Dust (8 page)

“Jennifer,” Renee muttered, teeth worrying her lip.

“Sister?”

“Yeah.”

The little girl sat down cross-legged, running one hand along the gravestone as she wept. Renee stared at her, hungry, mesmerized. What the hell good did this do, hankering after humans, acting sentimental like a human when that all had nothing to do with our lives, ever again? I turned away, half-hoping I’d find a stag or a mastodon or something lurking in the trees and have an excuse to go hunt it, and when I turned back Renee was watching me instead.

“There must be someone you miss too,” she said, like a challenge. She could make more actual words than I could, tongue not nearly so swollen and rotted:
Mussth be sssthum ye missssth.

Didn’t they even notice that grass on her gravesite didn’t look right? Of course they didn’t. They didn’t want to. No hoo ever thinks one of theirs could become one of us.

It doesn’t matter who I miss.

I came back here once, about two or three years after I died, after Joe and I fought and I needed to think. And I got no peace because there lo and behold was my sister, there was Lisa, standing over the family plot with daffodils and a rosary. How old was she then, twenty-one, twenty-two?

She was crying, teary shuddering sobs, and seeing it I felt happy, foolishly blessed. Never before had I had a single flower, no prayer cards or stuffed animals or little flags, no gravesite footprints, not a single disturbed pebble or grass blade to show that anyone remembered my mom and dad and I ever existed. No friends. No Grandma Porter or Grammy Sullivan, though for all I know the shock of this killed them both. No Jim, or at least if he came by he never left any traces. And Lisa, my sister, was always so timid and so scared of everything I just assumed she’d never dare come out here where there’s so much
crime
, where the
environment
is so harmful, but she fooled me. Isn’t it wonderful when people do that, when you put all your faith in their being selfish and self-centered and not giving a damn and it turns out, all that time, you were all wrong? She’d be shocked to see me, scared at first, but maybe we could talk. Learn to talk, since I couldn’t talk the old way anymore.

I thought, That’s just how stupid I used to be.

I crept closer, and it was the smell that got her, of course. She frowned, put a hand to her mouth and turned very slowly, shoulders stiffened, like she knew she’d see something she’d never forget but couldn’t stop herself from looking. I stood there and stared straight into her eyes. “Lisa,” I tried to say. “It’s me.”

If I could still talk like humans talk, it would have been different. I know it. But I was trying to remember how to sound out her name; I got out something like
“Ruzzz . . .”
and it happened: I saw recognition in her eyes, dawning disbelief and sick shock. She opened her mouth square and tight around a scream, a marionette’s jaw jerked to the ends of its strings, and then she let out a belch of revulsion, vomiting on her shirtfront, crying while she ran and running like I was Satan there to pull her into Big Catholic Hell. I hadn’t moved. I was still standing there, holding out my good hand.

But that was all a long time ago, and now it makes me laugh—man, Renee, you should have
seen
the look on her face. Fucking hoos.

“I saw my sister here once,” I said. “It could have gone better.”

Renee stared at her hoo-family, not listening, then let out a teary gasp and lunged forward. I grabbed her arm just in time. “Get back!” I hissed.

She fought me, with hard desperate fists.

“Get back, you’re gonna—” I kicked her, pinning her down with my legs, and dragged her ass over head into the brush. As I put a wall of trees between them and us she went limp, sagging against my shoulder like I’d shot her.

“I just wanted to see them,” she moaned. “Face-to-face. That’s all.”

I wanted to hit her for being so foolish, but she was crying too hard. “Show some sense! Do you know what you look like to them now? What you are? What the hell are you—”

“I want them back,” she sobbed, stretching out her arms. “I miss them. I just want to see them again. I just want them to see me.”

Her parents were hugging, gripping as if they could bore through each other’s backs and grab hold from the inside. I clutched Renee harder.

“Trust me,” I said. “No, you don’t.”

“They’ll smell you coming,” I told her. “From far off. There’s nothing you can do about that. But the good thing is that what they’re smelling is dead flesh. You’re not a
living
threat. Y’see? So you can be right on top of them, sometimes, before they realize they’re in trouble.”

I’d decided to try to cheer Renee up by teaching her to hunt for herself, no more begging infant favors from me or anyone else. We were deep in the quieter, more isolated woods on the park’s west side, far from the old highway we’d crossed to get to the cemetery: I needed to keep an eye on her. She stood there slumped against a tree trunk, arms crossed and half-blond, half-bald head bowed so I could see her scalp pulsating steadily with that big new undead brain underneath; no more pinky-gray matter, her new brain, a bleached-bone white instead. Our brains are larger than a human’s, more neurons. I read that somewhere, while I was alive. I bet hoos don’t like to contemplate what that might mean.

“Of course, the downside is that sometimes scavengers go after you instead.” I sat down right there in the underbrush; I was still feeling a little tired and peculiar around the edges, hadn’t caught up on my sleep yet what with all her crying. “I got attacked by hungry yellow jackets once, in the middle of a nap. That was fun. Then one time this goddamned raccoon actually came up to me and crunched right down on my foot, I swear, like it was some sort of tasty scavenged snack and I—”

“I feel like I hurt them so much.” She kept her head down, mumbling at her feet. Bare now, useless shoes kicked off, those ridiculous nylon stockings torn away. “I didn’t mean to. One minute I was there, and now I’m not.” She let out a laugh that sounded like a bad cough. “All of a sudden I’m not . . . a person, anymore. And I don’t feel human either. I mean, I feel so different. Already.”

It was that dull, resigned sound in her voice that was making me nervous. They get this way sometimes, the ’maldies especially, depressed, eating only when they can’t control the urge, trying to make themselves just fade away. Then they get worked up all over again that it’s not that easy. Can’t handle what’s happened to them. There’s really not much you can say, honestly, other than get over it. All the rest of us did.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “You’re different.” I plucked at an early cluster of violets, running my fingers up the stems. “You also have to think about what to go after, along with how. Squirrel’s not much good, nasty meat and you’re hungry again an hour later. Possum’s good. Possum sticks with you. Ducks, I really like duck, if you can get one with the eggs still inside it that’s a nice—”

“So how long before I turn into a giant pile of rot like all the rest of you? Or a skeleton, so this can all just be over?”

Okay, don’t be too fucking rude or anything. My fingers twitched wanting to rip violets up by the roots but I’d done that once before when I was angry, killed a tree by kicking it, and I felt so bad about it afterward my stomach hurt. I pressed my palm flat against the ground instead, to ward off temptation.

“You’re a rotter already,” I told her. “A few months, a few decades, it depends. You’ll get some extra time out of being embalmed, but not much. So don’t expect it. You’re in the initial decay. You won’t look all that different, for a while.” I showed her my feet, swollen up and turning bruised black. “Then a bloater, I’ve just begun that, that’s when the bacteria really start breaking your insides down—”

She made a disgusted sound. I hate ’maldies, Joe was right to be pissed Teresa dropped this walking wailing wall on our heads. “—and you go all gassy. Like Billy. But sometimes you just bloat up a little bit before your flesh collapses, that’s what happened to Linc. Then you’re a feeder. That’s when the bugs start hatching, like with Joe. It doesn’t hurt.” Itches like a bitch, so I’d heard, though. “They feed for a long time. It’s like they keep hibernating and waking up on you, or something. When they’ve got nothing left to eat you’ll be in dry decay, like Sam and Florian. A dusty.” I pulled myself to my feet. “A skeleton. Then you can be happy.”

No answer. I started walking off by myself. I wasn’t hungry just now, but her martyrdom had officially turned boring and I wanted to look for more violets. When I heard steps behind me I didn’t turn around.

When Joe first showed me how to hunt I loved it, it was all this secret knowledge I hadn’t had before and he was the only one of the gang, even Florian, who got excited as I did to see me picking it up. We practiced on ducks, grabbing them from the nests and snapping their necks. Crunching down the egg clutch, shell and all, somehow felt weirder than eating the duck itself, spitting out bits of splintered bone and mouthfuls of feathers; I looked like a walking down comforter, afterward. The first group deer hunt where I brought down the stag, he looked so proud of me he almost did a little dance. Proud of me and himself, of course, as the one who taught me. We had fun. Glad I wasn’t too good for it, like some. Renee was walking in pace with me now. I ignored her.

“So we don’t
need
to eat people,” she said.

I could feel how twitchy and riled up she was, not just because reality had slammed her in the face but because that’s how we are: tenser than hoos, angrier, always standing poised on the precarious, crumbling ledges of our own tempers and any slight, any sideways glance, any fleeting sensation of pique or boredom or melancholy can shove us straight over. I shrugged. “I’ve never eaten one,” I said. “Not worth the trouble. If you wanna, though, you can find them. Just follow the road north. Mags or Ben can tell you how to steer clear of the flamethrowers. It’s not so hard. And you get idiot hoos volunteering themselves all the damn—”

“So we don’t have to stay out here.”

“We don’t have to stay anywhere.” I headed for the clearing, spotting a little flash of faded purple. “It’s just . . . this is where we are. Don’t like it, go somewhere else.”

That was the first real fight we had, Joe and I, when he wanted to take me hoo-hunting up in Whiting with Billy and Mags and Lillian.
It’s the most fun you’ll ever have,
he kept telling me,
the best you’ll ever eat.
I was sure he was right because he’d always been before that, but every time I thought about heading back to the human areas and lying in wait upwind and grabbing one of them to snap their neck and eat (but not right away—Mags and Lillian both claimed that the hormones they oozed when terrified made the meat taste that much better, a savory pants-shitting marinade), something in my chest and stomach clutched up.

It’s like I was afraid, and if you value your eyes never accuse any of us of being afraid of the goddamned sniveling soft-spined little hoos firearmed or otherwise, but it wasn’t really fear. It was like my body’s version of that sound Renee made, looking at my gassed-up blackened feet, and something else, something bigger, having to do with knowing how scared Lisa got of strange noises in the house, how Jim sometimes liked to be reckless and go walking on his own, late at night. I kept coming up with excuses not to go and finally Joe and I just had it out for hours, he nearly kicked my chest in and I broke his arm, and he kept getting smack in my face weeks afterward with the same failed sales pitch, over and over, exploding into a
rrrrwah!
of frustrated screaming like a fist to the teeth. Over and over. I couldn’t fight him when he did it because I knew he was right, he’d been right about absolutely everything before, but I also couldn’t say yes; that nameless thing stomping its gaseous feet all up and down the length of my gut wouldn’t let me. Eventually, he just stopped asking.

“Are you following me for a reason?” I snapped at Renee as I pushed into the clearing. The purple was some sort of weed, not violets, but it was still pretty. “It better not be for meat, since you’re too fucking dainty for it I’m not gonna go out of my way to—”

“I’m sorry I said you looked rotten,” Renee mumbled, all fast and under her breath like an embarrassed kiddie.

Panicked along with embarrassed, she must have realized she’d insulted her one and only chance at a steady meal. I just laughed. “Well, I do, don’t I? And guess what? I’ve never had a problem with it.” I gave her a shove, enjoying watching her stumble backward. “And if you think ‘rotten’ is that much of an insult, you really are a miserable little piece of hoo shit.”

She scratched at her skull, nails scraping like fretful, hungry insects at the surgical sutures. “Maybe,” she said quietly.

She looked like I’d felt when Lisa ran away from me, when Joe screamed about what a useless sniveling hoocow princess I was for not going up to Whiting with him. Billy and Mags laughed their asses off, not at me but at Joe:
Gotta watch yourself now, Mister Joseph.
Mags grinned, hurling Joe effortlessly to the ground when he tried jumping her. She used to be such a bitch fighter, in her day.
Somebody don’t have stars in her eyes anymore.