Frail (35 page)

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Stephen managed, still breathless, angry peeled-pink rawness striating his palms, “we have to get out—”

“You’re not going anywhere!” Natalie screamed. She had a thin blood-streaked arm wrapped around my dog’s muzzle, muffled growls escaping; his teeth flashed as his jaw half-opened, half-closed, as though he were repeating her words. “You’re staying, you’re staying here with me—”

He wrenched free and threw her on her back. She slid on her heels, knife lost and arms thrown protectively over her face, and I couldn’t watch her die. I was between Stephen and my mother, grabbing their hands, running out the door.

A sound rang in my ears, my black dog’s incessant barking and whining. Not from the attack, not from pain. Because I was leaving, and he was lonely. I was leaving him all alone. I’m sorry, boy. I’m truly so sorry.

 

 

“I don’t—know—where we are,” I said, as the door slammed behind us. Gulping for air, clutching hard at my throat that throbbed now like all the sutures might burst open.

From the room we’d left behind came thuds and crashing, muffled screams, alternating with an ominous, unreal silence. Stephen craned his head down the hallway and cursed in frustration. “I don’t remember. I don’t fucking
remember
how to—”

“Left,” my mother whispered, pulling us down the hallway. “I think left. The gurneys always came through this way.”

We stumbled over uneven crumbling lino slicked with grime, gasping at the stench of shit and the overpowering milk-sour of decay; with head-snapping abruptness my mother pulled us left, right, left, straight ahead, doubling backward whenever memory failed her. We reached a tiny atrium like the hub of a wheel, the walls lined in glass-protected black-and-white drawings like something from an anatomy book and hallway spokes poking out from four different directions. A compass room. My mother came to a halt, staring down each hallway disoriented and lost, while Stephen ventured a little ways down each one in turn.

“Yellow,” he said suddenly, pointing to the north and south hallways: Unlike east and west these had little bright yellow tiles scattered along the flooring, like bits of plaque in an artery. “I went someplace with those yellow tiles to get out of here, I remember that.” He actually grinned in relief, the relief of finally remembering something necessary. “Yellow tiles. There aren’t that many in the whole—”

I ran down the south hallway. The glass covering those drawings was perfectly clean, not one streak of dust, which meant people came down here to clean it which meant we had to hurry—all solid wooden doors, down south. I turned and ran right past Stephen and my mother down the north hallway. Some solid, some with frosted glass windows like I’d seen when I first walked inside. Windows of any sort meant fewer secrets, not as deep into the lab.

“This way!” I shouted, and they followed me north, having no better guess.

My throat hurt so much I clutched it in real fear the stitches might split wide open, that I’d drain out like a field-dressed animal on the floor. The hallway became wider and lighter and then came an actual embankment of clear glass, windows we could reach and break through to get to the sloping weed-choked lawns they showed right outside—and then feet were clattering from the opposite direction, at the end of the hall. They let out a yell when they saw us, running for us in angry triumph, and I spun around in such panic I almost knocked my mother to the floor. She stumbled, pushed me ahead of her as we ran back away from the light.

“You’re not going anywhere!” An ex’s voice, every syllable slicing and striking at the ears. One of the ones who’d grabbed us in the forest, who’d hit Stephen in the face when he tried to get away. “This is your home, you’re staying home where you belong or we’ll—”

“Fuck you,” Stephen snarled, and as they came closer he pushed me and my mother down a stub of a hallway, toward a single metal door leading to a stairwell.

“Lower depths,” he said, truly breathless now. “There’s a way out here, there’s a tunnel, evacuation—route—into the trees—”

We clattered down the stairs, around a corner and he doubled over coughing, gasping, spots of blood welling up on his neck. The basement door flew open with a hollow slam, shouts penetrating the air like loose icicles thudding into soft snow; as Stephen straightened up, gray-faced, and pushed ahead I saw recognition in my mother’s eyes, soft glint of a memory all those sudden deaths and slight returns hadn’t taken away. The basement hallway veered sharp and graceful to the left but she pulled us right, yanking Stephen’s arm when he hesitated, and then we were in a tiny, stifling supply closet, crouching beneath a shelf crammed with leaking bottles that stank of bleach.

“Coming closer,” my mother gasped, actually laughing as she pressed against the closet’s flimsy back wall, seeking—seeking what? Thin like plywood, that wall, the shelf not flush with it but built inches forward, and Stephen and I got the idea quick, squeezing in fingertips to help her. “They wouldn’t know about this here, goddamned opportunists, only wandered in here after the plague, they must be, otherwise this’d be the first place they’d—left! Pull to the
left
!”

The false wall slid a few inches, buckled forward instead of to the side like it’d warped out of its frame. Footsteps coming. My mother hauled and pushed and swore in frustration, and then Stephen shoved it back a bit farther. Shouting now. Shouting for us. Closer. Panicked, I tugged at the wall’s splintering edge with all my strength until I heard a creaking snap; little wooden needles stabbed my fingers, my palms but it was wide enough now for a person to squeeze through. We pushed through the empty space behind. A mop and pair of brooms thudded through the opening like they wanted to come too, then we were standing in a windowless, whitewashed concrete cell with a long, curving ramp leading upward, upward into the dark. Stephen stared in amazement.

“I don’t know this place,” he muttered, and turned to my mother with a look verging on respect: If she knew about this, surely somewhere deep inside she knew everything that might keep us alive. The look of an unwilling, conscripted soldier, dragged to safety from no-man’s-land by one of the supposed enemy. “I never did—”

“People—back there,” I managed, my chest watery and burning like a great blister, the flesh of my palms torn up. “Rooms of them, hearts beating, they’re like us, we have to—”

Voices so close, just outside, they’d check the supply closet, find our hidden door. No time, no time. Exhausted and aching, we dragged ourselves up the dirty whitewash of the ramp, farther, higher.

They’ll find us, I thought, as we ran. They’ll find us. Too late. But it got so quiet the farther we went up the rabbit hole, twisting, turning, walls and ceiling so close and everything so dark my breath seized up claustrophobic but then, suddenly, a tiny flight of steps. A double trapdoor up above, outside light leaking around the frame, and we reached up and pushed and clean cool air rushed in, we were in the light. My fingers seized the thin cords of flower stems, the dry muck of dead leaf-clumps, crawling-snake tree roots as we crawled out, together, away from the fetidness and the rot. My mother slammed the trapdoor shut and we sat there for long seconds recovering our breaths, unable to move; then we were staggering filthy, disoriented, into the deeper shade of the woods.

“I should have—” Stephen coughed, gasped, threw a hand out to a tree to support himself. “Her knife. When it dropped.”

“No time.” My mother threw herself to the ground with a sigh, back resting against the thick, gnarled bark of that same old oak. “I have to stop. Sorry. My God.”

“Where are we?” he asked. So sure she could tell us, right down to latitude-longitude.

“Somewhere up on that ridge above the lab. Don’t know just where. I don’t remember.”

Far enough, anyway, for now. I sat down next to her, even though I was afraid if I stopped moving the exhaustion would leap on top of me, eat me up. I put my head against her shoulder and she took me to her, rocking back and forth with a casual ease like we’d never been parted. I pulled Stephen’s head into my lap and he wrapped an arm around my legs, holding on. The air, I’d get enough of the cool sweet cleansing outside air.

“My throat,” I said. Hoarse and croaking like some tree frog just hopped from a branch. “I was swallowing blood, I drowned in it. I shouldn’t be able to talk—”

“It’s only a skin wound now,” Stephen said, muffled against the cloth of my dirt-stiff jeans. Weary with the contemplation of it. “The muscles and blood vessels, everything beneath it, they’ve already healed. So we’ll just pull the fucking things out, when we can.” A smothered laugh. “Just like always.”

My mother touched a finger to the wounds on my neck, and said nothing.

“Gary,” I said to her. “This place. You’d always told me you grew up here—”

“And I did. This place. That’s no lie.”

Why was I asking this now, of all times? But I hadn’t ever felt as though I were from anywhere, really: All my—our— Lepingville life had been like squatting in a stranger’s empty untended home, and if she knew the path out of death’s house she might know more, might know where she—we—first came from. Where we really belonged.

“And before that?” I asked.

“Maybe East Chicago, like I said. I don’t know. I don’t know.” Eyes half-closed now, head pressed hard against the bark. “I told you, I’ve forgotten so much. Where I lived, when my birthday was, what my parents looked like. Only sensations, intuitions, when I try to think back, or—remember when we’d make breakfast for dinner, Friday pancakes and bacon? I’d eat it and think, This meant something to me, once, before. These tastes, sitting here, this pale yellow paint in the kitchen. Except I don’t know if it was really a memory, or just something I’d always wanted and never had.”

Every Friday night, when her shifts let her come home for Friday dinner. Pancakes and bacon. She splurged sometimes on real maple syrup, but honestly we both liked the artificial, extrasugary cheap stuff better. “But you don’t know,” I said, “what
actually
happened.”

Stephen shifted against my knee. “Déjà vu all over again.”

“I remember,” my mother said, “absolutely everything about the two of us.”

I reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear: still messy, still just short of curly, the gray bits with that broken-off springy quality I remembered from working a comb through Ms. Acosta’s hair, her smiling at how carefully I did it so it never tugged or hurt. Because I hadn’t wanted to hurt her.

“I killed someone,” I said. It’s getting so easy now, to say it. “Ms. Acosta, remember her, Mom? From school? That day she ran after me when you—she survived the plague too, she didn’t get sick. I killed her. I wasn’t defending myself. It’s just, she—she did something, she thought she was doing what she had to, but she lied to me and I got so angry and—and she died.”

My mother nodded and the hollow sorrow in her didn’t mutate into shock or revulsion. Because she blamed
herself
, her absence for—that wasn’t right, not right at all. It was my fault. “I hit her. I killed her. She had no face anymore and the blood was everywhere.” My voice shook and I swallowed, waited. “Because I was angry. It’s just that when I came back to the house, she lied to me, is the thing, she sent me out of the house so she could—are we dead? Are we some new kind of undead?”

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I truly don’t, Amy, I don’t know why we’re here, I don’t know how they succeeded with us when they failed so badly with—nearly everyone else. There’s a mass grave near here, Amy, I’m glad I can’t remember just where. All the mistakes buried and gone. I saw—” She shook her head hard. “I don’t know if you can call me human. I’m sorry.”

“Just don’t fucking call me
homo novus
,” said Stephen. He straightened up, slow and wincing like an arthritic old man, and got back on his feet, offered us both a hand. “I
know
I never heard anything so stupid before, she must’ve made it up.”

“Are we human.” I grabbed Stephen’s hand, pulled myself up, tried to pin my mother down with my eyes like that could change the answer. “Are we living. Are we—”

“Do you still do your music?” she asked.

“I lost my notebook.” Walking now, all three of us, zigzagging through the woods with eyes out for company. “With all the songs. My guitar. I still remember a lot of them. What are we?”

“I told you I didn’t know. I told you. I know what I have to think I am.” She turned to me, fingers spearing a dead leaf stuck to my hair. “Whatever they did to you it’s over, Amy, it didn’t take the rest of your life away. You remember me, you—” Her face distorted suddenly, smoothed and settled just as quick, and I saw that one terrible hidden fear of hers subside. “You’re human. You’re a human being. That I know.”

What was it Stephen said, back in the gardens of Paradise? The pure rottenness of judging humanity by memory? That creature my mother killed, so long ago now, he’d remembered something about her. He remembered what they were to each other. I stumbled, nearly fell over a thick undulating tree root, and hands reached out to hold me steady.