Frail (25 page)

 

 

They spilled from the trees, from the path Phoebe tried to lead us down, from everywhere and nowhere all at once because she distracted all of us, so easy, so easy to take us all in. Tall and muscular and full of febrile eagerness, the faces of exes in a hunting pack, except they bristled with guns and knives and they shone yellowish in the moonlight, like the sulfurous lights that used to flood every highway, the watery eyes of a vengeful ghost dog. Lisa grabbed at Naomi, flung an arm toward me like she could somehow pick us all up and run, and then there were guns on me and Stephen just like when Don found us, there were knife blades like open scissors prodding the base of my throat. Not Phoebe. They didn’t touch Phoebe. Phoebe stood aside, watching it all.

“Keep clear,” one of them said to Lisa, in the hard dragging consonants of an ex:
KAH-ee-puh! KUHLEARRR.
“Keep clear and go away.”

“The fuck I’ll ‘keep clear,’ ” Lisa whispered, and I could see all the strength gathering in her, making her tense and flushed and ready to spring on them all. “Get away from them or I’ll—”

One of them, thin and redheaded and with eyes like granite, pointed a casual gun barrel at Naomi, cocked the trigger. “Keep clear,” he repeated. Almost laughing at how easy it all was.

Two others had a death grip on Stephen and even as he tried to wrench free his eyes were fixed with fear, like he knew what was coming, like he’d seen it all before. “Let her go,” he said, so calm, like he already knew begging would do no good at all. “I don’t know what you want with her but you made a mistake, Amy’s not like me, she—”

The redheaded man reached up, slammed a pistol butt in his bruised face. Stephen shouted with pain and I shouted, hauling at the hands holding me like a barge balloon against its ropes, and then the gripping fingers wrenched so tightly I went limp and light-headed, sagging without meaning to against a plaid flannel shoulder. It laughed, the thing hurting me, and Stephen thrashed and struggled but he was like I was, pinned and helpless.

“It’s been a while, Stephen, hasn’t it.” Another one, stepping forward, with a sleek dark ponytail bouncing against her shoulder blades and a smile like bits of putty pressed into a curve. “You’ve had your time off, we all have. It’s time you came home.”

“You don’t want Amy.” His voice was twisting in terror, a futile hatred he wasn’t even trying to hide. “You don’t want Amy!”

Her putty smile stretched, widened, then she was all solemnity. “We need her, Stephen,” she said. “We need her very much, just like we need you. Someday you’ll understand what an honor that is.”

“You’re wrong!” Lisa was thronged by gun barrels now, all pointing at Naomi, she’d pulled her jacket off and wrapped Naomi in it like that somehow made her bulletproof. “You’re wrong! I don’t know what you want but you made a mistake, it’s not them!”

“Okay, you believe me now? You finally believe me now I showed you? I gave you what you need.” Phoebe was trying to push her way back from the periphery, elbow into the center of attention, but it was like they didn’t even see her and so she kept getting louder, shoving harder at their backs. “I gave you this, Jesus Christ, they’re the real thing, the new flesh,
look
at her, you can see in her face who her mother is—”

“You don’t want them!” Lisa shouted, clutching the sobbing coat bundle that was Naomi. “You want me! You want experiments? I’m the
first
experiment! I started all this without even knowing—it’s my fault!” Her voice cracked and broke and something human-sounding slid out of it: fear, pain, panic, guilt, sorrow, all we frail ones had left to offer. “It’s my fault! Take me!”

“You have to bring him back now.” Phoebe found the ex who’d struck Stephen, clung hard to his arm. “I’ve done anything you could ask, reported back to you every fucking night, I’ve kept eyes and ears out all along for you and you promised me, if anything ever happened to me, happened to Kevin, you’d bring us back—”

“Get the fuck off me.” The man she held on to, redheaded and thin-faced just like my mother, like me, he shoved her aside and she hit the ground hard, gasping. She pulled herself upright and dug fingers into his chest, wild-eyed, vibrating not in fear but thwarted rage.

“You promised me!” she screamed. “Last night, just last night you stood here and promised me Kevin, you’ll bring him back to me, you fucking promised, you know how to bring people back—”

The man, the Scissor Man she clutched in entreaty, he shoved her away and stuck his gun barrel to her temple. Her head popped into pieces and sprayed into mist, like that man I’d seen shooting his family in the street, and she fell. Naomi moaned long and low and Lisa let out a sob, clapped a palm to Naomi’s eyes too late, and the man kicked Phoebe’s body aside like a crushed soda can, pressed the gun under Naomi’s chin. Naomi just stood there, a garden statue, and Lisa made a sound like something dying.

“Please,” she whispered, her arms wrapped around Naomi. “Don’t—”

“You two,” he said to Lisa, “get out of here. We don’t need you.”

“What do you want?” Lisa screamed.
“What do you want?”

I was screaming then too because one of them was grabbing Stephen’s legs, pulling him off the ground, and Stephen was thrashing and horse-kicking and the dark-haired woman raised her gun, slammed him in the temple. He went limp with blood streaming down his face and they hauled him over their shoulders like he weighed nothing, just another bendy twig on the forest floor; they carried him away and the others already had my arms, my legs, I was going airborne as they kept guns pointed at Naomi and Lisa cried out,
I’ll get you back, I’ll get both of you back
, but she lied. They all lied.

 

 

The exes with Stephen were already yards ahead and I was still screaming, screaming up at the sky as they carried me and then a hand came around my throat, gripping and crushing until all the air left me and I fish-flopped for more. The hand went away and I gasped and gagged.

“Careful,” one of them muttered. “Need them both alive. Don’t break her neck.”

I tried to shout out,
Leave us alone
or
Lisa
or
Fuck you
, but my throat was closed up and no air got in, no sound got out, and we were deeper into the trees and I couldn’t see Stephen’s captors anymore. I was flung over someone’s shoulder now, face toward the ground, the sky shut out. They were moving faster, on the march, their footsteps everywhere, loud and crushing, rising up to blot out any other sound—

A tobacco brown dog, a real dog gone savage, was bounding toward us bullet-headed and muscular and huge. Its long dripping teeth were bared and hungry and it couldn’t kill them, the exes, nothing could ever kill them but it came at them over the twigs and leaves like it was happy to die trying. One of them raised a rifle as it approached us, took a calm steady shot—

—and he got that dog between the eyes, a neat little pop of red bursting forth right on target, but the dog didn’t fall. Its dark slitted eyes narrowed with hungry hate and it was running like bullets and blood were nothing, it leapt, it was on the ex who’d throttled me tearing furious at his legs, his hands, any bit of flesh within reach. The redheaded ex had a knife, like my big hunting knife Don took away, and he came running at the tobacco dog to slice its throat—and then there were more dogs, a pack, a gang, rushing in cacophony from behind every tree. Ghost dogs, phantoms, materializing from nowhere, I saw it happen, five, six, seven dogs baring teeth, jumping quick and high, savaging the exes who held me. Shouting, bewildered yells, and their damp, sticky inhuman blood oozed over my own skin as they lost their hold on me, let me fall hard and breathless to the leaves.

I couldn’t get up, not right away, so I curled in a defensive ball but the dogs didn’t want me, they had all the meat they needed. A couple of exes were on the ground now too, their wounds might heal right up tight and quick but it still looked like it meant something to lose all that blood. You get them good, Fido, Rover, Champ, King, Cujo, hurt them horribly before you turn on me and I die. A pack of dozens now, big, small, every color of fur, every breed, every pitch from low rumbling growl to high piercing cry. Eyes squeezed shut, his own blood thick over his face, the redheaded man started shooting again, all for nothing. And then he was aiming at me with hate twisting his face into a monstrous thing and the bullet went wild, ricocheted off a tree, I was somehow back on my feet and I ran.

“Stop her!” someone screamed, her voice lost in the sea of howls. “Stop—”

I was running, stumbling and I couldn’t hear anything but the dogs, the sound of them kept getting louder even as I got farther away, and then it was right there in front of me. The tobacco brown dog. The same dog, exactly the same that had rushed me back in Leyton, no more collar and tags from bygone days, that red smear on his forehead that didn’t matter because he was dead, he died long before they shot him. A famished ghost, vengeful chimera—and the sulfur-eyed black dog padded out of nowhere, so soft and soundless against the night sky, stood side by side with the brown dog. Ready, at long last, to have his tribunal, pronounce his sentence, execute.

I ran.

My feet were raw in their shoes, my chest closed up and heaving, no sound in the world but growling, howling, the deafening thud of ghost-dog feet in pursuit. I clapped my hands to my ears but it was everywhere, I ran one direction into brown and another into black and they were trying to flush me out like a fox, just kill me now, just kill me. The night had gone watery sulfurous yellow and my whole head was full of their barking, agonized whining, and beneath that something high and shrilly insistent, like bells, like musical notes, like the ringtone of a phone—

I was doubled over nauseous for breath at the very edge of the trees, in a neighborhood of houses and giant scrubby yards I didn’t know. My chest burned and I let out coughing heaves and the cell phone in my pocket rang over and over again, the same musical loop, fifteen times, sixteen—I wrenched it out of my pocket ready to throw it against a tree and it wouldn’t stop, the screen all lit up but no number showing, someone was trying to torture me and I didn’t know how they were doing it. Someone calling me a liar. Someone who knew everything, knew how to find me, and wouldn’t come get me. My hands were shaking as I punched the receiver button.

“Leave me alone!” I screamed, not waiting to hear even the sound of breath. “You won’t help me! You won’t show me where you are! Leave me alone, you fucking—
leave me alone!
”

Airless silence, on the other end. Then the sudden raspy clearing of a throat.

“Just keep going,” the voice said. “And I’ll find you.”

The roiling, burning-jelly thing in my chest spread through my whole body, so thick that my nerves stuck together not letting me perceive, react. Psychic honey, sugary and crawling with hungry flies. My whole body was shaking now.

“Mom?” I said.

Her voice.
Her
voice, at the other end. All this time. Every day. “Mom, where are you. Where did you go. Come and get me. I’m in—”

“Just keep going.” Her voice was so calm, too calm, as if everything were just that easy and fretless wherever she was. “Just keep going.”

“Mom, you need to come and get me.” Tears were rolling down my face and my brain was racing sticky-wild with thoughts, plans, we could go back to our old house, I’d explain what had happened and she’d forgive me—“Mom, I had to leave, I’m in Gary now, I don’t—I didn’t want to come here but I can get out, you have to come and get me. You have to say where you are.”

“I’ll find you.” Too calm. Too measured. Just short of mechanical. Mom! We don’t talk to each other this way! “I’ll find you.”

“Do you know where I am?” Silence, and then I was shouting hoarse and unsteady. “Do you
know where I am
?”

“Just keep going, and I’ll find you.”

“Mom. Where are you? Are you okay? How can I find you?”

Silence.

“Mom,” I said. “Come on.” Silence. “Where are you? What’s happened to you? Where are you?”

Silence.

“Mommy!”

The phone went dead.

SIXTEEN

I
threw the phone as hard as I could and it hit a tree, a big tree, and then I picked it up again and threw it again and tried to smash it under my shoe before I kicked it through the underbrush, ran from it like it might explode. Fuck you, fuck everyone who ever lived—I’d throw the thing in the lake but I wasn’t anywhere near the fucking lake. Another residential neighborhood like Paradise City, small deserted houses fringed by ankledeep lawns soon to be up to the knees. Rusted cars in the driveways, curbside. I stumbled down the middle of the street, trying to work out which direction Lisa and Naomi had gone. Where my mother had gone.

I was crying out loud but nobody was there to hear me, Lisa, Stephen, my mother—it was a trick. A prank, some ex’s horrible prank! Isn’t this just the sort of thing Billy would do, how, how the hell could he possibly do it!

Streaks of dark gray, in the soft black sky. It was past midnight, it couldn’t possibly be that late, we’d started out at nine or ten. I couldn’t have been running around those woods for hours, black dog to the left of me, brown dog to the right, it wasn’t—my feet were on fire, every muscle sore like I’d just finished a race. There must be some mistake. I’d know, if it were that long.

My idea. My fucking idea to bring Phoebe along because I felt sorry for her, because—Stephen. He never wanted to leave because he knew this was out there all along, he didn’t tell me—maybe they’d found Natalie too, maybe that’s where she was. Farther north, the lake, the lab, where he never wanted to go. They might be there right now. Keep going and I’ll find you.

“Fuck you!” I screamed at the sky, and coughed until tears came to my eyes. My throat was stuck-together dry, my clothes full of sweat. Like I’d been running for hours.