For the Dead (3 page)

In the guard room, the time-code on the monitors reads 03:09.

T
HREE SEVENTEEN A.M.

The buildings are vertical spikes, sharp-edged against a low-hanging sky the color of a scrape of graphite. They’re mostly dark at this hour but here and there, high above the street, a yellow rectangle gleams.

The rain has left a shiny line of trickling water in the gutter and puddles half an inch deep where the sidewalk dips. The girl skirts them without a downward glance. The boy stomps through them, trying to splash her. They’re small figures, and their clothes are all too big—dark, long-sleeved pullover shirts and loose jeans, handed down apparently by a long sequence of children. The jeans are cinched around their tiny waists with cracked, ratty-looking belts that have dozens of holes punched in them. The one around the boy’s waist has been wrapped around him twice. As they pass beneath the streetlight, the dark knitted caps into which they have tucked their hair glisten from the drizzle.

The boy yawns ostentatiously.

“Not yet,” the girl says without slowing. Her name is Anchali, and she goes by Chalee, which is what she thinks Charlie Sheen’s first name is. She’s seen Charlie Sheen on television, and even though she’s only heard him dubbed into Thai she admires the way he tells people to fuck off. “There’s a dumpster up here. I know a kid who knew a kid who found a laptop in it.”

“Working?” The boy’s name is Dok, but as long as he can remember, most people have called him Noo, which means
rat
.

“Of course not. But he got nine hundred baht for the battery and the keyboard.”

Dok says, “I’m sleepy.”

“Poor little baby, up past his bedtime.” She is eight months older than he and two inches taller.

“I’m the one who got us out.”

The girl wraps her arm around the boy’s neck and squeezes, part affection and part threat. “We’re going to get caught, that’s why we need to find something to take back. How mad can Boo be if we’ve got something worth a thousand baht?”

“We haven’t found anything so far.”

“This is the last one.”

“Promise?” He holds out a curled pinky.

She hooks her own pinky through his and tugs. “Promise.” They separate and she strikes out again, the boy a couple of steps behind. “Some day,” the boy says, looking up at the building they’re passing, “I’ll work in a place like this.”

“Not unless your reading gets better.”

The boy stops. He’s been hungry ever since he slipped part of his dinner into a plastic bag and took it to her after she was sent from the dining room for getting into a shoving match. His stomach growls, and he speaks more loudly to drown it out because he told her he ate his whole dinner and got extra for her. He’d be embarrassed if she knew the truth. “Let’s go, then.”

To their right the street is a dark river, obsidian, flat, black, empty. To their left, well-dressed women stand motionless behind plate glass like people whose best moment has been frozen for eternity. Carefree and well-groomed and unoccupied by anything specific, they wear clothes that have never shrugged off a wrinkle. Even the soles of their shoes are immaculate. Chalee slows slightly at the sight of a pale yellow sweater with flat pearlescent buttons, but Dok, passing, jostles her shoulder and says, “Come on.”

“I just want to look, Dok,” she says. “It’s the King’s color.”

Ahead of her, he smiles. He likes that she doesn’t call him Noo, even though the other children do.

At the alley, he pauses until she’s caught up with him. About halfway down there’s a single lamp on a pole, throwing a circle of light that’s a weak, corrupted shade of yellow, but there are many dark meters between them and it, and those meters are dim enough to be populated by clouds of rats.

“Last dumpster,” she says, passing him.

Dok’s terror of rats, coupled with two oversize front teeth, earned him his nickname. He grabs a deep breath and holds it, fighting off the thought of naked tails and clawed skittering feet. Seeking a thimbleful of comfort, he looks up at the ribbon of grayish sky above him. Cool mist sprinkles onto his upturned face, and he’s trying to enjoy it as he walks into the girl’s back.

Chalee swears with surprising and precocious filthiness. “You made me drop it,” she hisses.

“What? Drop what?”

“The lighter, stupid. How can we see anything without the lighter?”

He knows immediately what she wants him to do, and he’s not going to do it. “Forget it. We’ll go home.”

“You made me drop it,” she says. “You find it. Find it with your foot. Just stand in one place and feel around with your foot.”

“
You
find it with your foot if you’re so smart.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she says. “Look at you. You might as well be a farm kid.”

He
was
a farm kid, but so was she, so he lets it pass. “Nope.”

“I’ve walked for hours to get here. I’ve put up with you. I’m not going back without trying one more time to find something.”

The words
I’ve put up with you
feel like a slap in the face. “Fine,” Dok says, turning away. “Do whatever you—” He kicks something small and hard that makes a little scraping noise across the concrete.

“That’s it,” she says. “How far did it go?”

“Not far.”

“Which foot?”

“Right.”

“Okay, here’s what you do. Bring your other foot up with it, so they’re even. Then stick your right foot out just a little and move it side to side,
slowly
.”

“Got it,” he says. He puts his foot on it so it can’t go anywhere and then, with great reluctance, bends, finds the lighter with his fingertips, and snatches it up.

“Don’t light it yet,” she says. “We’re in front of the wrong dumpster. The next one is the one we want.” Chalee’s hand, warm and soft, lands on his arm. “I’ll count the steps, okay? One … two … three …”

Dok likes the way her hand feels. At the count of fourteen, she stops and says, “Okay. Light it.”

He flicks the little wheel, and the lighter sparks to life. Two big dumpsters leap out at them, solidified, right-angled darkness, a space of about four meters between them.

“We’re in between them,” Chalee says. “A little farther.”

As Dok steps to his left, holding the lighter, something low and irregular casts a moving shadow in the corner formed by the wall and the first dumpster, which reeks of rotten food. It has no recognizable shape, but it’s dark and rounded and almost knee-high. Chalee stops moving, her eyes locked on it, but Dok is the one who says, “What’s that?”

H
ER BODY IS
too big for her, too hot for her, too heavy for her; it hangs on her skeleton like a penalty. As cold as she was before, she’s hot now. She’s dragged herself through the night for weeks, and she knows she’s almost finished.

She’d thought the night was
her
time. She’d thought she could hunt in the night, hide in the night. She’d thought nothing could see her. Thought, for once in her life, she’d have an advantage. But the people in the house she’d lived in were just humoring her. They could see her even when she thought she
was invisible. The night doesn’t care about her any more than the sun does or the rain does. Doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. She’s just one more weak animal.

And the night is too big and too small. Too big for her to learn its paths and too small to keep her out of the way of the things that want to eat her. She’s been running for weeks, lost all the time, hungry forever. Everything she eats out of the big trash cans smells awful and makes her sick. Whenever she rests, they find her and chase her, with their loud voices and their big hands and their awful wet lips.

She had thought she could
laugh
at them.

The forest she’s dreaming is dark now and empty, or pretending to be. She’s burrowed down beneath a large stone and pulled a mound of leaves and twigs over her. She can sleep here, she hopes, get strong here. Maybe something harmless will hop by and she can reach out, so fast she’s invisible, and snatch it up and sink her nails into it and cram it, still living, into her mouth.

She’s decided she can eat fur as long as there’s meat under it.

But it’s rained as she slept and the wet has come down through the twigs and leaves and chilled her. She should move, she knows, try to find a tree with a hollow trunk or broad leaves, but she can’t. Her arms and legs weigh too much. She feels as though the weight of her body will push her deeper into the hole she dug, so deep that the earth covers her and she can finally give up and sleep in the dark. Sleep with her mouth open and let the dirt fill it.

She hears a sound, something hard scraping against something else. It’s both here and not here. It’s on the other side of the world, on the other side of the mound of leaves and twigs. It’s on the other side of her eyelids.

It may be the most difficult thing she’s ever done, but she opens her eyes.

“I
T
’
S A COAT
,” Chalee says. “Just a coat.”

Dok doesn’t like the shape or the size of the thing, but all he says is, “Does it look any good?”

“You’re as close to it as I am.”

“Old and dirty.” He gives it a second look and turns away. “Let’s search in the dumpster, fast, and then go.”

She makes a quick grab for the lighter and misses. “Maybe there’s something in the pockets.”

“Fine,” Dok says. “I’ll be right here.”

“I might as well be with a girl,” she says. “Give me the lighter.”

He says, “Ummmmm …”

“I’m going to look,” she says, taking it from his hand. She licks her lips and turns to make sure he’s listening. “I’m taking three steps closer, okay? One, two, three.” She stops. “Now every time I take a step, you take one, too, behind me.”

Dok says, “I don’t want to.”

“Then go away,” she says. “Just run away,
Noo
.” She holds the lighter in front of her, a little to the side so the flame doesn’t create a halo of darkness, and she takes the eight or ten steps that carry her to the coat.

“I’m right behind you,” he says, his ears stinging with the sound of his nickname.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have—” She reaches out to touch the coat, puts a hand on the cloth, then emits a small, high
yip
. She’s up in an instant, backing away. “Someone’s
in
there,” she says, “under the coat, someone is there.”

He knew it, but that doesn’t mean he wants to hear it. “Are you sure?”

“A shoulder, I felt a shoulder. Or a knee, maybe a knee. And I—I smelled it.”

The two of them are standing very close to each other now. The coat is motionless in the corner.

“
Smelled
it? Is it dead?”

“No, it moved. Just a little.”

“Big?”

She thinks. “Big? No. Didn’t feel big.”

“Not big, not dead,” he says. “What are you afraid of?”

“What am
I
afraid of? I’m not the one who hid behind a girl.”

“Give me that.” He snatches the lighter and squats, reaches out for the nearest edge of the coat, pinches the tip of his tongue between his teeth, and tugs the cloth back.

And wets his pants.

A bramble of dark hair. A face patched with black except for a pinkish-white strip across the bridge of the nose and the eyes. As he realizes he’s wet himself, the eyes snap open, wide enough to see the whites all the way around the iris, and the lips peel back to reveal gray teeth.

“
Ghost
,” he screams, scrabbling back on all fours like a crab, the lighter going out in his hand. “Ghost ghost ghost
ghost
. Run run run—”

He bumps into something solid. Chalee. He looks up at her and says, “
Black teeth
.”

She reaches down to take the lighter. “It’s not coming after you,” she says. “A ghost would be eating you by now.” She clicks the lighter, looks over at the coat, and sees the dark train of pee leading away from it. A little surge of pity pushes her into action—she needs to do something to make him think she hasn’t noticed. “Maybe it’s a kid,” she says, and with her heart pounding triple-time in her ears, she leans down and tugs back the coat, which has fallen back into place.

Even through the dark patches of whatever has been rubbed into the skin, she can see the delicacy of bone and brow and nostril. A girl. Not much older than they are—maybe one or two years.

She smells terrible. Dirtier than dirty. Very gently, Chalee peels the coat down another few inches and sees collar bones jutting out above a garment that was white once, loose and simple and unbelievably filthy. Chalee has been dirty, too; since her family fell apart after losing their farm, she has learned what it feels like to be so dirty she wants to die, but has never been
this
dirty.

The girl beneath the crumpled coat opens one eye and hisses, and Chalee falls back on her rump. Then the open eye rolls up, and the gray face empties.

Chalee puts a hand, very, very lightly, on the discolored forehead and then snatches it back. “She’s so
hot
,” she says. “It’s a girl. She’s feels like she’s on fire and she looks like she hasn’t eaten in a month. Do you have the cell phone?”

Dok says, “I can’t use the cell phone. They’ll take it away if they know I’ve got it.”

Chalee turns to look at him. “I think she could die,” she says. “So if you use your cell phone, maybe you lose it, and if you don’t use it, maybe she dies.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He pulls a cheap prepaid phone out of his pocket. “What do we want?”

“We need someone to bring the van,” she said. “We’ll never be able to get her out of here by ourselves.”

Dialing, the boy says, “I really liked having this phone.”

Chalee waits until he looks at her, and says, “You’re a nice boy, Dok.”

N
INETY MINUTES LATER
, when two boys in their late teens carry the feverish girl into the shelter, they’re both scratched and bleeding, and their bundle is struggling helplessly inside the coat, rolled up like a carpet and secured tightly at the elbows and ankles with leather belts. The sounds she makes are almost too high to be heard. Chalee and Dok follow, holding their jeans up with their hands. Their heads hang down. In the doorway they see Boo, the older boy who runs the shelter, silhouetted in the hallway, his hands on his hips, his pose telling them they’re in for it.