Grave (11 page)

“D’you even know what you’re asking me?” The gnawing, sickly little spark that had flickered to life inside me when we all started to wake up suffocating, when I went just yesterday into the trees and found kitty-Mags, kitty-Joe, the whole colony of feral cats who shared our woods lying dead in the underbrush, it flared up now like a burst of fountain water. I was hot and hollow as the inside of those lake stones, like something was trying to melt me down, but I’m not anything’s fucking candle-wax, I’ve never let fear turn me runny soft. “You’ve got no idea what it’s like actually
seeing
him, face to face. None. You think there’s any talking to it, that it knows us? Needs to know anything but itself?” I was laughing now. I couldn’t help it. “This was all your idea, right, Renee? Jesus Christ, everything that’s happened and you’re still just a fucking ‘maldie. I thought you were smarter than that. But that thing, it’s like looking at the whole universe at once except that part of it can talk, and you think it gives a damn whether we live or die!”

“I told you,” Linc said to Renee as I pushed through the doorway, stumbling when I shoved past him. He was almost laughing, too. “I told you, and told—”

“Jessie!” Renee yelled, as my feet hit the sands, as I started marching down the ridge to get away. “If he wants us for real this time—I never said to try and talk him out of it!”

The beach grasses, dry and sharp and crusted with sand, bent and bowed into the wind; the sky was clouding over again, turning an ashy pearl as the sunset crept up, afternoon starting to diminish into night. I kept going.

I heard footsteps behind me and then Linc’s sharp, reproving voice. Renee still had just enough hoocow in her to think earnest hand-holding talk could solve anything; thank God Linc had some damned sense. Some. The sands spread out ahead of me, a big curving sweep of beige raked into fabric-folds by the winds; nobody’s footsteps marked it but our own, nobody’s tracks and traces but the gulls. When I stood right on top of the ridge, bare toes pressed hard against the shifting ground and all that clean open space below, I could pretend it’d only ever been the gulls and grasses, that I just dreamed it all up myself from nothing. My own private landscape, sketched freehand.

A good drawing pencil makes a muted, crinkly scratch against crisp new paper. I hated the sound of it. I hated the way the tin foil rustled, when Renee tried wrapping another bent, sagging cardboard box into a useless solar oven. (Cake, Lisa said that once, if we had an oven we could bake a cake. What the hell would I do with a damned cake? Did she ever understand that meat was all that tasted like anything to the rest of us, anymore?) I hated Linc’s tuneless, sing-song muttering as he dug sandy-soil seedbeds, snapped a thrashing rabbit’s neck, leafed through our salvage piles from the Cowles County Library for the eighty-eighth time. All of it was nothing but goddamned useless noise, just like the rush of the lake waters, the winter wind, the spring thunder—none of it, magnified eighty-eight times over, could never do a thing to shatter the quiet inside us all. I was nothing
but
music, once; its electricity sang night and day all through my supposedly dead flesh, whenever I slept, whenever I woke, but now all that was gone. All I had left, all any of us had left, was the deadbeat pulse of a pumping heart, the nasty little sucking sound of our own hoo breath. Worthless. It was worthless. We’d all gone stone deaf.

The beach, looking at it, walking on it, it felt like the only thing we had or did that made any true sense, that wasn’t just distraction or marking time. Like our only happy thing. Even hunting—hunting!—didn’t feel like that anymore. It was just another endless, never-finished chore in the long line of perpetual chores that made up living again. Our new neighbors, down the road, how the hell did they put up with having to cook and serve their food all hoo-proper on top of it all? I’d go crazy. Crazier.

Maybe this is how Teresa felt, back in the first-born days of the sickness, when she stopped hunting altogether, started demanding all the rest of us in the gang fetch her food. Maybe we’re all getting sick again, like before. But it’s not that I can’t eat, that I’m not hungry. It’s that even as I need to do it, as I can’t stop feeling it, satiation’s gone from bliss to fleeting pleasure to work and I just don’t see the point of it at all anymore.

Neither does Linc, but then, he never did. The discussions we’ve had, late at night, when we were sure Renee and especially Lisa were both asleep:
I’ve tried it
, Linc said,
I’ve tried all this, living and dead, and I’m like Sam was: I just don’t like it. Jessie, if we ever get the choice back and can decide for ourselves, again—

I didn’t know what to say, back then, lying with foreheads touching and fingers twined together, hearing the rustles and calls and cries of nighttime through the newfound barriers of walls and window. We’d fought for this life-afterlife-after-death, all of us had; we’d wrenched it back and dropped it into our own waiting laps and how am I supposed to promise to give it up again, say a fuck-you that big and then agree to just get fucked in turn? So I didn’t promise to give up on life, not then, because I couldn’t decide and because even if I said yes, even if I wanted to right then and there, we’d been left no choice. Just like poor Sam, who tried so hard to get out of his human life and then just woke up again, right where he was, as one of us. At least now Sam, my old Sam, he had what he’d always wanted. He was gone.

Enough! Annie, back in the old days, she’d look at me right now and go,
Girl, you’re turning soft, what you need is a good goddamned fight.
Her, Joe, always right there to give me one. I missed that, the constant mad twitching urge to kick, punch, bite, wrench necks and break bones, do
something
with all the energy pulsing inside me. Did I miss that? Would fists and feet be anything now but another dutiful task? I didn’t even know that feeling now anyway. It all drained straight out of me when I became a new sort of human. Inhuman. I’d had no choice.

And if Renee wanted her Big Answers so bad, she could fucking well find them herself. Whatever this was—if it was anything at all—we’d just get through it, like we had the sickness, and not waste time asking any damned questions.

Because when we weren’t looking and we still thought we owned ourselves, that life and death might actually be in our own hands,
getting through it
had become our one duty, our sole and endless chore. Because one way or another, we just didn’t have any choice.

Sitting on the last bit of powdery piled-up sand before it all went damp and smooth from the tides, it felt like being on a little island unto itself divorced from the rest of the beach. I perched at the edge of the dry with my heels dug into the wet, the lake rolling inward in a heavy, easy wave that never quite reached my toes, and when I looked up again I saw a vast, dark figure silhouetted against the horizon, walking slow and easy toward me over the surface of the waters.

A muscle in my leg wrenched and twisted as I struggled to my feet. The ashen pearl sky, the sun swelling up flame-colored and full as sunset crept closer, they made a pale illuminated border all around him, a corona, his darkness like the burnt-out hole in a photograph someone set on fire. The great shadow of him took shape as he came closer and it was Jim, my brother, it was my father, it was poor blinded Lillian from the undead days and it was Ben who’d died alongside Sam and it was me, it was my own self and my dead departed face coming toward me faster and faster, walking so easy on the Lake Michigan waters. I was smiling at myself standing so small and astonished here on the beach, pleased to meet me. Every step I took from horizon to shore covered miles in a single moment. I was inches away from myself now, smiling and holding my arms out in greeting and all around me was that same border of pearly light, fiery rays of sun, blinding suffocating light all outside and inside me, inside the arms I’d wrap around me in ceaseless, perpetual embrace, nothing but night—

I was lying on my side half-coated in wet sand, no memory of stumbling or falling. I took in shallow gulps of air, like a beached fish, and my whole chest was one hollow constricted ache; something had passed straight through it, seizing my breath as it went, then tossed it back to me as an afterthought. I pulled myself upright, whipping my head around to take in the woods to my left, bluish silhouette of dead steel mills on the horizon to my right, the sands themselves and the now-empty dune ridges above and the dark undisturbed tidal sweep of lake waters. I squinted and then stared into the swelling blood-orange sun, in search of his lingering, thieving shadow—and there was nothing. He—it—had passed straight through me, and was gone.

God damn you, Renee. God
damn
you for being right.

With gleaming spots still dancing before my eyes, I rushed back up the ridge, urgent strides kicking up cascades and miniature sandstorms with every step, and back on level ground I ran past the thickening clumps of dune grass, down the dirty sand that became sandy dirt with each new step, along the trodden-down path our feet had made before Lisa’s empty beach house, Renee’s, the one Linc and I shared. I nearly thudded straight into Linc as I rounded the corner of our house, the one farthest in the woods and nearest the outside road. When he instinctively threw his hands out in self-defense, I grabbed his forearms, let my fingertips sink in to assure myself he really was flesh, that he wasn’t that sunset specter that could take the form of anything that’d died.

“Down on the beach,” I managed, out of breath, cursing the fucking air for crippling me once again. “I saw—”

“Tell me later,” Linc said, glancing over his shoulder. “I was just about to find you.”

“What d’you mean, ‘tell me later’? Linc, down on the beach, what Renee said, I saw—”

“Jessie?” He jerked his chin toward the trees. “It’s just right now we’ve got company. Hoo company.”

“Oh, fuck.” I started laughing again because this was too much, too goddamned much in one day. “For the love of God, tell them to fuck off back to their little Garden of Eden, right now I can’t take any of their—”

“It’s not them,” Linc said, his face closing up like it always did when something beyond him had him angry. “Just... come with me.”

He turned for the woods. I followed, puzzled, brushing off drying sand as we passed the cottonwoods and oak that grew thickly in this part of the forest, the little cluster of pine trees that signaled the approach of the white gravel roadside and the faded, weatherbeaten sign marking the beach. The trees were still shedding pale new spring leaves for the fuller deeper growth of approaching summer, growing so close together they made a natural green-tinged tunnel of the road. As we emerged, Renee was standing there, looking tense and lost for words, and as the last sunspot streaks faded from my vision, I could see why.

Weighted down by a half-dozen backpacks bursting at the seams, her eyes ringed bruise-blue from fatigue, Lisa swayed from foot to foot on the gravel like she was poised for flight, like the backpacks were folded-up wings that would unfurl and carry her up toward the dying sun. Standing next to her was a little knot of strangers, humans I hadn’t seen in the settlement down the road: a red-haired girl maybe the age I was when I died; older skewbald-redhead, obviously a sister or mother; tall skinny boy with dark hair and a tense, wary face; a kiddie not more than seven clutching hard at Lisa’s hand. A great black dog, shaggy-furred and with watery, red-rimmed, strangely beatific eyes, sitting obediently by the red-haired girl’s side, watching the hoos do their hoodom thing with an expression of elevated patience.

All of them, except the dog, looked like they might drop where they stood; all of them, except the dog, kept glancing from Lisa to me and back like they were expecting bad trouble, like they’d been told to anticipate a fight. Because fucking with humans is still one of the few pleasures we’ve all got left, I gave them a deliberate, calculated smile, a sarcastic little bow of the head. Lisa didn’t smile back.

“Long time,” she said, calm and measured, like all the others weren’t even there. “Good to see you again, Jessie.”

“Is it?” I asked. Linc and Renee, the hoo strangers, they didn’t say anything. They just watched.

“Yes,” she said quietly. Blinking hard, all of a sudden, a convulsive little muscle-twitch subsiding soon as it arrived. “It is.”

I thought that one over. Long enough for the mother-red to start looking truly nervous, the kiddie to frown and give an anxious, instinctive tug on Lisa’s sleeve.

“So put your goddamned
luggage
down, already,” I replied. “How the hell many miles did you walk around like that, anyway? You look like the hunchback of Notre Dame’s daughter.”

SIX

NATALIE

A
ll my drawings. My desk with the special locked drawer, broken now, that Amy couldn’t open. My filing cabinet. My doll. I huddled in the far corner of my room, holding Sukie my doll I named after my favorite of the old lab staff clutched close to my chest, waiting. The residential doors only lock from the outside and the desk was too heavy for me to move by myself, nobody left to help me block the door, when he came to kill me that wouldn’t stop him anyway. When my man returned to kill me, like he was destroying everything else that was mine: the oak trees, the lilacs, the deer, anyone who could help me out. Before he comes back for me.