Grave (26 page)

“It keeps comin’ and goin’,” he said. “Just like I told you. Don’t know what happens next, don’t know if—”

“Sit down,” Jessie said, fear making her sound almost reverent as she pushed him back down on the log. “Rest. Don’t try to talk. Don’t move.”

Nick padded up to them both, resting his head against Florian’s shin; we waited, we kept waiting, but nothing else happened. Florian didn’t speak, and he didn’t move. Naomi ran toward him, choking back the last remnants of her crying, but when she had nearly reached him, her steps slowed, hesitated, and she stopped. Florian watched, no anger in his remaining eye, as she quietly walked back to me.

“I meant what I said before,” Jessie told Stephen. Her mouth tightened as she spoke and she held Florian quite gently, carefully, as if she thought she needed to shield him from Stephen. “I want you gone. Every time you open your mouth or take a step around here, something goes to shit, and I’m not putting up with it. So get out.” She glanced at Amy, at Lucy. “Any of you wanna argue with me about it, now’s the time.”

Lucy opened her mouth to speak, then Amy tugged on her mother’s sleeve, shaking her head. Stephen took a step backwards, another, staring at Amy like he could have kissed, hurt, pleaded with her at all once; the air between them was thick and oppressive with indecision, tingling with countless unseen needles pricking their flesh, their nerves.

Lucy said nothing. Amy said nothing. I didn’t know what to say, what good it could possibly do, so I said nothing.

“All right,” Stephen said. He sagged in his clothes as he stood there, slump-shouldered, hollowed out and defeated like Billy. “I’m leaving. I’m going to Tina and Russell’s town down the road. If I figure out anything about—anything, I’ll send a message. Or something. That’s where I’ll be, if anyone’s looking for me.”

A few days, I thought, I’d give it a few days to blow over, then go and get him—we had to have at least a few days, all of us, to work through all this. We’d be all right for that long. Just a few more days.

Amy nodded at Stephen. “Okay,” she said. Her voice was small and miserable.

Stephen nodded back. He turned to Lucy and me. “Thanks for trying to help me out,” he said, and headed up the ridge toward the shortcut to the road.

Amy watched his retreating back until the trees had swallowed him. Then her face contorted, and Lucy grabbed her; Amy hung on fiercely, but she didn’t cry. Naomi, tear-stained and mute, clung to me. Nick, all the noise and agitation gone out of him, nuzzled at Florian’s shin some more, then lay down calmly at his feet.

“Good riddance,” Linc said.

Amy shook her head, still buried against Lucy’s shoulder, but didn’t speak. Billy was ensconced higher up the ridge now, leaning against the trunk of a still-living maple; he wriggled his shoulder blades against the bark as though they itched, then folded his arms and narrowed his eyes in contemplation of all of us left. Then he grinned.

“He’s right,” he called down to us. “Florian, the incredible shrinking man? The fucking coward who shows up for nothing and can’t say shit? He’s right. He can’t stop what’s coming. You can’t. Nobody can. It’s heading straight for us, coming right down the road.”

He laughed aloud, a sound of genuine, almost sweet-natured joy. “And I can’t wait.”

FIFTEEN

NATALIE

H
ead hurt. Back hurt. Everything hurt.

I was in the gray house with the red mailbox, me and Janey who was in a bed beside me, curled up and quiet. The palsied old man, the one who’d shouted at Billy, he was in the bedroom across the hall; the girl with the baby kept going in and out, talking to him, from the faint bits I’d heard I’d guessed he was her grandfather and he was dying. His heart, they couldn’t find any more medication for it even though Russell and the others went looking. He seemed calm and resigned to it all and his granddaughter wasn’t wailing or carrying on either—she was smart enough to realize he was lucky. That she was lucky too, whether she wanted to admit it or not, only one dependent mouth left for her to feed.

What would it be like, having family that looked like you and sounded like you, that was always just there? Who were all part of each other because part of their mutual flesh was one and the same, shared, divided? The thought of it was like longing, but gave way just as fast to a shiver of true disgust. Flesh shared, split, a lot of walking talking groups of amoebas—our way, creating our own new species one by one from a clean undivided source, that was better.

Head hurt. Back hurt. I pulled myself upright in bed and then that Tina came in, tray in her hands and a bruise ringing one eye, and went over to where Janey lay awake, bruised up herself, not talking.

“It’s just canned soup,” she was saying to Janey, as the scent reached my nose. “But it’s good. Chicken vegetable. Have some.”

Janey rolled slowly from her side to her back, used her heels to push at the mattress and raise her head. Without that red lipstick she used to smear on in a puddle of wet, her whole face was washed out and fading, skin pale and muddy all at once, dull dirty blonde hair falling dejected into her eyes. I could tell from watching her how much effort it took to move, after how Billy worked her over. She sniffed the soup and looked up at Tina, all polite anxiety.

“I’m not sure Don would want me to have this,” she explained.

Tina had probably heard crazier than that, plenty of times, because she just nodded. That ridiculous cross, slung on its chain so it looked poised to dive off one of her big breasts, bobbed and shook with the gesture. “Just a little bit,” she urged Janey. “A few spoonfuls.”

“Oh, that’s how it starts,” Janey said. Dark and knowing. “That’s how it always starts.”

But she ate the soup anyway and when Tina put the spoon down, Janey picked it up herself, working her way steadily to the bottom of the bowl. All this time neither of them had said a word to me, not so much as glanced in my direction: I was the blight on the town, the troublemaker, the one who’d brought Billy in their midst even if he did beat my ass just as bad as theirs. Janey, they just assumed he’d dragged her along with him, but I was the one even Ms. Super-Christian couldn’t stomach. I hate humans, ordinary unchanged human beings. I seriously hate them.

“Are you hungry?” Tina asked me. Her voice was even and steady like that’d make me think she didn’t hate me, like she could trick me just that easily. “There’s some more of this, or canned pork and beans—”

She looked like she could use a lot less pork and beans. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, pushing through the little jolts of pain it sent up my back, and found my sneakers she’d lined up at the foot. Sukie my doll had sat beside me on the pillow, she was the first thing I’d looked for when I woke up, and I stuffed her back in my jacket pocket, shuffled out the bedroom door without talking.

The front room, what must’ve been the living room once, there were stacked-up cartons, a desk with papers on it and another bed in the corner, someone else huddled in it under a nest of blankets and coughing nonstop. Battered spiral notebook on the desktop and when I picked it up and leafed through, it was like Stephen’s from Paradise City, lists of names, food and medicine inventories, a subdivided page marked “Special Needs”: Medical, Religious, Psychological. Food Allergies. I couldn’t find my name or Janey’s, they must not have had time to write them down. The coughing was congested and wet and made me shudder to hear it so I dropped the notebook, went in stocking feet out the front door and sat to do up my laces on the porch.

It was still sunny outside, but a veiled-over sunny, light shining through a thin gray scrim of clouds; I wasn’t sure if it was the same day we’d arrived here or not. Soft breeze, pretty view of all the gardens, that big oak in the middle of town—this must’ve been a nice place to live, before. Maybe once I had the lab really up and running we could move some operations out here, get rid of the humans and then this could be my house. I knotted up the left laces and then the right in hard little buds, they’d have to slice them off my feet if they wanted to take them, and when I looked up again someone was standing not a yard away staring at the red mailbox, and at the elephant ears of chard growing where there’d once been a lawn, and at me.

Stephen. I played it cool, staring back and waiting for Amy and that crybaby mother of hers to come up behind him and start acting like they owned the place, but it was just him. By himself.

He looked down at me and laughed. “Figures,” he said.

“So where’s Amy?” I asked.

He sat on the edge of the porch step, as far away from me as he could get, and huddled up so furious and wretched I could’ve felt sorry for him, he was one of us after all, but after how he and Miss Mystic left me in the dirt I couldn’t care less. All alone. Trouble in paradise? What a joke. He wasn’t even looking at me anyway, just like nobody ever did. He lifted his head and took in the houses, the haphazard gardens with only a very few patches of dry dead amid the green, the thick-trunked looming living oak.

“Things look okay here,” he said. Not really to me, just aloud. “Maybe that was all a mistake, it’s not everything and everybody that’s—it’s sort of okay here.”

“It wasn’t half okay getting here.” I didn’t want to talk to him, he certainly wasn’t inviting me to, but he looked too pleased with himself and I didn’t mind messing that up with the truth. Just like I did with Amy. “Dead plants. Dead animals. People, someone I knew at the lab, dropping dead right in front of me. You can ask Janey, she’s here too—I think the same thing happened to Don.” I reached down to my laces again, tugging them smooth, tightening them so I’d have something to do. “And him—you know.
Him
. The one I’ve been waiting for. He came. He was angry at me.”

When was he going to show up here anyway, long last, now that Billy had done his job and got me here and thank God he was gone to go cry over Mags for eternity? He was supposed to be here. I was supposed to be feeling as acute and as
now
as I could, just like how all the living things left were supposed to be upended and flung into chaos by his coming: leaves swelling up with moisture until they burst, stones rumbling and cracking from the inside as their lava stirred back to boiling life, flowers killing themselves in the rush to offer him that single, perfect culminating bloom. People screaming, crying, screwing, fighting, knowing that this was the last chance, the last they’d ever have, just like how things were back at the height of the plague—and instead everything was just limp and drab and sad, the living things creeping away almost apologetically departing this life while my back was turned. Even when it happened right next to me. It wasn’t a fitting tribute. Life should be sacrificing itself to Death in the open all around me, proudly, happily, knowing that after this last time it’d never have to fight again. Because I was going to win. I’d fight him and use all the lab’s secrets against him and I would save everyone, everything, all the life left. It had to happen now, I had to fight him
now
—

But all I had was the porch and the oak and Stephen, useless Stephen, for company. He was looking at me now, at least, gracious of him. The way he looked at everything, like he were an artist, a painter, wandering around his own first big exhibition and realizing too late he couldn’t draw for crap.

“The one you’ve been waiting for,” he repeated. “And who’d that be?”

Oh, God. “Don’t act like you don’t already know.” I laughed, because the truth of it just came to me. “Because if you didn’t, and you weren’t freaking out about it, you wouldn’t even be here. You ran away from the rest of them because they can’t see it, and you can—or maybe because they can see it, and since they do, you can’t pretend you don’t anymore. So you ran away. Didn’t you.”

Stephen gazed at me in silence, big dark eyes not the least caught-out uncomfortable like I’d wanted, and then looked away. He wasn’t handsome but he had nice eyes, a lot of dark hair, I’d seen Amy looking at him back at Paradise when she thought nobody noticed. Always has to have everything for herself. The other one, why wasn’t he here? Why wasn’t he
here
. If he were off behind my back with her, again, I wouldn’t be kind about it.

“Back at the lab,” Stephen said, out of nowhere so I jumped. “You said, when I threatened to hurt you to try and get something about the experiments out of you—you said I’d probably enjoy that. You made it sound like I’d done things like that before.” He ran a hand through his hair and it stood halfway on end, bristly and snarled. “Is it true? Or did you just say that to try and throw me off?”

Each of us had our own file, back at the lab, all the particulars anyone knew of our former lives, and if someone was a feeder from the juvie hall—the lab used a lot of them—his criminal records were included, the only fabrication in them the part about how he’d killed himself or run away from custody. Medical, Psychological, Special Needs, Allergies. The lab paid upfront for a lot of kids from juvie and psychiatric facilities, they needed them, but they didn’t care what any of them had actually done—it could be anything at all, from armed robbery to shoplifting. Trespass on protected research areas. Vandalizing buildings. Kid stuff. Nobody wanted to put up with it, not when they were pouring all that tax money into making sure the right towns and cities were safe and guarded and nothing dangerous anywhere could sneak through the cracks. But the lab didn’t care. I’d seen Stephen’s record, I read the whole thing. It didn’t take long. He stole a candy bar and a lighter, and mouthed off to the security guard who grabbed him. That’s it.