Grave (37 page)

“Was that it for all of you?” I asked. “The plague? Or are there still some real zombies—”

“Undead,” she said. “We never liked that other word.”

“Are there still real undead? Somewhere out there?”

The sudden longing in her eyes startled me.

“If there are,” she said, “they’re nowhere I am. You humans, you’re just endangered. It seems like we’re extinct.”

The zombies, undead, onscreen were all sorts of rotten and covered in things I was glad I couldn’t see clearly, seething crawling things, but it wasn’t awful when it was just a movie and you couldn’t smell them. They were doing something strange now, some of them had taken each other’s hands and started tottering in slow, awkward circles around and around, no seeming destiny in mind and the most aimless and random shifting of partners—sometimes three or four, sometimes two, some joining hands in a little ring. Two of them, one small and skinny, the other tall and broad and so infested it made me shudder, they broke away a bit from the others and began moving in a recognizable rhythm: step-two-three, step-two-three. A waltz. They were waltzing, these dead things, as the others danced in shuffle-step or circles or all by their lonesome, all around them.

The others, curled up in their seats, watched in utter silence; they looked half-asleep, heads tilting gently forward and then back, eyes closing and then opening again, like cats on sunny windowsills pondering whether to tip into a full nap. Did they see what we were seeing? Did they see anything at all?

I turned to Jessie. She stared up at the screen, watching the tall broad seething thing waltzing its little partner round and round, watching with too-wide eyes and a pained set to her mouth. “You bastard,” she muttered, eyes pinned to the screen. “You goddamned bastard.”

Whether she meant Death who’d put us here to watch this, or the seething thing, I couldn’t rightly tell. Maybe both. The dancing was atomized and piecemeal and there was no rhyme to their rhythms and yet somehow I could see it, all their ceremonial stumbling around becoming a flowing, easy harmony in time with music I couldn’t hear. Somehow no matter what their actual steps, all of them were waltzing, waltzing perfectly, step-two-three around the forest clearing; a peculiar sort of energy seemed to flow from thing to thing, drawing all their particular movements into one. It was like watching the revealed inner workings of some great ticking clock.

“I can’t explain it,” Jessie said before I could ask. Eyes still fixed on the screen. “And I wouldn’t, not to a human. But it was—you got this feeling inside you, this need to move, to dance, and—it was something that connected all of us, all of us could hear the music of it, simultaneously, inside our heads. Whenever it happened. You couldn’t make it happen, sometimes it just did. Then we were all like, I don’t know, limbs or cells or something in one big body.” Her teeth caught her lower lip for a moment, pressing into the soft flesh uncannily like Lisa always did, then unlike Lisa, releasing it before it became raw. “I could hear music inside my head, once. Music that couldn’t be written down. But I don’t hear anything anymore.”

The dance continued. I wondered what they were all hearing, whether it sounded like an actual waltz or some other, alien melody only they would find beautiful. I wondered which one was Jessie, of the smaller things dancing, because they were all so rotten I just couldn’t tell.

“You wouldn’t explain it to a human,” I said. “But you just did.”

“For the deaf among us,” she muttered. “No. I wouldn’t. If you think I just explained anything to you, you’re even dumber than you look.”

She wasn’t fooling me. We barely knew each other but it wasn’t hard to see how every time she told someone something important, something she thought they might use against her, she went running backwards fast as she could; she didn’t trust anyone, except maybe that Linc and Renee who didn’t even know her anymore, but sometimes she still couldn’t help talking. Kind of like Stephen, who didn’t even know me anymore. No wonder they detested each other on sight.

“I don’t think I’m human,” I said.

It just slipped out. This place did that to you.

“Not just since Natalie killed me. Maybe not even since I was born. My mother died and was brought back and died again a good dozen times before she got pregnant—can a dead woman have a living baby? The lab wasn’t very sure, that’s why they were so excited about me, Natalie said. That’s why they let her go when she ran away—my mother, I mean—so they could watch us both. See how we integrated.” My hands, thrust in my pockets, curled slowly into fists. “See what kind of human beings we made, if we really could pass as the real thing.”

Jessie shook her head and laughed. “All that time, they were terrified we undead would start breeding—never mind we never had sex, or wanted it, and couldn’t have had it if we
did
want it. Just the idea spooked them. And then they turn right around and deliberately make an experiment of it anyway. They were that stupid.” Her voice was a harsh, scratchy chuckle. “That relentlessly stupid. Every damned time, hoos manage to surprise me.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care about whether zombies had ever had sex, any more than I cared about the dodo’s zoology.

“So,” Jessie asked, “how did you ‘integrate’?”

I thought about it. I’d had no friends. My mother had no friends. But human beings, we—they—liked to go on about loneliness being our, their, given condition, so that couldn’t be the measure. Anyway, my dad had loved her and she him. Other than blowing off school sometimes, I never caused any trouble, not until everything fell apart and I killed someone else. Human beings feel lonely and they feel isolated and they feel alienated, but the sensation inside me that I was thinking about was far beyond that; I didn’t need anyone to tell me it was, because I just
knew
it since I was a child. Hollow walls all inside me, their plaster so thin any random fist could punch right through them, that’s all I’d ever been and all I knew of myself and what was behind those walls, waiting to reveal itself, it unnerved me so much to imagine that it was best I’d never tried. I’d never thought anyone else felt this way, not even my mother, because we never talked about it and I never knew the reasons she might feel the same. Stephen, he was the very first who knew what that feeling was. Who knew it with me.

And if it wasn’t as strange a feeling as I’d thought, if there were thousands of people secretly walking around feeling just like me, maybe that just meant the lab had been our wonder-working providence for longer, more often, than anyone ever imagined.

And now this place, this weakened decayed place disappearing all around us, was seeping into those hollow spaces like a winter wind whistling through the gaps around a windowframe, filling them with a harsh, bracing, shockingly newfound love. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the thought that that was what really sustained me, and that soon it wouldn’t exist anymore.

The figures onscreen were slowing, winding down, still in rhythm yet somehow I sensed a collective exhaustion overtaking them. Dance night was nearly at an end. I wished it wouldn’t stop. I wished I could see pictures of my young mother again. Of her with my dad, who loved her and me but I barely remembered him now.

“I’m sorry you went deaf,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

The movie was going spotty, big white patches eating up the picture like the film had started to melt. Without planning it or really thinking about it, we joined hands, she and I, and we headed down the thin-carpeted aisle as dusty and grimy and faintly lit as any real movie theater’s and we kept on going, squinting into that brighter and brighter projected white light. She wouldn’t have stopped, not even for a moment, if I hadn’t tugged on her hand and made her.

“Come with us,” I called, to Stephen, my mother, Lisa, everyone still in their seats. “You have to come with us. Please.”

Were they supposed to stay here? Was it wrong of me to want them? I couldn’t leave them behind, I couldn’t leave everything and everyone behind like it didn’t even matter if it all got taken away. It wasn’t fair. I expected them to stay curled up comfortably in their seats, to nod off and fall asleep and break my heart in earnest. But they got up, they all got up right away and filed through the rows like they remembered just enough to know I was someone they listened to—sometimes, when they felt like it—and as he came closer, Stephen smiled at me like he almost knew who I was. Almost. My mother stayed close to him and me, sensing somehow that she should. Lisa hovered at the periphery, bewildered and lost.

We walked right through the screen. It yielded to us like the surface of a jelly, that faint sensation of a cool wobbliness as you press a finger straight down, and then we were where we really had been all along, in the realm of those things that weren’t alive anymore but could still run, skip, waltz in film, in pictures, in memory. On the other side of the great white screen.

TWENTY-TWO

NATALIE

I
didn’t really know where I was. Not that it mattered. Stephen left us here to die and there weren’t any woods anymore, just every now and then remnants of grass or dead bush twigs sticking straight up from the ground like broken fingernails, and the sun was gone, wetly smothered, like someone had spilled a huge bowl of oatmeal all over where there once had been a sky. The damp that wasn’t clouds had all the weak failing light that was left, contained inside itself, and soon enough that would fade away, too.

Stephen left. The other one, he left too. Everyone always left me, in the end. It wasn’t fair. Janey had even left me; her body lying there with one arm flung out wide and her pale hair coated and tarnished, dim with what looked like dust in the horrible oatmeal light, that had vanished too. It happened right in front of me, inches from my nose while I lay right there watching, but somehow I never actually
saw
it. Left me behind without even trying to say goodbye. Just like everyone else. Everyone.

The old woman, the one who’d invited herself along with us, she was crouching over me where I lay on the ground but I shoved her away, dug my heels into the dry dust, used the leverage to slowly raise up my knees and press my palms to the dead dirt and pull myself up sitting. Inch by inch. Every punch and kick from Billy, from Stephen, roared and echoed burning hot through me and I wanted to cry but I just gritted my teeth, made myself be as tough and indifferent as any good lab rat. When I was finally able to sit up, we were face to face, right up close.

“At least that awful darkness is gone,” she said.

Then she looked around for a second, scared like she’d just tempted fate, and that made me think even less of her so I looked away. The problem was there was nothing left to look at, everything so desolate I really could’ve cried. We could breathe but the air was burning, unpleasant, like catching constant lungfuls of someone else’s stale cigarette. I decided to keep looking at my shoes instead.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Her voice shook and quavered like someone much older, she couldn’t have been more than seventy or even that, and that somehow made me dislike her even more. “Do I look all right?” I spat. “Seriously? And if you are, with all this, you’re completely crazy. Of course, everyone is, lately. Including that stupid Amy. So I guess you’ve got an excuse.”

Janey’s dead foot only half-inside her shoe had been curved and pretty, the line of her toes snaking at just the right angle from the arch. Stephen, when I’d seen him wheeled in from experiments robed and barefoot, he had strange feet, like someone had snuck in during the night and moved all his toes a half-inch upward for a joke. Bad shoes, Grandma once explained to me, malforming his feet when he was young and the bones were more pliable. Babies should never wear hard shoes. My feet, as I studied them, just looked like plain old feet. Plain old shoes.

Something popped and crackled in me, a memory. “You look like her,” I said slowly. “A little bit like her. You have her eyes, and her voice except it’s cracked and too old and awful, and it should be her face except it’s so old and worn out it can’t be hers. Grandma wasn’t half as old as you. You’re her.” I looked up then because I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help but feel wild hope now that everything else had gone. “It is you, isn’t it?”

She flung her arms around me and I smelled dirt, sweat, horrible bone-breaking weariness and I almost cried a little, I couldn’t help it because I’d thought I’d never see her again. But only almost. She still had that lab smell just like I did somewhere deep in her pores, that lingering not quite medicinal something that got in your skin and even now wouldn’t get out, nothing could ever scrub it away. I closed my eyes and took in breaths of it, for familiarity, but I didn’t hug her back.

She pulled away and I was glad of it, even though I didn’t want her to leave. “I’m not surprised you didn’t know me,” she said. In that quavering, all-wrong old woman’s voice. “At first. The last year’s been...” She broke off, something flitting across her face like terror, then caught herself. “I’m not what I was. I’ve paid for all this as much or more than anyone, Natalie, you have to believe me.”