Frail (33 page)

My dad was a mill worker. He died coming home, when I was five, when his car broke down on the Skyway and a gang of undeads dragged him away. I’d thought. I’d been told. Except that he knew things, maybe, he wasn’t supposed to know. They never found his body. Which “they?”

“I was your age,” my mother said to me. Her eyes were closed now against the sight of the room, the disjuncture of her own thoughts. “Around your age. I’d run away from home, from my father. Nobody looked for me. Squatting in those rotten old hazard houses here, maybe in East Chicago, with a bunch of other kids—I don’t remember who or where. Like Stephen said, when you die and come back enough times you start losing the whole thread of—there was a man, in a car, he looked like he had money, and so I went with him. And I woke up in hell.”

Natalie sighed. “That’s so melodramatic, okay? You don’t need to make it all sound so—”

“I think I was in jail,” Stephen said. He slipped his hand from mine, rising to his feet. “Juvenile detention. For fighting. I got angry a lot. I was somewhere else, and I woke up here. We had rooms here, cells. Locked. That felt familiar. They wouldn’t tell us why we were there, what they were doing to us. Like we were dumb animals, in cages, just waiting for—”

“They did use animals, to start, but it never worked—of course it wouldn’t work, who ever heard of a zombie dog? Stupid to try. Anyway, it wasn’t that bad.” Natalie shrugged, impatient, this was all so very much not the point. “They did what they had to. None of us would be here if they hadn’t.”

“Injections, usually. But not always.” Stephen tilted his head up to the windows, to the sheen of sunlight filtering through our mucky aquarium glass. “Hypothermia, sometimes. Afterward you were cut open, studied. Take samples of everything. See if your physiology was really still the same. How’d you do this to Amy, to all of us. Tell us how.”

“There were—six of us, maybe, seven?” Natalie stood up too, fingers fluttering nervously. “After the plague, though, I thought I was the only one left.”

“Killing each other in the hallways, here,” Stephen said, and his lips curled back in the semblance of pleasure. “For meat. All the staff, the scientists. I got out, then. During the plague they caused.”

“They never brought me back here,” my mother said. “After I got out.” She was combing her fingers through my hair now, the limp greasy ponytail halfway down my back, trying to work out the tangles. “I was stupid enough to think I’d lost them. But they knew. They knew all along where I was—they were watching me. Watching us, to see how I
integrated
, back with normal people. I integrated like shit is what I did, you saw, Amy.” Her hand rested against my head, trembling. “They had plans for you. All along. I know they had plans for you.”

“And you still left me. By myself. With people who knew I wasn’t really theirs.”

She pulled her hand away like she’d burned it. Like I’d burned it.

“I’d lost my mind,” she said quietly. “After—that day. After I killed—I knew him, he stood there dead and rotten and his eyes, his voice, I knew them like my own and I went ahead and I killed him anyway. Just to prove I could do it. Just to prove I was on the side of the living.” Her eyes, her voice, were faded and flat, worn down with a self-accusing misery that never ceased. “But I’m not one of them, not since the lab got hold of me, I’m a dead thing too and for like to kill like? Like I did that day? It’s murder. He came back to find me, and I—and then I thought, but my daughter, she’s a
living
thing. Leave her to the living. A corpse shouldn’t care for a real live child. Go with the dead where you belong.” Her hand came hovering close to my hair, my skin, needing to touch. “So I left you behind. It didn’t take them long to find me. Bring me back here.”

Past time you came home,
they’d told Stephen. He’d turned his back on Natalie now, was watching me and my mother in silence. “So you were here all this time,” I said.

“I wandered away, when the plague hit. Hid. Wandered back again. Nowhere else to go. I was sure you were dead.” She touched my face, lingering on the wonder of our mutual flesh, half-conjoined, together in this rotten womb. She turned to Natalie. “I lived in the basements, hiding, I never lured anyone here, I haven’t hurt
anyone
. What have you done to this place? What did you do to my daughter?”

“So I went to Paradise,” Natalie continued, as if nobody else had spoken, “to see if more of us were left—and there was Stephen. Didn’t even remember me, but he was nice, felt sorry for me with my whole poor-orphan act. Tried to
protect
me.” She beamed. “He knew me, still. In some way. Deep down.”

“And this is how you paid him back,” I said.

Her eyes sparked. “He was valuable. The work here, the real work using our kind, it’s valuable. I mean, Amy, my God,
you
were—I couldn’t believe it when I met you, I’d seen your mom’s picture in the files, you’re a dead ringer, it had to be you. All those rumors she’d had a baby—do you have any idea what it means, that
homo novus
could come back to life, conceive a living child with another living human being? Do you even know? All those plague-dogs are sterile, but us”—her smile was proud, so proud, like she’d been behind all of it all along—“we’re truly alive. Just like human beings, but better. You helped prove it.”

Just
like
human beings. But not human, not really. Not deep inside. Stephen saw my face and he sat back down next to me, gripping my hands like he knew this feeling, that his whole life and everything he’d thought was true was retreating and receding like a hometown in the rearview mirror. A town I was hurtling away from down an empty, deserted highway, late at night, Don’s car, no brakes. Of course he knew that feeling. Of course my mother did. And they didn’t even have the memories of what they’d lost.

“And what have you proven,” I asked.

Natalie shrugged. “That we can grow, age. That we’re not degenerate-rotten like zombies, or stuck in glue like the plague-dogs, we live, breathe, change—I’ve lived here all my life, since I was two or three. I’m the youngest one they ever brought back.” Her face was suffused with half-embarrassed pride. “And I’m bringing all of us back. I’m finishing what they started.”

She looked from me, to Stephen, to my mother, and smiled. “Daddy’s dead now,” she whispered, “and I don’t know what became of Grandma. But now, I’ll have a real family—but first, Amy, you have to tell me about the Friendly Man, the one who comes and goes. You have to tell me why he likes you better. Why he always comes for you, and he always leaves me behind.”

A sound prickled at the edge of my consciousness, a subdued tinnitus I knew no one else could hear. It was the sound of an animal, a dog, scratching persistently at the room’s heavy, impenetrable door.

 

 

“Daddy and Grandma,” Stephen repeated. He held the words thoughtfully in his mouth, let them take on an edge of derision. “But you were here since you were little—they came to visit? Your real family?”

There was a flash of envy, resentful sadness in his eyes. Natalie was oblivious. “Tell me why he likes you better,” she asked me, with desperate urgency. “I know he loves you best if you’ve killed someone, doesn’t he. Well, I’ve killed things, I’ve killed rats and squirrels and one of those cats that used to hang around here, I meant to kill that Paradise girl I ran away with—”

“So what the hell stopped you?” I felt not anger but dull contempt at her excitement: A sullen child again, I was, stuck at the birthday party of a classmate I’d never liked. “Not nerves, obviously. Afraid Daddy would find out and ground you? Take away your bike?”

“Daddy’s dead.” Her features tensed with actual grief. “He wasn’t my father for real but he took care of me and—he worked here. Daddy died in the plague. Grandma, I don’t know what happened to Grandma, she disappeared when everyone got sick and I haven’t found her. They ran the whole lab, you know, the whole thing. They supervised everyone, but I was their special project, the youngest one, they liked me—”

“The least squeaky guinea pig,” Stephen said, and smiled when she flinched. “Tell us how you brought us back. How they did, over and over again.”

“I thought you were dead, Amy,” my mother said softly. “I thought the lab was gone, everyone who ran it was gone, if I’d had any idea they could still—”

“So why did you keep sending me those messages?” All my edges were dangerously thin, filed down to a translucence that could slice through anyone who came close. I wasn’t human anymore, not human like other people are. Maybe I never had been, because my mother who conceived me, carried me never was. “Did you think it was cute? Did you like saying, Don’t worry, I’ll find you, just keep going, you just kept doing that even after all those men almost—and died right in front of—you called me a liar—”

I’d started crying again from plain confusion and Stephen was demanding
men, what men
and my mother was hugging me fiercely, the three of us were a huddled-up little flock of crows calling to each other and the prettiest little bird, the yellow finch trying so hard to show off her feathers, she was shut out. Even in the midst of misery that thought gave me an unholy satisfaction, scratched an itch inside me just like the sound of phantomsolid nails against a closed door.

“I never called you a liar.” My mother glared up at Natalie, certain she’d found the true culprit. “I didn’t send you messages, I wanted to, I wanted to so much but there wasn’t any—”

“Yes, you did,” Natalie said. “You must have.” She bit her lip smiling. “Or someone did it for you.”

That creature, the one who killed the men right before my eyes. The one who saved me. Shifting into the skins of dead people. The dead people I’d seen all over the road, following me and Lisa—my mother had been dead. They’d all been right, it turned out, all their nonsense about her dying. Because that creature, he only takes on the look of the dead. I drew back, studying her hard.

“You’re really you,” I said. “You’re really—you’re not
him
, again, in disguise.”

She touched my hair again, so bewildered I could see she didn’t know what the hell else to do, and that convinced me. “I—Amy, when I left I thought it was better to just leave. To go, and then everything fell apart—”

“It was the Friendly Man!” Natalie shouted, furious, triumphant. “He used to visit me too, when I was little, he can look like anyone who’s died! Anyone he wants! Once when he came he looked like
me
, that was so strange. It was one of the bad nights, something went wrong and I almost stayed dead, and my dissection stitches got infected, bad, and I kept calling for Grandma and—”

She broke off, gulping, hands balled up by her sides. “He came to me. Ever since I was little, whenever I had to stay locked in my room with my drawings and I was lonely or when it hurt so I almost couldn’t breathe. He said he loved me. He called me ‘kiddo,’ he kept saying, ‘Courage, kiddo.’ He told me I’d outlast everyone, everyone around me.” Her eyes were shiny-wet and she blinked ferociously, almost squeezing them shut to hold it back. “And he was right.”

Stephen turned to me. My mother.
Explain.

“An Angel of Death,” I told them. “A demon, maybe. I don’t know. He can take the shape of anyone who died, sound like them—he’s been following me, showing himself to me all along, except I didn’t know what he was. He’s followed me everywhere, since I left Lepingville.”

He could sound like
me
. He could be walking around, looking and sounding just like me, somewhere else, just outside, right now. Because I’m dead too. The thought made me shivery and sick but Natalie was smiling, calm again, that Paradise moment of fear and loneliness she let slip vanished sudden as it arrived.

“We’re all his,” she said. “Everyone who’s died, jumped in that big cold lake, he becomes part of us and we’re part of him. He can look like us, sound like us. We’re his special ones. But the people who killed someone else? Who
made
death with their own hands? They’re the ones he loves best of all. He never leaves them.”

The smile melted from her mouth. “Except, he hasn’t come back yet for me.”

Outside the door came scritch-scritching, stronger, longer, then an abrupt, attenuated
whuuuuufff!
so loud I almost jumped. Made myself keep still. This wasn’t a confession I owed her, my own murderer.

“That’s very interesting,” I said. Bland and indifferent. He came back for me, my dog, he didn’t leave me here alone after all. He was looking out for me. Or about to tear me into pieces, and even that, it was okay. Better than being left behind, forgotten.

“Tell me why he never came back for me.” Natalie stood straight over me now and her foot prodded me in the thigh, urging me to get up, stop daydreaming and come recite for the class. “I knew you were family, even without looking like
her
I could tell right off. Just like Stephen could tell. The Friendly Man, he promised all the family would return here, everyone would—the birthplace!” She waved her arms, flinging them at the grimesmeared walls, the air so thick with decay it smelled like last autumn, an ordeal to breathe. “The family home. He promised we’d all come back here—”

“You’re going to tell me how you brought us back.” Stephen slid to his feet again, hands in his pockets, one corner of his mouth crooking up in a smile while the other was a stick-straight line of stone. “The medical records. The lab reports. Obviously you’ve got ’em, you went and—”

“
I’m
the lab report.” Natalie scowled, baring her teeth. “I don’t need records, good thing since they’re all rotted trash or eaten up—they taught me, Daddy and Grandma, they didn’t want me to be scared when they cut me up or injected me with stuff so they told me everything, how it worked, exactly what they did. They made me memorize everything, repeat it over and over until it was part of me. I’m smart. I didn’t understand it at first. But now I do. You’re proof, aren’t you?” Her eyes flickered to his torn-up throat. “But either way, it’s not all me. If you’re meant to come back, I can make it happen—if you’re meant to die, nothing I do can change it. Nothing anybody can do. But you’re all here now. We’re all here. Of all the test subjects, only us. That means something. It’s got to.”