Grave (33 page)

Most of Janey’s hair was still there, fanned over the dirt like a discarded wig. It was sticky on one side, sticky and stiff where her head had come open. I ignored that. I smoothed it down as well as I could, gave her lone eyelid a brotherly kiss. Godspeed, Tina would probably say. I had nothing to say.

“You’re never going to find out.” Natalie was right there beside me where I squatted by Janey’s remains, when I pulled myself back on my feet. “You hear me? You are
never
finding out.” Her eyes shied away from where Janey lay and stayed fixed on my face, tearful and scheming. “I’m making sure of that. I’m going to fight him, and win! Just me, nobody else! Because it’s our fight, his and mine, and I’m going to win!”

I did something terrible, back when I was first alive. Before the lab got to me. Something so awful, even Natalie didn’t want to repeat it. She’d seen the files. All my records, right there in the lab. I was a bad person. Maybe an outright terrible person, straight from the start. She said as much herself. So it didn’t really matter if I did another terrible thing now.

“I won’t tell you.” Her voice dropped back down to a whisper. “No matter what, I’ll make sure you never find out.”

It wasn’t like with Nick, this time. This time, I knew what I was looking at. I knew I wasn’t defending myself, or anyone else. I knew just what I did, and I did it anyway.

My fists flew out and I struck her, again and again. The old woman screamed, tried to pull me off her, but I shook her off and kept hitting until Natalie fell to the ground like Janey had, until she didn’t move. Then I turned my back on them both and went on down the road, hellhounds on my trail, the sky’s light once more guttering and dying out.

NINETEEN

JESSIE

T
he sky, the woods, the beach, the lake, all of it was gone. Everything was gone but us, crouched together on a sweep of ash that had once been sand, and the swarms of human and canine ghosts thronging everywhere around us. Nick, Amy’s dog, had been carried off somewhere without our seeing it, swallowed up. Florian was gone, somewhere in what had once been the woods, eaten away. Just like we’d all be soon. We lay there, gasping and thrashing like fish, and I pressed my cheek to the ash, cursing everything and everyone that ever lived, and thought,
Just get it over with, fucking get it over with and let all of us die, dissolve, disintegrate
—

I took in a deep wasteful breath, sure I’d never have the chance to let it out again, but when I opened my eyes we were all still there. Amy held Lucy, and Lisa held Naomi; Linc and Renee and I were a tangle of limbs whose ownership hardly mattered anymore. The dead surged all around us, teeming lost and crying in the drained lake bed; why weren’t we among them? Why wasn’t I one of them? What the hell was keeping all of us alive? Billy lay curled with his back to us, face in his hands, and when I grabbed his arm, he hissed, bared his teeth like the old days come back.

“Why am I still alive?” he shouted, wild with frustration, at me, the lake bed, the sky. “Why the fuck am I still
alive
? It’s done! I’m here! Just fuckin’ do it and take me back!”

The sky went black again and I was blind, deaf, limbless, yet sinking under my own weight. My lungs were wet tissue paper, falling to shreds, disintegrating—and then I was whole again, retching, my face buried in the ash. And something was stumbling toward us, something human, crawling the last few feet on hands and knees. Amy didn’t have the oxygen to waste on shouting, but she mouthed something like
Stephen
and they were hugging ferociously, Lucy almost crying with relief. I heard barking by my ear and there was Nick, emerging from the sea of tooth and claw. He’d come back, snapping and snarling at the death teeming around us like he could actually make it stop. One last reunion, one small mercy, before the end. Stephen was sucking in air now like a kiddie gobbling candy, flinging words back out between every stolen breath.

“Everything,” he gasped, his eyes urgent and wild like Nick’s; Nick circled us all, barking, letting Naomi grab joyously at his fur like he never had when the world was whole. “That man, Florian, what he said—everything eaten up—it’s all true. Everything everywhere. Natalie thinks she can beat Death. She’s wrong. She’s so wrong.” He laughed, dog-eyed and wild with the sheer absurdity of it, and held hard to Amy like she could keep him from withering away. “He said—Death said—no more life, no death, no nothing—because of—what the lab did—and that we’re thieves that stole from him, just like Natalie, we’re all—”

The sky went out. We fell and fell together in the blind darkness, and then I was rolling with terrible gentleness down a long, steady chute: just like when I was sick, like when the plague ate us all alive and spat us back out as something else. No light. No substance. No nothing.

That used to be my home, my good home. Lightless. Peaceful. Then I had another home, a home above ground but still with darkness to spare, with the heat of hunting, with all of our collective inward music reverberating through me, through all of us, as our life’s blood. That was taken from me too. Death said I was a thief, like that little lab bitch? How was
I
the thief, me who’d had my death, my afterlife, my everything ripped from my own flesh, my eardrums torn open and ruined so eternity no longer sang inside me? When did we get back what the plague had stolen from us all?

“Help us!” Amy, or Lucy, was screaming, stolen breath rising in a sob. “Someone—”

Florian. Florian tried to warn us that what fed on him was coming for us, Death was a ravenous new rotter and all of us were deer... but he said no more life,
and
no more death. No more anything or anywhere. Death would feed on himself in the end, like the worst-afflicted humans in the plague, so ripped apart by famine they attacked themselves and consumed pieces of their very own flesh—

The air rushing back into my lungs seared and burned like lye. The emptiness and silence deeper inside, though, that had started long before this, and oxygen couldn’t cure it, and it never, ever went away. The lab. Always, always the lab. We weren’t goddamned thieves like them—they’d stolen everything from us! Everything!

“We hate them just as much as you do!” I screamed, certain Death heard me, just as certain he didn’t give a damn. “Just as fucking much! And we can’t undo anything they did!”

Something laughed, a thick deep noise hovering overhead like a cloud, and Naomi moaned in fear.

“
The hell you can’t
,” a voice said, somewhere inside me far beyond my ears. “
The hell you haven’t. If you didn’t steal back what was mine, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now.
”

The air was going again. The most horrible part was, it always came back—

The beachfront was black, brown, gold, white: the fur of the ghost-dogs that leapt for us, snapped furiously around our island of ash, their eyes a searing torchlight as blinding as the dark. There was nowhere to run from them, no coaxing them into calm; they were feral, starving, and all of us who’d lived on and on when we shouldn’t have were the rightful food they’d been deprived of. Their teeth snapped at what seemed like the empty air and our flesh was intact, unbleeding, but their teeth still some-how crunched down on our bones. Crunched right down to the marrow. Something was howling in agony and it was me, it was Linc and Renee and all of us. This was hell. This was—

Lisa’s arms were empty and she wailed with a sound beyond herself because the dogs had Naomi, they were dragging her into their sea of fur to drown. Dead humans all around them stared, cried out like Lisa, wept. Naomi’s thin little arms flapped, like a chicken’s wings when it senses the axe—and then Nick was there, everywhere at once, teeth snapping out right and left against that devouring mass. Naomi fell heavily back to the ash, Lisa snatching her up sobbing, and Nick was surrounded on all sides by fur, teeth, eyes. Swept away. Drowned.

The dogs receded. They had food now.

“Nick,” Naomi cried, her eyes squeezed closed. “Come back—”

“You came back!” Billy was screaming. He was on his feet, swaying like a tree praying to snap in a summer storm, eyes wide and white-rimmed in horrible ecstasy. “You’re back, you came back, I always knew those fuckers couldn’t keep you from coming back—”

Dead folk pressed in all around us, hundreds of them or maybe thousands, their faces full of confusion and hunger and terror. Mags was there among them, shoving through the throng with her hard eyes and hard smile, but she didn’t see me, or Renee, or Linc. She didn’t see anything but Billy, just like when she was alive and her living flesh sang out only for him. Billy was running now, stumbling over that tiny stretch of ground not seething with ghosts, and reaching her, he fell with a thud down to his knees. He collapsed then and there, crumpled up at her feet with his face still twisted, deranged with joy. He died. And Mags had her arms around his body, pulling him into the ash-dark sea, and then they both disintegrated, turned to nothing, and were gone.

The sound was all around us, rushing waves of dead voices too numerous, too scared, to shape proper words. They all shoved and pushed now, just like Mags. The dead, too, were frantic for space and breath, like a penned-up crowd of concert-goers ready to crush and stampede in panic. Someone wailed, close to my ear; I saw Lucy, Stephen, and Amy holding Lisa back by force, holding her back from a dead little ghost-girl not three feet away. Even if Lisa hadn’t been screaming her name, I’d have known it: Karen. Lisa’s Karen, the niece I’d never met, dead of leukemia before the plague ever started. Lisa thrashed and bit and fought to get to her. We held her back, shouting at her not to be such a fool, such a fucking fool, and then Karen’s face sank back into the crowd and was lost.

Lisa tried to claw and bite at my face, but we all hung on, Renee lying across her to hold her down. Lisa pushed her own face into the ash, breathed it in, trying so hard to suffocate.

“Hold me back,” Lucy said, and even her steady voice was trembling. “Hold me back, if I see Mike, my husband—hold me back—”

We reached out, all of us, and we lashed her to the mast. We clutched tighter still when a hollow-cheeked man rising from the swell made her shake and hold out her arms. She didn’t fight us, though. Her head dropped, and her arms, and tears rolled down her cheeks. And then, just as quickly as he’d appeared, he was gone. She said his name again, under her breath, and sat next to Lisa as we released her, sinking down there on the ash.

Mags. I’d seen Mags but nobody else there waiting for me in the multitude of ghosts: no Sam, no Annie, no Joe. I couldn’t have borne Joe. No mother. No father. No brother. Thank God, no brother. Amy stroked her mother’s hair, staring at me over Lucy’s head. Her eyes were wide and pale, like a terrified horse’s just before the runaway coach plunges over a cliff, but everything else about her was so still and calm. Just like me.

“I kept... disappearing, on the way here,” Stephen said, and shook with hysteria-edged laughter. “Just like Florian, losing his hands, his face—those dogs had no teeth in me, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I didn’t see him,” Amy said. “My father. Mom, I know you saw him, but I didn’t see anything where you were looking—”

“Because he’s gone now.” Stephen wasn’t laughing anymore. His voice had dropped, gone quiet with the realization. “Because while you were looking, while both of you were looking, he suddenly didn’t exist anymore.”

And if he didn’t exist, not anymore, wouldn’t their last memories of him start to go next? And my memories of Florian, of Billy, of everyone else would start to go too, and everyone else’s of me... and if our memory of each other was the only real world beyond this one, then not only would we no longer exist, we might as well never have lived at all. And it didn’t matter, because there was nothing we could do. Lisa rocked silently back and forth where she sat, Naomi in her lap, with a face that told me she’d never forgive any of us this last betrayal, not ever. Naomi was mumbling something I couldn’t hear, maybe a prayer. Lisa was far beyond that comfort.

The sounds of the dead rose louder and higher around us as we crouched in the diminishing eye of the storm. They were screaming now, like the sound of a tornado rising up, like dogs howling in useless aggression and pain. Their world was eaten up and gone, just like this one soon would be, and all they knew was that they were supposed to be somewhere that wasn’t here but they couldn’t go back, there was nowhere left to run. Their hands clawed at the ash, missing us by mere inches, and some of them actually cried with fright.

Enough of Death. Enough of his shit. I’d had some small, meager semblance of a life, here on Florian’s beach, and Death took it away and he was taking the next life beyond away from Billy, Mags, all the rest of us, and I’d fucking had
enough
.

“Florian!” I screamed into the maelstrom, as if that could really summon him. But he didn’t come. If he even existed anymore, to make that choice. If oblivion hadn’t consumed what remained.