Grave (12 page)

Unless he was going to kill everything else and leave me here, all by myself, the only thing still alive. Temporarily.

The windows here were too far up to look or climb through, so I didn’t have to see what was happening outside. Was it every-where now, all the dying, all the—I couldn’t be this afraid, it was ridiculous to be afraid when
I had his secret
. I knew exactly what brought dead things back to life, I’d
brought
them back, if I could do it with people there was no way I couldn’t figure out how with cottonwoods and anthills and rabbits. I had his secret right here, where nobody would think to look for it and even if they did, they couldn’t use it like I could. That’s why I was so important to Grandma, when she ran this whole lab; even among all the
Homo novus
, us new people their experiments created, I was special. He couldn’t do a thing to me. He had to know he couldn’t—

There was a sound, beyond my closed door, faint but unmistakable, close down the hallway. A sort of moaning sound, laughing and moaning all at once.

I missed Grandma. People laughed at me here, when I called her that, but she never did. She had this way of looking at someone, all level and unyielding just the same way she always carried her back, her long swoop of a neck perfectly straight and dignified, and when she gave them that stare—bright blue eyes that sparked and smoldered, when she was angry, like coals feeding a peculiar flame—people shut their mouths quick and scuttled to do what she’d told them. And she was always right, what she told them, if she hadn’t gotten sick and then vanished during those horrible few first weeks of the plague things around here would’ve been different, I wouldn’t have had to rebuild everything myself from the ground up. If she were here, right now, she’d stare Death himself straight in the face, just like she’d been doing through the experiments all along. She’d spark right back at him not the least afraid and he’d snivel and cringe for favor, oh did you think I
wasn’t
a Friendly Man anymore, how could you think that of me, or even better he’d just turn tail and run away—

That sound was growing louder. Like a man singing, horrible slurred off-key singing like someone drunk, except without a single recognizable word. It was words to whoever was singing, though, it was words to him in some secret language or other long since dead. Somehow I knew that. Somehow I knew that without ever having seen him.

If it were Death coming for me he’d have long since come in by now. He didn’t wait around for introductions, he never had.

I felt for my knife, my little surgical scalpel I’d salvaged for safekeeping, almost lost for good when I dropped it fighting Amy’s filthy dog. The singing was getting louder, I felt like I knew that voice—

“Open the fuckin’ door!”

The doors only lock from the outside so nothing could keep him from coming in, but he kept shaking the handle so it shook and shuddered in its metal frame until I thought of Death and the desk drawer and almost lost my nerve all over again. I wasn’t answering it, though, I didn’t have to do anything
he
said, not anymore. The rattling got louder and my teeth clicked and ground in turn.

“Stop that!” I shouted. I held tighter onto Sukie, clutched the scalpel until my fingers hurt. “This isn’t your house, get out!”

Drunken-sounding laughter, loud and phlegmy like a cold-cough caught in someone’s throat. “I’ll get out when I’m good and ready to get out, there ain’t anyone left here but us two chickenshits so just
open the goddamned door
!”

I didn’t budge. The door was slowly going rusted and warped, a loosening tooth in the lab’s great spacious mouth; it creaked and shook as it opened, the outside deadbolt rattling and ready to fall out in one piece. He stood there swaying in the doorway, clutching the frame two-handed like he might fall over, his pale bare toes flexed and poised against the floor as if the doorway were a barre and he were about to go up en pointe.

“You look like shit,” Billy said. Looking me up and down, staring at the dried blood streaks like it was all something brand new. Like he didn’t even know what blood looked like anymore.

“You look worse,” I said. I was on my feet now, my little knife extended. “Stay away from me.”

Billy’d always been a big pale fattened-up thing, a walking waxen puffball ever ready to burst his poison straight in your face, but now he looked shrunken and diminished, like something inside him really had blown up. His suit jacket hung in loose folds around his torso, his shoulders hunched forward like he might pitch to the floor at any second, his face was drawn and tired and flushed like he’d just wept himself sick and was quietly gathering breath to do it again—all for that Mags? That nasty bellowing bitch who led him everywhere by the nose, thought we were all her little barnyard pigs? I laughed when she died, when Amy killed her without even meaning to. Still wish I’d done it. The look she’d have had on her face, seeing me do it...

“What do you want,” I said. Flat and terse, no fear, like someone from a movie.

He didn’t budge from the doorway, just grinned hollow and sad from beneath those hollow sad eyes and swayed back and forth, forth and back. “So they left you behind, too, huh. Figures.”

“This is where I
live
,” I told him. Teeth gritted. “This is where I live, I told them to get the hell out of—what do you want, anyway? More human slaves? Well, I’m not human, I never have been. So you can just get the hell out.”

Not one word got through, I could tell just by his eyes. He shuffled his feet, bleary and confused, his head hanging down.

“I saw somethin’ out there,” he said. Arms still raised, fat waxen fingers curled over the doorframe. “Out in the woods. I saw something... out in the woods. Walking around. Spreading place to place like another fucking disease, doing its thing.” Falling forward the short, stubby length of his own arms, pitching back where he stood. Over and over. “Doing its thing. And you don’t wanna know what it is.”

“I already know about it.” I lowered my knife. He wasn’t even seeing me, never mind wanting to hurt me. “So it’s spread even further? Is it everywhere?”

“I ran to it.” He laughed and shook his head, ran a hand over the darker blond stubble at his jaw. “I ran to it, see, ‘cause I can run now like I couldn’t ever run before, I never get over how fast I can move. Didn’t you always say that, Mags? They might
think
old Billy’s a fat slow swelled-up slug, but he sure can stir his rotten stumps when he wants to, he’ll have you down in the mud neck-snapped and open-faced like a sandwich before you can scream help or goddamn you—she always said that.” Tears streaked down his pale dirty face, making clean damp tracks in the dried mud, then subsided again. “You always said that. And now, you’re—just lying there in the leaves. For the animals to eat. Like something true dead.”

He looked up at me again, and smiled. “Except, no more animals. Looks like. Everywhere I go. That thing, out there, it’s taking ‘em.”

Something deep in my stomach stirred and coiled around itself, tight and hurtful. That deer. Animals never did anything bad to me, the couple I’d killed to test I knew what I was doing I’d felt really sorry about afterward. Everywhere he goes.

“I ran toward it,” Billy kept saying, again and again. Like a chant. “I ran toward it, but I couldn’t reach—it was like, not a mirage, I knew it was really there, but like it was hidden behind some door or wall that I couldn’t see and so every time I almost got to it, it threw me back.” Shaking his head ruefully. “Threw me back like a fucking fish off the line. And then it just, went away.”

“He does that,” I said quietly. “All the time.”

He didn’t look half sad enough about it. Nobody really understands, even when they see it for themselves. “Hey! Doesn’t matter, though, you know why, kid?” He was leaning forward again, all huddled-up shoulders and a face full of happy conspiracy. “Know why? ‘Cause I’m getting there. I know I’m getting there. Not now, though, it’s not time yet—but later. Later on. After I take care of business. And then I’m gonna run. I’m gonna run like I can run now, like I never could before, I’m gonna crash right through that big old invisible wall and just keep on going and going.”

He smiled at me again, at me this time and not the open air. I felt good as certain now he wouldn’t hurt me but something about the sharp, tight curve of his mouth made the coiled thing inside me knot itself up harder, tug and twist. “So why the hell tell it to me?” I said.

Billy thought that one over. Nodding his head at someone I couldn’t see. “You can’t stay here, you know. You think you’re safe, he told me you’d think you were tucked up all tight in this little stinking shithole but your Friendly Man? He knows where you are.”

His smile was wider, harder, those long sharp-edged inhuman teeth a flash of incongruous good health, predatory eagerness in a face made gaunt and withered by grief. A death’s-head grin. “He knows where you are. And wherever you go? Whatever you do? He’ll find you.”

I never told anyone I called Death the Friendly Man. Nobody except Amy and her horrible friends, and they wouldn’t have said it to Billy. “Who told you that?” I demanded. “Who told you I used to call him—”

“We’ve gotta go,” he said. His smile didn’t waver. “You and I. We’ve gotta go, we’ve gotta get to what’s waiting for us. I’ll never get through the wall otherwise.” He leaned forward, half-bowed, defeated red-rimmed eyes alight with the pleasure of telling me something I didn’t want to hear. “It’s waiting for both of us. You, and me. You can stay here and let it find ya”—a single thick, damp potato-wedge of a finger traced a line across his throat, ear to ear—”or you can meet it out in the open. Your choice. Either way, once I find it again? I know what I’m gonna do.”

His voice was thick with satisfaction, the pride of a well thought-out plan, but the tears had started again. Stay here, and die. Because
he
knew just where I was, and he wasn’t happy. Or meet him out in the open, in the arena of ground and sky, and—

He thought he could kill me. He really thought that, that he could send Billy—Billy!—to finish me off, that he could threaten me and trick me into—I put my knife away, thrust hands in my pockets glaring at Billy. “Who told you I was in here?”

The corners of Billy’s mouth curled up again, subsided before a real smile broke out. “A man you can’t see.”

“Did he tell you to try and kill me?”

“A man you can’t see, behind a wall I can’t bust through.”

“Because you can’t kill me. You can’t. And he can’t either.” I cradled Sukie tighter in the crook of one arm, for strength. “He can’t kill anybody anymore, not without them deciding it’s time to die. That’s why he’s so angry. That’s why he’s trying to scare—”

“You can stay here, and rot,” Billy said. Jacket flapping around his diminished chest, pants loose and sliding on his hips, another full-flowering, poisonous tree dropping its fruit and withering before my eyes. “Or you can meet it out in the open.”

He couldn’t kill me. He couldn’t send Billy to kill me. He knew that now, knew our science was that far beyond him, that was why he was so angry. He couldn’t threaten me, not with Billy or dead-tinder trees or any other show-trick. He wanted to meet me out in the open, with
respect
, like the hero of some old movie meets the mortal enemy he can’t help but admire. And Billy was just the collateral damage, Billy even knew he was but with Mags gone, he didn’t care. Okay. Stop hiding away like some sad little human coward. Meet the Friendly Enemy-Man out in the open, fight him with everything I’ve got, show him all his old tricks meant crap. Obsolete. Less than nothing.

And then, everything that was his, all the power, would be mine.

Sukie was small and pliable enough I could bend her double, her bare dirty cloth feet touching the top of her yarn hair, and stuff her into my jacket pocket. I reached over to the dented gray metal desktop, grabbed for a couple of lake stones I’d used as paperweights—brick red, a mucky grayish-green threaded in pink—and when I felt the heat radiating from their surface I wrapped my hand in an old T-shirt for protection, gritted my teeth against the pain as I shoved them in my other pocket. The awful heat gnawed straight through the jacket cloth into my side and hip and leg, but they’d acted funny like this before and they couldn’t actually burn anything and I wasn’t leaving them behind just because of a little pain. I was tougher than anyone thought, than they ever wanted to think. I’d put up with a lot worse.

I took a deep breath and crossed the room, stood there until Billy retreated almost meekly from the threshold. He fell in beside me, shoulder to shoulder, stinking of muck and sweat, and we went down the hallway to the lab’s front entrance.

“Where are we going?” I asked, as we crossed the tall half-dead yard grass for the white gravel road, the noise of our feet on the stone-powder like someone softly, tentatively chewing something crunchy. “Where are we supposed to go, to meet him?”

“Leave that up to me,” said Billy. One of his puffy pale doll-feet caught a sharp fragmented edge, bled in spots against the white, healed over again in moments. “He told me to fetch you, tells me everything I need to know—so you just leave that well up to me.”

Meet him out in the open, the Friendly Man, in an arena of his choosing. Fight to the death, or rather, to the eternity. Okay. You asked for it. You’ll find out just what Grandma taught me, just what we learned about how to beat you back forever.