Dust (25 page)

I jolted awake, flailing. I lay on something hard and cold and my right shoulder felt funny, like a weight was pulling it down. My legs ached—legs. My legs. Not numb, or severed, or dead. I tried to sit up, just to check, and it was like pulling a concrete block by twine. Then some heavenly smell drifted past me and there were hands propping me up, holding the bit of heaven just under my nose. It was very dead, whatever it was. My stomach was a hollow husk, dry and thin and feeling like it might tear in two.

“Eat,” said the voice. A woman’s voice I almost knew, from somewhere.

I ate and ate and ate and didn’t look at what I swallowed, just grunted like a kiddie for more. I tried to sit up again because I still had that strange feeling in my shoulder, I had to check, and then I was staring down at my arm, at my hand. My hands. My
two
hands, firm and pink with the skin gathered just right at the knuckles, little pintucks of flesh with no swelling or decay. The nails embedded so tight, so solid at the tips. My
hands.

I dropped the piece of maggoty carrion I’d been devouring and felt at my face, at my mouth where a soft cushiony lip line now masked my teeth and jaw. Lips were such nasty rubbery things, what did I need with them? Why bother growing them back? My cheeks had gone almost plump and it hurt to touch them, like a big blister. I spat into my hand, and got something streaked with black but turning unmistakably clear. I sniffed my skin. Pure, unadulterated hoo.

My stomach buckled, twisted, but I didn’t get sick, just sat on the feeling like an egg until it subsided. Happy now, Jim, wherever you are? I’m not giving you a goddamned thing to eat, I’m keeping it for myself. Eating filth. Eating anything. My hands shook and I grabbed the piece of dead flesh back, swallowed it down in huge tearing mouthfuls; it was delicious to me now, that was the worst part. Happy now?

Someone sat close to me, too close, watching me eat as she made soft munching noises of her own; long straw-dry hair, half bleached blond and half grown-out brown, brushed my face. I turned, and immediately I recognized her. It was the woman from the woods, the one Florian and I saw die, the one whose car came sailing into our parking lot a lifetime ago. Her skin was pink again, not the bluish-black of her transitioning time, and the thick anxious arch of her brows, the curve of her jaw as she bit into her meat and the querulous quirk of her chin, all made up a face I’d known long before, should have known right away when we met again. Standing over my gravestone wiping teary eyes, big bewildered brown eyes I’d looked straight into, back at the park, but never saw for themselves. Opening her mouth square in a scream as she turned and ran. Falling over sick, dying, right at my feet, the shape of her so familiar but with a new liquid, a livid death-liquor, poured inside it so everything about her looked distorted, wobbly, a gelatin torn in two as it separated from the mold. I should still have known. I hadn’t wanted to. Just like with so much else.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

I nodded. My sister Lisa shook her head, the feel of her hair against my skin like an itch.

“Then you’re one up on me,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m me anymore. But I’m not like the others—like some of the others. Some of us did keep our heads. Or find them again, after a while, for whatever good it does us. Then there’s everyone else.”

She put a finger to my cheek, so cautious, like the cheekbone might shatter beneath her touch. “It’s good to see you again, Jessie. Even like this.”

Good to see me like
this
, again. But not the other way. I had nothing to say to that, absolutely nothing, so I kept eating.

Lisa twitched as she watched me, then grabbed another piece of flesh from the corpse lying next to us and devoured it in two large bites. She was painfully thin, cheeks bending inward like scooped-out gourds and eyes dark-circled and hollow.

“You didn’t recognize me at all,” she said, licking her lips for the last traces of the taste. “Back in the woods, I mean.”

“Your hair,” I said. I held out my hand, my right hand, my new right hand, for more meat. “You still had brown hair, when I saw you last. And your face, when you were sick. It was all . . . distorted.” The swollen bluish-blackness of her as she staggered up to me and Florian desperate for recognition, starving for squirrel flesh she couldn’t keep down. I shuddered. “For a minute, I think, I wasn’t sure, but—even your voice sounded different.”

“I don’t like remembering it. Actually, I don’t remember a lot of it.” Lisa shook her head. “I wish I could have explained, but my brain wasn’t working right. I think the change is a lot rougher on humans than on . . . what you were.” She pulled at the cloth of her jeans, twitching, twitching. The shy, soft timidity she’d always had, the pliancy like she was made of a putty you could stick your thumb in deep and yank into any form you chose, had hardened with age or sickness or both, turned her nervy and brittle. “Your face was a hell of a lot different too, when I saw you, but I recognized you. I knew you right off. Your eyes. I can’t believe you couldn’t see it was me, my eyes, something that—”

I put down my bit of rotten meat and stared into her face, hovering whiny-needy inches from mine. “Someone I love is dead,” I said, slow on each syllable. “Dead and eaten. My friends are dead. They tried to help me, and because of it they’re dead. They’re all dead and thanks to
your
brother the ones who aren’t dead are monsters like they never were before and everything I loved is gone and I’ve apparently turned back into the thing I most hate in the world, so can you give me a fucking break for five minutes or do I have to shut you up the hard way?”

She didn’t have anything to say to that so I finished my meal, almost bringing it all back up again in a giant Billy-style belch. So many words all at once, so fast, so effortless, completely distinct, so much tongue and teeth! That couldn’t have been me talking, it was a fluke. I grabbed another piece of rottenness and chewed as I looked around. We were in the old abandoned church out on the highway, the floor still covered in brown bloodstains and the powdery remnants of dry-sucked bones. And new corpses, our meal, dragged here who knows when by the Rat or maybe some of them
were
the Rat, I couldn’t tell, not anymore. Like it mattered. Anymore. I glanced up at the balcony; we were alone, at least for now. I couldn’t stop staring at my new hand.

“It’s because you lost it in death,” Lisa explained. “When the truck hit you. That and your legs. Anything you lost dying you get back. If you were born without it, though—tough luck. That was disappointing for a few people.” She shrugged, actually looked like she might laugh. “Life’s just never fair.”

“Where are the rest of them?” I asked, more to hear myself talk than anything. Still my voice but it had gone cold, sharp-edged and rat-a-tat staccato, like Ben’s or Sam’s, like one of the women in those old noir movies:
Johnny, don’t ya see I had ta turn ya in! Yer a rotten bum, Johnny!
“The others. Where’d they go?”

Lisa shrugged. “I’ve been at the wood’s edge for a while, I just followed them back in. There’s gangs like that everywhere now, running around. Just looking for more food.” She laughed, a flat, toneless sound. “All anyone anywhere can think about, more food. More food. But it’s all running out.”

I thought of Linc, kicking and flailing on the ground with Jim, his own gang tearing into his flesh, and decided to think of something else. There were new, dangerously thin walls up in my mind that wouldn’t let me think of Joe at all, wouldn’t let me remember just what that had been like; the walls hemmed me in like a box, a flimsy magician’s cabinet that could collapse on me in an instant, so it took all my concentration to keep the walls standing upright, myself safe inside. Sam’s face, alien, twisted with starvation-fueled hate. Renee, staring with dead, hollow eyes up at the moon.

“Jim said you lived with him,” I said. “In Mom and Dad’s old house. He said he locked you inside when you got sick.”

“I got out,” she said softly.

“He never mentioned that.”

“They’d have found me anyway. Probably killed me. Him too. They were asking him questions. He worked in the labs. It’d got out that they did something, maybe, that helped cause this. Everyone was getting sick. I’d disappeared all of a sudden. They knew what was going on.” She pulled herself to her feet, paced back and forth before the altar. “Jim was—I saw him, in the woods, after he got sick, I can’t believe that was just days ago, I, you’re right. I barely knew him. It’s not like someone just being dead.” She shuddered. “We were all we had left, Jessie, that’s the thing, and I . . . wasn’t doing well. He was so good to me, it killed him inside too when you and Mom and Dad—but he held it all together for me. Because I just couldn’t. He took care of me, when I needed it. And then at the end, when I needed it again. At least he tried to. I don’t know what he was doing at the labs, he wasn’t supposed to tell me but I don’t care what anyone says, Jessie, I don’t believe for one goddamned second he had anything to do with—”

“I asked you one simple question,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about him again. Ever. You talk too damned much.”

And it’s because of you. Because
you
came home and said you’d seen me, because that made whatever Jim was holding together inside go flying in all directions and look what he’s done now, Lisa, look what he’s done trying to save the day like he did when we were all alive. Alive before. Salvage Thanksgiving. Jump between me and Dad. Shout at you, try to get you mad enough to stand up for yourself at long last. Kill the whole world to try to get me back. It’s all down to me, Lisa. And him. And you. You were right, Billy. Hell of a family affair.

Lisa stared silently out the remnants of a stained glass window. I got up too, my whole skin tender and almost raw, and began searching for more food. It was hard, in fact almost impossible, to think about anything else; my box’s flimsy walls were holding up easier than they should have, because even as words like
alive
and
human
and
Joe
and
Linc
and
Renee
and
sister
kept flitting through my head my mind kept pirouetting away, lighting right back on
food, hunger, food.
It wasn’t like before, the bursts of flesh-lust that subsided the second the meat slipped down your throat—this was constant, insistent, tugging at every corner of my body like a whining toddler who wouldn’t let go. We’d stripped the corpses to nothing, a pair of piranhas on a picnic. I wrenched off bits of bone, ate them barely tasting them, and suddenly Lisa was right beside me feverishly munching her share.

“You’ve been out for days,” she said. “Eating in your sleep.”

I cast around my memory, dredged up nothing but the horrible screaming from my dream. “So what’d I miss?”

Lisa didn’t answer, just popped bits of vertebrae whole in her mouth. I searched the pews for more bodies, allowing myself shock at how easily and quickly one foot slipped in front of another, muscles flowing like liquid with every long loose step—no more jerking stiffness, no more stagger. So much easier to keep my balance, too, with two arms. It was like dancing and I might have enjoyed it, except for the growing, unshakable sense of panic that there was no more food in the church, that there might not be any more food anywhere and where had all that meat and bone gone, the heavy weight of flesh distending my gut just minutes ago and now I might never have eaten at all? I scratched at one of the dried bloodstains on the floor, trying to bring up some of the brownish powder, then crouched and put my tongue to it to coax it back into liquid. I tasted the sandy edge of concrete, and kept licking anyway.

“What are you doing?” Lisa demanded, right behind me.

I jumped backward, the heat rising to my new face, and snarled at her. She just shrugged again, like nothing surprised her, and handed me pieces of skull, a sucked-out bit of femur. As I gulped them down and licked my fingers clean she glanced out another of the window holes, the spring breeze wrapping half-bleached hair strands around her face, and sighed. I touched my own hair, touched it with my new right hand; it was one huge snarl, but thick and covering my whole scalp once more.

“Is this how it happened to you?” I said. “Like this, but worse?”

“First, you’re so sick you can’t eat anything. Hot, dizzy, aching, weak. Your skin turns blue. Then blackish. Then . . . rotten. Oh, hell, you saw it.” She shook her head, remembering. “And it feels raw, like a huge blister. It’s hard to breathe. A lot of folks died in that stage of it. Just asphyxiated. Then you get hungry. Ravenous. All day. All night. But you’re sick along with it, can’t stop throwing up. Then . . .” She shrugged. “You either die for real, like you must’ve thought I did, or you’re out cold for a while and then you wake up like this.” Her voice was dull and indifferent, like a comedian weary to get to the punch line and crawl offstage. “For better or worse. Sometimes you’re a little crazy, right after you do wake up again. Happy crazy. Furious crazy. Crazy like you can’t stop laughing at everything, right before you kill it—”

I remembered the gleeful, deranged glitter in Ben’s eyes, the all-consuming chill coming off Sam like winter breath. Poor Sam. “I’ve seen,” I said.

“Well, that’s what it’s like for humans anyway, living humans. Your kind too, I guess. It used to take weeks. Now it’s hours. I guess the virus mutated again—”

“Bacterium,” I said. “But this goes away, right? Feeling like this?”

Lisa hesitated. I thought of Teresa’s trembling, Rommel’s bellows of famine. Food. More food. I’m hungry, goddammit. Ben, bitten, his arm gone rotten, dead. He and Sam. Except not.
You’re out cold for a while and then you wake up like this.
Hot, dizzy, aching, weak. Like I’d been feeling, before Teresa ever attacked me. Just like Joe said. He was right. All along, he was right.

“Are any humans left?” I asked. “Is anyone immune to this?”