Dust (14 page)

I poked the branch at him for silence, then bent over the dirt. It took me a few minutes, clumsy and hesitant, to scrawl it all out.

Jim let out a quiet laugh, and shook his head.

“Nobody knows,” he told me, giving Linc a nervous little glance:
Don’t worry, I’m not ignoring you, if I did that might give you an excuse to kill me.
“We’re no closer to figuring that out than we ever were. Or why you’re so much stronger. Or why you decay so slowly. It could be a virus. Doesn’t seem to be genetic.” He dug a heel harder into the ground. “Nobody knows why at certain times in history there’s this great outburst of zomb—revivalism, bodies everywhere returning to life, and then other times, nothing, the cycle dies out. Boom and bust. And it used to be a lot more bust than boom. Centuries ago, you believe the thanohistorians, you could go your whole life never seeing an undead, never knowing they existed.”

He shoved his shoes against the soft dirt like he was trying to leave a fossil-deep footprint, a permanent artifact. “Now, though, since the Industrial Revolution, a big speedup, a lot less bust and a lot more boom, boom, boom. The 1918 flu epidemic, so-called. Detroit and Alameda in the forties. Pittsburgh in ’68—so many outbreaks in the sixties. More and more and more.”

Linc glanced at me, that look in his eyes of someone drawn in despite himself. They never told us any of this in school, only mentioned it in passing in books. Nothing but safety drills. Jim must have seen that look too because now he was staring up at the sky, the first time he’d dared take his eyes off me or Linc.

“Maybe it’s industrial pollutants,” he said. Talking, talking, like he’d been dying all this time to be someone’s, anyone’s little expert. He should’ve been a teacher, Mom always used to say that. “All the steel mills around here, refineries, factories, farm runoff, the whole region’s bathing in it. And we’ve been lousy with revivals here, the last decade or two.” He shook his head. “Hell, maybe it’s the beaches. You want to see a loved one rise from the dead? Bury them in a good sandy soil, near the lake coast. You know how much longer your sort lives, around the beaches? Decades, centuries. The geologists have their theories. But I’m in biology.”

I don’t know what it was, but you broke down so slow there, your body did.
I’d always figured Florian was just lucky that way, but then, we’d always stayed away from the beaches, we wouldn’t know. Too much water. Those rumors about the labs. God knew what went on there. A lot more than I’d thought, it sounded like.

“Industrial pollutants,” I repeated.

“I told you,” Linc said. “Go on. Ask him.”

Jim shook his head, uncomprehending. I pointed at the cornfield. Then at his rucksack, full of something meaty and greasy and dead. He actually trembled again, like I’d reminded him of something he’d been praying to forget.

“I have to go feed them now,” he said. His eyes were grim.

He retrieved the leaking rucksack and we followed him unbidden back to the cornfield’s heart, the wailing and moaning picking up at the sound of our footsteps like a needle jumping on a seismograph. The burial ditch was no bigger, but now three of them were scratching at it like they could burrow right through the cruel earth; the others gathered, ready to throw themselves in. At the sight of Jim I saw recognition on their faces, pleading fury, and Green Sweater came forward with the cringing servility of Igor before Frankenstein.

“Are you here to kill us?” he demanded. His sagging, ashen skin had deteriorated even further in mere minutes. “You have drugs that could do it, that’s what they say, please kill us. Or make them.”

“I’m back!” Jim held up the rucksack as if no one had spoken. “I’ve got food!”

The others cowered together, drooling, as Green Sweater clenched his fists and screamed. “We want to die! God, please just let us die!”

“I’m sorry,” Jim said, and he really did sound sorry, had that look like it was killing him to watch this, like he was ashamed of himself for wanting to run away. “I’ve got food. You’ll feel better if you eat.” There was this sudden flicker in his eyes that told me that was a flat lie. “I’ve got it right here.”

The moans and supplications rose as he reached into the rucksack and pulled out something skinned—a squirrel, a rabbit—and threw it into a volley of clutching hands. There were wrapped things too from some obliging butcher, raw cow hearts, plastic containers of blood he opened and lined up on the ground; they ran up to grab them, cried and retched with revulsion, crammed it all feverishly into their mouths. Green Sweater screamed louder and threw himself on the ground, not touching a bite. I had a horrible desire to laugh, the way he looked like a huge rotten baby throwing a fit in the grocery aisles, but smelling all that dead flesh made me feel sick too. The only thing worse would have been cooked.

“C’mon,” Jim muttered. “We’d better go while they’re distracted.”

Once out of sight and stench, his hands started shaking. “I hate this,” he said, rolling up the empty rucksack like a big befouled cigar, “but every time I come out here they beg me and they look so miserable, and in a way I feel like I owe—I’m just lucky they haven’t tried to attack me. They’re too weak now, but they’ll eat living flesh just as soon as dead—”

Linc reached out and clasped Jim’s shoulders, the soul of inquisitive friendliness. Jim stood there, wincing in pain as he clutched the crumpled rucksack, eyes watering from the smell.

“They’re not you,” he said. “They’re living people. Very sick ones. Or were.”

The sounds of retching started behind us, choking noises like someone spitting out something in chunks.

“Pest eradication,” he said, fingertips worrying the stained cloth like he was trying to unravel and reweave it standing there. “That’s what my job, our research was all about. I could have quit. But I didn’t. The money.” He laughed, a hollow, self-mocking sound. “That was my job, anyway. Now it’s trying to figure out how to keep . . . that, you just saw, from killing us all.”

He lowered his voice, as if those retching, stumbling things behind us had the cornfield bugged. “Before I was in the bio labs,” he said, “I interned as a collector. We would go around the beaches and woods after zomb—undead fights, collect the bodies of any with smashed skulls and bring them back for research.” He gave me this unblinking look like he knew exactly how repulsed I must be hearing this, all perversely proud of his own shame. (He was a shit mind-reader along with a coward. What did I care if they cut up some combat-stomp I’d never even met?) “Never got anywhere neurologically, but we got a pretty good handle on your digestive tracts. All sorts of amazing intestinal flora, not like a human’s at all. But then, a year or two ago, we started finding something very strange: a strain of what looked like
H. pylori
in the gut. The bacterium that causes stomach ulcers. Just sitting there, doing nothing. Strictly a human bacterium, we’d thought. And its gene sequencing was . . . off. It had mutated.”

The moaning from the cornfield grew louder, up and down, a call and response of impassioned agony. I walked away, clutching my branch and cursing my slowness, and Linc and Jim followed.

“But it just sat inside them, dormant.” Jim reached up to a tree as we walked, snapped off a small branch of his own like a fencing duel was imminent. “No inflammation, like you’d find in a human stomach. Then a few months ago, more bodies, that same germ in the gut. It mutated again. And never mind inflammation, it ate holes inside them, great ulcerous holes. And there was something strange about their skin. It was sticky, like sap or Scotch tape, and it had this strange smell—not of decay, mind, but live, diseased flesh.”

Linc and I stopped in our tracks. Linc clutched my hand, still holding the branch. Jim looked from him to me and back again, not the least happy at this revelation but just vaguely relieved.

“You know what I’m talking about, then,” he said.

It was Linc who nodded back.

“The stomach contents were strange too,” Jim told us. “You’re obligate carnivores, you need fresh kills. This lot, though, we found the remains of berries, leaves, garbage scraps. Rotten food, leavings you’d find in large trash bins. Anything and everything but raw flesh.”

Teresa.
Teresa refusing to hunt with us, demanding leftover meat and then putting it aside barely touched, because if the kill were too fresh she might not keep it down. Disappearing for days at a time, knowing if we found out her secret illness, the thing gnawing holes inside her so she couldn’t eat like us, had to rifle through garbage cans like a raccoon, that’d be the end of her gang leadership. And of her.

“Then, not long after that, the rumors.” Jim stared over his shoulder, nobody there, those things not us and not him now mercifully out of earshot. “Then on the news. People, living human beings, whose skin went black, who couldn’t keep down anything but raw meat, who smelled like they’d bathed in paint thinner. We found some of them, wandering the beaches, the fields. Just like those back there. They’d been thrown out of their homes, their towns, because people thought they were infected. Made undead, I mean. Never mind everyone knows you can’t spread undeath by biting—the old superstition. They were rotting from the inside. Finally they couldn’t even try to eat. They died. When we autopsied them, we found the same bacterium, that mutated
H. pylori.
The same holes in their guts.”

Those things in the cornfield. I was right, Joe, I told you, I
told
you. I handed Linc the branch, pointed toward the cornfield, to myself, drew a finger across my throat. Looked questioningly at Jim. Keep it from killing us all. Which us?

“Our ‘information’ is all hysteria,” Jim said. “Super-staph. MRSA. Flesh-eating bacteria. All wrong. Remember when we were younger, they never talked about any of this, they’d scream at anyone who did? All happy-chat all the time? Remember what hypocrites we thought they—”

I glanced over at Linc. He nodded at my cue and gripped Jim’s shoulders again, tighter this time; it must’ve hurt like hell because Jim shouted, squirmed, couldn’t shake free. Too bad, brother. Talk.

“The bodies of the undead we collected,” Jim said, sounding pained and sick himself. “Other things were different about them.
Less
decay. More muscle mass. A higher core body temperature. That same smell, like something living that bathed in gasoline or—all over the beaches and woods, around the observatories, that stink is everywhere they go. And they’re not dying. You’re not dying.” He shook his head now, kept shaking it, the panic he’d barely been hiding oozing like a vein of oil into his eyes, his voice, his tense clenched-up hands. “You’re getting stronger. Omnivorous. You’re de-decaying. While us humans . . . our labs are working on it, Jessie, but if this spreads any further we’re in real serious trouble.”

The sun had risen higher, and a dry wind sent a whiff of solvent like a ribbon trailing under our noses. We would have stopped for a nap already, Linc and I; you get careless on watch, this many years without anything to watch for. Linc let go of Jim, pointing to the cornfield and himself and me in quick succession, and when Jim shook his head Linc grunted in exasperation and branch-scratched at our feet:

“We don’t know. The answer could change tomorrow, it’s still mutating like crazy. But I’ve been swimming in it, and I’m not sick.” He ran a hand through his hair, stared at the ground like this was a shameful confession. “I’m not. Lisa is, Jessie. Lisa’s sick. I hid her, you don’t know what it’s like if anyone suspects you have this, there’s been violence, I had to lock her in the—Lisa’s sick. Don’t know if I brought it home, or . . .” His fingers grabbed at the cloth of his cuff, buttoning, unbuttoning, rolling it up and down, worrying it compulsively. “I need your help, Jessie, or she’s going to die.”

Something hard and sharp twisted inside my stomach. “You’re lying,” I said quietly, and grabbed his neck and rattled until I heard teeth scrape and snap. He was blue and gasping, curled up retching when I let him go. Jim’s stick had gone flying, the rucksack lay yards away, split in two.

“I’m not—” Gasp. “—making it up, I—” Swallow, choke. “Jessie—” He retched again, scrubbing a sleeve against his mouth as he sucked in air, crouching against the ground like it might shield him from me and Linc. “Jessie, the last thing I ever told Mom and Dad was to fuck off and die, and then they went—” Cough, choke. “—went ahead and did it. And you too, and it was too late, and now Lisa, I used to hate everyone else for being so scared and now it’s like I’m being punished for it over and over again, Jessie, I love you, I can’t help how we are now, please don’t kill me. Don’t kill me.”

His voice had unraveled from desperate pleading into gasping sobs, his eyes dry but grief and horror weighting down his voice so it stumbled, lollopped out of his throat: genuine sadness, unfeigned shame, the smell of it seeped out of him like that solvent-stink off the dead girl. Off Teresa.
I, me, mine, I’ve got, I had, I don’t, I’ve got, me me me.
But Jim was always like that, he never apologized for it, he wanted me and Lisa to be more like that too. Stand up for yourselves. Look out for yourselves. If people call you selfish, it means they know they can’t push you around. Some things really do never change.

Jim scrubbed his mouth some more, looked desperately up at me. “I’ve been trying to treat her,” he told me, nails sinking into the dirt. “I’m running tests, see if there’s a genetic weakness, something, behind this. You can help me. Just, tissue sample, a mouth swab, I have them from Lisa, myself—”

“He doesn’t deserve anything from you, Jessie,” Linc muttered, watching Jim flatten himself against the grass like a cat sighting a coyote. “No use for you at all until he needed something. Typical hoo. Let’s go.”

“Jessie. I know you must hate her, hate me, but she doesn’t deserve this. Please.”

Desperate, smelling not of the fear we’d kill him but that I’d turn my back on him and leave him in the dust. “I don’t want to kill you, I want to make things better, for everyone—I don’t know if this disease hurts your kind or not. If I help Lisa, maybe I can help—”