Dust (2 page)

The hoos like to make fun of how we walk and it’s true, we can’t really run, can’t manage much past a stagger. But Linc is just that little bit faster, fleeter, than the rest of us, and he knows his business. We gathered in a tight semicircle, freeze-tagging shoulder to shoulder, still as winter trees. Waiting.

A big beautiful stag rushed terrified into the clearing, Linc right behind it as it bounded the wrong way in its panic. One great roar in all our ears, eight earsplitting dissonant brain-radio symphonies of triumph and we closed the circle tight around that deer, broke legs as it tried jumping over us, tore away antlers when it tried barreling through us, groaned triumph over its rising screams of pain before Joe wrapped a hand around the stag’s neck and stopped all sound with a single, effortless
crack.

So hot they almost steamed, those good fresh deer guts, and warm dripping blood and the solid meaty muscle of a heart still beating as we tore the carcass open, venison like you never tasted it on your little hoo-barbecue with the charcoal smoke making it filthy. Linc snatched the first mouthful of the liver, the best and sweetest meat of all, and Joe kicked him away from the rest and Billy kicked Joe and why’s everyone fighting when it’s so good to feed, it’s so good, you can’t stop and you can’t think and you can’t do anything but chew and swallow and want to bust out sobbing you feel so wonderful? Sam grabbed at the bones, fought Ben over the marrow. Should we save some for Teresa? But by the time we got it out of the woods and across the field and past the old mill and out to the gazebo how fresh would it be, anyway? Snooze, lose.

I was a vegetarian when I was alive, not the fish-and-chicken kind either. No leather shoes, no honey. I drove my mom crazy. All those years of good rich meat going to fly-blown carcass waste, just remembering it now made me want to weep. How was I ever such a fool? There’s nothing in this world, nothing, that’s as honest or as beautiful as meat and blood, beautiful as this bone gnawed white and stripped clean, this shredded hide, those hanks of flesh and tooth scrapings of veined yellow fat still stuck to the fur—

Ben shoved me away and I sat down hard on the ground, panting, letting him have the remnants of the rib cage. Billy and Mags were still working on the guts, tearing off greasy handfuls and shoveling them in like potato chips; Florian nibbled at bits here and there, too old to have much appetite anymore. Sad-sack Sam gave me a big happy grin as he licked the fat from his fingers. Linc looked half asleep as he shoveled in leftover shreds of meat. There was a red haze over everything and a stench permeating the air, the heavy fast-moving odor of life bursting out and spilling away.

Joe, good humor restored, sidled up looking embarrassed. Like always. “Your arm okay?”

“Fine.” I wiggled my fingers. “No thanks to you.”

He touched the empty shoulder socket like it might shatter. The maggots and blowflies and watch beetles feeding off him head to toe pulsed with the hungry sucking and clicking of thousands of little mouths:
shuck-shuck,
in rhythm, and then
crrnc-crrnc
, biting down. They’ve been feeding off him for decades now, feeding on bits of nothing, between bouts of silent stasis. Do we attract a special kind of bug? It never takes dead hoos who stay dead this long to get flesh-stripped, and I never heard of hibernating maggots. He shrugged, his notion of apology. I glared at him.

“The next time you decide to rip me into kindling,” I said, “give me fair warning first so I can take out your eyes.”

He let off an angry guitar chord. Blinding isn’t funny—when Lillian, one of our seniors, lost her remaining eye in a gang fight, Teresa made me and Joe be the ones to take her into the woods and kick in her skull. Can’t hunt if you’re blinded, can’t do anything. Even Florian couldn’t argue with it, though he tried to. “You even try it,” Joe said, “you’ll end up with your teeth all over the ground. But you wouldn’t try it.”

“Because you’re so big and strong?”

“You said it, I didn’t.” He grinned and started rubbing my back, a soothing apology. “And you said yourself, your arm’s fine.”

“Try that again, Joe, I will gouge your eyes.”

“I’ll knock out your teeth.”

“I’ll smash what’s left of your skull.”

“I’ll pop these gasbags like balloons—” We wrestled again, shrieking, and this time good Samaritan Linc just gave us a lazy smile. When I shoved Joe away he just lay there, eyes closed. I wanted to drop off too, but it was close to dawn and if we stayed away during the big sleep we’d never hear the end of it: Teresa likes us where she can eyeball us. Too near her to hatch secret plots and plans, which is how she overthrew old Lillian and got to be gang head in the first place. I was trying to shove Joe to his feet when Sam stepped in, pulling himself upright with a grunt.

“C’mon, kids.” He was just a little older than Teresa but already as stripped-down as Florian, all exposed bones and dried-out leathery skin shreds that the bugs didn’t want anymore. “Time.”

Groans, jeers and mouthfuls of bloody spume didn’t dissuade him, and we retraced our steps in a ragged, complaining line back toward the riverbank. My arm lay in state on the boggy grass, jarringly clean white bone and soft, blackened distended flesh. If you looked closely, you could still see tiny chips of polish on the nails. Fuchsia pink.

“Wait’ll the hoos get a load of that.” Mags snickered, doing a lurching little dance around it. “They’ll faint.”

Even Linc laughed. “They’re not stupid enough to come here. Whose woods these are, I think they know.”

Ben muttered something under his breath. He hates it here or keeps saying he does, out in Hicksville with Fearless Leader dogging our steps, but he’s had a thousand chances to run off with a city gang and hunt humans every day of the week and he never does. Still too hoo for his own good, Billy says. That feeling, I think I know. I’d rather stay where things are wide open and quiet.

We marched beyond the sharp bend in the Great River, through the erstwhile playground, past a faded sign pointing to ye olde historic gristmill and sawmill and sugaring shack (maple syrup in Indiana, who knew?) and spilled into the parking lot, the late winter asphalt morgue-cold and soothing against swollen and bony feet. I was half asleep, wishing vaguely for a little marrow bone to suck on while I drifted off, and then suddenly wide awake as a pair of blaring headlights swung off the county road, knocked over the orange cones blocking their path, shot through the barricaded park entrance, peeled toward us in a wide screeching curve and came to a bucking-horse stop yards away, right there in the middle of the lot.

Unbelievable. The park is abandoned, the farms and subdivisions deserted, the roads strictly Drive At Your Own Risk, there’s no guards and no safe houses and no barrier gates and not a sane hoo for miles around and the assholes still come barreling through thinking they can be Big Mighty Zombie Hunters? Hasn’t happened in years, hasn’t happened since the unincorporated-county hicks finally lost enough Billy Bobs to realize we can do anything we want out here—as long as we stay out here—and there’s no National Guard to come raging in with machine guns like in the movies. This wasn’t a pickup truck though, just a crappy little white Honda, and before we could react the driver’s door flew open and a skinny blond hoocow crumpled onto the pavement and splattered herself with puke.

Correction: Mighty Zombie Hunters, and the occasional wrong-turn drunk. I fucking hate drunk drivers. I have my reasons.

If we weren’t already stuffed sausage-tight with meat and blood we would have tried rushing her, hope she’d run toward the woods in panic, but we just wanted a little fun. She was too busy groaning and pulling at vomit-caked hair strands to register our presence so we moved in a little closer, and a little closer, and when she finally realized that wasn’t more puke she smelled we were within easy stumble of dessert. She stared at us, bleary-eyed, face ashen. We stared back.

She dove head-first back into the car, slammed the locks shut and propelled the thing straight toward us. Sam just stood there, glowing and skeletal in the oncoming headlights, and put his hands out to the front grille; the tires squealed, turning over and over on themselves, and when his arms shook with the effort Billy and I stepped up too, our palms splayed side by side like a chart of fleshly decay. She gunned the accelerator, giving me a good bodily jolt but not moving the car an inch, and as Mags and Ben and Joe swarmed around the doors her whole body went slack with fear. Joe rapped on the windshield, a light little tap that made the glass blossom in a cobweb of cracks.

“You
lost
?” he shouted, looming in close so she could see his gnawed-up face.
“Is somebody lost?”

Mags staggered around the car groaning, her drooling-retard undead act, fingers buried in the mush of her own flesh up to the knuckles. The smell of terror poured through the door seals like gas from a vent; Billy and Sam on one side, Joe and me on the other, we rocked the car gently back and forth, up and back down again, and the hoocow tore at her own hair and screamed and screamed. Linc and Florian held back, like they always hold back, but they were both wheezing with laughter.

“Come on,” Linc managed, “knock that off. Or I’ll tell Teresa.”

We ignored him, the car way off to the side, balanced on one set of furiously rotating tires, then back. The hoocow was puking again, from vertigo or fear anybody’s guess.

Florian spat, a thin depleted stream of coffin juice, and stamped his bony feet. “You all a lot of pussycats?” he asked, drawing out the first two syllables. “How long you gonna stand here playing? Either kill it and eat it or leave it alone.”

Killjoy. We rested the car gently on the asphalt, stepping backward with bows and curtsies. The hoocow just sat there, covered in sick, probably stunned. She had big bewildered brown eyes, actual cow eyes, that skin so pale it always looks bluish. Actually she looked plain old blue, a dark sickly tinge rising up and suffusing her skin like a blush. Billy made elaborate motions toward the park gate and she just sat there. Little chips of windshield had fallen out, bits of glitter sprinkling the ground.

“You better leave,” Linc called out, pointing at the gate. He can’t talk any better than the rest of us, lips and tongues and palates all moldered away, but his mishmash of syllables at least sounded friendly. “This place isn’t for humans. You better go.”

The hoocow drew her brows together, startled, then gazed in wonderment at the puke on her T-shirt, at her left hand grasping the wheel and the right pulling the brake. At me. Big, dark stupid eyes staring into mine, sidling on down to take in my face and the rags of my clothes and lingering on my one remaining hand and Jesus Christ, how drunk was she? I screamed at her through the windshield and she started awake, throwing herself into reverse and heading exitward at a downright leisurely pace. The car meandered from side to side, nearly wandering into a clump of trees, then righted itself and vanished slow and unsteady out the park gate.

“What the hell was that all about?” Joe demanded, like I would know.

Ben yanked the ragged remnants of his fedora further over his eyes. “So stoned she couldn’t tell which hand was which. Big deal.” He gazed across the parking lot, frowning. “I coulda used a little tasty treat, myself—if she wanted to stay that bad, you shoulda let her.”

It was halfhearted protest; his voice had the same lazy edge of satiety as Joe’s, and by the time we crossed into the wide, empty park field bordered by gristmill and sugaring shack and thick bands of cottonwoods Lady Hoocow was nearly forgotten. Uncut for years, the tall grass was choked by taller weeds, their stems sharp and crackling as we pushed through them to get home. Teresa’s gazebo, its white paint peeling and carved patches of roof rotting away, sat across a little footbridge in an enclave surrounded by rusting park benches and clusters of oaks; the “Great” River, narrow and slow-moving and perpetually clogged with mud, circled around the rear and disappeared back into the forest.

The queen’s throne, but of course Her Majesty was nowhere to be seen. Teresa loves to disappear for hours and days at a time, no saying where or why, no saying how she fed. Ben and Billy and some of the others wander off too, go human-hunting whenever deer and ducks and possum and coyotes stop tasting exciting, but they always bring back bones and stories for the rest of us, make it worth everyone’s while. Teresa, she’s just too good to share and of course
we
can’t have a walkabout if she’s having one; we all have to be right there, sitting tight, waiting for whenever she decides to stroll back home.

That act’s getting old, dusty and ancient in fact. But right then I was too tired to care.

Ben groaned, crawling under one of the benches; the ground was softening with the approach of spring, but still cold and firm enough for good sleeping. “All that fuss to get back and she ain’t here. Told you we should’ve stopped for a snack—”

Florian, curled up against the gazebo wood, was already sound asleep. Sam hauled himself up again, groaning. “Our turn for watch, Billy, c’mon.”

He and Billy left for watch duty, to tramp around the near perimeter of the park looking for any more interlopers until all the sun and daylight exhausted them and a new shift took over. Not my turn yet, thank God. I get sleepy now the way little kids do, big wild bursts of energy evaporating in a flash, and falling into the tall grass was a relief. Joe settled next to me, front to front, Linc on the other side back to back. Mags was flopped out snoring at my feet.

“Wait’ll she gets back home,” Joe muttered, already half-asleep. “Th’hoocow. Stories she’ll tell. Zombie this, zombie that—”

“Good.” I shifted away from a sharp rock. “Keep her kind away.”

The sunrise was full orange, striated with wide soft streaks of pink. Stomach full. It was time to go to sleep.

I remember, when I was alive, reading somewhere that Eskimos don’t call themselves that—white men did, a corruption of some word that meant “raw flesh eater.” They called each other “The People.” Raw flesh eater. There actually is a gang up in the Dakotas that calls itself The Eskimos, but a lot of folks don’t get the joke. My gang, Teresa and Joe and Sam and all the rest, is called the Fly-by-Nights. Our turf is what used to be the Great River County Park in Calumet County, right over the Illinois-Indiana border and just south of where the Lake Michigan beach dunes begin, and it’s been their place, our place, long before I tunneled up and they took me in as family.