Grave (39 page)

“Me? Stop you?” Laughing softly now, rocking back and forth, forth and back like the crazy old bat she’d become and if Janey were only here, she’d have understood and not laughed. Janey would’ve been sweet and docile and helped me whenever I needed her to and I would find out where Death had taken her, I’d bring her back, I’d bring everyone back. This fight, this grand duel with Death, it wasn’t over yet. I would win.

“Me, stop you,” she repeated. “The
world’s
stopped you, Natalie, in case you haven’t noticed. We started by wiping out humanity dead and living, because we just couldn’t stand the idea of sharing the planet with our own deceased kind, and then we finished by bringing on this. All in the name of progress, which is to say our own need to be secular messiahs. All to get more research grants. Money. Egotism and money. That’s our legacy. Pride and greed.” Laughing harder. Louder. “We destroyed the world in order to save it.”

She chortled and choked and there was actual spit forming at the corners of her mouth, white and ropy even as she doubled over with laughter gone to dust-dry coughs. Janey’d been just a little bit crazy but Ellen, Grandma, was out of her mind. Why was everyone I used to look up, care about, such a disappointment in the end? I’d have to talk to her like a child.

“We haven’t destroyed the world,” I said, slow and patient. “Death’s tried to, because he can’t stand we have his secret. The genie’s out of the bottle. As for humanity, before—”

Well, what about it, before? I wasn’t one of them, almost nobody who’d survived was one of them and they never did me any favors, none at all. Grandma certainly never did, whatever she said now. “Dinosaurs. They had their time, they’re nearly extinct,
so what.
We’re here now.
Homo novus,
the new humanity, and as I bring us back, there’ll be more and more of us and we’ll take our rightful place on the planet. We’ll bring the plants and animals back, the whole ecosystem back, Death’s secrets are in the palms of our hands, we’ve literally breathed them in—”

“Two people!” She gasped for breath, still laughing, her voice going up and down like a rocking chair seesawing on its runners. “Two people you managed, just two, by sheer blind luck, and you look at all this and actually think you can—”

“We can have children,” I said. The thought of what the world would look like with just us in it, no Death to rule over us and no her to ruin the fun, it made me smile in her face and not care about her laughter, her spittle, her senile foolery. “We’re not like zombies, sterile remnants, revenants—we can breed, we can have children. Like Amy. You were all so excited about Amy, I remember that, because you thought it was impossible.” Wonderful perfect Amy you probably always loved more than me, probably just waiting for your moment to bring her back to the lab and introduce her to everyone, everyone who celebrated
her
birthday and not mine while she wasn’t even there. To make her your right-hand assistant and not me, even though she knew less than nothing. Turned her back on me. Ignorant traitor. But I’d have to forgive her, for our species’ sake. For now.

“I’m going to find all the secrets of the stones,” I said, “all the ones you couldn’t—new ones, that neither of us know are in there. I’m going to find all of them. And when I do,
Homo novus
won’t owe anybody
anything
.” Not Death, not you either, Grandma. Ellen. Whoever she really was now. I couldn’t help smiling, thinking of the future. “We won’t owe anything to Death, or to age, or to illness—and so we won’t owe anything to life, either. All that we’ll ever be beholden to is ourselves.”

Poor Janey. She vanished before I could save her but I’d figure it all out very soon—even if I couldn’t save the others, all the others now swarming sadly around us, I’d bring
her
back and it wouldn’t happen ever again. I’d find a way to make her one of us. She was always nice to me, she wouldn’t act like Amy and Stephen did when I brought them back. She’d be so happy. She wouldn’t have to worry anymore about what Don or Billy or anyone else said. She’d be beholden to nobody but herself.

There was so much to fix. I had to get started
soon
.

“No more teachers,” Grandma said. Tempered and subdued, none of the old briskness, the syllables turning over in her mouth painfully and slow. “No more books. The holidays have begun, and they’ll never ever end.”

“This isn’t holidays,” I said. Good and sharp, like how she was always sharper than she needed to be with me. “This is work. I’m ready to get to work. We’re going to rebuild all of this, all ourselves, and we won’t owe any of it to anyone else.”

“You could,” she said, and she was nodding now like she finally understood it, like I’d passed some sort of secret test. “If you were a grown woman, the world what it was, all the resources there at your—you might have done it. I really think so. Just enough knowledge on your side, just enough human disorganization and panic for you to exploit, in the name of your own kind—you have it in you, Natalie. You really do.”

Could have. If. Not
can
. She still didn’t get it and that was making me angry. “
Could
have done it? Are you even listening to me? I’m
doing
it. It’s happening. It starts right now.” I clenched the last bits of stone in my hand, the jagged candy-shell remnants emptied of their filling; they prodded my palm soft and insistent like another set of fingers and that vague pain where they dug in felt good, like a little reminder of who and what was really relevant here. They were living things too, these lake stones, they understood me and life and death like Grandma and all her lab flunkies never had. “If Death wants a war, fine, he’s got one. He declared it. And we’re declaring our independence. And we’re going to win.”

Grandma, Ellen, thought that over, her ruined chin resting on one knotted-up, trembling fist. She nodded some more. “And in that case,” she said, “I finally know why I survived all this. Why my life was spared. I thought it was punishment. But it was something more.”

She uncoiled her clenched fingers. Stroked my face right along the hairline, old gesture from the old days. “My life was saved,” she said, “so that I could stop you.”

TWENTY-THREE

STEPHEN

W
here was I, and what was I doing there?

I was almost certain I’d known, once, not long ago. But that had faded away and I couldn’t remember. I really couldn’t remember. We’d been watching a movie. There was a little boy on the screen, with dark hair and hesitant swaying toddler’s steps, carrying a toy he kept frowning at and examining like some factory inspector as he cradled it in his arms. A stuffed dog, with floppy felt ears that looked frayed and chewed to pieces. Nothing else seemed to happen in the movie, though, just him walking around da-ba-da’ing to himself and his toy dog, but I still liked watching it. It felt like happiness would’ve been just sitting there and watching that kid forever.

“You have to come with us,” someone was calling. “Please.”

I didn’t want the movie to be over, ever, but then it was and all of us were getting up to leave. The usher, or whoever she was who was kicking us out, I knew her. I knew I knew her. I liked her, her quiet voice and anxious eyes and tangled red hair whose texture I felt like I knew, like once very long ago I had touched it. Maybe I could talk her into letting us stay? But almost before I realized it, we were all leaving, me and the pretty worried girl and the few other moviegoers, all strangers, and we walked like it was nothing right through the blank white screen. It yielded to us like a curtain, soft and heavy, and I shivered as we pushed through it because it was so cold—

Water. Except it hadn’t been water, it had just collected in the lake basin in a semblance of waves and currents. We’d left the shore, all of us together, wading through it to the other side, and then without knowing how, we were in the movie theater. But why had we done that, and who were all these people? We were looking for... something, someone? But how? Why? What was this funny spot over my vision, growing slowly bigger and bigger the more I turned my head, like I was going blind on one side? I didn’t want to go blind. I needed my eyes, now more than ever, but I had no idea why.

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, frustrated, scared, and that red-headed girl looked terribly sad. She said something I forgot as soon as it left her lips, fading like I was losing hearing along with sight, and she hugged me. That felt good, but I still didn’t know who she was. Another red-haired woman, older, hugged her back, but that just seemed to make the younger one sadder. I couldn’t quite see where we were anymore, but something familiar insinuated itself into my socks as I walked, the soft, faintly scratching grit of sand; when I deliberately shoved one sneaker into it, the ground yielded, sank down over my foot and ankle like a great collapsed anthill. Definitely sand. Someone would be happy about this. Someone had told me how much he wanted to see his beach one more time, a long time ago, but I couldn’t remember—I couldn’t—

I couldn’t see anything now. I was blind. Somehow that didn’t upset me anymore, even knowing I had needed my sight, my eyes, for something terribly important. Whatever had mattered, once, was now dissolving all around me in a way that felt, at first, almost sweet. Like sugar in hot tea. I couldn’t see anything, and I fell. Someone—I hoped it was the red-headed girl—was cradling me on the sand, and voices were shouting and calling around me, but I couldn’t tell one from another. They were as musical and indistinguishable as the cries of birds.

Whatever “birds” were.

I fell because I no longer had feet. They just disappeared from under me, an empty space where once something had borne my weight, and so I collapsed. Had I ever had feet? Was I something that was supposed to have feet, arms, eyes?

I still had hands. I put them to my face, at the place where I was almost certain I was meant to have eyes. They were gone. No sight, no more sounds either. Had there ever been anything to hear, to see? Had I always just imagined it?

Some small, stubbornly solid part of me was screaming, deep down inside. It gagged and choked on the sickly sweetness, as my limbs, face, memory melted away like sugar in hot tea, and even without ears I kept hearing it, somehow, far within:
No! I don’t want this, I don’t want to be nothing! I don’t want everything to go away! Stay here!
But there wasn’t any “here.” There wasn’t anything. There wasn’t anything left of me.

I was something, once. A thing that was. That existed. Wasn’t I? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t.

Memory. I didn’t know what that was. Not anymore.

Existence. That was—

Nothing.

TWENTY-FOUR

LISA

“S
top it!” someone kept shouting at me. “You have to stay here, you have to remember who you are! Goddammit, this can’t happen now, you have to—”

“Jessie,” someone else said, pleading with the woman shouting at me. It was a red-haired girl with tears running down her cheeks, staring in a way that puzzled me at an empty space on the ground. “She can’t help it, for God’s sake, Florian and Stephen couldn’t—let go of her. That won’t help. Let her go.”

The angry girl, Jessie, had my shoulders in a death grip and was shaking me back and forth, making my teeth rattle, but the funny part was I couldn’t actually feel her touch at all—not even a sensation of pressure, like when a drill bears down on a numbed tooth. I trembled in her grasp and yet it was as if she never really had me, as if she held nothing. She let go, looking miserable and lost, and the red-haired girl reached up and tucked a lock of my hair behind an ear. I didn’t feel that either.

“She’s still here now, at least. That’s something, isn’t it?” The red-haired girl, the nice girl, turned to Jessie, then to me. “You’re still here,” she told me.

Was that important? I nodded and smiled, in case it was.
Be here now.
The ground beneath my feet was pale and grainy and once had a name, a name particular to itself—not “dirt,” not “grass,” if I gave it a few minutes I was sure it’d come to me—but the thought drifted away as soon as it appeared, drifted out and upward into the great bright blueness overhead. That, too, had once also had a name. Wandering over that strange ground were three little receding dots: a black-haired boy, a blonde girl, a woman whose hair was the same bright shade as the nice girl’s where it wasn’t wide ribbons of silvery white. There was a child there, too, not more than maybe five or six, but instead of walking around, she was just lying there, curled up in the shifting hillocks. A nap, that might be nice. Lying down. Standing here, however important that apparently was, was exhausting.