Grave (15 page)

“Doesn’t he eat?” Jessie asked, as Nick settled down with his nose on his paws, staring transfixed into the flames. “Ever?”

Didn’t care if my mother did or not, that was clear. At least she was consistent. “Never,” I said.

Renee and Linc exchanged glances. Jessie just nodded like that didn’t surprise her, reached over to stroke him without taking her own eyes from the fire. “Nice change, anyway,” she said, as Tina fussed with her little frying pan. “I mean, if folks I’ve never met before are gonna just drop in from the sky like this is fucking Grand Central Station, at least one of you doesn’t expect me to fuss and feed—”

Right on cue Stephen came stumbling up, blinking with sleep, and Lisa came from the last cabin carrying Naomi; introductions all around, Tina lighting up like she’d been waiting to meet us all her life and Russell standing back silent and solemn, not shy but not effusive, waiting for everyone else to seek him out. You could tell he’d be just fine if nobody ever did. Naomi kept staring at Tina, or actually at Tina’s necklace: a full crucifix instead of just a cross, cheap metal painted to look like gold, but instead of the little Christ figure being nailed down in a loincloth, he was in full robes, unbound arms held out to the viewer, the cross at his back like a bird-perch from which he’d spread wings and fly unimpeded right up to heaven. Slowly, like she couldn’t help herself, Naomi walked up with her eyes all on it, and as Tina smiled at her, she touched it with tentative fingertips.

“My mommy had a necklace like that,” she said.

Tina’s smile grew wider and happier, and she leaned down to Naomi with real pleasure in her eyes. “Your mother was churched? That’s wonderful! I haven’t met another believer since—well, in a very long time.” She smoothed Naomi’s hair, the little cowlick in the back springing up right on cue once her hand departed. “Gets a little lonely sometimes, to be honest.”

I remembered then where I’d seen that peculiar sort of crucifix: Talitha Cumi Church, the little storefront ministry a few blocks from my house, the one that took the whole Lazarus story to mean zombies were God’s creation too, that when Jesus and Mary went bodily into heaven, it meant they were also undead. Along with a whole lot of other weird ideas. It was all the same to me and my mother, we didn’t believe in anything, but people called them necrophiles, Satanists, even Nazis, even though they didn’t seem to have anything against Jews. Or anyone else. Naomi curled her fingers around the little floating Jesus, let the pendant go.

“We went every Sunday,” Naomi told Tina. “Sometimes Saturday too.”

“How old are you—six, seven?” Tina looked all excited now, like they were both conspirators in some grand wonderful cause nobody else knew about. Dean Sewell, this Baptist kid at my old middle school, he’d get that same look whenever he talked about how much he loved Jesus and it always made me nervous. “Have you been baptized yet?”

“I was going to be,” Naomi said. Eager and swift, like she’d been waiting and waiting for the rest of us to ask her about it. “We had baptism practice, after regular Bible school, and I had a white dress and a flower-wreath for my hair. It kept falling off. I needed bobby pins.”

Her face fell, grew pensive, the little light of that memory fading and going dark. “I never got my bracelet,” she said.

“It was being engraved special, Mommy saved up the money just for that.” She stared down at her feet, voice dropping to a whisper. “But then she got sick.”

Churchers, part of their whole baptism ritual was that you got a special ID bracelet you had to wear night and day, with your name and family details carved on it so if you came back a zombie—I think they thought everyone did, sooner or later—there’d be a way for believers to find each other. Dog tags for the Lord. There was a churcher girl in my class and everyone made fun of her for it, trying to grab it and rip it right off her arm. Tina’s eyes softened and she set her frying pan aside, holding out her own, bare-wristed hand.

“I lost mine,” she confided. “I don’t even know where or how, suddenly I just realized I didn’t have it anymore. That was hard. But I think God understands these things happen. When we’re blinded or crippled is when He best helps guide us. I mean, look what He’s done right now, leading us both to each—”

“Did you want me to fry those up?” Lisa asked. I could see her wishing for a proper crucifix of her own, or a Virgin Mary statue to hit Tina over the head with. “I mean, if you’re too busy with the homily.”

Russell didn’t smile, exactly, but his eyes, his face suffused with a sudden warmth, like the lines cut deep in the skin were rays; he’d been a handsome man, you could tell, a good long time ago. “Don’t let her talk put you off,” he said, giving Tina this easy look like her talk was part of the air, the water, he could tease about it because he’d never lose it. “It’s like she said, been a year and a day, for real almost, since she found anyone who—”

“I’m Catholic,” Lisa replied, stroking Naomi’s hair as she talked. “So it all means nothing to me anyway.”

“I don’t expect it to,” Tina said, picking up her frying pan. “We don’t proselytize. I thought it might mean something to your little girl, though, that’s all.”

“Some food,” Stephen said, “might mean a lot to the rest of us.”

Renee’s lips twitched, over where she and Jessie and Linc sat still steadily shoving morsels of meat in their mouths, licking fat from their fingers; she got up, the tarnished rings covering her hands gleaming with spit and grease, and wandered over to the carcass. “You’re welcome,” she said.

Nick got up from his place at the fire, settling himself right next to Stephen without bothering to turn round and round for a comfortable seat. He gazed up at Stephen, as heated and fixed a stare as he’d given the flames, then put his ears back and let out a low, rumbling growl.

“Stop that,” Stephen muttered, half-hearted, as Renee’s hands pinkened and reddened and the meat cooked for him, for my mother and Lisa and Naomi. “Just stop.”

Stephen looked dreadful this morning, eyes bloodshot and puffy like he’d been drinking and shadows underneath them that made skull-like hollows of his face; he’d picked the stitches out of his throat sometime during the night, nothing left of our lab misadventures but the faint puckered suture-holes already healing over, and my own neck itched and twitched needing to do the same, afraid if I tried it I’d end up gaping open and gushing blood.

After his outburst yesterday, he’d just sat there on the beach with his knees drawn up nearly to his chin, rocking vaguely back and forth and staring at the sand in something close to misery. Nightmares? Night visions, something that—why couldn’t we be alone, so we could talk about it? One night alone together, a few minutes here and there in the lab or Paradise City, that was the whole of whatever we’d had.

Stephen mumbled vague thanks to Renee when she handed him a plate, and he and my mother lowered their heads and attacked their meat, my leftover meat, the one oozing fried egg divided between her plate and his. Naomi, thanks to Lisa and Tina’s silent, ecumenical flickers of agreement, got a whole egg for herself. As she ate, she pointedly ignored Stephen, angling her small self as far away from him as she could without actually turning her back. I made myself concentrate on the egg I was sharing with Lisa, deep rich-tasting orange yolk like they always said chickens gave if you let them scratch for grubs and run around (but nobody let animals just run around, back before, having an open farm was a flesh-invitation to the undead so they penned them up in factory farms, guarded with machine guns for their own protection), the faint gamey flavor from the cooking grease, because I knew Nick wasn’t just barking at nothing. He’d seen something. We all knew Nick saw something. Stephen was scared and that made me scared and I didn’t know what to do but keep pretending everything was good and friendly until I’d finished my meal. Just like every meal, back at my uncle’s, when my mother was still missing.

“We saw you folks coming down the main road yesterday,” Russell said, into the silence. “Thought we’d let you rest a night before we came over to visit. We’re camped out in some of the old houses just down the way, what used to be Wakefield Dunes, plenty of supplies to share and beds and company if you—”

“Nick!” my mother shouted. “
No
! Stop it!”

Nick was growling louder now, then barking sharp and fast at Stephen as he sat huddled over his breakfast, and before I could stop him Nick leapt at Stephen’s knee and knocked the plate right out of his hands. Dish and venison and fried egg went flying, thudding wrong-side down on the leaves at my feet, and instead of rushing to eat it, Nick darted around the trees, hurtled back toward us, thudded to a confused, noisy stop at Stephen’s side once again. Naomi gasped, fork frozen halfway to her mouth, and Stephen sprang to his feet, a streak of dried yolk like paint smeared across his flushed cheek.

“Nick!” Naomi cried. Genuinely scandalized, she sounded. “
Bad
dog! Why did you do that?”

“Here,” Lisa said with a swift glance at me, holding out her plate. “Take the rest of mine, I don’t want it.”

“I’m not hungry,” Stephen said softly. He held the syllables thoughtfully in his mouth, like a fruit he wasn’t quite sure was ripe enough to bite; his hand ran fretfully through his hair, his eyes darted from me to Lisa still holding out her plate to the underbrush where Nick crouched, barking and barking. “Amy? You got him to quiet down last night. Make him stop.”

I couldn’t, today. I just knew I couldn’t, even though I didn’t know why, any more than I could stop him following me back at Lepingville; there was something in the air all around us, a heavy restless miasma in the morning sky that I couldn’t see but could almost taste, a gamey flavor like the venison weighting down my stomach but stronger, more sour, the first cousin of rot. I’d thought it was just the air in the cabins, but it was everywhere, its pounding staleness filling all our lungs; Nick’s incessant barking, here and last night, it was like he was desperately trying to cough it all up.

I called Nick’s name, almost crooning it, and he didn’t quiet down. I knelt down in the ruined leaves, stretching out an arm to stroke him, and then without any warning a mass of fur and teeth and high howling canine panic was flying straight at me, a wild blindness in his eyes as he sent me sideways and sprawling on my back in the underbrush. His jaws were wide open inches from my face, drooling with heat and ready to snap, my mother came running toward us with a scream—but he didn’t bite me, he didn’t even try, just barreled over me where I lay and disappeared at double speed, running feverishly through the trees and out of sight.

It’s all right, boy. It’s all right, it wasn’t me you were after, I was only the thing standing in your way—and they all knew it too, I could tell by their faces, as they ringed round me where I lay with mud caked down my shirt front and egg yolk drying in my hair. All except Stephen, almost shaking with anger as he helped brush me off and set me back on my feet.

“I’ll go after him,” I said. There was blood all over my jeans, I’d knocked my leg against a sharp rock, but I barely felt that or the bark-scrapes on my palms. “He’s never been like this, not before, we need to figure out what he’s seeing that’s making him so—”

“He’s not seeing anything!” Stephen shouted, an ugly spitting rasp in his voice, pacing feet twitching to kick anything in their path. “Other than easy targets, that’s what he’s seeing—first Naomi, now you, he’s your own damned demon familiar and he goes and turns on you, too!”

“He didn’t! He hasn’t turned on anyone, you’re just—”

“What, I’m seeing things? Like yesterday, on the beach? Like I just hallucinated him going straight for your face?” He swept an arm through the air, at the greenery around us, the sky. “The trees, the animals we saw coming here, the... whatever it is right now, that feeling in the air, it’s following us wherever
he
goes—he’s part of it! If he’s not causing it, he knows damned well what is!”

“He wasn’t going for my face! He was just trying to get away, everybody saw it! He’s shit-scared, just like the rest of us!”

“Stephen,” my mother said, and she’d never liked Nick, never wanted him, but she knew I was right this time, knew that whatever has seized hold of the air, the woods, the world had Nick as unmoored as we were. “Think about what you’re saying. I know things have felt... not right, for a long time now—”

“Not right at all,” Tina said, quietly. “Not where we are, either.”

“Exactly! It’s been everywhere!” My mother flung her hand in Tina’s direction,
see there don’t you see
, and Naomi’s eyes were growing huge with fright and Jessie, Linc, the others were approaching closer, cautious, ready to try and break up an actual fight. “Stephen, think. You don’t seriously believe Nick could be in eighty different places at—”

“Why not?” Stephen shouted. “Why couldn’t he? Everything that’s happened? The way Amy met him in the first place?” His eyes were on me now, the accused, the softhearted fool who’d dragged the blight into our midst and wouldn’t see it for what it was. “Everything you keep saying you’ve seen, Amy, why couldn’t—”

“
Saying
I’ve seen.” I shook my head. “You still don’t believe it, do you? I tell people over and over what happened and how he saved all our hides, including yours, but you never listen to a damned word I say!” I was shouting now too, hoarse and hurting and ready to hurl Tina’s frying pan right at his head. “None of you do! Nobody! I thought you were different, that you understood what—you
saw it happen
, you saw him get us out of there, and you still don’t listen!”