Frail (40 page)

“Ignore him,” I said, and even I didn’t understand the sudden urgency in my own voice. “Ignore him. Let’s just go.”

We went. The few times I looked over my shoulder he was still there, never catching up.

“It’s just another Scissor Man,” Stephen said. He swiveled his head around and glowered. “Let them track us wherever they want. Right? They’re just wasting their time. They want to say hi, we’ll give them a little surprise.”

Naomi gripped Lisa’s hand as we angled around a copse of serene silvery birches, and when Lisa picked her up she didn’t wriggle or whine. My mother poked her beach branch in a staccato against the dirt. “Is it the man you saw before?” she asked me, her voice a low murmur. “The . . . ghost, the creature, you said followed you here?”

I shrugged. “It could be. He can look like nearly anyone, anyone who’s died. Even you.”

Even me.

Something small and furry shot through the trees with a great snapping of twigs. Nick perked up instantly, ready to cut loose and run, and when I muttered
stay
—no idea if he even knew what that meant—he took off running anyway for a few yards, glanced around bewildered like he’d already forgotten what he sought, padded reluctantly back to my side as I broke from the group and waded through the underbrush. The trees were growing sparser now, the sunlight stronger; Lake Street, U.S. 12 were barely a half-mile off. Nick held off to mark another tree while I rubbed at the stabbing ache in my shins.

“Amy?” my mother called, sharp with anxiety.

“I’m coming!” I shouted. “Hang on!”

Still not used to being around people, so many people. It was still better this way. Nick could testify, there was no trusting the decisions I made all alone.

I crouched down to tighten my shoelaces, and when I straightened up again the other one, the ghost, the shape-shucking thing who’d followed me here was standing right in front of me: neatly gray combed hair, little wire-frame glasses, a face so bland and ordinary you could stand inches away and still never describe him. Jeans, sneakers, a wrinkled blue shirt. No black coat, no bare feet.

Nick bounded back through the trees, chasing after the others. Leaving the two of us all alone. The gray-haired man looked at me, and he smiled.

“Who are you?” I said. But I knew who he was. Even never having seen this face, this particular dead man’s face before.

His smile widened. “Even those who don’t know me all that well,” he offered, “they say I’m pretty friendly to strangers. A friendly man. Do you agree?”

I turned my head, looked behind me. The man in black was still there, stopped stock-still with his hands folded before him waiting for me to move. That’s the rule in chess: Black goes second. I didn’t remember anything else about the game, other than that the king was worthless and I could never make sense of the knights’ little jumping Ls. I turned back to the gray-haired man. Explain. But you never have, and never will.

“No,” he said, and nodded, quite courteously, at the man in black. “That’s not me. As you can see.” He sighed a little, the reluctantly delighted bearer of bad news. “Actually, I’m afraid that he’s something worse than I am, something much worse—but, you know, you’ll just have to deal with that yourself.” His eyes, gray as his hair, lit up with mirth. “You can do it. You’re a big girl now.”

“Amy!” Footsteps crunched over twigs and squelched through the leaves, my mother coming to look for me. “Are you okay?”

“Lake Street’s just over yonder,” the gray-haired man said. His arm pointed, perfectly straight, through the thinned-out cottonwoods and oaks. “I advise you keep going. Just keep going, and I’ll find all of you.”

“Are you all right?” Stephen poked his head into the clearing. “That dog ran back without you, and—Amy? What’s wrong?”

He’d vanished, the gray-haired man, so quickly Stephen hadn’t even seen him. So quickly, I hadn’t either. Stephen’s eyes narrowed as he looked behind me and I knew the thing in black, the Something Much Worse, hadn’t gone anywhere, wasn’t going anywhere without me. But I was used to that, well used to it. Just ask Nick.

All my crazy, all that time, it turned out it was really the farthest thing from crazy; either that, or the whole world had gone crazy too. Either way, it meant everything I’d feared, I’d hoped I just imagined—this whole new world, this place of hollow towns and empty roads and immortality bleeding and dying on the ground, everything I’d thought must surely be a dream that someday, if I were very good, might up and fly away—it wasn’t. It was the truth. I’d just have to deal with it, we’d all have to deal with it, or die. If we were ever even allowed to die. No choice. You’re a big girl now.

All the people around me who’ve died, and now I can’t imagine how we’re all here, living. Breathing. Naomi and Lisa. Stephen, my mother, me: more than human, less than human, never really human at all. The man, creature, thing following us, who can’t possibly be real. We shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t.

“I’m okay,” I told Stephen, my mother, Lisa, Naomi as they crowded around me, as Nick sniffed suspiciously at my legs. “I just stopped to tie my shoes.”

We took up the path again, ambling upward and downward and then steadily up through the remaining trees. A winterpitted Honda still sat in a tiny service station’s parking lot, cheek by jowl with the forest’s far edge; Lake Street opened up wide and empty at the curb.

My thoughts kept twisting, turning in ever-widening circles. My feet, at least, knew where they were going; just a few miles removed lay U.S. 12, and the long road east.

 

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DUST

N
ine years ago, I was alive. Nine years ago, Jessica Anne Porter was fifteen and lived in a nice house in the very wellguarded town of Lepingville, an hour out of Chicago, and got okay grades and wanted to do something someday with animal rights. Her hair was auburn dyed something brighter, I forget what. I don’t see bright colors well anymore. She had a mother, father, a sister in her first year of college, a brother in his last—neither of them could wait to get out of the house, they barely spoke to her parents. And her parents barely spoke to each other. Then one day they were in a rare good mood and took her out to dinner, and then there was the Toyota ride home.

Dad took the back roads home, the scenic tour. You weren’t supposed to do that, you were supposed to stay on the main highway with the blindingly sulfurous roadside lights (the “environmental hazards,” as we called them, you never put it more directly than that, supposedly hated bright light) and the toll booths. Each booth had a FUNDING COMMUNITY SAFETY sign so you wouldn’t throw a tantrum as you forked over your money, a sentry bearing an emergency flamethrower. See? Safety. Suck on that, you suburban cheapskates. The small, cramped booths could serve as safe houses in a pinch, if a “hazard” somehow surprised you on the road. They had to let you in, that was the law. But my dad had paid four tolls in eighteen miles just to get to the restaurant and my mom complained the road lights gave her headaches and it was a pretty night and for once nobody was screaming at each other so why not take the old road, the long way home? Rest your eyes. Have a bit of peace and quiet.

It was two miles from the county line, where the former industrial park gave way to beachy dune grass and rows of half-built condos sat empty along the roadside, silhouetted in weirdly dim, soft white road lights. The old-fashioned kind. This was after they finally passed the moratorium on residential building in rural areas, the one the developers held up as long as they could, until the “hazards” somehow got into that gated community near the Taltree Preserve; whose woods, fields and ex-farmlands these are, even they then managed to figure out. Nothing hazardous that night, though, just the dark sky and the low fuzzy whiteness and everything peaceful and sleepy until suddenly there were two blinding headlights bearing down on us from the wrong side of the road, howling brakes and screaming and then, like the lost breath from a hard stomach punch, everything gathered into a fist and struck, and then stopped.

I remember a pickup truck, yellow, gone faded saffron under the road lights. And a woman’s voice, not my mother’s, moaning over and over like some nauseated prayer while I lay on the pavement dying,
Oh Christ, oh God, oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ oh my God
and I thought, Lady, it’s a little late for that now isn’t it? Her voice was washed out, staticky with the buzz of a million angry flies eating her up, and the buzzing became louder and louder and there were new flashing lights, red ones, but it was too late, I was all eaten up, and I closed my eyes and fell asleep for a long time.

Then, days or weeks or months after the funeral, I woke up.

In old horror movies where someone gets buried alive, there’s always that moment where they blink into the darkness, pat and grope around the coffin walls and let out that big oxygenwasting scream as the screen goes black. Me, though, I knew I was dead, really dead and not put away by mistake, and another giant fist was gripping my brain and nerves and shoving away shock, surprise, bewilderment, only letting me think one thing:
Out
. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would break free. I didn’t seem to need air anymore, so I could take my time.

I tried putting my hands out just like in the movies, to feel the force and weight I was fighting—six feet under, that’s a lot of piled-up dirt—and that’s how I found out my right arm was shot to pieces. The left could rattle the box a bit, but not enough. I raised my legs, each movement a good long achy stretch after the best nap in the world, and pressed my palm, knees, feet against the white satiny padding overhead. Felt a rattle. Pressed harder. Heard a creak.

Then I kicked.

The first blow tore through the satin lining and slammed into the wood without a moment’s pain; the second splintered it, cracked it, and I kicked and kneed and punched until I hit shards of timber and musty air and then, so hard my whole body rattled, a solid concrete ceiling overhead. A grave liner, Teresa explained to me later, another box for my box, but I felt real panic at the sight and had to make myself keep kicking, harder, harder, and that awful concrete became fine white dust that gave way to an avalanche of dirt. I was gulping down mouthfuls of mud and I was sad for my shirt, they’d buried me in my favorite T-shirt that read ANIMALS ARE NOT OURS TO EAT, WEAR, OR EXPERIMENT ON and now it was plastered mute with damp black dirt, but I kept swimming one-handed, kicking, tunneling upward through a crumbling sea. The moist tides of soil were endless, then I felt something finer and powdery-dry and my good hand found thin cords of grassroots, poked through the green carpet-weave and ripped a long jagged slit open to the air. The
air
—I didn’t need it, maybe, but as I lay there drained and exhausted and felt it cool on my dirt-caked back I almost cried.

The sunset was a needle-thrust in my eyes. I crouched in my own grave hole, retching up pebbles and earth, and gasped at the smells of the world: the turned soil, the broken grass stems I clutched in my fist, graveside flowers old and new, the trees and plants and the thousands of people and animals that’d left scents behind traversing the cemetery grounds. My own dead, dirty stink, and it still didn’t shock me, I was too distracted by the other million fits and starts of odor flooding my nostrils—this was how to experience the world, this note of mushrooms sprouting in damp grass, this trace of old rubber from a sneaker sole, compared to this banquet eyes and ears told you nothing! My head pounded, painlessly, like a great throbbing vein: the hard pulsations of my new brain, my undead brain, but I didn’t know that yet. I reached up, like someone would be there to lift me, and touched something rough and cold. A tombstone, my tombstone: AUGUST 14, 2001. I died on August 14, 2001, but what day was it now? Where was I now? Where would I go, where will I sleep, do I
have
to sleep—

I smelled it before I saw it, darting quick and confused across the grass. Rabbit. Fresh, living rabbit.

Every other scent and smell in the world instantly vanished. Hunger rattled my skull and shook my bones—pork chops, hamburgers, steaks rare and bloody, everything that would have made me vomit when I was alive but I had to have them now, I had to have them raw and oozing juice and if I didn’t get that rabbit, if I didn’t kill it and devour it
now
, I had nothing to live for at all. I staggered to my feet and stood there trembling, legs stiff and exhausted, but before I could even try to run for my food something bloated and rotten in the shape of a man, his dark suit jacket torn and spilling fat little white grubs, crawled on all fours from the pile of dirt that had been his grave. The grave next to mine. The rabbit had halted too soon, crouching frozen with fear by our collective tombstone, and as I watched it spasm and kick against death, as I watched my father sink long teeth into its skull and spit out soft tufts of brown fur, I was small again and only wanted to scream and cry, Daddy, why did you take my toy?

Something crawled from behind a yew tree, feverish and fast. A woman in the rags of my mother’s favorite blue sweater fell on him, grabbing the rabbit’s meaty hindquarters for herself, and held on tight and chewed no matter how hard he punched and kicked, so hard she sobbed between bites: Whap, cry, swallow, whap, cry, swallow.

But, Daddy, that’s
my
toy.

They rolled on the ground, snarling with rage.

And you. What are
you
doing in my mom’s favorite sweater?

But they’d dropped the rabbit carcass, fighting that hard, and I was so hungry and it was so good and I knew the answers to my questions, I already knew.

A garter snake slithered over my mother’s foot and they both went crazy, grabbing fistfuls of grass where it had shot out of reach. Arguing again, fighting forever, only with sounds now and no words—screeching violins, deafening pounding drums. I was gone already, walking away. I never saw them again.