up and I wanted to shove my plate away, but I was afraid they’d punish me if I didn’t eat. Pick up your fork. Eat it like medicine. Then something struck hard at my hand and the fork flew right out of it, and I was rigid in my chair as Mags loomed over the table, arm still raised.

“When one of us talks,” she snarled, “you listen, and answer. You understand?”

Her t’s, k’s, d’s jabbed and stabbed at my ears even as her voice went hissing soft, like fireplace pokers wrapped in moldy velvet. Lisa was on her feet, Kevin too but I could feel them both holding back, gauging how far they could go before I got punished for what they did; Lisa put a hand on my shoulder, careful, just the palm.

“She’s right, Amy,” Lisa said, voice soft, a stroke of the hand in silent apology as we all sat back down. “Go on. Don’t act too good for the room.”

Or you’ll get your head kicked in and I can’t stop them.
Just like with Don. “We lived in Lepingville,” I said. I looked Mags straight in the eye, her big dolly-eye fringed with the longest lashes I’d ever seen. When did women stop having roundcheeked doll faces like that? She must’ve died decades ago like Don, longer. “Me and my mom. That was it. Lisa’s not my sister. We met on the road. She thought saying that would make it easier here. My dad died when I was little. My mom . . .” You do not affirm lies out loud. “. . . is gone.”

Janey held my fork out to me, timid, confused, and I didn’t take it because I couldn’t pretend to eat anymore. Don gave her a little nudge. “Your food, Jeanette Isabella,” he muttered. “It’s only half-gone.”

Janey looked flummoxed for a moment, then smiled like she’d just worked out an impossible math problem and dug in, with my fork. I’d been wrong, she wasn’t waiting for permission. She needed Don to remind her to eat at all. Stephen, who’d sat picking at his green beans and glowering in silence, pushed his chair aside and stood up.

“New platter,” he muttered, and dumped what was left on Don’s, Billy’s, Mags’s plates, carelessly as a farmer slopping pigs. He took off for the kitchen, all long skinny shambling legs; as he came marching back with another meat-piled platter Naomi suddenly darted into his path, reaching for a napkin that had dropped to the floor. He tripped right over her, fresh utensils and meat and gravy and gloppy rice splattering over the dirty wooden boards like some great invisible creature sicked it all up.

Stephen shouted in surprise, sprawled on hands and knees in the mess, and Naomi let out this breathless little scream of terror like a rabbit seized by a cat. Billy was out of his chair, thick pale fingers in her scalp clenching her chopped-off hair and nobody was doing anything, we were all sitting there, standing there, holding our breaths, waiting. Even knowing it’d take him only seconds, a second, to snap her neck.

“It was my fault,” Stephen said, almost slipping again in a juice puddle as he dragged himself to his feet. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, she was picking up—”

“You little shit,” Billy whispered, nose to nose with Naomi. His hard ex’s voice had gone soft and molten like wax under a match, as if the rest of us were squawking receding dots he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear through the fog of his own rage. “Do I keep you around so you can starve me? Do I do that? Do I keep you so you can
fuck with my food
and get your miserable scrawny meat-stick ass in the way of—”

“It was my fault!” Stephen shouted. “I wasn’t looking!”

“Leave her alone,” Lisa whispered, and she was out of her chair again like someone had pulled her by the collar, like slow strangulating strings were forcing her to rise. “Get your hands off her, and leave her alone.”

“You fucked with my food.” Billy shook Naomi until I felt my own teeth rattling. His face was a smooth, bloodless mask, eyes the thinnest of paper slits. “You
fucked
with—”

“I didn’t mean it!” Naomi’s voice came out in a warbling little croak, like she hadn’t spoken in hours or days, and then she was sobbing hard knowing it wouldn’t do her any good. “I was picking up Janey’s napkin, I didn’t see, I’m sorry—”

“This how you want to behave, Naomi?” Mags was perfectly calm, sitting there popping another chunk of venison in her mouth as Naomi went scarlet from crying. “You want the Scissor Men to take you away? Because if you don’t wanna be a good girl, if you don’t even wanna look where you’re going, they can come take you someplace bad—”

“I don’t.” Naomi was gasping, snuffling back tears, Lisa was standing there vibrating with rage trying to judge her moment, couldn’t just jump in case he hurt Naomi, and Don was smiling at Stephen daring him to try. “I don’t want to go with them, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I want to stay here with you—”

“Come on,” Kevin whispered, pushing back his chair, taking my arm ready to haul us both out the door. “Come with me and Phoebe. They’re too angry to care who they hurt. Come on quick.”

I stayed where I was because I couldn’t move. Phoebe sat there too, her eyes dark with unfeigned fear.

“You wanna go to the bad place?” Billy was singsonging now, a sneering lullaby from behind gleaming grinning teeth. “They’ll take you there, you little bitch, the Scissor Men’ll take you there
right now
and they’ll snip your hands clean off, snip your feet off, you’ll never run and trip people ever again, snip
snip
—”

Naomi made another sobbing screaming sound and Lisa was grappling with Don, who’d thrown himself feet-first in her path. Don’s chair went flying, Phoebe leapt out of the way before it could hit her and Kevin shoved her protectively behind him; Janey sat there smiling at nothing while Don and Lisa feverishly punched and kicked, scrabbling in the fallen meat scraps and drying smears of rice. Mags just laughed and kept stuffing her round pretty face and my skin felt swollen hot, my arm was raised with my water cup ready to fly at Mags’s head and then Janey, spacey oblivious Janey had my arm in a death grip, forcing it and the cup down with both hands. Stephen was brandishing something long and tarnished in Billy’s face, the big carving knife he’d dropped tripping over Naomi, and even though that was nothing to Billy but a rusty scrape, a papercut, we were all watching, the whole room was suddenly still and quiet. Stephen’s teeth were clenched tight and his face looked as flushed as Naomi’s, hot as mine felt, not with fear but rage.