Frail (34 page)

My mother loosened her grasp on me and stood up. I followed suit. The scratching was louder now, the door handle rattling. It couldn’t just be me who heard it. My mother, the noise was lending her strength.

“You won’t keep us here by keeping secrets,” she told Natalie, so calm, so quiet. “If that’s your—”

“We’re all supposed to be here, and stay here. We’re family. That’s what families
do
!” Natalie’s voice rose to a shriek and then she subsided, startled at herself, gazing at me in desperation. “You were the only one of us who hadn’t died at least once, hadn’t dropped to the bottom of the lake. I had to do it. It was an initiation—”

“It was an
experiment
.” Stephen was hissing from between his teeth, quiet with purpose. “I can experiment too. I can do anything I have to do, to get you to talk—”

“Don’t,” my mother said quietly, putting a hand on his arm. Stephen shook it off.

“Phoebe and all the rest?” Natalie let out a curt little laugh. “The ones who thought I was somebody’s poor orphan treated me like trash—except you didn’t, Stephen, Amy didn’t, you knew I was family. Daddy and Grandma, they protected me, almost nobody else here knew about me. Didn’t matter how high their clearance was. I had my own secret rooms, so I’d be safe even when the plague hit.” She tugged on a hank of hair, tugged hard like Lisa as if aching to tear it into threads. “All too busy bowing and scraping and sucking up to, what d’you call them, the exes? They’re all dead, the exes, they’re just rotting from the inside out now instead of—
you get away from that door!
”

I was reaching for the door handle but Natalie had her knife out again, and though she couldn’t hurt Stephen or my mother without surprise on her side I still dropped my hand, took a few steps back toward her. So close outside it made me ache were snuffling noises, an animal’s low pleading whine.

“It’s okay, boy,” I said, staring up at the windows suffused with daylight. “I’m here.”

“Stop that,” Natalie muttered, between gritted teeth. “Stop showing off.”

“I’m here,” I repeated, smiling. You cut me, kid, I cut you right back. That’s how it always works.

“Who are you talking to?” my mother asked.

“You’re staying here,” Natalie said. “Not because I’m forcing you, because you have to. You’ll never find out what you are otherwise, not without my telling you—”

“I can take care of that,” Stephen said quietly.

Natalie’s mouth quirked. “Yes you could, couldn’t you? You’d love it. I bet Amy doesn’t realize yet just how much you’d love it. In fact you’d love it so much you’d probably kill me before you got anything out of me—you know what Daddy used to say, before every new experiment? ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ You’d never bother with the measuring, you’d be having too much
fun
with the chop and slice—”

“You have to stop this now, Natalie,” my mother said, and her calmness was like a smooth, cool stone, sinking peacefully to the bottom of a great freezing lake. “You need to tell us what you’ve done, and why. That’s what families do, Natalie, families talk—”

“Like you talked to Amy?” Natalie snickered. “Like you didn’t lie and lie, all the time you were—”

“Shut up,” I whispered. “You shut your damned mouth about my mother.”

The doorjamb was rattling now, low persistent
thud-thudthud
as he tried to head-butt his way inside. I couldn’t be the only one hearing it. They felt it too, the vibrations inside their bones, even thinking they didn’t.

“No one they bring back is ever the same.” My mother was advancing on Natalie now, slow, serene, barely bothering to notice the lethal little blade. Stephen approaching from the other side, silently backing her up. “Memory shifts, distorts, or just vanishes. Cognitive changes. Little bits of your personality, it’s . . . you can actually feel things are disarranged, like someone broke into your bedroom, moved everything on the dresser just an inch to the left but you still can’t quite
see
it—and you did that to my child.” I could see the silent fury filling up every space inside my mother, for me, all for me. “You did that to her, because I lost my mind and left her to—you’ll tell me what you’ve done. You owe her, if she’s your ‘sister,’ to tell her.”

“This is the only lab anywhere that’s ever made dead humans live again at will. Do you realize that? They all tried, but this place, right here, this is the only one on
Earth
.” Natalie was alight with the excitement of it, the pride. “This place, this spot. It’s where the meteor hit, tens of thousands of years ago, that they think started all the changes, that made the dead revive. The secret’s in the sands, the rocks, maybe even the water—all the beaches of the lake. All here, our home.” The thought of that seemed to overwhelm her and she shook her head, brisk and swift, to bring herself back. “You have to stay. You have to stay because this is the place that made us all.”

I took a step backward, closer to the rattling, shuddering door. “Come on, boy,” I called. “Wanna go for a walk?”

Natalie’s face went dark. “You were my special sacrifice,” she spat. “You! I could tell you’d done something terrible, to get through the winter, the way you’d always act when Phoebe—you’re one of his special children, the ones he loves best. When I brought you here, gave you back to him, he was supposed to come.” A tremor passed through her, shook her, subsided. “He left me, one day, and just never came back. Why didn’t he come back? He was supposed to remember me, and come back like he promised, and I’d have all my family. Even without Daddy and Grandma, I’d have all of them.”

The tremor returned. Gripped her harder. “The hell with him.”

Muffled barking, outside the door. The tearing edge of a low growl. Stephen, my mother, they thought they couldn’t hear it but I could see them distracted and glancing toward the door, suddenly uncertain what to do, as if they couldn’t easily overpower a skinny little fourteen-year-old girl, knife or no knife. Maybe my dog had been Natalie’s all along—no. I knew that wasn’t true, I knew it because something inside me had shifted and moved that immovable bare inch after I raised up my hands to beat another human being to death, after I realized that though there were no witnesses the whole universe took notice. The very light of the world, inside my head, had changed. He was death’s and he was for me. And Natalie, well, I didn’t know why death wouldn’t come for her. Maybe it didn’t count, somehow, if you killed someone who could be brought back. Maybe Natalie was just trying too damned hard.

“He’s not for you,” I said, over the enraged animal frustration filling my ears, behind the door. “He’s not for you. He’s for me. I don’t know why, but that’s just how it is. Accept it, and tell me what you’ve done to us.”

“He was mine first.” Natalie’s head whipped from Stephen to my mother, back again, every part of her tensed up waiting for them to spring. “He was mine
first
, before you ever met him, every time I hurt until I screamed he was there for me, I’ve done everything he could ever ask of me and he’s supposed to come back—”

“Over and over, I came back. Are we still even human at all?” For just one quick moment Stephen’s expression buckled, like an awning’s last supporting rods snapping and veering back and forth in the wind. “Are we—immortal?”

Growling, banging, over and over, the slam of wooden door against metal doorframe and, like a hangnail tearing away from the skin, the exquisitely painful sensation of wood splintering.

“Immortality,” Natalie said, and her face knotted up with laughter and disgust like the very thought was obscene. “That was never the idea. Never at all. Who’d want to be stuck just living and living and living, people around you saying the same crap over and over, pretending to change but making all the same mistakes as a hundred years before and a hundred before that, same jokes told a thousand times, every place already visited, everything you liked torn down or paved over, nothing to do, nothing to think—nothing. Who breaks their necks running after nothingness? Idiots, that’s who.”

The thudding, the thudding of that door all through my bones. My teeth banged and clicked without meaning to and it was like small persistent feet inside me kicking me, making me all juddery-sick, and Stephen and my mother both stared at the door not knowing why and came to stand beside me, I was that door, they had to be nearer it and me too.

“Were those your drawings?” I asked. “In the other room? Was that your doll?”

“Imagine aging as fast or slow as you wanted to.” Natalie slashed the knife through the air, thick spongy fetid air like soft supermarket bread gone to mold. “You love being twenty-five? You can be twenty-five for fifty years if you want—but when you get bored with it, then you can move on. Someone dies in an accident, gets cancer, people are always all, oh, she was so
young
, she had everything ahead of her? Think if they could bring you back, the very moment where you were before you were cut off. You can choose when, how, if you age. You can choose when you die, tomorrow or a thousand years from now. Someday. And why shouldn’t we? Zombies got life again, they got it without rhyme or reason or doing anything to deserve it—why shouldn’t human beings have that too? Why couldn’t we climb out of the dirt too? That’s what they were working on here, using us. You and I, all of us, that’s what our lives amounted to.”

She swallowed hard, her eyes shiny and full. “We meant something. Okay? It doesn’t matter if the whole rest of the world forgot us, never wanted us, thought we were dog stuff on a shoe, they had no idea how much we actually meant—”

“So all of us, everywhere could just keep coming back and back and back,” Stephen said. Glancing toward the door, to Natalie, to me, right back again. “Any time we die. Not just us.”

“Not without help,” said my mother. “Obviously.”

“They were working on it.” Both Natalie’s hands curled around the knife handle, holding tight. She gazed at her fingers like something surprising, precious. “They were halfway there, and they needed us, and Grandma made sure I knew everything I needed to about their work so if something happened, something big, I wouldn’t need them—we’re the half-measures, the unfinished experiments. But I’m going to make us whole.”

Splinter. Crunch. The sound was all through me but the door was still whole, impenetrable, he wouldn’t show himself. I couldn’t stand it.

“Am I human?” I asked, and my splintering stomach clutched up wishing never to hear the answer. “Am I undead? What did you make of—what did they make of us?”

“People go on and on about God, God and heaven and damnation—” Natalie shook her head. “It’s all death. Life’s all just slow death, decay, rolling down this huge, endless slope with nothingness at the bottom—that’s what Daddy used to say. That’s what Grandma would say. They said it was horrible, and wrong, how death cast a shadow over living time. The only master of everything that ever lived, is death.”

She smiled, as lit up and young as she really was—not yet decaying like every human past their earliest youth, not yet rolling slowly downhill, still full of light and happiness and promise. “But we’re changing that. Us, the half-measures, the throwaways. Together. We’re enslaving death. He’s going to work for us. He was our master, the only one, for all mankind’s existence—”

A wet, crunching squeal outside, like the pain of something bitten through its soft fatty flesh straight to its bones. Pain, and outrage.

“And now,” she said, touching her hand to Stephen’s neck, pulling it away. “Now, he’s our servant.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. And it was like something else was speaking, through me. Warning her.

Natalie looked at me. She knew. It was all part of her too. Part of all of us. She stared back in defiance, in hate, of me and of something far beyond me.

“Just watch us,” she whispered. “You just watch.”

An invisible booted foot slammed into the doorframe again, again, shaking the door and my body and the tremors reached far beyond me through every wall and floor, the soft stair-step sweep of the lakeshore and every dry scraping grass and tree, through the sky and water and eaten-up half-ruined memory and the dark hollow places in everything. The door flew wide open, banging against the greasy blue-green wall, and something huge and dark and solid with life rushed past me, knocked my mother to the floor and fell on Natalie, slavering, famished.

The wetness of blood was on me like rain.

TWENTY-THREE

A
girl screaming, high little-girl panicked sound, and the shrill, skittering howl of an animal in pain. Blood everywhere and Natalie was waxen white doll hands and feet under a suffocating pile of black fur, fingers folded round a knife slicked red; she slashed wild and clumsy at anything in reach as my black dog, my dog grown so horribly huge from when he’d trotted at my heels just hours ago, snapped its teeth left of her head, right, biting down on air as they wrestled on the floor. Stephen tried to tackle it from behind, wrench it off Natalie like Lisa had dragged the Leyton dog away from me, but it threw him off and he hit the floor skidding, palms razed, my mother crawling over and throwing herself on me, certain we were next.

“Is that what you were calling to?” she cried. “Is that what’s been following you?”

I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t. Natalie slashed with her knife, shouting, my dog snapped teeth inches from Stephen’s throat and I screamed, Get away, my God just get away from it, and he was staggering backward bleeding not from dog bites but from Natalie’s knife. It bled now, my dog, it was whining with pain like the Leyton dog not understanding why it was being hurt, why this was happening when it was only doing what its master told it to—

“Enough, boy!” I shouted, absurdly. “That’s enough now! Stop!”

To my amazement he pulled back, positioning himself, his unnatural gargantuan weight, between Natalie and the rest of us. Breathing hard, face white with exhaustion and untouchable fury, she ran at him and he lunged, jaws no longer seeking mere air, and as they rolled on the floor again there was so much blood I closed my eyes to memory, back in Dave’s living room staggering from sofa to chair to what have I done, what have I done—someone was pulling me to my feet, Stephen and my mother were pushing me toward the door.