Frail (38 page)

My mother stood there next to Stephen, ashen-faced. She gripped something in her fist, like a clump of hair, but holding it had stained her fingers red. Her face, her clothes, covered in tarry blackness just like mine. Stephen, his shirtfront and hair matted in winey rot, squatted near one of the bodies. He looked up at me, eyes full of defiance and fear, and swallowed down some of the same stuff smeared all over his mouth, cheeks, neck. A mouthful of blood.

I came forward and took my mother’s hand. Gently uncurled the fingers, one by one, and she let the bloody torn-off thing she’d been holding fall to the ground.
Your teeth, they’re so sharp now. Like mine.

“Mom, this is Lisa,” I said. “I met her on the road. She looked out for me for a while. She and Stephen already met. Lisa, this is Lucy. My mother.”

Lisa nodded, looked suddenly almost shy and awkward as she glanced at us all together.

“Are you okay?” she asked my mother.

My mother thought that one over. “We can all pretend we are, together,” she mused, locks of salt-and-paprika hair falling over her face. “It’d help pass the time.”

Lisa nodded again. A good answer, I could see her thinking. A good answer.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “I have to go get—don’t go off anywhere, Amy. Or any of you. Christ, I told her to stay by the lilacs no matter what, if she’s wandered off I swear I’ll—”

She ran off, threading through the birches. Stephen reached up with his sleeve covering his hand, wiped what traces he could from his mouth.

“Are we dead,” I asked, again. “Living dead. Dead living—”

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I don’t know.”

“Do we—can we—eat human flesh.” The question was a hard suet lump in my throat and I forced it out, like coughing up something swallowed the wrong way.

Stephen put his hands in his pockets, stared at the ground with his face knotted up.

“There’s something in my head now,” he said, “when I get scared enough. I don’t know if it was there, before, it’s like I said, I have a terrible time remembering a lot of things—” He shook his head. “I can do . . . things like this. And it’s like I don’t even know I’ve done them, until they’ve happened.”

He glanced over at my mother and I saw the gratitude of knowing it wasn’t only him, of knowing that someone else had been forced or bred or made exactly this way. He looked at me and I saw him waiting for me to turn my back, resigned and waiting. I reached up and touched his hair.

“Mags is dead,” I said. “I killed her.”

His eyes widened. “That’s not even poss—”

“And this is? What you did?”

He had no answer for that.

“I didn’t even know I’d done it,” I said. “Until it happened.”

My mother took me in her arms, gave me a short, sharp shock of a hug. Stephen kissed me. When I looked up again Lisa was standing there watching us, arms wrapped around her body in the old way like she could somehow push this wrong skin of hers into a good fit. Beside her, leaves and dirt clods sticking to her hair and her eyes bleary with sleep, was Naomi. Here with Lisa all along, hiding, seeing and remembering God knew what.

My mother looked from Naomi to the bodies and back again with alarm, but Naomi’s eyes studying it all were big and dark and so very matter-of-fact, so used to the supposedly unthinkable. We had all seen all of it, before.
There are Scissor Men, there are.
Had she seen Mags’s body, Billy huddled crushed and broken beside it? She’d called them Mommy and Daddy, once. I nodded at Naomi, woman to woman, and she nodded back.

“This is Naomi,” Lisa said to my mother, curling a palm around the top of Naomi’s head. “My daughter.”

Naomi’s expression didn’t change, but she leaned into the touch. My mother managed a smile.

“That day back in Lepingville,” I said to her. “The day I snuck out to watch you on the intrusion call, and—”

“Yes,” my mother said. “I remember.”

“Was that my father?” I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Or my dad? It was, wasn’t it. Which one was it?”

Ooooooossss.
Holding out his hand. Her hands, curling that much tighter around the flamethrower. She looked back at me.

“They never found your dad’s body,” she said. “I had nothing to bury, nothing to burn. Then—” She closed her eyes hard for a moment. “—and then, there he was. A body to burn. And that’s what I did.”

That screaming when he died again, ceaseless screaming, the noise like a scalpel teasing agony from bleeding skin. Right in front of me. Ms. Acosta, lying there on the floor, one pale, nearly bared breast and fingers half-curled in panic her last remnant of intact flesh. There she was. And that’s what I did.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

She nodded and we headed side by side toward the patches of pink laboratory brick, the swaths of thick open grass. Everyone followed, Naomi bringing up the rear with Lisa and clutching at a long, curling, dead strip of tree bark like a teddy bear as she walked.

 

 

The wind was picking up, the grass around our shins bowing and flattening and the tiny gnarled trees at the top of the duneface doing an easy little list back, forth, back. We made our slow wounded way through the grass and toward the narrow white gravel road, waiting to be seen. Waiting to see who’d see us.

But nobody came out of the lab, ever. Instead we heard footsteps behind us, tracing the path we’d just deserted, and Stephen slid a protective arm along my shoulders as we all turned around. She was breathing hard, bruised, great smears of drying blood splayed like handprints over her cheeks and arms and sealskin hair, but she was bright-eyed, smiling. She still had her knife.

“I saw them,” she said, buoyant with pleasure. “The Scissor Men. You got them
all
. The ones who thought nothing could ever touch them.” Her eyes on Lisa were derisive, gleeful with triumph, and she laughed. “That’s what your kind thought, isn’t it? That you were better than all of us? Well, guess what, things are different now. The ones who came back—the exes?
We’re
the only thing that can kill them. God, Amy, your eye looks terrible. Sorry.”

“Give me my fucking dog back,” I said. “I know he’s not dead, however much of his blood you’ve got on you. That’s not how it works.”

Natalie snorted. “I told you, you don’t need Death now. You killed what they all thought could never die—and it was dying all along. Rotten, liquid, all on the inside.” Her eyes flickered contemptuously to Lisa again, back to me. “You should be dead right now, all of you. You aren’t. The master is the servant. That’s the whole point. We’re already halfway there.”

I studied her up and down, down and up, like the tougher girls at school used to do right before a fight. “Give me my dog.”

“God, you’re boring,” she hissed. “I can’t, okay? He just vanished, we were in there and he could’ve bitten my face off and then, it was like he was black sand or something, under my hands. He dissolved.”

Death had deserted her again, it still didn’t want her. I could almost have felt sorry for her, if things had been different. Stephen smiled as he stared at her, a thin mocking smile like he was thinking just the same thing.

“You still haven’t told us,” he said. “How we’re ‘almost halfway there.’ Or how we can kill what isn’t meant to be killed. I never knew we could do that, I never
could
do that before and God knows I tried—”

“Come back with me,” she whispered. A hand on my arm, all naked, unfeigned appeal. “Come on. Okay? Not
them
”—her eyes flickered to Naomi and Lisa—“just, you guys. We belong here, this really is our home and I can’t clean it up all by myself—”

“You already killed me once,” I said, and the thought of that ridiculous statement being true made me want to dissolve into giggles there on the gravel. “You’re not getting another chance.”

Her expression hardened. “And if I hadn’t you’d be dead right now. You’d never have been able to fight any of them, you know that! Why are you so angry? I don’t have to tell you what Daddy and Grandma told me, it was a secret! I’m not supposed to tell anyone! It was all just in case something happened to them, if you stay with me you’ll see it for yourself!”

She was pleading now, actual desperation, like the Natalie I’d thought I’d known back in Paradise City. Like the person she really was somewhere inside, might have remained for her entire life, if this place had never had her. How could anyone live with themselves, knowing that? Realizing they’d never know just what they really were? The ringing chorus inside us both, in us all, human and inhuman and impossible to sort out each from each, it made me even dizzier and I turned my head away. My mother put a hand to the back of my head.

“You’re making too big a deal out of this,” Natalie said. “We’re all human beings here, we’re not monsters—you want to know how it all works? Then you have to stay. The story’s right
here
. In the sands. This is the only place on Earth, the only one where Death doesn’t have a boot on humanity’s neck—you’d be dead if it weren’t for me!” Shouting at my mother now, angry like a toddler sensing their promised candy treat slipping away. “You’d all be dead!”

“You disgust me,” I said. “Everything about you disgusts me.”

“You’re no different than me,” she hissed. Her face was flushed, tears of genuine hurt in her eyes. “I don’t know why he loves you better, why you get pets and presents and—we’re both the same, both of us are the same. Inside, you’re no different than me.”

I reached out a hand, touched her thick tangled black hair. She blinked back the wetness in surprise.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not. But that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it.”

My fingers lingered, memorizing the color so dark it had that faintest sheen of icy blue, the texture silken and thick even when long uncombed: one good thing nobody had been able to take away from her, here or in Paradise or anywhere else. One good thing to take with me wherever I was going. Then my hand dropped and I turned my back on the lab and her, stepping off the cheerful gamboling white stone road.

“Where are you going?” she demanded. “You can’t just wander around the sands and find anything, you know how many people tried that? You won’t find anything by yourself!”

Some of the beaches had little whitewashed wooden stairways leading down to the dunes, I’d seen pictures, but here was just a slim sandy pathway tucked between two thick, tufted outcroppings of beach grass, up at the top of the hill. I took a handful of tufts for support, winced in surprise at how sharp they felt against my cut-up palm, slid my feet like a skater down the ridge.

“You have to come back!” Natalie shouted. “You have to!”

Standing up here you could see the whole long sweep of the beach: rucked-up dry beige sand like frosting clumsily spread on a cake, then the wet stuff at the shoreline a darker sugar-brown, smoothed out by the tides, studded with the dried fruits of stones. The trees up on the ridge, when you took just a few steps closer to the water, already looked distant and lonely like they were somewhere far removed.

“Watch your feet,” someone said softly behind me. My mother, probably talking to Naomi. I kept going, ignoring the grit in my shoes, the sand easy underfoot as we traveled down.

“Come back!” Natalie was screaming, as far away and untouchable as the trees. “Come back!”

Seagulls strutted along the sands, absorbed in whatever it is seagulls do all day, wheeled briskly away at the human approach. Nothing but old bones here sticking out of the sand, there’d been all those wild rumors near the end that lake sands and the waters cured the plague; you heard stories, crazy stories, about people burrowing in near the shoreline, like sand crabs trying to escape a predator’s shadow. The sky was hard and painfully clear, the remains of Chicago a bluish shadow out on the horizon just across the lake.

“Come back! Please come back!” Fear, and thwarted rage, and begging. “I don’t want to be here all alone! Please! It’s so lonely by myself, I don’t want to be alone!”

She was too far away now, I could barely hear her. A seagull marched past me, with that comically furious, head-bobbing bird’s concentration; I turned at the last minute, walking along the damp tide line studying the brown-sugar sand, the stones of a dozen-some muted colors like dust-caked stained glass, splintered bones picked clean months past. The gull kept straight on toward the water.

TWENTY-FIVE

“D
on’t,”my mother said, running up to me quickly as I bent down. “All you’ll do is get sand in your eye.”

She was right, of course. I put down the wet, cool handful I’d vaguely thought to slop over my bruised eye and gazed out toward the water, the faint bluish shadow of a dead steel mill—dead long before the plague, operations shifted to China, though I’d seen decades-old pictures of its thick white smoke wafting over the shore—still sitting at the far end of the sands. Naomi came up beside me, bark strip abandoned for a lake stone.

“If you put it to your ear,” she said, holding it out to me, “it sings. Just like a shell.”

I put it to my ear, and heard nothing but the thick, contented silence of a tiny slab of rock. That was a sermon I saw advertised once, on the marquee of that little church near our house: THE STONES WILL SING. LUKE 19:40. Red graffiti sprayed on the side of their white cinderblock building, calling them heretics, Satanists, necrophiles, kept bleeding through the hasty cover of paint. I handed the stone back to Naomi and she slipped it in her pocket, staring at me like I’d know what to do next.

“Don’t look at me.” I shrugged.

Stephen picked up a stone, raised his arm to hurl it at the water, but something in Naomi’s face made him drop it back to the sand.

“It’s headed out there anyway,” he pointed out. “Just like it came in with the tides—”

“They’re all headed out,” Naomi agreed. Happy, suddenly, like someone finally understood. “But not yet. Right now, we still need them.”