Frail (6 page)

“That and X-ray vision, and we control the international banking system—no, our night vision’s no better than yours. Or any human’s.” She dug into the pile of dingy towels again as we trudged down Van Dijk Street. “So can I fly too? Walk through doorways? Heal scrofula?”

A lot more signs of human life, this side of town. Cars abandoned in the middle of long-gone traffic. The trees fronting the Catholic school and the library missing long strips of bark, torn away by famished hands. The grocery store’s parking lot glinting with so much broken glass it was a great gleaming dead riverbed, the shining shore-sands of a lake drained dry. Van Dijk was the main artery feeding into I-80/94, second-stagers from everywhere might’ve passed through. The stripped trees looked like upended loaves of bread with fistfuls of crust torn away; I was amazed so many were still budding and alive.

Near where the grocery parking lot ended and the town security gates began were skeletons, piles of them dressed in birdtorn rags, ripped parkas oozing cotton batting from dozens of little wounds. Gnawed to the bone, no more maggoty stink and mess, but right there against the fencing was a little bag of bones with a larger one cradled round it; the big one was crouched down, the little one in its winter coat and hat and mittens and knitted snowflake scarf and tiny puffy red boots tucked up unsafe in its lap. So graceful how they fell, or someone posed them that way, or the bigger bone-bag took something, fed some of it to the little boy or girl, sat them both down to die.

Something in me wanted those miniature red boots, wanted to pull them off and hold them because surely they’d still carry the last ghostly traces of clean, sweet childish sweat, the blood-warmth of fat little feet seeping into the soles and lining—something else. Think about anything else. I
wanted
those boots. Something touched my shoulder and I jumped, jerked my head away and saw a miniature CD player in Lisa’s upraised hand.

“You want some music?” she asked. “Might be nice.”

Trying to distract me, like another little kid. “You can eat anything,” I said, pushing my cart curbside by a squat, grimy gray brick building marked HISTORIC LEYTON TOWN HALL. “Living, dead, raw, cooked, you’re real genuine omnivores. That’s what they say. You don’t need sleep. You don’t age, don’t decay—I just saw you can’t get hurt or die. Maybe you can grow fingers back like a starfish if they get chopped off, how would I know? Compared to us, to humans, nobody can touch you.”

The front yard of Historic Leyton Town Hall had big bare patches of dry gray dirt, grass pulled out in raw clumps for waiting mouths, but there were scattered threads of green already starting to come up. That made me feel a little better. The bark was growing back, some of the flowers ripped from the garden boxes dotting the periphery. Tulips, in commemoration of the town’s first European settlers being Dutch, I read that on the Historic Leyton Town Plaque in one of the Historic Leyton Town Parks. All those skeletons by the fence, they can commemorate the Indians. Another one lay beside a flower box, a dead, dried-out tulip bulb cradled egglike in its palm. Lisa stood beside me staring down at the body, her cart forgotten in the street.

“We need rest,” she said. “I’ll need it soon enough. I’ve been walking for days.”

“Can’t die, though. Just stay like you are forever.”

“It hasn’t even been a year.” She tugged at another clump of hair. It was uneven, thinner in some spots, like she’d chopped bits of it off and it was regrowing in fits and starts, or like she kept ripping it out at the roots. “I don’t know if we age. I don’t know if we die. Just because certain things can’t kill us, doesn’t mean
something
won’t. Jessie thinks that . . . that we’ll all die in the end, one way or another—”

“You eat like you’re starving. Are you?”

She angled her head, studying the tulip box skeleton up and down like she’d never seen such a singular thing before. It was wearing a thick, tweedy-looking brown coat, not all that torn up.

“That might fit you,” she said. “Squeamish about taking it?”

“How the hell do you think I got these boots?”

She knelt and started undoing the scuffed brown buttons, full and curved like little dinner plates.

“Do you have sex?” I asked. “I know zombies never did.” I really did want to know. But I also suddenly felt like being incredibly rude.

“The phenomenon exists, yes,” Lisa said dryly. The corpse’s unbuttoned coat gaped open, revealing a filthy pink blouse, the remains of a gray skirt. “I’m not sure we can get pregnant. I don’t get periods anymore. Neither did Jessie, or her friend Renee, or—”

“I wish I didn’t.” The safe house tampons would last five, maybe six months, then I’d be back to folded-up washrags. “You’d have to be crazy to want that now. To want to risk having a baby. Absolutely crazy.”

Lisa eased one skeletal arm out of the coat, going slow and careful like she might injure the dead thing inside. “My little girl had a pair of boots just like those,” she said.

She slid those dirty bones from the sleeve so careful and slow. “I didn’t know you had a little girl,” I said. What a monument to stupidity, those words: Of course I didn’t know. I hadn’t been told. So she told me.

“I don’t know what happened to them.” She eased the skeleton’s clutching hand from the tulip box, holding it in hers so its finger bones still cradled the bulb. “After Karen, my daughter, after she died. Those boots, or her pink coat I bought her for Easter, or the little busy-box toy she liked in the crib—I hate this thing where they want you to box up everything a dead person ever owned and give it away, God forbid you—” Her hands shook, her eyes were shiny-wet. “God forbid.” An anaerobic stink seeped from the coat’s satiny beige lining, the rotten pink blouse’s armpits. “We sure learned.”

Lisa was right, it would probably fit, the skeleton was small like me. No way in hell you could pay me to wear it. If her baby got a funeral, family boxing up all her clothes and toys and whisking them away, it must have been long before all this.

“One of the people I was with, she was pregnant,” I told her. “She lost her baby. I mean, she had it, but she lost it. It was stillborn.”

Lisa scrubbed the coat lining with a bandanna, like that could clean it. “I want those boots,” she said. “Tell me I shouldn’t take them. It’s ridiculous.”

Why shouldn’t she? Plenty of room. Especially since we both knew we weren’t taking the coat.

“Tell me I shouldn’t,” she repeated. Louder. Harder. In a way that scared me.

“They look like someone posed them that way,” I said. “Like, they couldn’t bury them, but that’s close as they could get. You’d be desecrating a grave.”

Lisa thought that over, for a moment, and nodded. I stopped holding my breath.

“She didn’t starve, did she?” Lisa asked. I shook my head in confusion. “That woman you were with.” She picked at the tulip box’s splintering wood, pulling off robin’s-egg paint in little chips.

“Not exactly. There was food, but she couldn’t eat.” I glanced back at our carts, making sure they were still there. “She had an infection, I think, I mean, she was bleeding when she shouldn’t have been. And some of the blood smelled strange.” Kristin was sweating hot near the end, feverish. That wasn’t my fault. That part.

“Was it a girl or a boy?”

Even a heavy cart could take off, in a good gust of wind. It was picking up again. I walked back to the curb, making sure the wheels were tilted against sudden flight.

“The baby,” Lisa kept saying. “What was it?”

I’d grabbed some books from the remains of the library; I pulled up blankets, toilet paper rolls, making sure they were still there.
The Wind in the Willows.
My mother gave me that, one Christmas. Lisa stood by the curb, watching me, scratching at her scalp.

“Were you able to bury it?”

I put the books back in the cart, tucked salted almond cans more comfortably against my old folded-up Yale sweatshirt. Uncle John got that for me, we didn’t know anyone who went to Yale. That was him all over.

“The ground was still frozen,” I said.

Lisa turned back to the tulip box, unhooking the skeleton’s fingers like she was prising open a clam shell. She took the moldy, dirt-caked tulip bulb and perched it on the clothes in her cart’s kiddy seat, like she might need to keep staring at it to make sure it was still there.

“I guess we should leave,” she said. “No point putting it off.”

The sun was so hard and clean it was starting to hurt. As I slipped my sunglasses back on there it was, again, the faintest outline of a black dog with watery amber eyes staring at us from the fencing, from the town hall yard, from around every corner and inside every breath. But she couldn’t see it. I had no advantage in a fight so I had to keep her thinking she was the crazy one, not me, that she might need my clear sober skull when her nerves got jangly again. Don’t say a word. Not when she keeps asking so many questions.

“That’s a pretty paint,” I said, nodding at the tulip box. “That color.”

“That’s what my sister’s hair looked like. That time she dyed it.”

She walked back to the box and I thought she might take a little peel of paint, as a reminder. But she stopped just long enough to redress the skeleton in its rotten old coat, button it back up to the neck, and we took up our carts and headed for the expressway.

 

 

It’s sort of comforting, when nothing’s what it used to be and never will be again, how all the dull shitty soul-killing things keep right on being dull and shitty and soul-killing right up to the end of time. Get past the bodies by the roadside, jackknifed semis stuck in ditches, cars already rusting out and I-80/94 looked exactly like it always had, cracked chunks of tarmac, sad spindly trees, wispy grasses in a thousand tints of drab. Carpets of loosestrife, which they said was choking out all the native plants, but it was a relief how its clumps of tiny purple flowers blotted out the endless eaten-up grayish brown, the bare patches of dead dry dirt.

I’d stopped seeing the dog too the minute we left town. It must’ve been Leyton, must’ve been all the death clustered all on the edge of town where I hadn’t seen it. Does things to your head, makes you remember—

Tollbooths, with the old signs still on the side. DESIGNATED ABOVE-GROUND ENVIRONMENTAL SHELTER. ATTACKED? PURSUED? CALL *999 FOR ASSISTANCE. FUNDING ROAD SAFETY. TEN CENTS A MILE TO RIDE IN STYLE. (But take the wrong exit and you’re on your own, no protection for rural roads or poorer neighborhoods and private funding was a joke, my dad’s mill had to strike before the company hired mill yard sentries and the zombies got him anyway—but the lettering was too big for all that to fit.) Inside one of them, a thick pair of canvas and leather work gloves that actually fit my hands, hers were way too big. Lisa looked thrilled to death.

“Keep those on,” she said, as we pushed along. “Your hands look bad enough, even without the scrapes—did you have a decent pair of gloves, this winter?”

My hands had been scaly white and cracked bright pink for so long I barely noticed anymore; lotion vanished into them like a stream of water in a drain, half a bottle’s worth couldn’t get them smooth. “Sick folks got into my uncle’s house,” I said, “stole all our stuff. Tore it up trying to eat it. I didn’t have much left.”

“I was gone. By the time the plague really got going.”

“They kicked you out?” They started doing that, folks who were still well, when the sickness spread. Sometimes just shooting anyone they thought was walking funny. You had to hide.

Lisa shook her head. The wind was sharper along the expressway and she’d taken an old wool cap from her cart, dustmatted pink and gray yarn pulled low over her forehead and ears. “I said, I was gone,” she corrected me. “They wanted to kick me out, yeah, but Jim, my brother, he hid me. Then I got away.”

“They found out he was hiding you?”

“I got away,” she said softly. “Don’t ask me from what. Or whom.”

A coyote lay by the shoulder, its fur dancing and leaping with flies; Lisa stopped for a second, staring, then pushed forward. “You said you were with some people. I was all alone, until I found Jessie and her friends. I might’ve liked some human company—”

“They’re dead,” I reminded her. “All of them. So they weren’t much company, were they.”

“What were they like?”

She wasn’t going to just shut up about it, not ever. Push and push until she heard what she wanted.

Ms. Acosta looked so different with her face scrubbed clean of that streaky orange foundation, gray hair all crowding out the “auburn” because she couldn’t do a Bozo henna rinse anymore. Furzy silvery hair and clammy white skin and pale eyes, a washed-out watercolor woman, but they were big clear eyes, almost pretty; when she shut out everything else around her, dismissing the stink and mess and waste to concentrate on finding more bottled water or canned peaches or insulin or antibiotic cream, it’s like they almost shone from the inside. Shining with a sort of otherness, that everyone has in them but you never actually see: the person inside the “person.” The flesh in the breath, though everyone mistakenly thinks you should say that the other way around.

“Ms. Acosta pretty much told us all what to do.” I yanked my cart over another pothole. “She worked in the principal’s office at my high school. Dave was one of the janitors. When I got out of my house, my uncle’s house, when I got out of the basement, I couldn’t think where to go so I ran to the school, they were both there—”

“Out of the basement?” Weirdly interested now, like a detective whose murder suspect just let everything slip without knowing it. “Was this when they broke into your house? What happened?”

I woke up and my uncle was standing over me with a knife. That’s what happened. Everything had disintegrated by then so there was no school, no 911 or 999, no LCS patrols, it was either wander the streets watching everyone die or stay home, hide what food was left, try to keep him away from it. I’d started keeping it under my bed, anything I could salvage; I had to eat too and there was no hope for him, none at all, I didn’t starve him. The disease did that. So I closed my eyes for just a second and next thing I knew, there he was. He was sick enough by then that his grasp was weak, his fingers unnaturally pliant like toothpicks gone damp, and that plus the headboard of my bed being in the center of the wall so I could slide out the other side, that’s why I lived. I was going to go out the window. Then the window broke. Other sick ones were coming in.