Frail (26 page)

Phoebe, all her little smiles, all her crazy lies.
You can see in her face who her mother is.
What the fuck would you know about my mother, Phoebe? What would you know? I’m glad you’re dead. I’m glad you’re dead. I’m glad.

Keep going. Keep going where? North, toward the lake. Which way is north? Down . . . Colfax Street. Okay. Follow it and see if it ends in sand. I have time. Unless they find me again, those Scissor Men, unless—

As I crossed a thin little sidewalk there was the click of a rifle, from the adjoining yard, and then I was looking into a dozen avid, smiling faces, the barrels of a dozen scavenged, loaded guns.

 

 

“Hi there,” said the one with the rifle.

Human. Maybe my age, no older than twenty. There were more of them coming from the yard now, all armed, all men and boys, the youngest looking only thirteen or fourteen. I started to run and one of them laughed, grabbed my arm where the exes had wrenched it and twisted it until I shouted, and then he had fingers in my hair, horrible dirt-caked fingers and the others were snickering, whistling, gathering in a tight little circle. The one with the rifle shoved them aside, looked me up and down.

“Prettier than the one we got now,” he said. “Whaddaya think, Jason?”

“No tits,” said the one with fingers in my hair. Then he grinned. “Guess we can’t be fussy, though, right?”

“Like you even want any, you faggot.” Another of them, calling in a singsong jeer from the corner of the yard. He had a woman with him, I suddenly saw, his arm gripping hers as she stood there with her head hanging down, a filthy torn-up yellow nightgown her only clothes. “Day Mike finally plows your sad ass’ll be the happiest in your whole—”

“Shut it,” said the one with the rifle. Mike, surely. He had pale blond hair in a bristle-thick crop, bristly brows, a face made of hard straight planes that overlapped and sawed against each other like they might split apart fighting any second. He reached out and felt at me and that seemed to happen so fast that I couldn’t do anything, just make this sort of shouting noise that roiled in my throat and didn’t go anywhere, and even without the thought of Phoebe’s skull popping and leaking open I couldn’t move. Then he pulled his hand back.

“I’m Mike,” he said. “You’re coming with us.” As an afterthought, “We’ve got food.”

I nodded like that all was perfectly sensible, like I had any choice, and then that woman and I were standing face-to-face, looking at each other. She had long dark hair and for a horrible moment I thought it was Natalie but she was too old. Too tall. I’d never seen her before. I wished I could stop seeing her now.

Jason, the filthy-fingered one, he laughed. “You girls make friends,” he commanded.

I could tell she couldn’t even hear him. This is a mirror. It’s a mirror of the future, my future, it’s what I’m going to look like after they’ve finished with me. Her eyes stared straight into mine and they registered nothing, empty scooped-out cups of dazed disorientation like they’d blinded her too, like she’d die in earnest if she ever let herself see. Janey without a Don. This is what he found, by the side of the road. This is why he had to remind her to eat.

“Where are we going?” I asked. My voice was a harsh croak.

Instead of answering, Mike circled fingers around my arm and we all started walking into the dark and the streets of empty houses. A bird called low and sweet from the trees and I was trying inside to fly up into the branches but I couldn’t do it, the ground and the half-broken sidewalk kept me down, they’d shoot me anyway if I flew. My throat pulsed in little shallow swallows as I tried to keep from throwing up and that Mike, I knew he could see it, he loved it, it would make it even better for him when they got started. I could see him smiling wide and fast, from the corner of my eye.

The woman next to me was too broken to need restraint anymore, they just kept shoving her forward as we passed a deep, tilting bend in the street. I could see her neck pulsing, throbbing like a panicked bird’s, and suddenly she barreled forward and shoved through the sea of arms and ran. Her limbs flapped like pennants, her body so small and thin in the translucent, blood-streaked nightgown as she ran across the street, toward the yards, if she could, I could—

“Oh, fuck you, you smelly used-up bitch,” Mike whispered, like an incantation, a prayer, and he raised his rifle and aimed but he missed. She kept running. It was Jason, on my other side, who pushed forward and aimed and then the greasy lemony nightgown cloth was fresh thick bright red, he’d got her in the chest, she tottered where she stood and she fell to the grass.

“Bull’s-eye!” Jason shouted, his voice thick and congested like it was gathering into a sob, a tearful wail of victory over nobody and nothing. She twitched where she lay, once and violently like a dead thing hooked up to electrodes, and he let off more rounds, slamming into her arm, stomach, chest like a fist into a pillow except where it tore open there was blood instead of feathers, blood spraying everywhere. Pieces of her insides bursting and falling out of her and soaking the sidewalk, the grass. Then she stayed still.

Then one of them nudged the small of my back with a gun barrel and we continued down Colfax.

 

 

Still walking. Need to keep walking forever. It was when we stopped that everything would start. I want Lisa. I want my mother. I want Billy, fucking Billy, who said I wasn’t to be messed with. Except when he snapped his fingers, his nasty fingers that should still be properly rotted away and said it was time to carry us off, take us to the lab. If Phoebe were even telling the truth. Home. Time to go home, Stephen. Help me, Stephen, Lisa, Mommy. Please—

Another abandoned house, white clapboard with a satellite TV dish still clamped to the side like a big gray shelf fungus on a tree trunk; armchairs in the front yard, junk strewn everywhere, a big wooden picnic table sitting right next to the chairs. They were pulling me toward the picnic table. My feet pressed hard against the grass and tried to root themselves down, all those stories from that book my mother gave me of nymphs and girls picking flowers and god-rapists and escaping the god-rapists by turning to trees, and Jason giggled again, Mike grinned and gave a hard shove between my shoulder blades and I stumbled and fell, facedown, cheek hitting hard enough to bruise. Someone had my wrist, holding it to the splintering wood so careful and precise like anchoring pins through a dead insect wing. Someone else—

Their hands pulled free like they’d suddenly forgot, like some sudden distraction grabbed them by the scruff, and as I raised my head I saw her, saw them all staring at her in unabashed shock. Her hair was still limp and lank, that girl they’d shot until she’d run with blood, her skin still soaked in bruises fresh and fading, but her eyes that had been little hollow teacups now brimmed over big and dark and sparking bright with happiness. She smiled, a wide triangular smile like a television newscaster, except instead of a newcaster’s false dolly-cheer she was all joy, all peace, not a single bullet rip in her flesh or tear in her clothes. She looked them up and down, without a trace of fear.

“Step aside,” she said.

Soft-voiced, human-voiced. She couldn’t be an ex. An ex could’ve fought them all off, an ex would’ve healed on the spot. Mike just kept staring at her, gaping, and Jason let out another demented volley of giggles. “You fucked a
zombie
, dude,” he gasped, in between wheezing seizures of mirth. “I don’t fucking believe it, all the girls over in that hog pen you could’ve grabbed and you went and boned a fucking corpse—”

“You shut up,” Mike whispered and then he slammed the butt of his gun into Jason’s face. “You shut your fucking—bitch, you want more of it?” He brandished the gun at her, the woman I’d sworn I saw die, kicking Jason as he huddled moaning on the sidewalk. “You want some more? I’m gonna blast your fucking head off, you piece of—”

“Step aside,” she repeated. Like no one had spoken.

Mike jerked his head toward his gang and they all raised rifles, they all aimed, they all fired at close range. And she just stood there. I don’t know where the bullets went but nowhere near her, all the blood stiffening up that sunshiny nightgown was old blood and they couldn’t possibly have missed but they had. She rocked casually from bare foot to foot, a nightgown strap sliding down her arm so one breast was nearly bared, a twisty-turny little smile playing over her face.

“Try again?” she offered. So cheerful. So calm.

She was staring at me now, smiling even broader, sister to sister. Mike was breathing hard from between his teeth and then something exploded inside him, like a shook-up soda bottle bursting under froth and pressure, he was scarlet-faced screaming and they all were screaming as they rushed her, a panicked mob of gazelle thinking they could tear a lioness apart. She stood there, watching, and she lifted her arm with thumb and finger poised like an imaginary pistol. Mike wasn’t more than a yard away when she pushed down her thumb, the imaginary bullet found its mark—

And he fell. She hadn’t even touched him and he fell to the sidewalk, face and limbs flopping and slack, and then he was quiet and still on the ground. Jason, there next to him, eyes closed and arms flung out like he was beseeching the sky. A half dozen more in a pile of limbs and winter-stinking clothes and guns clattering from limp fingers, and then all around me, all the men and boys, every one, still and dead in the weedy spring grass.

The trees, I thought as I clattered past a half dozen houses waiting for the ghost bullet to find my skull, if I went back into the trees she might corner and kill me there but better than running in open air like the flushed-out deer, rabbit, field mouse that I was—

She was standing right in front of me, blocking my path and I had no idea how, she just
became
from one place to another. My feet skidded, my arms airplaned for balance and she watched dispassionately, as if from very far away.

“You see how things are now, Amy,” she said. “I do think you finally start to understand.”

“Don’t kill me,” I said, in a thin crumpled-paper voice. It was time. It’d all caught up with me. I’d thought I was ready but I didn’t want to die, don’t kill me, don’t let me die. I don’t want to die.

“I’m not armed,” she said. “Not against you. Come with me now.”

“I’m not coming.” I shook my head, and then backed away shouting, as if my hysterics could defend and wound. “I’m not coming with you!”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m on your side.” She, it just stood where she was but that meant nothing, she could reappear right beside me or maybe even inside me whenever she chose. “No matter what. You’re one of mine.”

“You’re my dog, aren’t you.” My whole mouth was sticking dry. “You’re the black dog, you’re what’s been following me since—”

“He’s a good boy.” She shrugged her bared shoulders. “He was a good boy alive. So was his little brother, the brown one. Good, and deserved more than they got.” She looked down at her body like it were a curiosity, something she’d thrown on from the depths of the closet while dressing in the dark. “So was this poor, wretched woman. And that Stefanie Scholl whose bass playing you loved so much. And your friend, Ms. Acosta.” A step forward. “And Dave, and Kristin. And her small one, not stillborn. And your mother.”

That smile again, that beaming gleaming dark-polished smile. “And you.”

Don’t kill me. No matter what I’ve done, how much I deserve—I was running again and there was nowhere to go because that thing looking like a dead woman was everywhere, part of the air, the night, watching and waiting to spring from the corners of my own mind I’d thought dark and safe and alone. I veered up the curb, into the tall grass, and where the dead woman had been Kevin, Phoebe’s Kevin, was now waiting for me.

“I know what you’ve done,” he said. “I’ve seen everything, eyewitness, in the flesh. Even if you didn’t see me.”

I stumbled toward an oak tree in the backyard, a cluster of wild half-dead lilacs, and there Phoebe
became
. “I’m tellin’ ya, kid,” she shouted, loud and brittle-bright just like always, like the handful of days I’d known her, “you don’t need to run like this, I’m on
your
side! Christ! Your side!”

And nothing changed about her, her features didn’t bubble or shift before me but just suddenly, somehow, she was Kristin. Lank blonde hair, vacant eyes, a too-thin arm draped over a belly swollen like a tumor.

“Your side,” Kristin, the thing that took Kristin away, whispered. “Even after everything you’ve done.”

A block, two blocks down and I could feel it behind me even though I couldn’t hear it, my feet would split open at the soles, I was gasping sick. I crouched over a parked car with my palms pressed against the hood, fighting for breath. Dave strolled casually up to meet me, in the old Marines T-shirt he wore under everything, soaked in rotten-apple diabetic’s sweat as he died.

“I know what you’ve done,” he repeated. “I’ve always known. When you’re ready to say it out loud, I’ll be here for—”

“Leave me alone!” I screamed, let it laugh at my panic, mock my useless flight like it had the dead boys, dying with dignity was a myth like all the others. “I hate you! I won’t go!”

“Amy,” it said in a new voice, older and female and almost sorrowfully pleading, “you still don’t understand.”

Ms. Acosta. Standing there with her pale eyes full of reproof, harbingers all in her face and her wild, flying-away hair gone wholly gray—I was shaking and I couldn’t stop. And she, it, looked at me with pity, with
love
, and that made me want to scream all over again.

“Stop,” I said, and there were tears leaking over now, trickling down my face. “Please stop.”

“I can’t.” The thing that stole her body wasn’t smiling anymore. “This is what I am. This is all that will ever be.”

“I’ll hurt you.” I tasted salt now, all through my mouth, and the crying wouldn’t stop. “You know I can do it. I won’t let you hurt me—”