Grave (19 page)

“My whole head hurts,” Janey murmured, as we passed the remains of some kind of factory; what looked like big piles of steel girders still sat in the yard outside, higher than our heads, rust slowly overtaking them like a creeping orange moss. “It just won’t stop.”

Even with the old mills right there on Prairie Beach, shadowy bookends at the far corners of the lake, I kept being surprised at how you’d see an oil refinery, then right up against it huge untouched swathes of sand or forest or wildflowers. I wished she’d be quiet so I could look at them in peace. “There’s probably rain coming,” I said, pointing at the clouded-over sky. “I always get headaches right before it rains.”

Janey just shook her hanging-down head, almost gritting her teeth at the sensation. “It’s my whole skin,” she said. Not the whiny way Grandma sometimes said I complained—
Natty, now do you really think one little girl’s petty complaints should be such a universal concern
?—but all matter of fact, like these were things we just needed to know. “And my eyes,” she said, closing them hard for a few moments, “it’s like this weight is coming down on them, pressing—”

“Yeah, things are shit all over.” Billy tugged her along, letting her stumble and trip. “Mags is dead, some fucking frail’s got a tiddy-headache, my heart’s breaking
will you two quit foot-dragging and move
!” He whipped his head around, glaring at me clench-toothed and feverish, angry waves of heat stirring up a lake of ice. “We ain’t got all year to get there!”

Janey’s sensible flat shoe I knew she hated hit a rock hard and her eyes snapped open from pain; she smiled in her old vacant far-seeing way, she didn’t complain. I didn’t like it, how Billy treated her, Janey was all right. It was like watching someone keep yanking a kitten’s tail. Don would have killed him, if he’d seen it.

“He’s right,” she said, and something in her voice was so sad and it had nothing to do with Don or Billy or any of us, I could feel it. “He’s right. Nothing’s got all year left.”

So she knew about it too, just like Billy: that the showdown was coming, that I had to face Death with just wits and science and Sukie as my weapons. She was literally sensing it in her bones, that’s what was hurting her. I felt sorry for Janey, I’m not some psycho sadist like what Amy liked to think (too bad she never saw her precious Stephen’s juvenile record, before the lab, before she ran off with him, if she thinks I’m so terrible), but at the same time knowing everyone could
feel
it and sense it inside themselves, it buoyed me up and made me happy inside. The same feeling as when Grandma brought me back from death and it turned out I’d been part of some hugely important new experiment, I’d just
proven
something in the very flesh about life and death, except better. Because I was in charge of all the proving now. The proving grounds. That’s where we were headed.

“It’s not long now,” Janey said suddenly. Her eyes that were always far away, they were practically orbiting Pluto. “It’s so soon, I didn’t expect it nearly so soon, if only Don were—”

“Shut up.” Billy grabbed a hank of her blonde hair, something I’d seen Don do when Janey got too far away to reach without a reminder, except Don just took a little bit of it and tugged careful but Billy jerked her whole head backwards with his fist and she shouted. “You keep walking and
you
keep walking and if I hear another word outta you, Janey, I’ll send you right back to Don, I’ll break your fucking neck. Shoulda broken all your necks.” His laugh was a skittering perilous thing, a little boy flying along the ice knowing any moment he’d crash into a tree. “All the fucking hoos, everywhere. Back when we were dead and had a chance.”

Janey put her tongue away. I kept my mouth shut sightseeing the mills and flowers and maybe a half mile later she turned around to look at me, the look on her face, there was such pity and sadness and it was all directed at me that I didn’t even want to think how crazy she’d got. Why was she feeling sorry for me? I had important things ahead of me, I had the whole universe at my back and I was saving it from
him
. I wasn’t upset about Amy anymore, things were so much bigger now than her. They always had been.

I stared back at Janey cool and calm and she nodded, a sorrowing nod like she’d just known I wouldn’t understand whatever crazy thing she was thinking, and swiveled her head back to the path; US 12/20 kept inching forward and forward, everything on it new to me except so much of it looked all the same. She kept walking. Billy’s shoulders were hunched forward; he’d started crying again.

The road ran parallel to a set of rusted-out railroad tracks for two or three miles, then it widened and went gravelly underfoot, then turned narrow again, the trees overhead curving together in a canopy. It would’ve been nice, I guess, all dark and green and cool inside with just little bits of sunlight glinting through like lighter panes of stained glass, except half the trees were bare gray branches and as we walked, Billy still with a grip on Janey’s arm, little pencil-shavings of dry bark drifted onto our clothes, our hair. My feet were killing me, my stomach twisted up starving, I’d been so wild to leave I hadn’t even thought of food, but now I couldn’t think of anything else. My little hoard of chocolate bars, the really good expensive kind from the lab’s emergency stores that I’d hidden during the plague, I could’ve been eating one of them right now. Up ahead, even though there was nothing around us but the woods and beaches I was already sick of looking at, Billy suddenly stopped.

“We’re there,” he said, a little thread of triumph snaking through his voice like someone had tried tricking him out of the knowledge. “Almost there.”

“I think so,” Janey said. Just as mild and soft as if he hadn’t left her arm ringed with bruises. “I just wish I could remember what I was supposed to tell—”

He yanked her forward. Another half-mile down, my feet hot and raw but if I complained it’d just set Billy off, there were the beginnings of another tiny abandoned town—not even a town, really, one of those little summertime beachfront hamlets that was a few houses thrown together, a couple of stores, police station with a group hazard-shelter underneath. People, though. As the trees opened up and gave way to grass and the road became pure white gravel, like back home, I saw the smallest little signs of life, like the faint wing-flutter of a bird that looked dead but was just stymied, half-paralyzed by the cold: bicycles propped neat and unrusted against a shed wall, the raked-up beginnings of vegetable gardens like Paradise City’s in what had been a front yard. A silhouette, just visible in a house window, watching us approach. In the center of what had once been that whole town was a huge oak tree, living-leaved and trunk so thick even Stephen’s long arms couldn’t have circled it, and nailed to the tree was a hand-painted wooden sign with tall, thin, sprawling black letters: COWLESTON HUMAN SETTLEMENT. ALL ARE WELCOME. GO TO THE GRAY HOUSE WITH THE RED MAILBOX OUTSIDE.

Billy hunched forward, frowning his way through the sign, then snorted like that was just the funniest thing he’d seen in his life. “So cute,” he muttered. “That’s just so fuckin’ cute—okay, then!” His voice rose to a shout, there in the middle of what had never quite been a town square. “All are welcome? Here I am! You frails hear me? I’m here to get what’s mine!”

A gray-shingled house with a cardinal-red mailbox on a pole wasn’t ten steps away, turn your head and there it was, but before we could go to it (was that where Death was waiting for me, was he luring in more humans in the guise of rest and welcome?), the door opened and a little group of people came swiftly through the yard, down to meet us. A skinny, sunken-eyed man with shaggy hair and beard, half gray and half redheaded just like Amy’s mother; behind him a short stubby little woman, Chinese, Korean, with a Purdue T-shirt straining across her chest and a huge cross slung around her neck. The others, a girl maybe sixteen holding a baby, an ancient dry stick of a man who could barely stand upright, they fell back. Billy smirked, letting go of Janey as he folded his arms.

“Well, hello, folks,” the red-haired man said. “I guess you’ve read the sign.” His eyes flickered to the dark finger-shaped marks on Janey’s arm, then back. “This is Cowleston, idea of it at least, I’m Russell and—”

“I don’t give a shit who you are,” Billy said, his harsh grating ex’s syllables a short sharp shock after Russell’s quiet solicitude. “I want something to eat, and then I want to know what you’ve done with my girl.”

Russell, I’ll give him credit, he didn’t blink. If he were in charge here like it seemed, he’d probably already dealt with so many crazy people this was a drop in the Atlantic. “I don’t know who your girl is, mister,” he said, calm as anything. “But if you think she’s come here, maybe I can help you out—”

“Does
she
want to see
you
?” the short woman asked. Fingering her cross, like that’d help her. Something in me liked how nervous she was. “Because you should know that humans are free agents here. We’re not sending her back to you, if she doesn’t want to go.”

Billy just stared at her, and when his eyes, his mouth creased up smiling it was like his icy-lakeness broke out in soft, ominous cracks. “A human,” he said, “thinks she can keep Mags from me. A human.” He took a step forward. “A fucking hoocow bitch thinks that—”

“You leave her alone,” the old man behind her shouted. Trembling, whether from fear or palsy or both I couldn’t tell. “We don’t want your kind here. Get out and leave us alone.”

“Tina,” Russell said, without turning around, “take them back into the house.”

“Is that where you’re hiding her?” Billy gave Russell a shove, just a tiny little tap on the shoulder, and that was enough to throw Russell off balance, make him stagger backwards. “Is that where you’ve got Mags? Because you’re giving her back now. You and whoever that was behind the wall, that high wall I can’t get over, this is where I’m supposed to be and you tell me what you know, tell me how to get her back before I—”

“Get out!” shouted the girl with the baby, it didn’t cry but just stared at all of us with big wide fearful eyes, six months old at most and already it’d seen too much. “Leave us alone and get out!”

More people emerged from the other houses, the yards: a burly man with dirt-caked jeans clutching a trowel, two women with what looked like chicken feathers stuck to their shoes, a much older woman smart enough to linger near her front door. The man took one look and jerked his head at the women to stay back and that made Billy actually throw his head skyward and laugh, a snarling spit-soaked ugly sound.

“Go ahead,” he said, to nobody in particular, “try and bash my head in with a garden hoe. Go on! You can’t fucking do it. If you could, I’d be out of this shithole faster than—I want my girl back.” He grabbed Russell by the shoulders, dug and gripped and twisted and Russell’s knees buckled, his heels digging new divots in the dirt. Billy shook him, a dog shaking furious at a rabbit in his teeth. The short woman, Tina, tried to pull Russell from his grasp and Janey just stood there like always, wide-eyed, round-eyed with fear, dismayed fingers splayed over her mouth and I didn’t like this anymore,
stop, stop—Billy let him go.
Russell swayed in Tina’s arms like the palsied old man, gulped, straightened himself out inch by inch though I could tell it hurt like hell. The others just stood there, watching, just like we were. Because even a dozen armed humans against an ex was no fair fight, because there was nothing they could do.

“This is a human settlement,” Russell said. “Just like the sign says.” Still calm, still quiet because he was stubborn as hell, that’s probably how he got here in the first place without dying. “There’s nobody here named Maggie or Margaret—we keep a roster, we take attendance at Sunday town meeting. I’m sorry for your loss.” There was an incipient tremor in his voice that diminished swiftly, swallowed down hard. “We’ve got nothing against your kind, but your kind disrupts things for us, so I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave. There’s a good bit of beach, just about a mile down the road—there’s a few like yourself out there and a lot of empty space if you want to be alone. Good woods for hunting. I’m sorry for your loss.”

You sort of had to admire how he gave that speech, all steady and sensible like he wasn’t talking to something that could gut him with one fist, tear away his face with nothing but bare hands. Talking like he really had any hope of keeping us out.

I didn’t like this. I didn’t like it and I couldn’t make it stop. Billy smiled, and nodded, and then punched Russell in the face so he went flying and kicked him into a curled-up ball, kicked him again, and some of the other humans were running to try and pull him off and Tina, in the Purdue T-shirt, she marched up and kicked Billy, hard, over and over.

“Oh my God, don’t!” I shouted before I could stop myself, Billy would kill her and I didn’t want to see her die in front of me. Russell groaned out some warning from the ground but Tina just stood there, eyes blazing, until Billy stopped and looked up at her in amazement, at her fingers grabbing in vain at his arms.

“The fuck,” he muttered.

“You get out,” Tina said, and I could feel the heat coming off her, burning up with her own righteous wrath, fists forming at her sides. “You get out, go try and scare someone who actually gives a damn for your—”