Frail (32 page)

“You let
me
think you were dead!” Screaming now, I don’t want quiet, I need to hurt something, I need to hurt myself. “You left me there by myself and everyone kept telling me you were dead, I pretended I believed them but you weren’t dead, you
weren’t
dead but you and all of them together, you let me think you were—”

“Amy.” She was crying so hard and broken that everything in me ached to hug her, Mommy, stop that, please stop, but I held back shaking with the effort and it wasn’t to punish her, it wasn’t that at all. It was to punish me, me for letting myself start to believe they’d all been right. We won, Mom, I hate you for doing this to me but we won! We won. You’re not dead. You never were.

“You’re not dead,” I said, and wanted to laugh but swallowed it down because with all the crying, laughing, I’d get sick right here on the floor. “You’re not dead.”

She shook her head. “I
am
dead, Amy. I am. I died before you were ever born. And then I went crazy, and I left you, and now they’ve done the same to you. Because I wasn’t there to stop them. Because I—”

She stood there, her head down, quietly sobbing. I turned to Stephen but I could see he didn’t know her, he was certain he’d never known her, and then I walked over and put my arms around her light and cautious as if she might snap in pieces. She cried that much harder, draining away with shame, and I picked up her dangling arms and fitted them around me, making them hold on, posing her like a soft-jointed doll. My mother isn’t dead. I’m not dead. Her hair smelled all wrong, no more of her old cheap chamomile shampoo with a scent like dried mouthwash, but it was still hers. I stroked it, feeling how coarse and springy the gray was under the smoother, straighter red. So much gray. You just stopped being dead, Mom, don’t get old.

“Please don’t be sad,” Natalie said, and it startled me because I’d forgotten she was there. She actually sounded like she meant it, like she was sad we couldn’t be happy like her. “You don’t understand. We’re alive. Us, all of us,
we’re
the living ones. Not those things outside here, that think they run the show. And humanity, real living humanity, we’re going to bring it back.”

I looked up at her and she back at me and she smiled, so glad, excited, like we were all at the start of something wonderful. “We’re going to bring it back, Amy.
I’m
going to bring it back.”

 

 

“The lab always worked at cross-purposes,” Natalie said. “They were always fighting about what were the most important projects.”

We were sitting on the floor now, Stephen and my mother and I, cross-legged with our backs against the wall. I had an arm around my mother and she had both of hers around me, and Stephen had my other hand. Shielding each other, ready to bolt as one, except the windows were too small and high up and Natalie, something about her eyes made us not want to try for the door just yet. She kept plunking down wearily in front of us, leaping to her feet again in excitement, pacing up and down, down and up.

“I saw others,” I said. “Did you kill them too? Are they really dead?”

“There was the stuff they let people know about, so they’d feel their tax dollars were going to important work. Public-minded work.”

“What
work
?” Stephen’s voice was cold, scornful, his fingers curled around mine tense and tight. “What work? The labs never
created
zombies—they were always around, thousands of years before this place was ever built. No scientist made them happen, no sickness—”

“They just were,” I echoed. “And nobody’s ever figured out why some people came back after death, and some stayed dead. Or why sometimes there were so few you could go all your life without seeing one, and other times they were everywhere. Pittsburgh. Detroit. Ypres. St. Petersburg. They never found any reason for those big outbreaks.” I was enjoying this, perversely, reciting all this third-grader’s who-doesn’t-know-that back in the face of her
public-minded work
. “People complained about that, a lot, you know. Taxes funding places like this when the labs didn’t find anything new, didn’t accomplish shit—”

“Because of course,” Natalie said, entirely unruffled, “if you didn’t know about it, it mustn’t have happened. Sorry, Amy, but if only what
you
know is what’s true? Then God help us all.”

She was back on the floor, fingers combing through a chunk of hair: Three thick strands, divided between fingers and thumb, and she reached up her other hand, started plaiting a decorative little braid. “Perception’s as important as reality, that’s what they always said around here. People liked hearing the labs had ‘very promising’ research results, how they were this close to eradicating the undead—they really did get close, you know, they were working on a sort of pesticide, something you could spray like they do for gypsy moths, mosquitoes. Of course, that was a big mistake.” Natalie laughed, shaking her head, a vindictive little mother watching her child tumble off a tricycle. “That’s what caused the mutations, you know. That pesticide. There were rumors someone meddled with it. Who knows. They sprayed it around the labs here and yeah, the zombies got sick, some of them died, but others lived and turned into what Billy and Mags are now, and then the
humans
all got sick and started dying and mutating and, you know, here we are. Last remnants of the Prairie Beach feeding plague.” She shrugged. “You’re right, though. All this happens, and still they never knew why some dead people revived and some didn’t, genetic or environmental or what—”

“Perfectly easy way to make sure
nobody
ever came back.” So weary, my mother sounded, as she held on to me. Like she couldn’t believe it was me, like she couldn’t trust her eyes and needed the solid tactile proof of bone and flesh. I felt the very same way. “Easy and proven. Cremation. Fire killed any undead, and a box of ashes can’t revive. But people just didn’t
want
to give up embalming and burial. Even with more and more bodies reviving and nobody knowing why. They believed the funeral homes, all that bullshit about how ‘second-step embalming’ would guarantee they stayed in the ground forever—and the labs needed to stay
just that close
to finding the big answer, without actually finding it. Lot of jobs depending on their not figuring it out.” She glanced down at my jacket, her jacket, the LCS insignia with the mustard-yellow C slowly unraveling. “Their jobs. Their money. They could’ve just mandated cremation, and avoided all this.”

“They had to string folks along,” Natalie agreed. Her head was tilted toward her fingers, the fat, shiny little braid halfway complete. “For funding. Especially after the pesticide made things even worse. Perception was everything. But the real money, that went to the real research. The stuff nobody was supposed to know about.”

“Us,” Stephen said.

The word was flat and dull, a dirty coin dropped in a rusting slot. He gazed down at the floor, mouth held straight and grim, as though he were ashamed; as though he’d done all this, not had it done to him. I slid my fingers tighter around his and he gripped back almost hard enough to hurt.

“They didn’t just want to keep people in the ground.” Stephen rocked back and forth, forth and back as he spoke. Pulling his own memories together piece by scattered piece, shards stuck by force into the barest semblance of a vase. “They wanted to learn how to revive
certain
folks. Their own wives, husbands, children, parents, friends, each other—they wouldn’t have to worry about cancer or car accidents or anything taking them before they wanted to go.” Still rocking, tugging my hand in a gentle seesaw. “They wanted the power of life and death.”

“Except not to create more undeads,” said my mother. “Undeads are, were a whole different species, different brains, biology—the labs wanted to wake the dead, but keep them human. Keep them what they always were. Drop a stitch, unravel a little, start knitting the whole row again like you never stopped.”

The Fates, from my old mythology book, with their scissors to snick-snack off the long, short, infinitesimal thread of a human life. Scissor Women. The lab wanted a way to grab the two ends of each thread, tie a hasty knot, keep unspooling. I’d been made a fishing reel, the bait hook snapped off in Natalie’s hands and sunk to the bottom of a dark, freezing lake; then she repaired the line. And wound me back up here again.

“Why me,” I said. My mouth was dry.

“They tried and tried and tried.” Natalie’s voice was a bored singsong as she completed her little braid; her fingertips held it together, her other hand stroking up and down its bumpy, uneven twists. “Hundreds of test subjects. Maybe thousands. So many of the records got lost or destroyed during the plague. They’d bring people here, drugged, and kill them—with more drugs, like executions, it didn’t hurt—and work on bringing them back—”

“How.” I could’ve slid fingers around her neck and throttled but she was our only source of answers, my murderer, my reviver. “How did they bring them back. How did you bring us back.”

“Drug addicts,” my mother said. “Prostitutes.” The corners of her mouth quirked in a rueful smile. “Homeless people. Criminals. Foster system children.”

“Runaways,” said Stephen. More bits and pieces, sharp and cutting, as if something here in this room, this building, had been waiting to hand them back. “The institutionalized. People nobody missed. The facilities got bribes, kickbacks for letting them take people. Supposedly. Assisted living, group homes, nursing homes—”

“Most of them died.” Natalie let the braid go, combed it out again with her fingers. “Others, their brains post-revival were just . . . gone. Mush. They could maybe say a few words, follow orders but lights on, nobody’s home. They’d dispose of those, fast, until they realized they’d created a whole group of workers they wouldn’t have to pay.”

That poor woman, Mike and Jason’s gang fuck-toy. The deadness in her eyes, I’d thought it was from everything they’d done to her but maybe it was there before, maybe they saw it in her eyes and knew they could grab her without a struggle. She still tried to get away from them, though, there was still enough
her
in her to try to run away. My free hand clenched up, nails slicing at my palm.

“Naomi’s Scissor Men,” I said.

“I guess.” Natalie shrugged. “They hang around here, they mostly do what they’re told. They’re not
that
scary.”

Stephen raised his head, gazing at Natalie, and smiled. “Dozens of times,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how many, it ate holes in
my
brain too, but I know it was that many or more. But I could never figure out how they did it. How they brought me back. They were so careful never to let that penny drop. Tell me how we’re all alive.”

“Homo novus.”
Natalie was back on her feet, happy and excited, stretching like she’d just had a long, comforting nap. “The ‘new man.’ Human. Whatever. That’s what they called us—”

“Us?” I said. “You’re—”

“Of course I am, for God’s sake.” Sharp, impatient, like she were my kindergarten teacher and I’d just failed numbers and colors for the dozenth time. “You think I’d have wasted my time in Paradise, that dead freaks’
dump
, if I weren’t looking for the rest of my family? However many of us were still alive? Scoured half of Gary those first months looking but—nothing.” She plunked back down on the floor, arms wrapped tight around her knees. “I bet you believed all the rumors that those plague-dogs, those dead things who got the diseases, that they ran this place—”

“The exes,” I said.

“Exes.” Natalie thought that one over. “I like that. Yeah, some of them lived here for a while but they kept fighting, couldn’t make things stick, a lot of them drifted into the woods and never came back. They’re all just animals anyway, plague-dogs, exes. Dead animal carcasses walking around. All they want to do is fight and hunt. A few hung around, or made deals with me like that Billy, because they wanted something. They wanted the stuff I remember from before, the stuff the lab knew. They don’t know they’re doomed.” Her voice cracked in a much older woman’s laugh. “I couldn’t help them if I wanted to. They’re all doomed.”

She leaned forward, smiling, as if all of us together shared in a wonderful joke the rest of the world couldn’t fathom. “Everything you know,” she whispered, “is wrong.”

“You run this place,” Stephen said.

He sounded every bit as disbelieving as I felt. That room, Natalie’s room. Her drawings, I was sure of it, for how many years in this place? All her life? She knew Stephen, he didn’t know her. All along. Even while I’d felt so horribly sorry for her.

“You really don’t remember me at all, do you?” she asked him, and underneath the smiling triumph there was a flicker of something that almost, if you fixed your eyes just right, might have been wounded feelings. “We were both here at the very same time. Your mother, Amy, of course I’d heard all about Lucy, everyone had, but she was still way before my time, she was ‘Sarah’ back then—”

“I thought I got away.” My mother shook her head, silent mockery of her own delusions. “I actually thought I got away. I escaped, I—there was a guard here, he liked me. I used that. I escaped.”

She raised her head, brushed strands of hair away from my forehead. I was still so angry at her leaving me behind but the touch of her fingers to my skin, it made the horrible feverish shovel-wielding thing inside me calm down and curl up to sleep. “Your father,” she said.

“Dad worked here, before?”

She shook her head again. “Mike Holliday, that was your dad. The guard was your father.”

My uncle and aunt, my dad’s sister. The way they’d both look at me sometimes, like I were some drunken stranger at a party that only painful, martyred politeness kept them from throwing out. They knew. And she left me with them. “What did he know? I mean, my dad, about—”

“He knew what I was. Whose you were. He didn’t care. He loved us. That I know. It’s a long story.” My mother glanced toward Natalie, and her eyes went hard. “And she’s not going to hear it. It’s none of her fucking business.”