Grave (32 page)

“What do we do?” Natalie wrenched away from Janey, eyes wild, like Janey were something diseased. “
What do we do
?”

“Road,” I managed, addressing Janey, while we all coughed and wheezed for more air. I pointed in the direction of the beach. “The others, Amy, her—”

“You can’t do this!” Natalie kept screaming at nothing. At the nothing she’d helped bring on us all. “You can’t!”

I shoved her away and grabbed Janey’s hand. Janey would follow me where I told her to. I pulled us both off the porch in case the house was the next thing to collapse. Every yard and open space around us was gray and dead and empty, what had been grass coming away in clumps of dust and horrible blind-spot holes beneath our feet; we stumbled and hit the ground on our knees, sure we were next. Those others left living stumbled in circles, disoriented, no warning. I’d been warned, I’d been warned and nobody listened to me, or maybe they had and I’d been too busy not listening to Amy, to Florian, to Nick, too busy feeling sorry for myself to—

Tina staggered toward me, her hair wild with bits of twig, and she clutched us hugging and then pulled back like she knew where we were going. Russell lay on the dirt behind her, silent and still.

“Go,” she said, no wasted breaths, “We’ll—” She looked around her, touched the cross at her neck, crouched beside Russell to take him in her arms. “—take care of—”

“You can’t leave me here.” Natalie grabbed my sleeve, tugging. I wrenched my arm away so hard she staggered backward, but she wouldn’t budge. “You can’t, he’ll kill me, you can’t—”

“Look over there,” Janey said. As mild and sweet as always. Just pointing out a fact. “Look what’s coming.”

The square and the road and the whole ruin of Cowleston, everywhere I could see, was filling with the faces of people who were there but weren’t there. There was bewildered disorientation in their eyes, a terror mirroring that of the living, and around their legs there surged fur and teeth and claws and watery-luminous eyes. Wild packs of dogs, dozens or hundreds of them in one seething mass, there and not there all at once. Above the deafening barks and howls I heard Natalie scream and then a whole group of the living, crouched by the remains of the oak tree, were pulled in before they could make a sound. They were smothered, extinguished, in that mass of fur, and I watched as the dogs devoured them without ghostly teeth or claws leaving a single mark. They just collapsed, and melted like burnt camera film in great spreading spots of nothing, and were gone.

I grabbed Janey’s hand and we were running, running across the town square and past the houses and back on the short, less than a mile, endless impassable road heading straight down to the beach. The dogs were breathing down our necks, a hot moist canine breath that was a clean chill illusion at the very same time, and then there was no sound but Natalie and some other voice crying out, panting to keep up as we ran with our hands linked pretending she wasn’t even there. Then the world went dark again, and there was no sound at all.

We were down, Janey and me, still clutching hands there in the airless dark. Then the air rushed back into our lungs and we gasped, overwhelmed to the point of sickness, dug nails into each other’s flesh, stumbled far as we could manage down the road before the horrible darkness decided to return. Natalie was still right behind us, squandering breath sobbing, shouting at someone else to keep up or go lie by the roadside and die, but no time to tell her to do the same thing, no breath, no time, no air, no light—

Hurdles. It was a game, an obstacle course, and each time I went blind and a fist squeezed my chest until the breastbone could snap and break it was just a hurdle, a passable hurdle, less than a mile and I needed to find Amy, Naomi, Lucy. I needed to find them and I wouldn’t leave Janey behind. I wasn’t afraid. I couldn’t be afraid. I’d died before, more times than heaven allows—but I’d never been nothing before, I’d never before disintegrated and simply never been. I couldn’t be afraid.

Oxygen. Light. Not sunlight, though, just a bleak watery gray gleam like a blindness all its own. The sun, moon, clouds were gone. There was nothing left in the sky.

Janey dropped to her knees, gasping even harder, her breath seizing, trying to apologize as I pulled her back to her feet. The lights went out. Just as swiftly, they came back on. In that instant, the dense walls of trees lining our path had all fallen without a sound, acres of forest gone to dry crumbling piles of wood. Janey yanked at my arm, scrambling over a logger’s cluster of dead maples, actual hurdles thrown across our path. Not a living thing was left anywhere, not in the sky nor on the ground. Not a single living thing but us, leaping the hurdles on our way to hell.

It was almost a mercy, a kindness, when the lights went back out.

“Not now,” Janey whispered, leaning over me, shaking me so hard my teeth clicked together. “We’re almost there. I can feel it. We have to keep going.”

“Get up!” Natalie shouted. “You have to—”

I’d passed out. The light was back and the ghost-dogs were running at us from every direction, slit-eyed and growling like the guard dogs in the old days at the lab, and we felt and yet didn’t feel their teeth snapping at our flesh. Natalie screamed. The old woman who’d come with her helped me back on my feet. We ran until the rawness seared our throats and lungs. Not enough air, never enough air, in the dark or in the light. I saw a landmark I remembered, road signage lying flat on the dead dusty ground, that told me we were getting closer, I forced back nausea to sprint ahead, pulling Janey with me as we barreled over another ruin of elms, running headlong and smack into—

I stood there, panting, poor Janey almost doubled over but her fingers still wrapped around mine, and the man I hadn’t seen standing in our path gazed down at us both with a happy little smile. Pale hair, pale skin, sharp colorless eyes, thin twisting lips that mocked himself and us and all of existence. A rucksack with a large wet stain slung over one shoulder, and jeans smeared with mud, workboots smeared with blood. Natalie and her old woman were behind us, hiding, no shame—Natalie knew who he was. But of course, we all did.

“I guess you wish you’d listened,” he told me, and I didn’t hear his words so much as feel them somewhere inside me, insinuating themselves deep in my head. He, it, shook his head, laughing softly. “I bet they wish they’d listened to
you
. I bet you all wish you hadn’t wanted to know what Nick saw that you didn’t.” He chuckled, a sound dry and dead as the ruined wood. “So easy to turn you against Nick, all of you against each other—because human beings never listen anyway, not ever. All mouth. No ears. Now, those are freaks of nature worth the study.”

I knew him. My memory was eaten down to nothing by what happened at the lab but I knew him, I knew that face; he’d worked there and he’d probably died there and now Death stood there grinning at me with that face as his mask. Like he’d chosen it on purpose, to try and scare me further. Janey made a hissing sound, and I turned and saw her staring at him in clench-jawed rage like she knew that face too. Like she had reason to hate it too. Her free hand rose up like she was gripping a knife.

“Get out of our way,” she whispered, soft and searingly sweet, Don’s compliant crazy little pet gone away and vanished. Another mask, dropped. “Get out of our way right now.”

“So you can
run
and rescue all your little loved ones!” His feet shuffled in the ruins, a near-dance of gloating delight. “Scamper after them, when you tossed them over the side like so much ballast the second you fought! It never gets old, you know, watching the lot of you run run
run
like scared little rabbits, trying to keep me from your best beloveds—run into burning buildings, run through intensive care units, run across battlefields and over oceans and into back bedrooms four dozen times a night and none of it ever does any good at all.” His grin was wide and unnatural on that human mask of a face, but the death’s-head smile beneath it felt like the most horribly natural thing in the world. “None of it. But you crazy kids, God bless ya, you make Daddy proud and just keep right on trying! Right up to the
very end
!”

Janey listened to him with her brow knotted up and then she frowned—a frown like confusion, like disapproval—and when she suddenly let go of my hand, I was scared. It was like she’d slipped far beyond me into that sea of fur and teeth and nothingness, even though she was right there, even though we stood just inches apart. She was squatting down, beside one of the ruined wood-piles that had been standing trees, taking a great heavy branch in her arms like her own beloved child.

“You be quiet,” she whispered, and there was fury in her eyes: fury like a candle flame that looked so pale and flickering and frail as its taper melted away, but that weak sister, that little flame could burn down a whole building. “You get out of our way, or I’ll make you get out—”

“Janey!” Natalie screamed it for me. “No!”

But Janey had the branch in her arms, a huge dead dragging branch weighted down by so many offshoots she had to lift it two-handed, and with a scream of exertion and anger she heaved it at him. It went airborne, that huge heavy thing, and hit him in the skull. Death flung his arms out, grabbing at the thickest part of the branch like a child clutching a new birthday present, and out of the mesh of sharp twigs that would’ve sliced up any human face, I heard him laugh in delight.

“You never stop!” he cried. “All of you just never, ever stop!”

He lifted the branch up, tossed it hand to hand like it were a great light piece of honeycomb, and with a force no human could ever have managed, flung it right back at Janey. I jumped in front of her, my own hands raised to take the blow, but it was too late, it had already happened, and I was dragging the mass of twigs and branch off her body as she lay there, unconscious, on the ground.

Something was leaking from Janey’s chest, from the side of her head where the branch had split it open. As she lay there. Not unconscious. Dead.

I looked up at Death and he looked back at me. Candle-flame eyes just like Nick’s, flickering guttering flames that consumed everything in their path. Behind us, Natalie and the old woman screamed and wailed and cried, but I could barely hear them; there was nobody else there just then but the two of us. Us and Janey, down at our feet, who didn’t rise up again.

A buzzing sound filled the air around us, the sound of ten thousand flies. Janey’s body bloomed in patches of blindness and blankness, invisible insects eagerly gnawing her into oblivion, and as I watched, one of her hands disappeared. A foot. Part of her startled, distorted face.

“Thieves,” Death whispered. “Thieves, all of you, thinking that when it’s time for me to have you, time to claim what’s rightfully mine, you can just grab your lives right back.” His hand snatched at the air between us, bare inches from my face. “No more. I would have let you live, I would’ve let your sad little excuse for a world keep spinning, if that one”—he gave Natalie a horrible smile, and Natalie cringed and wept—”if
that
one hadn’t spat in my face, hadn’t started stealing and thieving and boasting how she’d bested me all over again, just like those filthy little labs tried to before—but no more. You understand me? You should. You and your dear best beloveds, back at the beach, you’re every bit the thieves she is, whether you know it or not!”

His voice grew louder and louder, rising in an exultant echo. “Humanity’s had its chance,
life
has had its chance—now this is the end. No more life for you to steal, no more death for you to cheat, nowhere to go when your worthless day’s done—no more anything!” He was almost howling in triumph, in joy. “Ever again!”

And then, he was gone. As if I’d dreamed him, the dream melting from my ruined memory seconds after I awoke. As if he’d never really been there at all.

Natalie sobbed in great panting gasps. The old woman was stone silent. Some of Janey’s body was still there beneath the deadwood, bits and pieces of disjointed, doll-part flesh the flies of blindness hadn’t yet devoured. I pulled the branch away, picked bits of twig from her pretty blonde hair that never did her any good, put a shoe that had slipped half off back on her remaining foot. Janey hated being barefoot. She’d have slept in shoes if Don let her. The whole ashen landscape around us, the invisible starving flies, time itself, seemed to stop for just a few moments, to let me to do this. Just like Death, that had so kindly stopped for us.

“I never exist for him,” Natalie spat out. The words were hard and congested full of rage but she couldn’t stop crying, so broken and crying. “I’m always there for him. He’s never there for me. He’s not having it! He can kill any of us he wants, it doesn’t matter, he’s never having it!”

Most of Janey’s face was gone, but there was still one wide-open eye, a fish-eye lens staring pitilessly at the nothingness of the sky. I closed it. Untwisted the necklace that lay in the spot where her throat had once been, a thin gold chain that was one of the last of Don’s gifts.

“I know how to defeat Death,” Natalie said. If grief and slyness had a child, its birth-cries would sound like her voice. “I know how to fight him, and win. You hear me? And I’m not telling you! I’m never, ever telling any of you!”