Grave (5 page)

I had to stop crying so hard, I felt sick. Choking on snot like some nasty lab bitty-baby. It was usually so pretty up here on the ridge, the white gravel road winding outside the lab and the whole sweep of dunes and water right in front of you, the woods and the lab yard dark green shadows behind. It was like having your own country estate and I would’ve shown Amy the Aquatorium, its columns concrete gray instead of marble white but still like a pretty little Greek temple cake-crumbling into the sands. Up on the second floor where it’s all open space you can see the whole horizon, all the way out across the lake to Chicago. Chicago’s gone now, I suppose. I never even got to see it.

It was nice here, though. Didn’t need Chicago. The lab would have beach parties here and I got to go too, for summer solstice and the Fourth of July and Labor Day and Birth-Day, the day they found out one of their experiments could bear a living child—did you know that, Amy? Did you know dozens, hundreds of people you never even knew gathered here for
your birthday
with barbecue and sparklers and cake and you got everything, you always got everything. Your mom might’ve run away but she was still contributing, they were still researching her in the wild. You too. I could’ve showed them to you, all the files and field notes they kept on you and your mother. I even saved some of them after the plague hit and the sick people were looting the lab, so hungry they were eating paper. I was saving them for you, Amy! All of it!

I decided to burn them. Never mind Birth-Day, you all could go ahead and die out there without my secret of what could bring you back, and I’d have a Death-Day, I’d take everything about you and burn it all up. Right away. I crawled out from under the pine tree, trudged over the weed-gone lawn and through the back door, and I was home. My home.

There were rusty red streaks still smearing the floor, my floor, where I’d fought with that filthy thing Amy called a pet dog, but here were all my drawings, my desk with the special locked drawer she didn’t open, my little filing cabinet. My doll. There’d been boxes of files about Amy and her mother but what I’d salvaged just filled up that one little desk drawer. The thought of how she hadn’t even thought to look in there, passed right over
herself
by spying on me, it made me feel even better as I jabbed the drawer-key into the lock.

Bent warped key, soft cheap metal, the lock rattling loose in its base—it was all so cheap, all the used-up banged-up things they gave me, not like precious Amy’s barbeque-sparklers-layer cake Birth-Day with no expense spared. Didn’t matter, not anymore, what I had here was worth ten thousand parties. I had everything that was left: her mother’s real name, experiment logs, some of those reports Amy’s pediatrician and her dad’s sister and a couple of neighbors sent in because humans really are tattling scum who’ll do anything for a little money, hospital records—the damn drawer stuck halfway open; I’d stuffed too many papers inside. I snaked fingers in to try and edge the papers away from the drawer seams, ease them out—

Cold in here, like those high-up windows I could never force open had suddenly broken, given way in a storm, letting early March air rush in. But it was almost May. I’d been sweating trying to break open my own stupid lock but my arms and back went tense with the chill, a fresh strong punishing breeze with a damp green smell of springtime, and then I started to shiver. So cold, even in dead January this room never got so cold. The drawer wouldn’t move, I couldn’t get my fingers far enough in to grab. I hated this desk, I hated this room, I was such a special-special experiment but not like that bitch Amy, who got her own white desk with flowers on it and a chair to match when she was twelve (her aunt tattled about the birthday, her aunt tattled about everything), all I ever got was this gray metal ugliness with a shortened leg they were going to throw away—

“Turn around,” he said, behind me.

His voice was soft, quiet, velvety-damp just like the air: sharp and freezing as all of January, rich and scent-filled like the middle of May. It made my head spin. You, again. After all this time. Go away, it was Amy you really loved. All the work we did here, the work I was still doing, was so I never had to love you again.

“Turn around, Miss Beach,” he said. Even quieter.

Natalie Beach. That was how we got written up in the files, us lab rats, like medieval people whose last names were all Of-The-Nearest-Village. I never found out what my parents were really called, or what happened to them. I yanked two-handed at the drawer, felt its frame buckle and warp.

“You can leave now,” I said. Cool as March, keeping all my love to myself. My fear. “I don’t need you anymore.” Let the drawer snap loose from the frame, go flying from the desk like a tooth pulled from a mouth with twine and a slamming door. “You only ever pretended to be my friend, go talk to precious Amy if that’s who you—”

“Amy will die soon.” Soft as soft now, a sneering croon, like a lullaby for a baby its mother hates from birth. “That much, at least, will make you happy. Be a polite little freak of nature and turn around.”

My teeth banged together with the cold, clicking sharp and hard like the teeth of the zombie I’d seen die out in the woods when I was six or seven: it succumbed to old age, rotted and crumbled down to a walking skeleton, shaking itself to powder there in the April violets and needle-stick beach grass. I’d never be warm again, I’d never—I threaded my hands into my sleeves, sweatshirt fleece spotted and ruined with dog’s blood and mine, and cringing and shivering in all my love and fear, I turned around.

Death can take on any face he wants, when he calls on you, the face of any dead person he’s already claimed as his. Gray hair, this time. Little wire-rimmed glasses. Khakis and neatly tucked-in flannel shirt, the clothes of a lab man heading out for field work. A nasty, torn-up nylon backpack, bulging and stained dark brown with something’s old blood, slung easy over one shoulder. He smiled at me and my skin went numb with the encroaching ice.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said.

Feeling your heart leap up and dance for someone you’d sworn to hate is like hurting so much you pass out, your own insides tormenting you into oblivion, and then getting hauled upright and forced awake so the torture can start all over again. His colorless eyes saw straight through me and into my jumped-up heart and my fingers were tinged blue; it wasn’t him doing that, this part of the world was well used to frost in May. I shoved my hands in my pockets and clenched my fingers, rubbing against the cloth to try and coax them back to life.

“Hell of a greeting,” he said, “after so long away.”

His voice had a weight that stretched out its softness, distorted it, like fistfuls of coins in a sock. “I called and called for you and you never came,” I said, backed against the warped desk drawer like he’d come for my papers, Amy’s papers. Like he gave a damn about things like that. “When I was younger, and they were still experimenting on me. After the plague, when I was the only one left here. After I started our experiments again. All that time.” I laughed. “We’re getting rid of you, that’s the whole point. We’re figuring out how to control when life ends, how to keep folks from dying at all. And I, me, I’ve found out how to make it happen, what the real secret is to cheat death—and it’s right here, on this beach. It’s right here. So I don’t need you anymore.”

He was standing across the room and then suddenly he was right next to me, inches away, and I never saw him move. Nose to nose, no human breath from him to warm my freezing face, and his raised-up hands didn’t touch me but somehow I still went stumbling backwards grabbing at the air, clutching the desk for balance as he pulled the broken drawer out so smooth and light. He didn’t touch my papers but they spilled out anyway, of their own accord, fluttering all over the floor in a dry drifting snow.

“Well?” he said, and slammed the drawer shut so hard the whole desk, my arms gripping it, shuddered. “Aren’t you happy you’ve got your Friendly Man back? Here-boy good-boy coming running whenever you want him?” Smiling, smiling wider, his words a throaty hiss. “Baby cried and cried for papa, now baby’s got him back.”

This wasn’t his house, he couldn’t talk to me like this. This was
my
house, all my laboratory now. He’d always been so nice to me before. “I told you, I know what you’re about.” Stronger, louder than that, dammit, Grandma who ran all the scientific testing on me always said to straighten up and look people in the eye. I’m using my loudest straighten-up voice right now and I still sound like a weak little girl. “I know what your secret is, I know why this beach is so important to you. We found it, all of us here, the lab found out how to control life and death. It’s right here in the sands. I’ve killed two people, with my own hands, and brought them back alive. I don’t need you anymore—”

“Baby’s got papa back and if she’s very, very good, he’ll swear never, ever to leave her again, no matter what she does. Isn’t that just what you always wanted, deep down in your rotten dragged-back stinking dead insides? Or maybe there’s some second thoughts now, rattling around that tiny little mind?” Slam, went the drawer, slam again, his stretched-out arm shoving and banging it shut. Again. Again. “Aren’t you glad you’ve got me?” Again. “How d’you like me?” Again. “D’you like your blue-eyed boy?”

That slamming drawer vibrated all through me like a blow, a hard bruising fist, but I couldn’t let go of the desk. No matter where I turned my head, we were face to face and his light clear eyes, stolen human-mask eyes, they tugged at something in me like I really was rotten inside, rotten as the dead things that survived the autumn sickness, and that was the part of me that yearned to have him back. “I think you have to go away now,” I said, and something dragged the words out of me, in a whisper, like they were all flattened and scraped against a cold concrete floor. “This isn’t your house anymore. We dug up your secret. We know how to make dead people live again—not as zombies. As
people
. You can’t stop it. And you have to leave.”

He tilted his head, his eyes soft with amusement. “Go away now,” he repeated. Slam. “Is that begging, perhaps? Is that how you tell me you’re scared, under all that idiot talk about my
secrets
?” Slam. Slam. “Don’t just spit out nonsense you’ve heard the grownups say. You’re far too old for that.” Slam. “Old enough to talk.” Slam. “Reason.” Slam. “Argue. Old enough to die. But then, nothing on earth’s ever too young to die.”

Slam, thud, slam, reverberating through my arms and shoulders and back and jaw, wrenching me between his hands like I was a dry half-broken branch. The drawer banged home and pulled back faster and faster and then it was a volley, a frenzy of clanging steel and jolting blows shredding me into splinters and I screamed, my fingers flying away from the desktop frantic to save me. I stumbled backwards, didn’t fall, wrapped my arms around myself but they couldn’t keep me still; I shook and trembled with the rattling echoes inside me, the screech of tortured metal ringing in my ears.

He reached an arm toward me, to jolt and break me just like he had that desk, and I cringed and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, he was holding something out—my papers, the whole lot of them from all over the floor, gathered up tight and crumpling in his fist. He couldn’t have picked them all up so fast. Bits of them fell to the floor again, like torn-off corners, and then, there in his hand, they all crumbled so softly into pulp, into dust.

“You won’t need these anymore,” he told me, watching them disintegrate. “Amy won’t need them either. Not where she’s going. There’s nothing your researchers”—that word, in his quiet mouth, was a snake poised to strike—”can tell anyone anymore, to do them any good.”

My desk was ruined now, the frame buckled and bent and the lock-up drawer twisted nearly in half, hanging forlorn from the edge of its runners like it’d melted. The vibrations of it were still banging all through me, my whole skin prickling and painful as the warmth, spring warmth, slowly flowed back. I wasn’t going to let him think he’d really scared me.

“We can do lots of things now,” I said. “We can bring dead people back. I can. Us lab rats, we’re new, a new kind of human. When we die, we can bring each other back. This isn’t your house anymore. We’ve kicked Death out.”

“You think you have me figured out,” he said, and he was cheerful again, quietly genial, his face thoughtful as he surveyed the tiny anthills of dust littering my floor. “Because you know. You’re in possession of all the facts.”

He smiled, a real smile, open and sweet like the old days. “You know all the facts. Well, know this, when the time comes: you had a chance to stop me. All you had to do was leave this place—let it sit, find another roof, tell each other all sorts of ghost stories about the God-knows-what-went-on-here as it rots in the sand. You did, for a bit, last fall—remember, when the folks trying to shelter here gave up, headed east? But then you came back.” He didn’t move a step but he was still inches from me again, eye to eye. “
You
came back. My little prodigal daughter, crying for her fatted calf. Telling old father he’s not welcome in his own home anymore, he has to clear out.”

Something stirred in the dust piles, the little paper trails, shifting, settling, crawling out of the center. Ants. They were actual anthills now, all around us, with tiny black dots busily heading in and darting out as they set up housekeeping at our feet.

“You threw me out,” he said, and watched impassively as a line of ants reached the summit of his shoe. “Can’t even set a foot out of doors without getting kicked out of my own home—you can’t even imagine how long it took me to get used to it all, to make what’s mine really
mine
, but you don’t care. Don’t give a damn. So I’m out.” His voice was so soft, so suffocatingly soft. “All your experiments, setting up to take the Grim Reaper’s scythe away, so I can’t claim a single solitary soul until they decide when to die, how to die, all on their own. And
then
you have the gall to turn around and beg, sob, cry for me to come back, daddy, come baaaack—and I do, I do just that, and after all that fuss you throw me out. You want me gone that badly? Maybe I’ll just go. Forever. Not
one single part of me
ever to return.”