Frail (24 page)

“You, and me, Lisa, and Naomi, and Stephen—we can’t take it here anymore. We’re leaving. Come with us.”

“His body.” Her face was scarlet and the corners of her mouth drawn back rigid with bottomless grief, a Glasgow smile of anguish. “Like garbage, like all the stuff he’d clean up for them, working for
them
, they left it in the street like—”

She grabbed at the splintering porch railings and made a noise like a scream. The sight and sound of that made a coward of me and I left.

 

 

The kitchen houses on Illinois Avenue were desultory chaos: people wandering in and out at random, Alice sitting subdued on the porch steps four doors down, Al nowhere to be found. Stephen was waiting for me near the mini-forest of barbecue grills, everyone else milling out front, and we slid arms around each other and held on. My skin had twitched in a weird, selfconscious embarrassment, seeing him again, but that passed as soon as both our skins touched. We sat together on the edge of an old chaise longue someone had stuck next to the grills, rusting metal covered with dirt-caked tangerine cushions. Rough, knobbly fabric, like an actual orange peel.

“I don’t believe this,” I said. I did, but I didn’t.

“Why not?” Stephen pressed his face to my shoulder and then pulled back, calm and grim. “Billy’s been itching for this forever, he was bound to snap.”

“What the hell does he want with us, Stephen? Is it just food, or—”

“I thought I was figuring it out.” Stephen’s chin rested on my head, he rocked us absently back and forth like he didn’t realize he was doing it. His voice was low and shot through with quiet frustration. “This place, the kitchen crew, I thought I was putting together—never mind what I thought, I strung together A and Q and eleven and thought I had an alphabet. Gibberish. I’ve got nothing.”

But it wasn’t just me, trying to make alphabets, new words from all this. That was something. I glanced around, nobody in earshot. “Lisa and Naomi and I,” I said, “we’re leaving. The night guard-crews switch off every other day, Lisa said the head guard gets careless. We’ll just go into the woods, not come back.” Like Natalie. “We’re going to try to take Phoebe. You’re coming too.”

I’d said that as an imperative, an assumed thing, but as soon as it was out of my mouth I shrank away from it. “You are, right?” I asked.

Stephen ran a palm over the dirty orange-skin cushions. “So we should leave in the middle of all this,” he said. Trying to sound casual, like it was just some thought exercise, and failing. “Leave and cause even more disruption—”

“They’re distracted, for God’s sake, aren’t they? Stephen, we have to get out of here.”

His obstinate silence, the stubborn set to his mouth I couldn’t understand. I reached into one of the cold barbecue grills, fingering the remains of a briquette: Strangely satisfying, to watch the dark gray lumps of ash give up the pretense of solid form, crumble and disintegrate in my palm. “You don’t want to leave,” I said. “Do you.” Nothing. “Stephen, I saw Kevin’s body, what was left of—for what? A garden rake? That’s what Phoebe told me—”

Stephen glanced behind us, the thick furze of overgrown trees, the impenetrable clumps of weeds. “Not toward the lakeshore,” he said. His face was open now, quietly urgent, refusing to plead but also refusing to back down. “I won’t go there. I can’t.”

My palm was covered in fine gray ash, chalky, like what I imagined nuclear fallout must look like. I brushed it clean against the filthy seat-cloth. “Not near the lakeshore,” I repeated, turning the words over in my mouth. “Where the old lab was. Is.”

Stephen gazed back like he was trying to gauge something about me, like there was something I was supposed to know and didn’t. Patient Zero. Belly of the action. “What happened,” I said.

Silence, a yawning, echoing space full of things he wouldn’t ever say out loud. Not to me, not to anyone. Fair enough.

“Please come with me,” I said. “South, back toward Leyton. There was food there, places to—I got scared. I shouldn’t have left. Food and water, the Little Calumet River runs through there. Then we’ll, just, figure things out from there.”

Stephen nodded, slowly. Looked away from me, fingers tugging at the ash-smeared chaise fabric. “You’re sure you want to bring Phoebe along,” he said.

“I have to.”

That night Billy and Mags and Don and Janey came to dinner again, we had to serve them, and Billy looked smug and happy, lolling in his seat like some mob boss from an old movie flush with cigars and wads of cash; he sucked down instant mashed potatoes and fried squirrel and rabbit like he might actually die if he didn’t eat. Mags wouldn’t look at him, just made absent placating sounds whenever he chucked her chin, and picked at her food like exes never do. Don watched them both, cold and calm, sardonic lines creasing his forehead in lieu of a smile. Janey ate nothing at all.

FIFTEEN

L
isa’s and my idea was to commandeer a car, but there wasn’t any chance of that; humans might sometimes slip in and out but supplies like vehicles, gasoline, the ammunition that couldn’t kill them, those the exes guarded with our lives. In the end I just got up at sunset the next night like always, took an onion bag to gather greens, headed toward Milstead and kept on going. We met just outside Washburn Street, Stephen, Lisa, Naomi and me; Phoebe showed up late and dragging, eyes down and mouth twisting convulsively around words she couldn’t spit out, but there was grim determination lurking inside the crazy all the same.

“So how hard is it,” I asked Lisa, “to skip this place?”

“A lot less hard than if Don were on,” Phoebe said, before Lisa could answer. “There’s not enough of them to make a fucking
building
security team, never mind surround a whole town. Kid, let’s just go, can we just go now?”

Don was out, driving the abandoned roads with Janey looking for more human conscripts. Or just getting away from us all for a while. Billy and Mags and a whole pack of exes were hunting on the other side of town, where the deer were too stupid to stop congregating. Time to move.

Stephen, who hadn’t said a word since we started out, he took Naomi’s hand and helped lead the way. We humans zigzagged through the gardens like we were foraging and Lisa walked ahead, an ex going where she felt like going, ignoring us at her leisure. Leading us out. A cleanup crew, not Kevin’s, came by dragging a fleet of empty wheeled garbage cans; we wandered around a yard digging for onions, not looking up, until they passed. (Naomi actually found one, a tiny shriveled thing like Lisa’s Leyton tulip bulb, and insisted on keeping it.)

Milstead. Clyburn. The soil was getting sandier now, the vegetation scrubbier and giving way to piebald vacant lots, a strip of empty fast-food places, a rusted metal bench with John 3:16 emblazoning the wooden seatback in defiantly huge black on white.

Kentucky Avenue. The enclosed little neighborhoods of Paradise City—Richmond Park in better days—opened up here to more lots and shops and a straight shot to Lake Street, the beaches, but we turned our backs on it and slipped like dead things after the hunt into the overgrowth consuming the yards and back alleyways, the stretches of woods reverting back to actual forest. People who’d never been here, my mother said once, who never lived here, they heard about the steel mills and oil refineries around Gary, saw from the interstate the city-sized spreads of smokestacks and thought the whole county looked like that, thought Gary wasn’t just too poor and too black and too flyover but also looked like the surface of a sulfur-stench moon. The beaches and the nature preserves were my mother’s own secret, growing up. She wasn’t afraid of the labs, the undeads, she’d slip in and out, she’d go anywhere. The cast-iron nerves you needed for security work. I tried to pretend I was her daughter, that way, as we walked.

Phoebe walked beside me, twitching, jumping at the sound of a calling bird like it was going to fly off and warn Billy we’d vanished. “Where’re we going, anyway,” she muttered.

“The long way around,” Lisa replied, her neck craned and eyes scanning the trees. “We’ll circle through here and back into the preserves near the beaches, and pick up U.S. 12 from—”

“Oh, Christ, you can’t do that.” Phoebe seized my arm and Lisa’s, her grip somehow tight and limp all at once, and though Lisa flinched she didn’t pull away. “There’s actual no-shit patrols on Route 12 ever since the spring started, those crazies who think they run the lab now are all—”

“Just what’s going on over there?” Lisa demanded. “And don’t tell me nothing. You’ve known all along it’s not nothing, poking at my past to see what you could dig up and use. Little scavenger, just like all of them. Worse than any zombie.” Nearly nose to nose with Phoebe. “Right?”

There was a hate in Lisa’s eyes that I’d never seen before, that made my own fist-swinging animosity a paltry petty thing. Phoebe twitched, wriggling a little under Lisa’s gaze, and studied the ground as she laughed.

“I told you,” Phoebe muttered, spilling her heart out to the underbrush and a clump of marrowy mushrooms, “they won’t let me back in. Supervisory head, my own research division, and I try to go back, I get nothing. But
what I hear
is they’re picking up people, humans, taking them over there, and I don’t know what the fuck happens now when they arrive. Hell, maybe what happened to you.” Looking Lisa in the eye now, no more smirky coyness, they both knew what they were talking about even if the rest of us were shut out. “Yeah, Billy knows about it, Don too, think they’ve got a little exchange student program going on. What for, I don’t know. Them and the lab. So we gotta go another way—”

“I don’t believe you,” Stephen said. As matter-of-fact as when he’d warned Phoebe he’d hurt her, again. “There is no way to get out of here without picking up Route 12. Unless you want to wander straight into the lab’s backyard anyway, right across Lake Street, because we’re way too close already—”

“Are we
going
?” Naomi pleaded. Not whiny, but afraid. Like me. “We have to go. You said we could go.”

“Look, I know some shortcuts, okay?” Phoebe paced impatiently in front of an oak tree, picking up sock-cuffs of last fall’s leaves caked in tarry mud. “You should know them too, I mean,
considering
, you go straight through and loop around the back end of the trees and—oh, fuck standing here arguing all night, follow me! Or don’t!”

Phoebe barreled over the leaf clumps and I could feel it in all the rest of us, even Naomi, that collective desire to let her wander off, go wherever she was headed all alone, turn our backs and head for U.S. 12 without her grinning, gesticulating crazy as our gyroscope. She’d stopped now, waiting, twisted and tense where she stood.

Lisa glanced at me, and her, and then just shrugged. “I can find our way back out again,” she said. “And she might be right. We don’t need to go through all this just to run back into Don.”

A penny for the widows and orphans. The four of us trailed after Phoebe, Lisa holding tight to Naomi’s hand, Stephen silent again. He hadn’t wanted this. He was a grownup, for Christ’s sake, he didn’t have to say yes. Phoebe led us deeper into the trees, like she’d promised, the ground a bendy lattice of dead branches over a pie-filling of sticky mud and the leaves overhead still new, almost sparse outlined against the darkness. Lisa stepped lightly over the underbrush, almost dainty on the balls of her feet.

“Over this way,” she told Phoebe, drawing us closer to the edge of the woods, the empty roads near the holy park bench and the shell of a McDonald’s, a dry cleaner’s. “If we follow the perimeter of the roads—”

“Then they
find
us, for Christ’s sake,” Phoebe almost growled. “C’mon. This way.”

“Hunters know the trees,” Stephen said, not moving from where he stood. “Lisa’s the hunter here, not you. Do you have a clue where you’re going?”

“Better than you do!” Phoebe was almost shouting again, her natural volume bursting out of the box. “I know, batshit crazy Phoebe couldn’t find her way out of—you think I don’t know what people say? If Kevin were still here, if he could still—”

“Phoebe.” Lisa’s voice was quiet, weighty, a stone dropped into a field of rustling, agitated grasses. “Don’t think about that now. We just need to get out of here, then we can fight all you want. Okay? So just tell us what this path is and where it leads.”

Stephen shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere she leads. We follow the perimeter, right,
Lisa
?”

“You don’t give the orders,” Phoebe said, whipping her head toward him like she’d been slapped. “I’m done with that, you understand? I’m the scientist here, the educated one, I supervised my own fucking research group, I’m done listening to the freaks, the workups, the
experiments
who think they can shove me around now just because—”

“The only good thing,” Stephen hissed back, a soft snarl, letting go of me and stepping forward so ready to hit her. “The only good thing about any of this, was watching all of you
educated ones
fall apart and fucking die—”

“Stephen.” Lisa moved between them, swift, pleading. “For Christ’s sake not now—”

“For Christ’s sake
right now
!” Stephen turned on Lisa, his face contorted with a fury I’d never seen in him before, not with Billy, not with anyone. “Right now, right here, if she wants to try to fucking pull rank like it’s still—”

“She’s trying to distract you,” I said, another smooth stone in the wind-whipped field. “You and all of us.”

“Oh, you smart kid.” Phoebe was laughing again, laughing in all our faces. “We coulda been friends, you know, Amy, I coulda helped you, but you weren’t having it, the second you could you threw your lot in with the freaks. Guess you can’t help it, with your family tree you just can’t help it, but—”

“What are you waiting for?” Leave her here, to rot or starve. Leave now. “Seriously, just come out and say what you’re waiting for—”

“Here!” she screamed, her eyes full of urgency and fear and horror at herself, at everything that had become of us all, and the triumph of following my unwitting cue. “Here! They’re over here!”