Frail (11 page)

“No.”

“Yes, you are,” he said, and there was a gun from inside the folds of his black raincoat and it was pointing at me.

My head felt all floaty and dreamy, like I really had fallen asleep standing there. Maybe I had, because that black dog growling nose to nose had felt so much more real than this. Lisa drew in a sharp, angry breath and he shrugged, actual apology in his eyes.

“Get in,” he said, talking over my head to Lisa. “You want Prairie Beach, right? Like everyone else? Well, they’re full up now, no room at the inn, but I can take you to the next closest—”

“We’re not going with you,” Lisa said. “We’re not going.”

He shrugged again. “That’s all right with me,” he said. “But you seem fond of your little pet frail, I know how easy it is to get attached, and she’s a stain on the road shoulder if you don’t come so just think it over, ’kay? Think hard. And hurry up.”

He had a hand on my arm now, closing tight on the spot where Lisa nearly broke it, and the barrel was right up against my cheek as he cocked the trigger. Just like in a movie. The woman behind the wheel kept sitting there, dreaming her own little dreams as she waited, and Lisa said something to Don I couldn’t seem to hear, and he laughed, and then Lisa was in the car’s front passenger seat and I was in the back with the gun and Don. Don had my knife too, Dave’s knife. I wasn’t sure how he got it, all that was another blur. The seats were so soft, a dried sticky streak on the leather like some kid had spilled a can of pop ages back, and the heater was turned up so high I felt cool steam evaporating from my soaked skin. I shivered, folding my arms in my sopping wet jacket they hadn’t yet taken from me, and looked from the side of Lisa’s anxious, knotted face to the dark paper-scroll of the interstate to Don, who tilted his gray head and gave me a grin.

“Am I dreaming?” I asked, as we headed right down the middle of I-80/94 at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour.

Don laughed. The same sort of laughing sound Lisa made, a deep, barking cough that shot the air from his throat like he was angry at it.

“You were all daydreaming,” he said. “All humanity, everywhere. Now you’ve had your wake-up call. So how d’you like it?”

He looked suddenly almost warm and wistful like the very thought of that made him happy, like some great iron band binding him tight had just loosened and his whole being was shifting, stretching in relief. The rain clattered against the car windows, the headlights illuminating the deserted expressway, defunct service stations, signs counting down the miles to cities now inaccessible if they still existed at all; I drew my fingertips across the condensation on the glass, three thick, clear, foreshortened lines in the fog, and waited to see how long it would take my last little traces to be erased.

BOOK TWO

TOPSY-TURVY

SIX

“W
ell, my God, you don’t need to look like
that
.”

Janey, the woman behind the wheel, stared at me in the rearview mirror, big gray-green eyes narrow with amusement; up close her hair looked disheveled and glassine, like she’d coated it thick with hairspray without bothering to comb it first, and her lipstick was a haphazard greasy smear. “Nobody’s driving you to your funeral, now are they?”

Human. Her voice. I don’t know why that surprised me so much, but I sat up straighter against the padded leather and scrutinized that little rectangle of her eyes, nose, mouth like it were a rebus full of clues. “I don’t know what you’re taking me to,” I said.

“Of course you don’t,” said Don, who’d put the gun away and was cleaning his nails with a little paring knife, bored as you please. He was sitting passenger side, right behind Lisa. “You’re a human. You don’t know anything, you don’t understand anything, it’s like expecting a muskrat to stand up and recite Racine—”

“Don,”
said Janey, her greasy mouth screwing up in a reproving pout. “Be nice.”

“The truth isn’t nice or not nice, dearest Jeanette,” he said, not looking up from his pinky finger. “It just is.”

“I want to know where you’re taking us.” Lisa kept twisting around to look at me, then back at the road signs. If it weren’t for me I bet she’d just throw herself right out of the car, any broken bones a mere fleeting inconvenience. “If you won’t tell her, you can damned well lower yourself to telling—”

“I told you already, didn’t I?” Don put the paring knife away, stretched out his long blocky legs so his knees pressed into the back of Lisa’s seat. “You said you’d been walking all day, and you were heading north. That makes your destination fairly obvious, if you have any clue what’s left standing—and I assume you do, you may be ignorant but you’re not fools. You—” He pointed a finger at Lisa. “You want Prairie Beach. You’re a bit late in the day, they’re not taking anyone new and they wouldn’t want your frail anyway—”

“What about Elbertsville?” Lisa demanded. “There’s a human settlement there. That’s what everyone told me.”

Don pulled a matchbook from his pocket, digging under his nails again. Janey squinted at the road.

“You ran into one of those twisters, didn’t you?” he said, his mouth pursed with concentration as he sawed the matchbook’s thin paper edge back and forth. “A couple touched down in Hammond too and one right outside Lake Station. Bad, bad weather. You don’t look like the sort who’d travel with a pet but no supplies, you must’ve lost them all along the way. You might as well come with us.” The matchbook edge frayed, bent, and he turned it over for a fresh plane of attack. “Janey and I patrol the roads sometimes looking for folks just like you, who’ve lost your way—you’re lucky we stumbled over you. We’re open to everybody. We don’t discriminate.”

“They don’t discriminate,” Janey repeated, veering such a sharp left to avoid a fear-frozen deer that I grabbed for the door handle, nearly bashed my head on the window. “Everyone’s welcome. You’ll be happy there.”

“Where is there?” I asked. “If it’s not Elbertsville or Prairie Beach, then where are we going?”

Janey sped up to seventy-five and clunked right over and through a pothole, a yawning frost heave, so roughly I winced for the car’s transmission. North, obviously, still north, to Gary. But not Elbertsville. Lisa fumbled in her pockets and stretched her arm back, handing me something: a little half-crushed foil packet of peanuts, like the kind you get on airplanes. Spicy Red Hot flavor. Don chuckled when I tore it open.

“You’ll be earning your food from now on,” he said. “No more handouts. But it won’t be bad. You’ll see. Plenty for everyone.”

“Plenty for everyone,” Janey crooned, her smile filling up the rearview mirror. Her tongue swept over her large, square front teeth, mopping away a lipstick streak. “And nobody will take you away from—what’s your name, anyway?” She turned to Lisa, who glared silently back. “Nobody will take you away from each other, we respect family ties. It’s all about family, one way or another.” She sailed through a standing puddle, a soft swishing sound of water as the wheels sank inward, and onto the U.S. 12 exit ramp. She rubbed a hand over her eyes and I saw violet-gray circles beneath them, soft crushed-looking skin like flower petals in a mud puddle, and something in her sagged wearily against the seat cushions before she straightened up, clutched the wheel tighter, gave the mirror a resolute smear-free smile. “All about family,” she repeated.

Nobody’d asked my name. Maybe I don’t have one anymore, as far as they’re concerned. I guess they can have the knife, it was Dave’s anyway, but they’re not taking my cell phone. My cards. The CDs Lisa gave me. I licked my fingers and rubbed them over the oily foil, picking up the last peanut crumbs and salt.

I want to go home.

The padded car seat felt good. The heater. Heat that came out of a machine whenever you wanted, the touch of a button, drying your clothes without leaving any damp or mildew behind. Already that felt singular, seductive. It was dangerous to let comfort suck you in, heat, soft chairs, the promise of gasoline and food and lipstick. Be like Lisa. Sleep anywhere, eat anything that comes your way. Don’t give a shit. But I’ve
been
doing that, I’ve been, and nothing’s worked out right.

The car clunked and skidded into the outskirts of Gary, a silent teeth-rattling ride over empty railroad tracks past steel mills and coil makers and warehouses gone to hollow caverns. Maybe it was Janey who called me, or Don, warning us they’d be right along. But it couldn’t be. Don would’ve smashed my phone right on the pavement, crushed it under his shoe, just for fun. He wasn’t getting my phone.

Stick with Lisa. She’ll help me. She’s got to.

 

 

We clattered down a residential side street, all overgrown forest patches and neat little houses with worn siding and tiny piebald lawns. The protective fences were torn down, or simply never there: Property taxes paid for all that, zombie fencing and warning sirens and sulfur lights up and down the roads, and you could tell these houses had never been worth much. Bodies by the roadside, flesh-picked or clean rotted away, skeletons curled up in the grass. Janey slowed the car to a near crawl, staring wide-eyed at each house in turn like a thief casing the neighborhood, and Don looked up from the shredded remains of his matchbook.

“There’s no point in foot-dragging, Jeanette Isabella.” He returned the matchbook to his pocket. “We’re almost there.”

“I’m not
foot-dragging
, I’m just enjoying the view.” Janey leaned back in her seat, let the speed drop from twenty-five, to twenty, to ten as she smiled beatifically at the dead grass, limp shrubbery, wan dilapidated little sardine-tin houses. “I love cities at night—they’re just so big and spread out, so full of people and life and activity. So many possibilities. Don’t you love the lights, Don? Look at all the lights.”

Other than her headlights, the street was completely dark. Lisa swiveled around in her seat to face me, eyes silently warning me to keep quiet—what the hell did she think I could say, anyway, to that?—and gave Janey a calm attempt at a smile. “My name is Lisa,” she said. “My friend, the human girl, her name is Amy—”

“Janey,” Don interrupted, calm and unruffled, “start the fucking car up again before I hurt you.”

Janey flinched, like some random noise had just jostled her from a daydream, and sped up. Still smiling. The rain had slowed, nearly stopped. Lisa squinted at the street signs. “Ogden,” she said. “This
is
near Prairie Beach then, I can tell just by all the trees—”

“An invigorating hike away,” Don agreed. “So close, and yet so far.”

Ogden, Illinois, Buell, Indiana, Pennsylvania. Janey pulled up at the curb right off Massachusetts Avenue and I saw the metallic glint of a restored fence, curving over and across the street, people with flashlights leaning bored against it like sentries. One of them had a gun in a holster, like Don. Another one, a hunting knife like Dave’s. Lisa reached back and took my hand and held it as firmly as she could without breaking it, to stop the trembling.

“This is my ‘pet,’ ” Lisa said, glancing from Don to Janey in turn. “Not anyone else’s.”

“You’re worrying about nothing,” Don said, squinting out the window. “We have nothing to worry about anymore, our kind. Nothing can touch us. Leave the fruitless hand-wringing to the weak and frail.”

A man was coming through the gate, tall, stout, white-haired, in a dark gray suit inches short at the wrists and ankles. He flapped an impatient flashlight beam at us and Janey leapt like a happy little puppy from behind the wheel, stumbling over to Don as he unfolded himself from the back seat and slipping her arm through his. She was in high heels, a good size too large, sliding precariously up and down inside them as she tugged the stiletto tips from the soft wet dirt at every step. I waited until Lisa came over to my side of the car, opening the door for me and taking my hand again as I made myself climb out.

“I’ll handle it,” she whispered, even as her wary glances from ex to ex—I didn’t need to hear them to know what they were—told me she had no more clue what she was handling than I did. “He said nobody would separate us. Let’s call his bluff. Just let me talk.”

“Why are we here?” The night was soft and hazy, the smallest bit of moonlight filtering through the clouds and making the budding tree branches look anemic, sickly; no lamplight eyes peering at me through the bushes, no black dog. I almost wished it were there. It wanted only me, if they tried taking its prey away it’d make them all shit themselves. Even smug, smirking Don. “What do they want?”

“Just let me talk.”

The short-suited man banged his flashlight on the car hood, like we didn’t already have his attention, shone the beam fast in our faces. Up close his hair wasn’t white but a pale golden blond, soft fluffy locks like feather tufts, his eyes narrow and ice-colored and as sour as his thick pink twisted-up mouth. He marched up to me and Lisa and his pale exposed ankles, his broad bare feet looked incongruously shapely and fragile, like wax sculptures threatened by a match.

“So whaddaya got for me, Don?” he asked, in a voice gravelly and thin all at once like a rain of tiny pebbles. “Because you never bring me shit no matter how far you drive, and this don’t look like any exception—”

Don laughed, a wispy stream of mirth like tobacco smoke. Janey clutched his shoulders from behind, massaging with her fingertips. “One of us, and a frail. Since when can’t you use more work crews, Billy? The frail’s young, strong—well, strong as her kind ever get, anyway.” He pulled out a packet of cigarettes, a lighter. “She’ll do. As for the other, well, ask her if she wants to stay. The frail’s her little pet goldfish, she probably will.”

Billy leaned forward, squinting at us like he had bad eyes. His breath had the same faint traces of brine and decay as Don’s had, and Lisa’s didn’t. I backed away without meaning to, as he looked me over, but he seemed pleased with that.

“That’s mine, what you’re nosing around,” Lisa said, cold and steady, moving in front of me. Almost nose to nose with Billy, staring him right down. “I’m Lisa.”