Grave (14 page)

“Tell them,” he said, his puppet hands gaining life again, balling into slow fists just like Naomi’s. “Nick likes to
lead
people into a lot of dangerous places, doesn’t he?” Amy was silent. “Doesn’t he? Isn’t that what he does? Amy, you know what I’m talking about. You know exactly what I mean.
Tell
them.”

Amy was still squatting at Nick’s side, chin down and all her concentration focused on stroking the back of his neck. Her nails dug in, giving him a good scratch, and as Lucy watched her, an echo of Stephen’s frown appeared on her own face.

“Not unless,” Amy said softly, “that’s where they already wanted to go.”

Stephen opened his mouth, then closed it again; we wouldn’t agree with him, wouldn’t second his lying eyes, and almost imperceptibly, his shoulders started to sag with confusion, with doubt. I wanted to say something, assure him that I’d seen plenty of things in my time that I’d sworn were real and true only to turn out to be empty echoes from my own brain, but that would’ve only made it worse. Naomi snuffled and grabbed at my hand, the empty cheese-cracker wrapper balled up in our mutual grasp. Her fingers were oily from her snack, and thinly coated in sand. She was gritting her teeth.

“I don’t like you anymore,” she hissed at Stephen.

Nick nuzzled at Amy’s hand, then headed off in a lively trot that took him in a parabolic loop up the ridge, then back down where the light rucked-up sands became dark and smooth; over and over, he approached the shoreline and then veered away, kicking up tiny arcs of spray in each paw’s wake, gazing fixedly at some undefined spot far out in the water. We stood there, watching him, as the night approached. Stephen picked absently, roughly, at the sutures in his throat, stopping only when Amy lifted his hand away and took it in her own; the look in his eyes, as he watched Nick watching the water, wasn’t anger or dislike or frustration. It was fear.

I could have discounted that, could have chalked it up to the pure exhaustion from our ordeal in the lab, in the woods, on the road, making him see what had never been there at all; I could have, except that Jessie, hanging back in the shadows, and Amy, clasping his hand in both her own, looked just as frightened as he did. Just as frightened as I felt. All the more because I—because we—had no idea why.

EIGHT

AMY

W
hen I woke up the next morning, I saw thin gray light streaming through my cabin’s grimy, half-broken window and Nick curled up right beside me, still wide awake, mercifully quiet but every muscle in him on tensed-up high alert. I rubbed his nose and he made a little whining sound, like I was affronting his dignity by doing something so playful at a time like this; I rubbed it more vigorously and he wagged his tail. Stephen and my mother, pressed close on either side of me, stirred but didn’t wake up.

“You have to give me better hints than last night,” I whispered to Nick. “I know you can. Is this about the dead trees? The birds?”

He just gazed up at me, full of silent reproach. Lassie he wasn’t. He wasn’t even Taffy, our neighbor’s old golden retriever who’d hobble up stiff-legged with arthritis and bark at you all genial wanting to tell you about her amazing day; I was glad she’d got cancer and been put to sleep before any of this started, before the plague.

What had Nick seen, out there on the horizon, and how was I supposed to get that Jessie to say what it was? Was this what Lisa meant, when she said Jessie saw things she, Lisa, couldn’t?

Dead birds falling from nests built in dead trees, small curled-up corpses landing on dead bushes and springing off the tight whorls of dead twig-branches to fall dead to the ground. Everything here, though, it all looked so green and new and fine, just like it was supposed to. Death itself, was it—he—trying to scare us? But he’d sent Nick to look after me, Nick who saved us and helped get us out of the lab. Stephen didn’t understand that, that Nick led me into the place where I was meant to die but then got us all back out again, that he never took me anywhere I didn’t want, didn’t desperately
need
to go. He didn’t kill me. He just didn’t
save
me, not until he was supposed to.

What happened last night, to make Stephen start seeing things? I knew he didn’t want Nick there, nobody else but Naomi did, but he wouldn’t make up stories to turn me against Nick; he really thought Nick was trying to pull Naomi into the water. I could tell. Was he just nerved up, or was he
seeing
things? Like how for the longest time, nobody except me could see Nick... but that never meant that Nick wasn’t always there?

This all didn’t start happening until the creature following us, the man in black I knew wasn’t Death, had disappeared. Not Death, and not any damned Scissor Man. This was fact. Even if everything else was guesswork.

“Show yourself,” I said, very softly, to the air. As if I could summon him back, make some sort of incantation to whatever wanted to play with us anew. “Come back, and show yourself.”

I waited. I really did wait, I really did hope for a few seconds, because being scared makes magic, that stupid arbitrary trivial magic you just made up in your head and whose kindergarten ritual only you can master, start to seem not only possible but likely. Come on, now. Come back.

Nick was waiting with me. I could feel it, I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t know just what this was either, I was suddenly certain; he just knew it was wrong, he just knew it shouldn’t be there and by God he was
going
to scare it away. Good dog. Don’t listen to Stephen, don’t you listen to anyone. Stephen, don’t you even fucking think about trying to make me choose.

“We’ll figure it out,” I told Nick, soft into his big dark ear. “We have to.”

The sunlight looked strangely muted and heavy in here and it smelled, a musty airless smell like an old memory of milk gone sour. It was probably all of us more than the cabin. Shifting carefully so I didn’t wake anyone, I got up and headed out.

The backs of the cabins faced the woods. There was an old fire pit outside one of the other cabins, a square brick-bordered dirt ditch with a healthy orange flame already crackling in the middle. Jessie, Linc, and Renee were squatting in front of it, their hands all right in the fire, roasting bits of meat that dripped spattering fat on the dirt and the brick border and then shoving them in their mouths, tearing at the stuff hard and eager, barely even looking at what they ate. Their fingers, their skin—the fire didn’t touch them, it did nothing to them at all. What they ate was hanging from a tree a few yards away, field-dressed, its antlers dangling useless inches above the ground; they must’ve been up already for hours.

It was each other they kept staring at as they ate, intent and heated and shutting the whole world out; like a ritual, like this was a closeness speech or sex or mother-love could never hope to match. I stepped back; I’d interrupted an intimacy I’d never wanted to see, but just then Jessie crammed the last hunk of deer meat in her mouth, licked fat from her unscorched fingers, looked up at me with a baleful stare that made me want to go running for Lisa. I made myself glare back. I’d killed one of her own kind—though just how, I still didn’t know—and she knew it.

“Well,” Jessie said. She got up from where she sat, mud clinging to her jeans. “That’s one chore done.”

Right off, when we met, I saw her family resemblance to Lisa: same thin angular features, same sharp clear eyes always darting back and forth like they just knew someone was up to something right behind them, same tense posture like runners about to spring from the blocks. Linc and Renee gazed up at her, looking like they wanted to protest, but then they lowered their heads and finished their meat.

Jessie marched back to the dangling stag, reached in and casually, efficiently tore long strips of flesh from its carcass in a way that made me feel a little sick—a stupid feeling, I’d always eaten meat, I’d snared and dressed rabbits, squirrels, even possum plenty of times since last autumn. But it was something about the way she didn’t bother with a knife, just dug in her fingers so thick with dried blood that the nails looked like one continuous scab. She tossed the meat to Renee, who obligingly held it to the flame. Renee, who was tall and blonde and even with her hair chopped too short, was like something from a magazine—or an old art movie from the Sixties, the ones with beautiful European girls robbing banks and then sitting in cafÈs explaining it was all because of existentialism. You couldn’t help but keep looking at Renee. Linc, with his long gaunt body folding up at the elbows and knees like a camping knife, sallow pitted skin and big mop of dark chaotic springy hair falling into his eyes, looked so comically ugly that in a way, a weird oppositional way, he and Renee almost matched. He was all Jessie’s, though, that much I had figured out.

“Where’s Lisa?” Jessie asked me. “She never could manage to get up before noon.”

I shrugged. Lisa’d been up at dawn plenty of times when we were traveling from Leyton to Gary. It wasn’t my place to get involved, Lisa had made that much clear, but Jessie seemed to expect more of an answer. I didn’t have one, and the rich smell of roasting meat filled my nostrils and my mouth was watering so much I’d forgotten about feeling sick, when two people I’d never seen before emerged from the trees: a short, round woman with black hair shorn close like Renee’s and a calm cheerful face; a man tall and thin, gingery reddish hair with thick streaks of gray, pale blue eyes sunk into a face webbed with lines you could tell were premature, from bad living and hard treatment instead of encroaching age. He smiled at me, uneven teeth leaping from the thatch of a half-grown beard. I tried smiling back, but the effort faltered and I wondered where Lisa was, or my mother.

“No berries yet,” said the woman—fully human, from her voice—setting down a battered wicker picnic basket whose withes were starting to split open; she pulled out plates, some paper, some china, all mismatched. “I was hoping at least for an early strawberry or two, but I always was a dreamer—here you go.” She handed me a plate, thin stiff orange plastic. “Now, are you Amy or Lucy? Jessie just said red hair—”

“Amy,” Jessie threw in, flat and unenthused. Like I’d just had a stroke and couldn’t talk for myself. Renee got up, slid the venison onto my plate, gave me a look that at least tried to be friendly. Dammit, Lisa, get the hell out here before I go and drag you out of—

“Our chickens are laying!” the woman exclaimed. “At long last! We couldn’t not share a few eggs.” She flourished a little saucepan proudly, pulled from the depths of the basket, waiting her turn at the flame. “Plenty of fat for the pan. How many did you bring, Russell?”

“There were ‘bout six,” Russell said. His voice was reedy and thin, the faintest little whistle coming from his mouth like some of his crooked teeth were missing. “Rhody and Carla put in laying overtime. I brought three. Everyone can have a bite or two, anyway.”

“Or three,” Renee said. She went up to the deer’s remains, pulled away a thick little gobbet of fat. “I don’t like eggs. Amy, this is Tina and Russell, they’re from the human settlement Jessie mentioned—”

“Cowleston,” Tina said. She rubbed the fat all over the pan’s insides, none of my hypocritical squeamishness; the pendant around her neck, a big cheap-looking cross, swung from side to side as she worked. “That’s what we’re calling it, anyway—very unimaginative but it gets the job done. Nice to meet you, Amy. I hope you like them fried.”

Clever, Jessie, bring along the humans from down the road, laden with treats, have them take us all off your hands in one go—Jessie wasn’t looking especially devious, though, more like my mother would when it was her turn to host my aunt and uncle for Christmas and she was counting the minutes until they left. Poking at the fire, muttering to herself like Tina hadn’t said a word.

The venison was good, a bigger piece than I could finish. “Fried is fine,” I said. “But they’re your eggs, you don’t have to—”

“
Amy
!”

My mother’s voice, high and anxious, from the doorway of our cabin. I motioned to her impatiently and she came stumbling up, still half-asleep, silent Nick padding along close at her heels. Jessie stayed bent over the fire, muttering some more.

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” my mother said softly. She glanced at the trees, the gutted deer carcass hanging from one of them, and quickly turned her head. “I thought maybe—I got worried.”

Ever since she’d found Lisa and me talking in the woods—eavesdropped on us, God knows what she heard, even though she kept insisting she’d barely heard anything—my mother had attached herself to me like a silent sentry, where’re you going, what’re you doing, how do I know you won’t go kill yourself in my absence? Plenty of time to do that before, Mom, plenty of years you weren’t there at all to stop me, but now you want to play catchup ‘cause
you’re
scared—the little flicker of anger that darted through me light and quick, it wouldn’t help anyone right now, so I pushed it to the side, offered her and then Nick the rest of my meat. No takers.