Grave (9 page)

Because nobody around here listens to me, he just turned around and headed out the hall, like he was just so sure I’d drop everything and run after him, and since nobody tells me anything unless I go looking for it, I followed him out, through the A-Wing and across Residency and out the old double back doors. The beach was just a rumor back here, a quiet prickling sensation that traveled through the air so everything felt lighter, cleaner, and at the same time ponderous with the sheer weight of water. The grass was up around my shins, the woods bordering the lab grounds on three sides thick with leaves and blooms; at the far edge of the trees, a deer nibbled away, too used to humans to do more than stop and look up when it heard us. I was about to ask where the hell he was taking me anyway, I wasn’t getting lured into the woods on some pretense so he could kill me and take over, when he stopped in his tracks and pointed a few feet in front of us, down in the dandelions.

“Okay,” I said. “So what?”

The bodies weren’t torn or bitten up like what Stephen and Amy’s mother had done, when they fought everybody off. These just lay there staring sightless at the sky, intact, dead. I squatted down to touch one and she was cold and stiff, clothes soaked through from the saturated grass and last night’s rain. “So what am I supposed to do with this?” I asked him, as he paced back and forth with fingers curled tight over his gun holster. “So you guys were stupid enough to get into another fight yesterday, before they left, you should’ve just let them go—”

“This is nothing to do with those frea—with yesterday, okay, you get it? Do I have to spell it out?” He halted in his tracks and stood there big and bristling angry, but with hunched-up shoulders like he was cringing away from some invisible hand about to slap him sideways. “This just happened now. It just happened, what, half an hour ago. We were out here, talking shit over, and I turn around—I mean, literally, I turn around ‘cause I think I hear someone coming out the back—and when I turn my head again, boom. Gone.” He waved a hand at the bodies. “All dead. Right in front of me. Or, in back of me.”

Why are the people who work for me so stupid? “They’re stiff,” I said. “Full-blown rigor, they’ve been dead for—”

“I know they’re stiff. I know they’re cold. I know what it looks like—and whatever it looks like, it was just a half hour ago.”

He was pacing around again, walking a perimeter of the bodies like a dog sniffing tracks, that filthy dog of Amy’s who hated me most of all. “You gotta do something,” he said. “You think you’re in charge of this shithole now, they’re supposed to have taught you all kinds of medical shit, you’ve gotta do something. You’ve gotta bring them back.”

Like it was that easy, you just snap your fingers and whoever you decide to bring back—even under the very best conditions, the best test subjects, it didn’t work anything like that. Like I’d even waste my time bringing one of his stupid friends back, if it did. “I can’t do that,” I said. “How long did you work here, anyway? You know it’s not that simple, a lot of times you do everything right and dead people just stay—”

“You have to do something!” He had my arms now, digging in the fingertips hard and abrading like how it’d felt when that drawer kept slamming, all inside my bones. “They were right here, we were all right there, then I turn my head and they all just fucking drop like something flipped a switch—you think you’re in charge around here, you gotta get your ass in there and figure out what happened, how to—”

“Let go of me.”

“This is just like before.” Still had his hands on me, the grinding pressure of his fingers boring straight through to my bones, stuck drawer slam-slam-slam. His eyes were big and luminous with panic. “Just like before, when everyone here started getting sick and then everyone else, everywhere. You fuckers went and did it again.”

“You let go of me,” I said, quiet, calm as you please, “or I won’t ‘figure out’ a damn thing.”

He let go. The hatred smoking and heating him up all inside like a brazier felt good to see—it didn’t bother me at all when weak little humans or plague-dogs hated me because they were so jealous. Because the world was mine now, not theirs—and not my man’s either, I didn’t care how much he tried to scare me. He was a liar. “I don’t have time for this,” I said, and turned right around to go back inside. “You bring them inside if you want, I can’t stop you, and I’ll look at them
if
I get a chance, but I’m not promising—”

“Oh, shit.”

His voice sounded torn in two, pain and shock and fear all twisted up and made into sound, and that’s what made me turn around again.

It had stormed during the night and my first thought was that somehow lightning hit the trees while I was sleeping and I didn’t hear it, hit them so hard it fried them from the inside and then all the land around them too. Except lightning didn’t work like that and the trees didn’t look scorched or heat-blackened, they were just gray and bare and dead. And those trees had been living just seconds before, living and covered in tiny pretty green leaves like those salads they used to serve in the lab refectory, bushes exuberant with tiny pink and white bits of lace, branching sprays of deep red berries, maples letting off winged seedlings like candy thrown from a parade float. Gone. The grass, the unmown weedy grass almost up to my knees, that was still living, but the deer who’d gone right back to its lunch after it saw us was lying there in the clover and dandelions. Lying still.

The lab man whose name I couldn’t remember, his arm was reaching in vain up to the trees, the wall of sticks that’d been trees, like he could entreat them not to do what they’d gone and done. His face was drawn and white. “What’d y’all go and do?” he asked softly. The southern in him was coming out stronger now he was really frightened, hillbilly drawl, those families that came up here a hundred years ago or more to work the steel mills and still sounded like they’d barely left Alabama. “The hell did you—now everything’s getting sick.” He started to laugh and the laughter was a scary sound, scarier than the wall of sticks. “Wasn’t enough just to kill
people
, now everything everywhere’s getting sick, I can’t believe you went and did it again—”

“You shut up,” I whispered, Halloween-mask hissing, and then I was running toward the deer, the green grass it should’ve been bending down to eat. It just lay there on its side, big pretty liquid stupid deer-eyes wide open and a mouthful of clover, torn-off bits of creeping Charlie, still wedged in its teeth. I pushed at it with my fingertips, ready to jump back, in case this was some sort of prey-animal trick and it might any moment spring back to its feet. Playing possum.

It just lay there.

Those things my man said to me, back in my room, they were lies. The thing about everyone suffering because of me, because I had his secret and I wouldn’t leave. I knew lies when I heard them, nobody ever said anything to me but lies. Except him, a long time ago. He was lying, and even if he weren’t he couldn’t have meant things like flowers and deer. They never did anything to him. Trees. He couldn’t stop me, couldn’t stop our work, trying to scare me with a few dead trees.

He was lying! It was all a trick!

The deer felt cold and stiff when I touched it, like it’d been lying there for hours. I got up, my bent leg already cramped beneath me, and brushed the dirt off my shins. “Hey,” I shouted to Lab Man, Hillbilly Scaredy-Boy. Jerkface pronouncing
Miss Beach
so precise and proper, over-enunciated, trying to make it sound like another word. “Come help me carry this back in. You wanted me to look at your stupid friends, okay, fine. But this first. Come and help me!”

No answer. Because nobody was standing there anymore.

I walked back to where we’d both been, slow as you please, because all that happened was he got disgusted standing there waiting for me, went off down the hillside, still whining and crying about how I cared more about some dumb animal than his buddies. That’s all. Because I know lies when I hear them. I’m no fool.

The other bodies were still there and he was next to them, curled up on his side just like the deer, one hand on his holster though his gun wasn’t drawn and the other arm still stretched out, full length, like he was grabbing for a dandelion from where he lay. Eyes wide open, liquid-clear with fright. Cold and stiff. Like he’d been there for hours.

No more dandelions. In the time it took me to walk from the deer back to him, all those bursts of yellow suddenly went damp rotten brown, right there in the grass, and died.

FIVE

JESSIE

“W
ell?” I asked. “What d’you think?”

Renee frowned, squinted. “Do you want an honest answer?”

Why the hell do people always say that? If I didn’t give a shit what they actually thought about something, I wouldn’t waste my time asking. “Spit it out,” I said.

“Well—” She squinted harder, looking her own face up and down as it stared back at her from the paper, then she broke into a grin. “You ain’t no Picasso. But we already knew that, right?” She ran her hand along a cheekbone, like she was checking its measurements against the drawing. “And you didn’t put my nose totally out of joint, so I like it. It’s good.”

Renee broke her nose last autumn—shattered it, actually—fighting over food with the other Prairie Beach refugees, and even though it healed right off like these new bodies do, it never looked quite the same as it did before: it skewed to the side in a way Linc and I barely noticed and Renee couldn’t stop thinking about. Her fingers reached up constantly and unconsciously, stroking and tracing the bridge-slope like she could coax it back where it’d been. I’d offered to re-break it for her, see if a strategic blow from the right might push it over left, but she always said no. She’d had her last fight, she kept saying, even though I wasn’t angling to fight her at all. Those last buried bits of hoocow in her kept showing up, like some burrowing thing inside her had turned over all her earth; it made Linc impatient, those sudden outbursts of delicacy, but I kept telling him, she was barely out of the ground a month before everything started changing for good. Barely that. You had to make allowances, like it or not.

“I really do like it,” she insisted. Teresa’s rings clinked and rattled on her thin fingers, the faintest little wind-chime sound, as they traveled from cheek to nose and back again. “I’m not just saying that—”

“Okay already, I asked you once. I ain’t no Picasso. And you ain’t no Botticelli.” She laughed and I laid the drawing out next to the others on the old short-legged table I’d stuck in my cabin for a desk, reaching for a pencil. “What month is it?”

“May. I think.” She frowned. “You better ask Linc, but I’m pretty sure it’s May.”

I wrote that down at the bottom left corner, then leafed through all the others; May’s nose was less flattering but more accurate than April’s, hair texture was a lot truer to life than December’s, still couldn’t draw hands for shit but I gave up on those back in January. In November, Linc had brought back some art pencils and a tattered yellowed book called
The Mind of the Artist Within
—he said it’d been a big thing for a while, back when he was still alive; a lot of hoo-babble inside about Jung and Myers-Briggs types and accessing the right side of the brain, but in between the bullshit was line and perspective and other actual useful stuff, full of drawings for examples, and the babble plus Renee’s face to practice on helped pass the time.

Passing the time, all the time, that was our job now, just like it’d been before. When we weren’t hunting, Linc had his books and the garden. I had the notebook and a half, page after scribbled page, where I’d tried writing down everything that happened to me, to us, then gave up because I can’t write for shit and tore out the rest of the pages for pictures. Renee did most of our foraging now and was constantly trying to work out how to make a solar oven, weatherize the cabins, build a chicken coop, and a thousand other things every bit as useless as my sitting around trying to pencil her hair just right.

I blamed Lisa for all that, Lisa who kept reminding and reminding Renee of her long-lost hoodom for no good reason whatsoever and then just took off, with barely any warning, mumbling something about how she wasn’t doing anyone any good staying here and wanting to find out what actually became of things while she was sick and blah blah fucking blah just say you can’t stand the sight of us anymore, why don’t you? She never forgave me for saving her, I knew she hadn’t; never forgave me for pulling her out of the sands as something more than human, not quite human, why the hell was everything for her still and always about the fucking humans? They had their world, whatever was left of it, and I didn’t care what. I had mine. Frankly, I liked my company a hell of a lot more.

I hoped Linc was telling the truth when he said he foraged all my art stuff from an elementary school, that he didn’t get it from our new neighbors down the road. Always showing up here, that bunch, no warning, acting all please-pretty and howdy-neighbor-God-bless-you and you
couldn’t scare them away
for love or blood, they drove me insane. Linc hated humans as much as I did, maybe even more, but I still caught him talking to them in the woods and he just shrugged, said
They might be useful idiots, sometime.
Half of that was right, anyway.