Frail (37 page)

I was weak, weak and stupid and about to die, it hurts, it hurts so much, I don’t want it to hurt. Little frail, about to be gutted, killed, eaten, killed again, killed forever. Mags settled her weight against me, enjoying the show.

“I haven’t had a really good hoo-kill in years,” she said. “Not a good feeding one, not since before Billy and I got sick. You came along just the right time.” Hand to the side of my head, yanking my chin up and back. “That’s one thing they can’t take away.”

A good hoo-kill.
Hoo. Oooooosssss.
You’re dead, you
talk
dead, you shouldn’t even be here. I shouldn’t be. I’m dead. I
died
. I died like you died. There were riots in the grocery stores and I kicked a man’s head so hard something crunched and broke, I didn’t mean to do it but then came the second time, the deliberate time, I’m you, Mags, Billy, I am
you
. You’re all I am and all I’ll ever be. Mags’s cushiony, columnar fingers explored the sutures on my throat, a mocking little tap dance from one side of my neck to the next. She laughed, doubly happy.

“I knew it,” she said. “Little lab rat.”

Then she dug her fingers in, to rip them all open.

I don’t know what happened next. I’ll never know. Every part of me was screaming-hurt and drained dry and her nails were sliding in to tear me all up, but inside me something caught hold. It caught fire. It didn’t matter anymore how much I hurt. My arms shook and something hot and scorching brought a different sort of tears to my eyes and I pulled so easy from Mags’s clutches, I wrenched my head away like her iron-band hands were nothing. I took her by surprise, I so loved taking her by surprise. I sank teeth into her arm, hanging on, head shaking to bite down deeper and she roared in rage.

“Rotten little bitch!” she screamed, a hand in my hair slamming my head against the leaves, the tree roots again, again. I didn’t even feel it. My body’s just a dead skinned hide draped over what’s actually me and you can’t get to it, wet stickiness dripping in my hair now that must be my own blood, it didn’t matter. You can’t kill me, bitch, I’m
dead
.

“I won’t tell you anything.” Laughing still, my arms and legs flying up to hit, kick, scrabble heels back down in the soft forest ground like I was built for this place, born-reborn to it. “Nothing, not a—” She got my jaw again, my teeth slamming together under the impact so it echoed through my skull. “Not a thing, nothing!”

“Then you’re nothing,” she whispered, with the sighing softness of breath, the last breath, leaving a body for good. “You’re nothing. And this is all over.”

Her hands were around my throat. Throttling. About to snap.

My nails caught on soft powdery-smooth flesh that tore open, that spilled a wetness far too thick over my hands, and with her fingers still circling my neck I twisted, kicked. My feet thudded and something bent and cracked beneath them, I heard a shocked scream that wasn’t me, my teeth found flesh again and a taste foul and necrotic coursed into my mouth, this isn’t me doing this, that dark lake water is rushing over my head again but I’m breathing it in as air, flying through it, sailing over dark coursing tributaries like the veins buried in my own body—

A pulsating thud, all in my ears. What a child like Kristin’s child hears in the womb, its mother’s heartbeat, dwarfing and drowning out its own.

I was standing over her. I had no memory of rising up but I was standing over her, over Mags where she lay on the ground, and the rushing searing drowning thing inside me, hot enough to melt glass, cooled and congealed into dark, spiky, shining shards. Hard glassy bristles, like the fur of a great black dog. My own breath, sobbing and ragged in my ears. Over and over again.

The taste coating, sticking to my mouth was so foul I bent over and spat, again and again. My hands were winey-syrupy, a purplish tarry stuff ground into the nails and smeared over my palms and I tried scrubbing them on the tree bark, flinched at the pain, stared at Mags where she lay still and quiet on the ground. Her face, the eyes wide-open startled, scored with lines down the cheek like my own fingernails. Throat a torn, tarry mess. Her gut. Ripped open, kicked open, a great soup of decay where vital organs should’ve been soaking her flowered green dress, coursing down her soft pale springy-firm thighs, saturating the leaves and tree roots and ground.

The smell. You can’t imagine the smell, oozing from all inside her. Kill it, Mom. Kill it. Set it on fire.

I staggered backward, waiting for her invulnerable undying ex’s body to close up, knit together. It just lay there, limp and depleted, a wineskin burst open. I was dizzy and my slammedaround head kept doing a kaleidoscope tilt and then there were sounds behind me, Billy and Lisa had smelled it too, heard it too and they let each other go. We both had black eyes, Lisa and I: Mine swelling up, squeezing my vision down to the slit in a window blind, hers already yellowing and fading as the blood sank back into subsiding flesh. Billy, torn up, fucked up, heaving breaths like he’d run a race. All of us, staring down at Mags not believing what we saw.

Billy kicked at the leaves, like they were road barriers blocking his way, and came so slowly closer, waiting for her to wake up. His pale blue eyes were round and wide, the whites on full display, taking it all in and not seeing what they saw.

“Not funny,” he said, as he stood over her. “Not fucking funny, Margaret May, get the hell up.”

She didn’t move.

“Mags,” he said quietly.

The ground beneath my feet danced, circled, like it was taunting me, playing tag. I staggered again and almost fell and Lisa caught me, hung on, made murmuring sounds of would-be comfort that had no words, no end, no point. Billy was kneeling in the stinking saturated leaves, a hand touching Mags’s snarled auburn hair.

“Mags. Get up. Wake up. Mags.” Order. Bargain. Plea. “Mags.”

Lisa kept an arm wrapped tight around me, a hand to her mouth.

“Mags,” Billy said again. All quiet.

Then a sound came out of him that pulled all the energy from the tree roots, the ground, the air, a howling anguish punching holes in the sky. He seized her shoulders, shook her rotten remains like he could jostle the life back into her, and he turned toto me, his hands—both our hands—smeared with horrific stinking ooze, his eyes shiny and face feverish with wild impossible hope.

“Kill me,” he said, and as he laughed his pale round rabbit eyes brimmed and spilled over. “Can’t kill myself. We both tried, she and I. Tried and tried. You don’t know how fucking many times. So kill me.”

I just stood there, the swaying ground and trees finally straightening up, trying to understand how she could be lying there unmoving, unhealed, dead. Billy stroked her hair, passed a hand over her eyelids to close them, then screamed to me and the tree roots and the air, “Kill ME!”

What do I do? I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I
did
. It has to be a trick. It has to. Lisa was still murmuring, whispering, the nervous drone of some meditative mosquito. Billy laughing again, stony, hollow, as his face grew damp like rain.

“You wanna die?” he whispered, and all the hollowed-out despair in him flared up, searing, like a dead tree catching a discarded cigarette’s flame. “You wanna get outta this tramp-around, tread-around life and have any peace and quiet, ever? Any rest? You ain’t gonna.” Each syllable snapped and flared up as it left his mouth, more dead branches for the fire. “You’ll live forever, nothing but endless fucking
living
and breathing and stumbling around the trees, no point, no purpose, no nothing, everyone you care about gone and you don’t get to follow, you just keep going on and on and on and—that’s what you can have! You can have it!” Screaming, an air-rich roar of flame consuming the clearing, acres of trees, every last thing in its path. “
You can have it!
You’ll have it! And you’ll curse every worthless fucking second that you’re—”

He pressed his face to Mags’s forehead, choking, sobbing. The stench of her, strong and sharp and porridge-thick, still spilling out on every part of the ground, the leaves, the rug, the wall behind the sofa, the tablecloth of a mutual shroud. I wrenched away from Lisa and I ran.

 

 

I stumbled in the direction Stephen, my mother had gone but I didn’t get very far. Lisa was right behind me, she half-tackled me just the slightest bit gentler than Mags and then I was sobbing against her shoulder. That goddamned sound again, that there-there noise she kept dress rehearsing, her kind couldn’t even do that much without Brillo-scrubbing a human’s ears.

“Shut up,” I whispered. A good soft sound. “Shut up, shut up, shut up—”

“I looked for you all night,” Lisa said, and kept rocking me back and forth with a quiet ferocity. “I heard one of them screaming you got away and that’s my girl, that’s—I went back to Paradise, I thought maybe you’d gone back, and some of the buildings were already on fire. The commissary.” Her fingers touched the edge of my eye, now swollen almost shut. Her own face, she might never have been hit at all. “Kevin, Billy doing that, it was the last straw. I don’t know what’ll happen to them, everyone left, I’ve got Naomi, she’s here with me, but—”

“How did I do that?” I coughed, almost doubled over. “Mags. How did I do that. It’s impossible. How.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

She touched my hands, still sticky with what had happened. My mouth. “Your teeth,” she said, with a distant sort of wonder. “They’re like—they’re so sharp now. They’ve changed.” She made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “They’re like mine.”

My teeth. I touched them myself, ran a tongue along their edges: still square like human teeth, the slight up-and-down unevenness I’d always had. I put a fingertip to them, examining each in turn. When I took my hand away that finger was bleeding.

“What does that mean,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“The lab.” I put bleeding fingers to my swollen eye, felt a jolt of pain when I touched it and my hand flew back down to my side. Everything hurt, my eye, my mouth, my throat, my hands, my whole body, but something told me I should’ve been hurting more. Adrenaline. That’s all. “Lisa, the lab, when Natalie disappeared, it—”

“I know.”

“They’re taking people for it, human beings, they’re still taking them right now, it’s filthy and there’s not even electricity but they’ve been doing things that—”

“Amy.” Her face was somber. “Just trust me, I know better than you could possibly imagine.”

Patient Zero,
Phoebe said. Poor crazy backstabbing dead Phoebe I wasted so much energy hating. Something about Lisa’s brother. He couldn’t be the “Daddy” of Natalie’s dreams, could— why couldn’t he be. Why couldn’t anyone. Lisa’s hand traced my jawline, tears in her eyes as she touched my throat.

“Oh, God, Jim,” she murmured, all to herself. “What the hell did you really do in that place, all those years. What’d you do to all of us.”

I pulled away. “So what did he do?”

She shook her head. I knew I’d never get an answer.

A wailing sound emanated from the trees, rising, falling, and I walked quietly back in because I wasn’t running away from what I did, not a second time. Billy lay on the leaves next to Mag’s torn-up, how-the-hell-did-I-tear-her-up body, his eyes squeezed shut and sobs convulsing him, like they were working their way up from his feet and out his mouth; he didn’t see me, he didn’t see anything around him. Phoebe had that same look, after Kevin died: a wild dizzy sickness, like they were both trapped on tiny boats spinning and drifting crazy onto a hostile, lethal sea. I saw what he did to Phoebe, I shouldn’t have any pity.

How could I not have pity? We were one and the same, Billy and I. Killers together. This wasn’t the second time, this was the
third
and I didn’t even know how I’d—I got out of there fast, I turned and fled like I’d sworn I wouldn’t and Lisa was standing there, waiting. She pulled something from her pocket, a squashed candy bar with a singed-smelling wrapper.

“Eat,” she said, shoving it at me without ceremony. I ate, every mouthful a big clump of stale peanuts stuck together with caramel like rubber cement.

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” I said. Maybe that was actually true. My lips were coated with melted sugar, they came unstuck when I talked like an old envelope flap. The candy was dry and hard and it hurt like hell to swallow. “I didn’t know—how could she die? How?”

Lisa just shook her head. When she saw the fear in my eyes she smiled, ran a hand over my cheek.

“I’ve had nightmares since I got sick about never dying,” she said. “Never. Being trapped here forever. So if I’m wrong, if something out there could actually kill me—fine. I’m ready. It’s only Naomi and my sister I’m worried about.” She watched the chunks of peanuts disappear down my throat. “And you.”

I grabbed Lisa’s hand, and she almost jumped. I could see it on her face, her face that couldn’t hide her feelings for shit: My grip was far too strong, stronger than it’d ever been since she knew me. Sugar rush, Lisa, that’s all, right? “Tell me. Tell me how I did it. Tell me or I’ll—”

“Amy!” My mother’s voice, calling out scared, and despite everything something in me leapt up so high and easy hearing it, like a stag bounding toward a cool river. “Amy!”

“Here!” I shouted, and took off running, Lisa behind me, in the direction of her voice. “Over here!”

The trees here at the wood’s edge were a mere curtain scrim over the high uncut grass of the lab’s back lawn, the lab itself, just a few hundred yards up the hill. I saw two people there waiting for me,
alive
, and I laughed with an edge of true hysteria and then I stumbled over something and almost fell, and I looked down.

It was a foot. A human foot, unevenly severed, still in its black lace-up shoe and with a toothpick edge of bone sticking from the torn-away bit of shin.

The stench was an impenetrable fog rushing into pores, nostrils, mouths: the same smell that poured from Mags’s body, when I somehow killed her. There were bodies strewn between us and one of them was the black lace-up’s owner, he lay there broken and in pieces and some of the pieces were missing. He bled red but the others around him, they were full of an indiscriminate stew of winey-black rot, their bodies tureens of bone cracked open along the sides. The Scissor Men, the ex-humans, who had pursued us believing like we believed that nothing could bring them down.