Frail (22 page)

“Don’t be an idiot, Kevin.” Sharp and impatient, like he was nothing worth getting fussed about. “You know the lab needs to know about—”

“You’re not getting back to the fucking lab!” Scarlet-faced, Kevin slammed a fist against the porch; Janey flinched and shuddered at the sound, like she hadn’t at all the yelling. “Do you get it yet, Phoebe? It doesn’t matter what you do or what you know, there’s no more lab, there’s no more Prairie Beach, there’s no more of any of that shit for human beings so just be happy we’ve got a place to stay and we’re not starving to death! You have to stop this, Phoebe! You’re gonna make that kid crazy—” He broke off and I could hear
as you are
floating in the air, unsaid but heard by everyone, before he gathered himself up with a hard, shaky sigh. “Phoebe,” he said, pleading, his hands open and reaching out in entreaty, “honey, just let it go. Okay? Let it go.”

“There’s so much you
think
people don’t know about you, isn’t there, Amy?” Phoebe was smiling now, crazy again but also calculating and triumphant and so happy to be shouting it out in front of all the bosses, the elect, the exalted ones who died but hadn’t died. “I mean, you poor kid, you think you can just pass for anyone else—but I figured it out.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I said, soft and almost breathy now because otherwise I’d scream it. Because she was scaring me. “Just go fuck yourself.”

“I know where you come from now. And you’re one of the only ones left, you must’ve had to hit the road in a big damn hurry after you—”

My hand wrenched itself away from Stephen’s and my arms flew out and I hit her, fast and hard. I caught her off guard and she nearly fell, staggering sideways under the impact, and then something was rushing at me and she had a handful of my hair, a skin-scratching hair-pulling worthless fighter but I knew how to throw real fists. Dave had taught me. He knew I’d need it someday, he was smart like that. I thanked him inside as I hit hard bone with real fists, the right sort of fists, and my fingers shook and throbbed with the impact but it felt good, better than good, when Phoebe let out a scream.

Phoebe got me in the mouth, pain all through my jaw and the taste of a new wet warmth, and then Kevin had Phoebe and Billy had me, barely even gripping me by the fingertips but it hurt, it hurt bad, Lisa was trying to yank me away but Billy had me. Like he had us all.

“Crazy little bitch!” Billy was roaring with laughter, wiping his eyes with his free hand. “Jesus fucking Christ, get them crazy enough and they start thinking they’re us, trying to fight like they—basement, kid. You started it. You can sit in there for the rest of the damned night, that’s enough of a show—”

“You’re the fucking bitch!” I screamed at Phoebe, as Al and one of Billy’s gate guards took me from his grasp. “I’ll kill you, I’ll sic my fucking dog on you—”

“Give her back!” Lisa was shouting. Naomi was wrapped around her leg, her forehead pressed to Lisa’s thigh and eyes squeezed hard shut. “You give her back, she’s
my
goddamned—”

“You want her neck broke?” Billy snarled, giving Lisa a shove. “Huh? You want her neck broke, you want your big pet and your little pet lying in the dirt all twisted up like a car crash? You want it?”

Lisa peeled Naomi off her leg and she and Billy were going at it, kicking and pounding like I never could’ve without breaking in two, scrabbling on the sidewalk in smears of quick-drying blood. Naomi ran to Stephen, sobbing now like Maria; Stephen was shouting something I couldn’t hear, couldn’t hear anything over the roar in my own ears. Janey closed her eyes to the fight and turned her head away, humming some tuneless, sickly melody like fever turned to song. Kevin frog-marched Phoebe into the trees, no more sweet reason. Mags just stood there, watching all of us, taffy-apple hair spilling into her eyes and broad-beamed body solid like something sculpted, a chunk of granite surrounded by cracking beams of plywood. There was no expression on her face at all.

 

 

I went limp and let my feet drag on the ground, like those funeral-home protesters you used to see on television, but they just hauled me off my feet and into one of the empty homes on Connecticut Street, shoved me into the basement, locked the door. One dim little light, as I quit pounding the door screaming about dogs and groped my way dizzy and hurting down the stairs, a small flashlight lying forgotten on the floor that let out a dying battery glow as I switched it on. Filthy old mattress in the corner, ripped open and oozing batting that gave off a mushroom-stink of must; a workbench opposite me, stripped of all its tools, a dark stain painting the top and soaking into the wood. Emergency supply shelves, all empty, long since raided or gone to the commissary.

I marched around the workbench, like it could tell me something, and then sank down in a corner away from that disgusting mattress and wrapped my arms around my knees, twitching with the feverish exhilaration of needing to hurt something, hurt Phoebe. My hands were puffy and sore and my throat scratchy from shouting and my lip swelling up where she got me, the skin raised and tender like my own mouth was some foreign growth attacking my face. Every part of me felt not mine, turned inside out, I knew this feeling from the last time and Phoebe knew about that time, she knew everything, so
what
if she knew everything? With the way she planned and schemed, she and Kevin never got here just by accident—

“So where are you?” I yelled into the dim light, at the nearsolidified stench coming up from that mattress. “I could’ve used some teeth in that fight! Some claws!”

Well? Here, boy! You know where to find me!

How about you, phantom caller? Anybody? Dead phone, no battery, that’s nothing to you! Talk!

Nothing. All alone in the dark. Lisa wouldn’t come, I was sure of that. She was too afraid of pushing Billy into really hurting me, or Naomi. All that strength, invulnerable flesh and just like with Don, on the road, it doesn’t help. Helps nothing.

I curled up against the wall and cried some, and slept, and then someone was at the top of the stairs, rattling the door handle. Key sliding into a lock. Maybe this right here was “Prairie Beach,” the place where anyone who acted up ended up, the tide sweeping their dirty unfit selves off their feet and into the crawl space—I stood up, waiting. Darkness in the doorway, and then a pair of eyes, piercing sulfurous lamp-eyes—

Stephen. He had a flashlight, one of the big industrial ones from the kitchens that he didn’t switch on until he’d closed the door behind him, and a bulging black tote bag on one arm. He glanced behind him, and with the bag lying across his back trudged down the stairs.

“How did you get in here?” I asked. Half-whispering, because maybe someone really was outside. My voice was scratchy and hoarse.

“Through the door,” he said dryly. “Just like you. I brought you some stuff, it’s not much but it’s what I could take without being missed.”

He emptied it all out on the workbench, not noticing or caring about the stain too dark to be water. Another small flashlight. A box of wheat crackers. A jar of peanut butter and a little knife. Some apricot jam. I’d never liked the taste of apricots but that didn’t seem relevant just now. A tightly folded blanket. Some books, random paperbacks he’d obviously grabbed in a hurry. “Your notes will be off now,” I said. “The supply inventory.”

“This is the commissary’s food.” He laughed. “Their books. Their shit. Phoebe’s problem, not mine.”

There was a reckless little glint in his eye that reminded me far too much of Phoebe. “Billy will miss you, serving dinner—”

“He went off hunting with Mags.”

“Al, then. Alice.”

“They’re both afraid of me, in case you haven’t figured it out. Guns or no guns. They think—fuck it, never mind what they think. They can think what they want. They’re not here.”

He passed me a handful of half-flattened Tootsie Rolls. I shoved them in my pocket.

“I want to know what they think,” I said. I sat back down on the floor, the folded-up blanket beneath me. My stomach was a peach pit, I couldn’t eat. “Why they’re afraid of you, and why everyone hates the kitchen crew but Billy won’t have us touched. And all that stuff about Prairie Beach, and Natalie, and us three being alike.” I tugged at strands of my hair, like Lisa would. “And why everyone avoids you—”

“Your mouth’s swollen,” he said, sitting down next to me. “Like mine. I can’t steal first-aid stuff, they guard it—”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“There’s rumors,” he said, slowly, like he’d lose the whole unspooling thread of his story if he rushed it. With what he’d said about his head, maybe he would. “That the lab at Prairie Beach, the big one doing all the thanatological research before the plague, that it’s started up again—”

“Researching
what
? And how? There’s no more undead, everyone keeps saying they’re extinct, and even if there were there’s no computers left. No electricity, or, anything.”

“Hippocrates didn’t need computers,” Stephen said, brusque and impatient. “Galen didn’t need electricity. All either of them needed was a test subject, and a knife.”

Something flashed in his eyes, and was gone again before I could take the measure of it.

“So something really is going on there,” I said.

“I don’t
know
. I just hear. I hope I hear wrong.”

I yanked harder on my hair and Stephen put out a hand as if to grab mine again, stop me, but it hovered midair and descended, rubbing against his jeans leg. I made myself quit pulling even though I could see why Lisa kept on: Those tiny flashes of pain were a perfect distraction. I found a loose thread on my sleeve, ripped at that instead. “So how long have you been here, anyway?”

“Since last December.” He felt gingerly at the bruise on his face, faded pale yellow now springing back to darker life. “Long enough.”

Natalie’s dead.
Scissor Men.
Amy and Stephen are just like I am.
Don’t lay hands on the kitchen crew. It all meant something, it had to, though probably what it meant was Natalie was lonely and Billy was hungry and Mags found a good way to scare the shit out of a little kid.

“I hope Natalie didn’t do something to herself,” I said. There wasn’t any point in not saying it, we were both thinking it. “You don’t think Maria would’ve kept it to herself, if she saw—”

“Are you kidding? They’d be throwing a fucking party to celebrate right now.”

His voice cracked on the words, harsh and bitter. I took his hand, my fingers tense like any second he’d wrench away from their touch. He shifted closer and put an arm around my shoulders.

“I wish I knew what Naomi meant,” I said. “When she said Natalie was already dead.”

“There’s still rumors flying around that zombies aren’t really extinct.” He shrugged. “I don’t believe it. Everyone just wants things back like they were, after all that—”

“Because, see, it’s just like how for years they kept telling me my mother’s dead, when I knew that wasn’t true.” It was like heat all of a sudden inside me, an itchy prickly sweat that wouldn’t break out but just escalated into fever, a furious sickness. “I knew it wasn’t true but they just kept saying it and saying it like, Oh, we’re doing you
so much good
to stand here and keep telling you lies, and I used to think, they’re all gonna look so stupid when she comes back, when she walks through the door, they’ll think she fell dead without a fly on her but she’ll be alive as any of—”

So angry now I couldn’t talk, congested up inside me stopping my throat. My mother. Kristin’s baby. Natalie. Lisa’s baby. Naomi. Stephen. All dead or wished dead. Like there hadn’t been enough of that. They got up, walked, the fallen-dead people. They thought, felt, remembered things. Apparently. They could understand us.
Talitha cumi,
Jesus said to that dead girl in the Bible, and she got up again. A few streets down from us there’d been one of those weird little storefront churches, the kind that said that and the Lazarus story meant zombies weren’t abominations, that Jesus created them for a reason. Talitha Cumi First Bible Church. They got a lot of death threats. We were agnostics so it was all the same to us.

Stephen turned to me. Our faces were inches removed and the look on mine, twisted up as I could feel it was, it didn’t faze him.

“If you say your mother’s still alive,” he said, “then I believe you.”

Believe me? I don’t need you to
believe
, like a favor you grant me. I
know
. But someone who believes me. Someone who knows I’m right. And says so, out loud.

“I don’t know why you talk to me sometimes,” he said. No self-pity, no fishing for swoony praise, just so dry and matter-of-fact. “A million questions, just like me, and I haven’t got any answers.”

I took a few crackers, forced myself to munch them dry. They stuck inside my mouth like soaked tissue paper. “I wish I’d brought a toothbrush,” I said. “Would’ve already lost it anyway, in the storm, but—”

“I can get you a toothbrush.”

“I wasn’t asking for one—”

“I know. But you should have stuff.” There was faint color in his face when he said that but he pushed forward anyway, a defiant set to his mouth. “You’re . . . very pretty.”

That word slumped and fell as he said it, like a cake collapsing right out of the oven, and he turned away in embarrassment, touched gingerly at his bruised mouth. Pretty. There wasn’t much I could do with that now, but then there hadn’t been before either. “Janey’s prettier,” I pointed out. “So’s Mags.”

He didn’t answer that, just snorted.

“Phoebe knows things about me,” I said, and the thought of that made me scared, no, it reminded me I was scared, that that hadn’t stopped since Lepingville ended and the dog found me. Being around people, that hadn’t stopped it. “She—what happens here if you’ve done something bad? I mean, before you got here, if maybe things were, they got mixed up in your head, and then you did something that was—”