Grave (35 page)

“You just said—”

“Because,” Jessie said, “it
could
be what I want it to be, what I keep thinking I hear. It could be this.” She slipped her hand back in her pocket and retrieved a flat dull-colored stone, one of the dozens scattered over every sand dune on every part of the Lake Michigan shore. She held it up, as if it were significant somehow, then put it away. “Or, it could be the sound of everything coming apart.”

That ringing in our ears, a buzzing that rose and fell like the sound of great swarms of faraway flies, but sometimes when it fell there were seconds, endless seconds, of a silence so great it went beyond mere deafness. Just like those blank spots were no ordinary blindness. That was what she meant, and none of us needed it better explained. Stephen, on seeing the stone, rose slowly to his feet.

“What does that mean?” he demanded. “Does it mean something? Back at Cowleston, Natalie had some, and then they split open—”

“They did?” Jessie turned sharply toward him, not trying to hide her surprise. “When? What happened?”

Stephen shrugged. “Right before... all of this, before all it started. Just before. She was holding them in her hand, and then it was like they’d grown hot, like they burned her, and then they split open right in her hand and this sort of sand came out—was it a trick? Did it mean something?” He stood over Jessie, as if waiting for her to produce the stone from her pocket again, but she didn’t. His eyes were swollen and puffy, ringed with exhausted shadows. “Tina got angry when she saw it, she thought it was some kind of ugly joke—but I don’t get the punchline. What did it mean that that happened?”

Hearing that, Jessie suddenly looked as sad and lost and confused as all the rest of us.

“I never knew,” she said. “I never really figured that out, except... that sometimes, somehow, it made some things better. Fixed some things, maybe. Cured them.” She laughed, a tubercular spitting sound. “But it sure as hell isn’t fixing this.”

Stephen sat down next to Jessie and he looked so overwhelmed I could’ve hugged him, but he wasn’t that sort and except with Amy, neither was I. Linc and Renee exchanged glances, looking like parents suddenly saddled with the care of someone else’s children, and it was a relief to want to laugh. Silence interrupted the ringing in my ears once again, an ominous split second, and Naomi rubbed fretfully at her own ear as though it hurt.

“I want to go home,” she whimpered. “I don’t like it here, I want—”

“Used to be a hell of a lot nicer than this,” another voice said. “But I can tell I don’t have to tell ya that.”

From somewhere between the blank spaces, he’d emerged: Florian, walking toward us with pale blue eyes full of kindness and melancholy. Amy, Stephen, and Jessie drew in sharp breaths of surprise, and before Lisa could stop her, Naomi ran to him and, sobbing, flung her arms around his legs. Florian smiled at her, then reached down and gently unhooked her grasp.

“Easy now,” he said. “I can’t say if I’m here or there or am or ain’t any given second, and if I go again, I don’t wanna drag you with me—”

“I want to go with you!” Naomi cried, and sobbed harder. “I want to get out of here, you can take us out, I want to go home—”

“Child,” Florian said softly, “when I ain’t here, I ain’t nowhere, and I ain’t never been. And every time I end up nowhere, I leave part of myself I can’t ever get back, andÖ you don’t want that. That’s what you’re tryin’ to fix, bein’ here in the first place, ain’t it?” He patted her on the head, gingerly, as though he feared his touch were diseased. “So you gotta stay and try, like it or not. You gotta stay and try, for as long as what’s left of this place stands—Lord, pets, I never thought I’d find you again, I’d just be eaten up for good and that’d be that, but I never was gladder to be wrong. Never gladder.”

When he looked at the rest of us, his smile faded and his shoulders sagged and he looked like the sad old man he must once have been, the gaunt skeletal undead thing Jessie had once loved like a grandfather. He gazed up at the ruin of the sky, back down at the ruin of the ground, his eyes shining full and bleak like he were too far gone to weep. Renee and Linc, ignoring his hesitation, went and took his hands; Jessie stayed where she was, but nodded like she understood him better than any of us. And, of course, she did. Stephen took a few steps toward him, then faltered and stopped in his tracks.

“So this really is it,” he asked Florian, “it’s where you go when you die?” He kicked at the ground, releasing a small ashen puff of dry dust. “I’ve died a lot, I mean, more than most people. I don’t remember anything like this... I mean, like what it must’ve been. Once.”

“Neither do I,” I said. Of course, I didn’t remember any of it, at all. A side effect that always suited the lab right down to the ground.

“You weren’t dead long enough, any a’them times, to see this,” Florian said. “Just like us, when we were proper undeads—we didn’t hang around the grave long enough to cross over to this side. If we had, we’d never have been able to come back.”

And never have wanted to.
He didn’t need to add that part, we were all thinking it. We’d all been so badly cheated.

“So we’re meant to be stuck here,” Amy said, “forever.” She trembled suddenly, contemplating it, and I went and put an arm around her. “Except that like you said, everything’s falling down—”

“—and so things that should be here, ain’t.” Florian rested a sunken, hollow cheek against Renee’s blonde hair, just for a second, then raised his head again. “And things that ain’t meant to be here—well, here I am, talkin’ to you.”

A strange look crossed Amy’s face, like she wanted to argue with that, but she didn’t answer.

“Those stones,” Stephen demanded. “What are they? Do they do something... magic?”

“Never knew,” Florian said. “Never rightly knew. All I know is that when I had ’em with me, in my pocket, I felt worlds better—”

“They helped us,” Renee said. “Me and Linc and Lisa—and Jessie—during the plague. Just having them seemed to help. I’m not sure how. But they did.”

“But they’re not helping any of this,” Stephen pointed out. “Just like Jessie said.”

Florian shrugged. “And they didn’t stop my dyin’ either. So like I said, I can’t rightly explain ’em.”

He flickered and faded, standing there before us, like a reel of film running out and emptying off the spool. His face twisted in alarm and he flung his arms up, like he could somehow push away the great furious force bearing down to devour him, and then where he had stood was a man-shaped blind spot as painful to the eye as a sudden flood of fluorescent light. I blinked hard, saw Amy and Stephen involuntarily jerk their heads away, and when we recovered ourselves, he was there again but not there, all at once. The fear on his face was more frightening than any of the desolation around us, and the sight of it made fresh tears run down Naomi’s cheeks.

“It’s all going,” Florian said. The outline of his white head, his black clothes, had melted together and faded; his voice wavered, echoed, and we had to strain to hear him. “No afterwards. No memories. No consciousness. Nothing. Everything that is, was, ever would be, vanished forever in a—”

And where he had stood, there was nothing. Nothingness. And no sound either, but the soft monotonous buzz of a thousand unseen, starving flies.

Lisa and Naomi were both crying again, almost decorously silent as their faces went wet. The fly-buzzing tickled my ears, my insides like a maddening little itch, and I felt myself twitching in the effort to dispel it. Linc shuddered with the sensation, gritting his teeth. Jessie, though, she was calm and still, her eyes darting from the stagnant lake to the dead flat land and back again as if trying to decide something. Then she glanced at the not-there spot where Florian had been, where now the ashen ground and sky had almost vanished in turn, and squinted with the effort to focus on it. Then she smiled.

“Later days, Florian,” she said.

Then, without hesitation, she walked down the shoreline and straight into the pewter slick of water. Lisa, Linc, and Renee stared in disbelief, then started running.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Lisa shouted. “How can—”

“Fuck, it’s cold!” Jessie shouted back. She was in it now up to her knees, the water not flowing aside in her wake but forming tiny hillocks, thick and solid, as if her legs were a shovel pushing through mud. She halted and turned to us, motioning impatiently. “Come on!” We didn’t move. “For God’s sake—what’re you afraid of?” She started to laugh. “That we’ll drown and die?
Here
? Seriously?”

Lisa looked embarrassed and defiant and bewildered all at once. “
Yes
!”

Jessie shook her head in disgust, kept pushing forward. She was up to her thighs. “The woods are eaten up,” she pointed out. “Like the termites got to a house so bad, the walls are about to go. But we can still see the whole lake, can’t we? See?” Her hand swept the air, reaching toward the horizon that kept receding faster every second. “There’s still something here. There’s still something that
exists
here, and it’s not fading away, so I’m going toward it. Only an idiot would go where there’s nothing, so you all be fucking idiots if you want, but I’m going.”

“Going where?” Linc shouted. He looked less frightened than the rest of us—if only because love can make you trust the good judgment of someone who’s clearly out of their mind—but every bit as confused. “You seriously think you can find—”

“Him? It? Yes!”

“And what?” Renee demanded. “Talk him out of it? How the hell are you going to do that?”

“So why’d you come with me, if you didn’t even want to try?”

Jessie was in up to her waist now, the water—the mud, the mire—not splashing but oozing as she turned toward us once more. She wasn’t shivering, didn’t look cold, but then her kind, the exes, were nearly impervious to the elements; what would happen to one of us, in that expanse? Would we be pulled under immediately, suffocate before we could be eaten up? She was laughing, at us or herself or the absurdity of it all I couldn’t say, but the edge of recklessness, of desperation, in her voice shouldn’t have been perversely reassuring. But it was. All of us, in over our heads.

“I did it before,” she said. “Talked him out of... some shit he wanted to do, sort of. Maybe. It’s hard to explain. But I did it, anyway. I didn’t just give him everything he wanted. I didn’t just give in!” She was up to her chest. “So are you coming, or not?”

Slowly, Amy walked up to the very edge of the shore. I didn’t try to stop her. I couldn’t move. She was shaking. “What if we drown?” she called.

Jessie shrugged. “Didn’t you say you already did? Before? So if it happens, it won’t be anything new.”

She ducked underwater, and didn’t emerge. Lisa let out an awful sound, and as she was rushing toward the water with Naomi at her heels, Jessie’s head and shoulders rose above the surface. She took a long breath, then another, and I noticed that her hair, her clothes, were still dry.

“We won’t drown,” she said. “Not right off, anyway.”

Renee’s lips twitched, like she was long since used to this kind of thing from Jessie. She probably was. “What’s it like out there, soldier?”

“Cold,” said Jessie. “Freezing.” She cupped her hand, took a handful of the liquid around her, then opened her fingers to let it trickle away. It hit the lake surface in slow, fat clumps. “But it’s still
here
.”

Amy went in past the shoreline, up to her ankles. I didn’t try to stop her. The lake lapped around her shoes and she started shivering, so violently that one of her feet jerked back toward the shore, but she put it firmly back down in the current and stayed where she was, and the horrible chill must have passed. Stephen waded in next to her, taking her hand, and also flinched with cold, and also recovered himself. Linc and Renee followed, wading in right up to their knees without any apparent shock.

“I think you’re kidding yourself,” Stephen told Jessie. “I don’t think we’ll ever find him. Not this time.”

“Because you would know,” Jessie said.

“Look, he’s already said his piece. We all heard him.” Stephen lifted up a leg, slow and careful, like he worried the droplets surrounding it might be little weights to drag it under. “He even said to me, he said, ‘Death was alive once too.’ He said that. So if this is all... Death deciding to die, somehow, to not be anymore, what the hell are we supposed to do about that? Why would he ever want to be found? He’ll just hide until we’re not there anymore to seek.”

“So sit there and cry some more. Why do I care?” Jessie tilted her chin back, gazing overhead, then squinted and winced and dropped her eyes. “But it’s the only thing left to do, and we’re here, and the trees behind you are mostly gone and now the sky’s starting to disappear. So either we at least try for the last word, or...” She folded her arms across her chest, elbows poking up from the lake surface as her hands disappeared beneath it. “Or nothing.”

I looked up into the sky, like Jessie had, and what I saw—or rather, what I didn’t and couldn’t see at all—made me shudder and look away. Amy was in up to her knees, Stephen letting her lead him in turn. Linc and Renee were already two more bobbing heads in a dry, formless, iron-colored sea.