Frail (12 page)

Billy didn’t seem put off at all. Normal meet and greet, maybe, for an ex. “That’s yours, huh?” He glanced over at Don, who’d shaken off Janey’s clinging fingers like someone flicking away an ant and was sucking deep on his cigarette, eyes squeezed shut in pleasure; Don held the packet out to Janey, who took her own cigarette with a delighted squeak, and Billy’s narrow eyes went narrower with distaste. Disgust, even. “Like we don’t have enough of that shit round here already—”

“She’s my sister.” Lisa spat the word, all shortcut sibilance like Don blowing out a match. “So just leave it. If you want her so bad, and I don’t know why you do, you’d better take me too.”

“Don’t lookit
me
.” Billy snorted, all lit up now like he and Lisa were just sharing a friendly joke. “The trash Don likes to collect from the side of the road, I ain’t got nothing to say about it, but she looks young enough to work and if you stick around you won’t have all the burden of feeding her, you should be fucking grateful—
Phoebe!
” He turned and shouted at the gate guards, so bored they hadn’t moved an inch from their haphazard posts. “Where the hell’s that Phoebe, I know she’s on night crew this week! Get the dumb bitch over here now!”

He hadn’t been looking at her but Janey jumped and twitched, taking a last guilty draw on her cigarette, before she dropped it in the dirt and pulled off her shoes to run; she scuttled at double speed through the gates, Don strolling leisurely behind her, and after a few moments another woman came running out. Curly black hair cropped close to the scalp, blue T-shirt, sensible red sneakers, an angular rail of a body vibrating with so much nervous energy everyone else looked half-asleep in comparison. She skidded to a stop in front of Billy, one narrow hand shooting up to her temple in a playful little salute.

“Chieftain?” She grinned, and actually clapped her feet together like some soldier on dress parade. Human. I was starting to get a little feel for who was who, even before anyone talked.

Billy stood there looking at her, nostrils flaring like she stank. Phoebe just kept grinning, a wide-eyed toothy cheekiness that made you tense up inside waiting for someone to slap it right off her face. “New meat,” he said, nodding at me. “Show it around. That’s Lisa, she owns it. Do what she says like you’d do what I say, or I’ll beat the living shit out of you. Go get them beds.”

He turned and stalked off, the bare bits of his nearly hairless shins gleaming like wax, like bleached bone. It should’ve been ridiculous, him striding away barefoot in his little short pants, but the edges of his heels looked sharp enough to slice skin. The moonlight bisected Phoebe’s thin ferrety face and she gave me this strange eyeblink of a look, like she thought she knew me from somewhere but couldn’t quite place the face, then she slipped between me and Lisa and locked arms with us like we’d all three been jolly pals all our lives.

“You must both be
worn out
!” she shouted, grinning at me like that was the best and jolliest thing she could imagine. Up close she looked older, faint webbing all around her eyes, patches of old acne surrounded by flaking skin; her teeth were uneven, unhealthy nubs, like crumbling tea-stained sugar cubes. “We all sleep in the women’s dorm, plenty of room for everyone. Couples and families, they have their own space—but they don’t like to
encourage
that, you know, the big bosses, not if they can help it, don’t want any more
really
little mouths to feed, know what I mean?” Her laugh was a soft low titter. “You’ll get your work assignment tomorrow, after you sleep—see, you can get a little shut-eye first, they’re not running Parchman North up here no matter what anyone’s been telling ya!” She squeezed my arm, hard. “Welcome aboard. You’ll be glad you came!”

Lisa? Make her stop talking. I’ll pay you. Lisa just studied the gate guards, glaring at them while they glared back but none of it seemed hostile; one of them nodded courteously and handed her an extra flashlight as we passed through the gate, into another emptied-out subdivision of plain lawns and sad shrubs and slightly bigger houses. A little group was gathered on one of the lawns, scooping something into a tall brown leaf bag. Phoebe was humming all high and sprightly under her breath, my theme-song welcome to Don and Billy’s Home for Wayward Batshit Crazy Humans. “Where are we?” I demanded, pulling my arm from Phoebe’s. “What is this place?”

The guard nearest us, the one with the hunting knife, turned and grinned at me. Her eyes weren’t unkind. “Some of you frails started calling it Paradise City. Why not. Compared to what things are like outside? That’s no lie.”

“We’re staying long enough for Amy to rest,” Lisa said. “Then we’re leaving again.”

One of the lawn folks, watching us as he kept the leaf bag’s edges standing upright, shook his head and laughed. “You’re leaving when Billy and them say you can leave,” he said, as another of his fellow humans dropped something into the bag: an armload of filthy old bones, mixed with clumps of last autumn’s wet dead leaves. Cleanup crew. “She is, anyway.”

“She’s with me. She’s my sister.” Lisa was glaring down the guards again, whipping round to spit rebuke at the bone gatherers. “I say when we leave and when we—”

“Lady, just let it go.” The second cleanup crew guy, big and sturdy as a linebacker but with a gentle, patient face, big blue eyes, straightened up and wiped his leaf-mucky palms against his jeans. Careful not to get his Bears jersey any dirtier than it already was. “You’ve been out there, haven’t you? You know what it’s like. It’s shit. It’s hell. Especially for a girl. If you care about your sister you should be glad you both got here, one way or another.”

“Let’s
go
.” Phoebe grabbed my arm again, right where Lisa had bruised it up. “The women’s dorms are over on Elbert Street. I’m on shift, y’know, I have to get back to the kitchens or old Mags’ll have kittens.”

She led us through a weed-choked backyard and a knot of elm trees onto the next street: Elbert, the fourth house down, a defeated-looking white clapboard pile with peeling black trim. There in what used to be the living room were cheek by jowl rows of beds, futons, cots, sleeping bags, more in the next room, maybe two dozen in all; some empty, some with shoes lined up before them and exhausted barefoot heaps lying fast asleep. Phoebe made a needless little keep-it-down hand gesture and motioned to an unoccupied cot in the corner.

“You can’t stay here,” she whispered to Lisa. “The bosses have their own housing; this is a human dorm—”

“I’m not leaving Amy.” Lisa’s ex voice turned down low was a seething hiss, like a pressure cooker threatening to blow. “You can’t just grab people off the streets, sweep them up like those leaves and—”

“You can’t stay here.” Phoebe had dropped all her nudges and nods and grins and stood staring up at Lisa, mouth in a grim line and feet planted wide apart like she was scared of being pushed. “This is ours, the sleeping quarters are ours. Bosses don’t get to come inside. That’s the rule. We get our own space, and you can’t just drop in and out whenever you want to. It upsets everyone.”

“I’m not anyone’s boss, and I’m not trying to do anything but—”

“Don’t make me get Mags.” Phoebe was hissing like Lisa now. “These here, they’re on day shift, they can’t sleep in, it’s not fair, it’ll wake them up and be all your fault but
I’ll
still get blamed for—”

“It’s all right,” I muttered to Lisa. My whole head was wrapped in cotton batting, my eyes stinging and pricking with exhaustion; just looking at the little cot made me dizzy needing to lie down. “It’s okay.”

Phoebe smiled at me again, a quick spasm of thin lips and bad teeth like someone had tugged puppet strings hidden in her hair, and gave me that same funny, penetrating look as she had back at the gate, as if I were telling her some unsavory secret without even knowing I was doing it. I sat down on the edge of the cot, fumbling with my LCS jacket zipper.

“We’ll figure all this out tomorrow,” Lisa told me, squatting down and pulling my T-shirt cloth free of the zipper teeth like she really was my mother. I got the message, as she zipped it to my neck:
Keep this on. The rest of your stuff could disappear.
She rifled through her own pockets, passing me another foil peanut packet, as Phoebe pursed her lips and shook her head in delighted reproof.

“Can’t do that,” she whispered. “Can’t do that, no special treats or favors if you don’t prove you can work—”

“I decide what my frail gets,” Lisa hissed back, rising slow and easy to her feet. “Not you, human.”

A little eyeblink pause, as some of the sleepers murmured and stirred, then Phoebe shrugged.

“No offense, memsahib,” she said. “No offense. Nighty-night, Amy.”

They went out, the door creaking behind them. I curled up on the cot, patting my pockets, and ate my peanuts with as little foil-rustling as I could. All these people made me want to slip under the cot and hide. Tomorrow. Sort all this out tomorrow.

I decide what my frail gets. Not you, human.
It came out of her mouth so cold and hard, so easy. Frail. Mine. Like she’d been waiting her chance to say it, all along.

The second I closed my eyes I slid down a long, smooth chute, cool like metal and with the contained darkness of a womb. Somewhere far away, minutes or hours later, there were sounds of people getting up and leaving and others dropping into the beds, futons, cots they’d left behind; sunlight came hard and clean through the grimy windows, turning the womb-space behind my eyelids from soft black to a cloudy illuminated amber.

“Is she new?” someone whispered, right overhead. People standing over me, looking down at me. Maybe wanting something. Still couldn’t open my eyes. “Or did they change her shift?”

“How would I know?” someone else whispered back. “Who fucking cares. Welcome to Shit Town. Next nine exits.”

Their footsteps receded and a door slammed and I slept and slept.

SEVEN

T
he next thing I knew the sun was rich and fading like late afternoon and someone was wrenching my arm, my bitten arm, making me shout as I bolted awake.

“Night shift’s up,” she said, a barrel-built woman in her fifties, maybe older, deep lines in her face and a hard, unforgiving look in her eyes. “Get the hell out of my bed.”

“Rise and
shine
, night shift!” Phoebe’s voice came sailing from the porch steps, through the open door like a baseball whizzing toward window glass. “Don’t give me all that five-more-minutes-Mom, some of us have been out and about for
hours
already, you don’t see us complaining!”

She had my arm and we were out the door again before I could say two words.

“I am
exhausted
,” Phoebe shouted, half-dragging me down Elbert Street. “I mean, I couldn’t sleep half the day, tossing and turning, all this excitement! New people! It’s all too much! Don hasn’t found anyone alive in the longest time, you know, the last one cut her foot on something before he got there and the gangrene had already set in by the time they—here we are!” Half a street down, a canary yellow bungalow at the corner of Elbert and Massachusetts. “Welcome to our humble commissary as I like to call it, have to get you fed and dressed and pressed before your first assignment, we don’t want the bosses thinking I’m cutting you any slack . . .”

There were piles of clothing stacked against the front room wall, clean and filthy alike all neatly folded; little hand-lettered MEN’S, WOMEN’S, CHILDREN’S signs with pointing arrows divvying up the piles. Cardboard boxes everywhere, less organized, overflowing with all the same safe house stuff Lisa and I had crammed in our carts and then watched blow away. “C’mon, kid. Down this way, bathroom. Chop chop, said the executioner.”

“Where’s Lisa? You told me that—”

“All in due time, kid—she’s sleeping right now, she’s plumb tuckered out. Lotta work, looking after
you
!” Phoebe’s eyes got big and bright and she was laughing again, soft chuckles and indulgent head-shakes like she just couldn’t get over me. “Hell of a job, convincing her you were just sleeping like the dead and not roasting over a spit for the bosses’ dinner, plug up that bathtub drain like a good girl.
I’ll
be back in two shakes, once I get the water going.”

Breakfast—brunch, late lunch, early dinner—was canned peaches and tuna fish and then a bath in
hot
water, buckets of Lake Michigan water heated on a fireplace woodstove and hauled into the bathtub. There were new socks, new underwear, sneakers that fit, antibiotic salve for my bitten arm and hydrocortisone for my scraped-up itching palms and athlete’s foot spray for my toes and I was trying hard not to care about comfort, to become someone who could march all the way to the Volga on bare blistered soles, but my hair felt clean for the first time in months and there was hot coffee, instant stirred right into the cup but I even drank down the sludge.

“Well, you must have questions,” Phoebe finally said, as I sat dressed and pressed on the toilet seat sipping my second cup. “So fire away. Now or never.”

“Paradise City,” I said, shivering with the early spring chill and pressing my palms tighter against the warm cup. The words felt thin and sour against my tongue like drops of ink. “What about Elbertsville? There was a human settlement there, just humans, Lisa said.”

Phoebe pulled her clothes off, trailed fingers in the lukewarm tub; she hadn’t had to tell me not to drain the water. “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she said. “Maybe there was one, could’ve died off last winter, could’ve been raided. There’s gangs all over the north county, y’know, human, extra-human, some of those folks could be over here now, all I know. If your Lisa didn’t just get the whole story wrong to start with.”

Naked, Phoebe was all jutting bones and splotchy skin, angry eczematous patches interspersed with gleaming grease: moisturizer slopped on too thick, or maybe corn or olive oil, like Ms. Acosta and I used when we couldn’t stand the winter scaliness. Bits of her skin shone with it like the elbows of a worn-out suit. She jumped into the tub, dug fingertips into the thick wet scum of the soapdish. “Anyway,” she said, “what the hell does it matter? Trust me, kid, we humans are a hell of a lot better off here than on our own. We’ve got protection, guards—”