Dust (27 page)

“Just you wait,” she sneered, exactly like Mom now. Spitting image. “Just wait until you really start starving to death—”

“Anything for some peace and quiet!”

I marched over to the fire and stomped it out, feeling a detached sort of interest in how my bare feet didn’t melt or char, and then headed for one of the empty strip mall shops to rest, alone. The fabric store was relatively intact and with bedding to boot; I picked around until I found an unrolled bolt of something that felt flannel-like, wrapped myself in it and curled up with my back to a sales counter, imagining it was Renee or Linc I felt pressing against me. I started to shiver. Then an actual draft blew right over me, making the fabric ends flap like flags; someone had opened the store door.

“Jessie?” Lisa murmured.

I didn’t open my eyes. She lay down next to me and I wrapped the flannel tighter around myself. She pushed in closer, and slowly a bit of our warmth seeped into each other’s skins. Even through the layers of cloth her shoulder blades, her elbows were jutting and sharp.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Whatever. I’m sorry, you’re sorry, we’re all goddamned sorry. Mom was always sorry too. I didn’t answer, just felt for Florian’s little bag of stones and cradled it close in my hands. That and Lisa were all I had left now. Just like that wretched old hoo and his bike.

“I miss my daughter,” Lisa whispered, her voice shaky and full.

Daughter. Daughter? I had a niece? Had. I didn’t dare ask what had happened to her. For a second I thought Lisa might start weeping and keening like in the movies but instead she just lay there, dead quiet, her sharp-chinned head tucked against my arm. Gradually her breath became slow and even, and I pulled free carefully as I could.

Peace and quiet. Too dark now and too quiet, and they were all slipping back to me through the cracks in the walls: Linc, Renee, Joe, Ben, Sam, Florian, my parents, tugging at bits and pieces of my mind until I felt sucked dry and exhausted. My grandmother. Mags and Billy. That poor bastard on the bike. The niece I’d never had. Lillian. Annie. When I was still dead we beat this kind of rank sentimentality out of each other, but now here I was revived and stuck with nothing ahead of me but the two things I’d hated most about living: tedium and loss. What the hell was life anyway, but one long meaningless slow-motion act of loss? Like a big brimming jar inside you that kept tipping over and spilling, tipping and spilling, until you were down to your last swallow and had no choice but to go forward and forward and forward slowly sinking from thirst.

And so what do you do when it’s gone, when even the dark wet stain on the inside of the jar has dried up and faded away? You don’t die, you just realize you’ll never be free again as long as the memory of the full jar is with you, as long as the echo of what you once had calls out to you. Like how long after Joe found me and I had my new family I could still hear bursts of my parents’ brain radios, very late at night as they wandered east through Indiana and Ohio, and then there came that moment when I couldn’t pick them up at all: a light shining from a farmhouse window on some dark, empty highway, streaking brightly across your windshield as you drive past, and then fading. And then gone.

I reached toward Lisa again and groped for her hand. She stirred awake, fingers grabbing mine and pressing hard.

All up and down the road leading north, just the dead, the dying and us. Corpses piled everywhere, soon-to-be corpses wandering aimlessly, indifferently along the roadside, no fighting for our food other than with rats and birds. Lisa was actually scared of the rats, jumping and shuddering at those hostile squalling chirrups, but I just took my share of bites: Only one thing could kill us now, and rabies wasn’t it. Besides, she was more than happy to eat them, once I’d snapped their necks. I was the Little Red Hen at the End of the World.

The hunger kept growing worse. We ate and ate and ate, freshly killed, weeks dead, long-rotting things without discrimination, without tasting, and it melted away in the time it took to bite and chew. Restaurant ketchup, honey, shredded potatoes gone rancid. Blackened supermarket produce, rock-stale cereal, smashed-open cans of creamed corn and tomato paste and cold salty soup. The trees confused me at first, it was spring budding season and they were still bare as winter, then I realized the branches had been tooth-stripped, from berries to bark. Underfoot large, uneven grass patches were missing, torn out in hungry fistfuls; we grabbed some ourselves, trying to fill the empty spaces inside.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” Lisa wept, as we licked at fistfuls of salt poured into our palms, gnawed twigs and chicken bones, targeted the ever-multiplying rats. “I can’t. I just want to die. Why can’t we die?”

“Don’t tempt me,” I snapped. “You sleep a lot more than I do.”

“Do it!” she screamed, holding her arms out like I might shoot her in the chest. “I don’t care anymore! I don’t! This is hell!”

Oh good, unhinged melodramatics! That would help! Typical human and no, I
refused
to start thinking of myself as one too. “Speaking,” I said, as coldly and calmly as I could muster, “as someone with a little actual afterlife experience? This isn’t hell. There is no hell. It’s just what your kind always do to the world in one form or another, so pull yourself together and keep walking.”

“Why!” she shouted, shaking me hard. “For what? We’re out of the damn woods! Isn’t that what you wanted? There’s nothing else out there, we can fucking stop now! What the hell are you looking for?
Why are we doing this?
”

I squeezed the lake stone sitting quiet and patient in my pocket, willing it to keep me calm, keep me seeming rational even though I knew I’d gone crazy: All I wanted now was the beach, I wanted to see it, feel the sands underfoot before I died. The sands I’d never walked on as a hoo, that I’d ignored entirely while I was undead, now that I was born times three suddenly I wanted them, needed them, so badly that the yearning had swallowed me whole even as hunger hollowed me out. I missed my beach. And it wasn’t even
my
beach—except maybe it was, maybe it really was, thousands of years ago, just like all the stories said, maybe it was the whole reason I’d become what I was. So I wanted to see it, just the one time. To see just where I’d come from. To say good-bye.

I turned my back on my sister and continued down the road. The stone deep in my pocket, the little bag of them weighty at my side: Florian was right. Hunger or no hunger, they kept me walking.

Lisa followed behind me, stumbling over her own feet, sobbing under her snot-clogged breath. The rats swarmed around us, single-mindedly mean in a way I’d grown to admire; bare dead branches and bones snapped almost apologetically underfoot. Move. Ten more miles, fifteen, fifty, a hundred and fifty, twenty thousand. Look. All the town gates swinging wide open, security fences torn up, guard booths long deserted. Eaten-up corpses (not enough, nothing was ever enough), houses trashed inside and out for any trace of food (we tore them apart all over again anyway), whole neighborhoods reduced to smoldering cinders from a leaking gas main or arson or flamethrower panic or someone’s fucked-up try at roasting remains, the poor dead torn-apart dogs and cats and rabbits and coyotes (but we finished off whatever was left). The stench coating our mouths. Vermin everywhere. A kiddie of two or three lying facedown by the roadside in a brackish rain puddle, naked, gnawed-on. Our stomachs growled at the sight. We didn’t touch it. A woman, also naked, stumbling dazed down the road’s shoulder, cradling something in a blanket in her arms, something stinking and buzzing with flies—

I don’t want to talk about it.

Another torn-up security gate, the electronic sensors smashed, the metal warped and buckled like a neck wrung in a giant fist. A long stretch of railroad track surrounded by overgrown, leaf-stripped trees, dilapidated food-trashed wooden houses peeking out from the foliage, the soil underfoot pale and full of sandy grit: the outskirts of Prairie Beach, a little shore town that Gary swallowed up and annexed a hundred years ago or more. Up north, at long last. How far were we from the beaches? I didn’t know this place, had been here maybe once while I was alive, just knew that if you kept going north far enough then boom, smack, water. I should’ve let Joe take me here, when I’d had the chance. A hundred years ago or more.

“I need to rest,” Lisa said, quiet enough that I knew she wasn’t kidding. She shook like a scrap of paper twisting in the wind, her face a hollow-eyed smear of chalk. “Okay? More walking later?”

“No more walking,” I promised. Plague-converted hoos weren’t as strong as my kind, that much was becoming clear, or maybe it was just she’d been sick that much longer. I was an asshole for pushing her so far either way, but I had to. I had to get here. I couldn’t explain. “Over by the trees. We’ll rest there.”

Across the road was something that looked like a little nature preserve, sand-duneish prairie cheek by jowl with the coiled gray guts of a power station and another abandoned supermarket. Lisa and I looked over at the supermarket, mouths watering though we knew it’d be an empty looted box, and then we saw someone alive near the opposite end of the preserve, his back to us, a black coat far too big for him flapping in the breeze as he stood over a neat line of corpses.

We ducked behind a knot of debarked trees to watch. He hovered over the bodies, closing eyelids, preparing his little makeshift morgue for funerals that would never occur. Unaltered hoo, then, either that or like us but past wanting to feed. Either way, we’d be doing him a favor. And it felt like decades since I’d eaten anything blood-warm and freshly killed.

We crept forward quietly as we could, Lisa letting me set the pace. He was careless, not minding the perimeter as he worked, and while he stood there rolling and unrolling his coat cuffs like someone fussing with a venetian blind we came within ambush distance unnoticed. A glint of metal caught my eye and I saw the shovel leaning against a nearby tree. If I’d only had this body while undead, this speed, this ease—in one amazingly easy movement I rose to my feet, grabbed the shovel, crept behind him and put all my strength into a blow to the back of the skull.

He staggered, stunned, but his brains stayed inside his broken head: One of us, then, we’d have to fight. I so badly wanted to fight. He whipped around, snarling in anger and pain, and I struck again and again with Lisa kicking and punching from behind, bludgeon blows that healed within seconds but still got him down to his knees, curled up in a quaking ball on the ground. I raised the shovel in both hands, aiming for the neck, and he pulled himself upright and lunged for my legs.

“Jessie!” he shouted, clutching at me in entreaty.
“Jessie!”

I stood there, the shovel still held high. He crouched in that ridiculous black coat, a tangled mess of dark hair falling over his thin, sallow, homely face, and as I looked into Linc’s eyes I dropped the shovel and started to laugh and laugh and couldn’t stop. Then I started shaking, still laughing myself watery-eyed and sick. Lisa lunged for him one last time, and he turned and, as pure afterthought, punched her breathless. The hilarity of that almost doubled me over.

“I saw you being eaten,” I pointed out, and got quite giggly at the thought of it. “I saw—”

“Jessie,” said Lisa, her meal snatched right off the plate, “you’re doing it again. Stop it—”

I couldn’t stop. Linc had my arm and was saying something about being left there half-dead, there was this huge fight, wasn’t it just his destiny to get lost in the shuffle, if I greeted my friends this way what would I do if the Rat revived, and I just mopped my eyes and gasped for breath. He kept stopping to kiss me, again and again. The touch barely registered. Lisa followed sullen and drained behind us as Linc led me down a hill slope and into a thick, denuded copse of maples, full of thin, sick near-corpses just like him, just like me. They huddled together in their own little groups, watching us with such mild, distant curiosity that I knew they were dying.

“Look what I found!” Linc shouted, raising my arm up like a winning prizefighter.

They looked at me and went right back to huddling and shuffling in silence, but then suddenly one of them came running. A blond girl with a beautiful face, head-turning even wasted to bones and nothingness, came up to me, took my arm and sat me right down in the dirt.

“We thought you were dead,” Renee said calmly, and then almost broke my ribs in a huge sharp-boned hug. “We were out, and then . . . we just woke up, I can’t explain—”

“Same here,” I said.

“Linc was hurt and we couldn’t have fought and any minute we expected—we were so damned lucky.” She jerked her head toward Lisa, her expression hostile. “We thought she took you away to eat you—”

“That’s my sister,” I explained. “Lisa. She got me out. She’s all right.”

“Oh, the gratitude,” Lisa called out bitterly. “Warms the cockles.”

“I don’t know why they left us there,” Renee said, ignoring Lisa. “They must’ve been looking for food, any kind of food, but they wanted to fight even more than that. So they just left us there to rot. Thank God.” She rubbed at my face like a mom with a toddler, scrubbing away tear streaks and blood and dirt with her sleeve. “When we woke up some of them were still wandering around the woods, getting weaker, and we all sort of drifted up here together.” Her eyes flitted around the preserve, resigned and sad. “That was a few days ago, I guess. The Rat was there fighting, Jessie, you should see them now, they’re all so sick, the gang’s fallen apart—”

“Hey, we did okay,” said a new voice, the scraped-clean shell of its former self. “For a while.”

A blanket-wrapped wraith stood over me: Ron, Rommel’s second in command from the Rat. I laughed again, knowing I sounded crueler than I felt, but he just shrugged and grinned. “Man, Jessie,” he said, “you got some crazy shitheads in your family, you know that? Sicking up the whole world? Just to prove he can? And Rommel and I thought we were nuts—”