Dust (16 page)

“What are you doing, Teresa?” Joe asked, without a trace of belligerence.

Teresa fumbled with the matchbox, lips pressed together in concentration—she had lips again, grown newly full and fleshy to cover her dead grinning teeth for the first time in years. Her cheeks were fleshy too, the rot retreating, and under saplike beads of refinery-stinking sweat her skin was smooth and firm, almost springy over solid cushions of flesh. Her hair was still lank and limp but it wasn’t dead straw anymore, it had stopped falling out. Her hands, still inhumanly bony, trembled badly but she kept at it until she pulled out a match, her whole body taut and twitching with hunger. A newborn’s hunger.

“Teresa?” Mags said. “Put those away.”

Teresa pursed her full new lips, studying the thin strip of striking paper. “Just go back to your meat.”

We didn’t go back to our meat. We couldn’t go back to it because Teresa was trying to light a match, set a fire, and even without Ben’s half-charred face to remind us we knew what fire could do. Even Renee had heard Annie’s story, poor dead Annie. All those gate guards, with their flamethrowers.

“Put those down,” I said, the words springing from me by themselves. “Now, or we’ll take them.”

Teresa gave me a long, triumphant stare. She knew I knew, I could see in her eyes she knew, and it didn’t matter because she was far beyond us now, her illness making her something
other
, no need to be careful around us because she wasn’t us anymore. “Try,” she said.

I didn’t know Linc was beside me until he took my hand, and then of all folks Renee was there too, the three of us heading for a fight before Joe grabbed and tackled me, pinning me as I flailed and cursed and spat. Renee fell back, scared, and Ben and Linc threw themselves on Teresa, grabbing for the matchbox; Teresa tossed Linc aside like trash from a speeding car and then there was the sound of lightning cracking a tree trunk in half, the sound of Ben’s arm wrenched sideways and back by Teresa’s clenched teeth. His hands lost their grip on her neck and he screamed and screamed.

Mags gasped out loud. Teresa bit and pulled and crunched at Ben’s shoulder until I heard another snap, and then he staggered away moaning in pain and tumbled heavily to the ground. Teresa, the soul of calm, picked her matchbook up from the dirt and stood there, grinning, happy, shaking so hard with hunger pangs her rings clinked on her fingers like wind chimes.

“Anyone else?” she said.

Renee grabbed my hand like Linc had, and I pressed back without thinking. Joe stood beside us, ready to jump again if we went anywhere near Teresa. Linc crawled to where Ben lay twitching on the ground. Ben, oozing from the mouth, didn’t move.

After several clumsy tries Teresa lit a match, tossed it into the pit and watched the pile of kindling slowly flicker to life. She yanked hunks of deer meat off our abandoned carcass, speared them on another branch and held them over the flames, pacing and skirting like someone waltzing with a live grenade; the smell of roasting flesh crawled through the air and Renee started to retch. Teresa chewed greedily at every burned scrap, sucking her fingers for the grease and letting out little sated sighs. I studied every face to see who else was properly sick at the sight and who looked like they wanted a taste, just a little bitty taste, and when I growled low and threatening at nothing, I saw Joe smile. Billy growled too, confused but not wanting to be left out. Ben still hadn’t moved.

Her meal complete, Teresa picked up the tin bucket and tossed it at Sam’s feet, waiting; finally he grabbed it, shuffled silently to the river and back and doused the fire. I felt a weak sort of gratitude, watching it steam up and die. Some water splashed from the pit and Billy, feet dampened, jumped and shouted as if flames were curled up in the fat droplets ready to burst forth. Teresa shook her head in disgust.

“Pathetic,” she sneered. “Scared of a little fire. No wonder we’re stuck out here, while the Rat Patrol’s roaming all over the whole county, half of Chicago—I should’ve known better than to come back to this hellhole. None of you could handle what I’ve seen. None of you could make the change.”

Her voice snapped with fury but it was happy too, a high-flying manic happy like her eyes when she stared into the fire she’d made. Nobody tried to stop her, nobody got in her way as she headed for the footbridge leading to the parking lot and the outside road. Billy kicked and stomped on the bits of branch in the fire pit, reducing them to splinters.

“Careful, sweetie,” Mags pleaded. “They might still be hot—”

“What the hell was that all about?” he shouted, grinding his heel into the ash. “Huh? What’s wrong with that bitch?”

Billy and Mags danced on the fire pit’s stone border, crushing it to powder, while everyone else gathered around Ben. I pushed my way through and found him rocking back and forth on his side, trying to hide his arm beneath him like something shoplifted.

“You okay?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t. “How bad is it?”

“My arm,” Ben whispered, cradling it as it crooked nearly backward from the shoulder; his teeth chattered, he was fever-warm. “I can’t move it, it hurts.” Linc tried, gently, to straighten it out and Ben stiffened with agony. “Don’t.”

“You’ll live,” I said, because that was how we talked to each other when we were really hurt; pity was wasted, panic fatal. “Hell, look at me—even if you lose it, you’ll hunt fine.”

Linc glanced at me, both of us silently thinking the same thing: Should we just tear it off, right now? It’d hurt, Ben would pass out from the pain, but he’d live. Adjust. Hunt again. We might have to, if it didn’t heal. Sam looked up at both of us.

“No,” he said, baring his teeth.

“It hurts,” Ben repeated, and closed his eyes. “Please go away now.”

We left Sam sitting with him and headed for the gazebo, appetites gone, everyone staring sidelong at everyone else for a hint of the secrets they were concealing; I heard the word
change
in murmured snatches of talk like a coin glinting in a river, pretended it meant nothing to me. Why had she done it in front of us, why didn’t she just keep scavenging in private? Maybe just to show she could. Maybe it was a test, we were supposed to have been intrigued and amazed and demand to be transformed too. If this is what it does to you? I’d rather be ground into compost.

Joe held back, taking my arm, and drew me aside into the trees. He looked me in the eye for the first time since the dance.

“So I guess you know,” he said. “That Teresa’s . . . changed.”

“I told you,” I said, hard and cold. “I told you it wasn’t just ’maldies. Now let go of my goddamned arm.”

“I didn’t know what the hell they were,” Joe hissed, sinking his fingers in harder. “Or if it had anything to do with Teresa. I’ve been following her, trying to figure out what she’s up to, she’s been buddying up to the Rat Patrol just like I said—I told you that, didn’t I, you can go check for yourself if you think I’m such a liar. Inside that abandoned church out on the highway, the big gray building. There’s a bunch of them there right now.”

“You’re sure it was them? You got close enough to—”

“Jessie, I was in the Rat for a good decade or three, I think I know Rommel and Ron and their little psycho inner circle by sight. They were all out there, just cooling their heels, a little country vacation. I left before they saw me.” He leaned in closer. “And tell you what, they all had that same smell to them. Like she does. That same look, like their faces were filling out again. You couldn’t miss it, not from yards away.”

He paused, letting that sink in. I stared right back, letting him make whatever he wanted of the silence, and when he smelled the animosity on me the guitar chords in his head started up sharp, angry, loud.

“You’re getting fucking paranoid,” he said.

“Hard not to, when you’ve been flat-out lying to me—”

“Jessie, I didn’t
know
what they were, okay, and I just goddamned told you what I do know. Whatever this is, Teresa’s got it, the Rat smell like they’ve got it.” His grip loosened, eased, and he slid his hand away. “And you said you’ve been feeling sick.”

I just kept staring at him. I couldn’t think how the hell else to react to that.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded.

“You’ve been tired all the time, right? Feeling hot? Feverish? Under the weather?” He was looking down at me not in triumph, no gotcha glances, but genuine concern. “You’re eating okay, you don’t smell all that different but—”

“
All that
different?” I shoved him, I didn’t want a fight, not another one like the last one, but he was revving up to deserving it. “So who’s the crazy paranoid here? Yeah, I’m goddamned tired and worn out, I have a right to be: Teresa’s acting nuts, Renee’s up my ass, you’re always pitching a fit, those sick hoos are all over our woods like beetles on a feeder—”

“I took care of them,” Joe said. “Don’t worry.”

Those bodies in the cornfield. Another question answered. Maybe. “All that different? I wanna know what you mean, ‘all that’ different—”

“Jessie, it’s like I keep telling you, I just want you to be okay.” He folded his arms, stepping back when I tried to push him, not letting me set him off. “If you’re just tired and that’s all then fine, great, but Teresa’s watching you, I told you she’s got you singled out—”

“So the best way to make sure I’m okay is to make up some bullshit story about ’maldies and—”

“
I told you
, I didn’t know what the fuck they were! You were right, they smelled human, they bleed red, I should’ve guessed it myself, I’m sorry!” He curled his fist to strike out at an oak in frustration; his arm hovered clenched and suspended in midair like a stop-motion frame, then he slowly let it drop. “You were right. And Teresa, the Rat, I know they know something, they know a lot. All Teresa ever let slip once was that it has something to do with a lab.”

I nodded, calm and easy like this didn’t signify anything in particular to me. Joe bared his teeth, irritated as he always was when he couldn’t be my expert on everything. “The Rat’s all over Gary and Burns Harbor and everywhere else the scientists are meant to be, they’d know all about this better than she ever would. Maybe that’s another reason she wants in with them, they can all—so who the fuck asked you two in on the conversation? Get the hell out of here before I crack your little skulls in half!”

Linc and Renee turned and walked away; I saw Linc’s sardonic expression, Renee’s long sharp mother-of-pearl teeth scraping and grinding at her lip, and then they went back through the trees arm in arm.

Joe sneered at their retreating backs, spitting in their wake, and I rubbed at a temple starting to ache. Yeah, look here, Joe, this means I’m a plague-dog for sure, it can’t just be you’re all a goddamned pain in my head, my neck, my ass. I was holding a string of half-truths and unfinished stories fragile as Florian’s dusty powdery bones, a paper chain dropped in a puddle, but I had to figure it all out because hoos were getting sick, when they got sick they always took it out on us, what if they decided to try to burn us out, if we all—enough. Enough decline, enough dropping into dust, enough of everyone falling ill. There had to be a way to stop it.

“I don’t know much either,” I said. That was nothing but the truth.

What if this really was just as bad for us as hoos, if we all died? Like Lisa might die, and Jim? Joe. Linc. Ben—I shoved that last thought out of my head, you couldn’t kill anyone just with teeth, not for trying. Ridiculous. Joe was right, he’d heal up.

Joe actually smiled at me, the proud, almost proprietary smile of someone who thinks you have a problem only they can solve. “We’ll figure it out, Jessie,” he told me. “One way or another, we’ll get the jump on Teresa. If she thinks this is gonna be good for her, all this, whatever it is, she’s in for a surprise.”

When Teresa made us take out Lillian, after Teresa jumped her for the gang leadership and blinded her and Happy Tsarina’s first royal decree was making us two stomp her, we did as told; we let Florian and Annie and Sam kiss her good-bye and dragged her far out in the woods where nobody’d have to hear or watch, she was sobbing, she’d lost all her courage when she lost her remaining eye,
Don’t do it, you fucking backstabbers, you’re happy about this, I don’t deserve to die again. Don’t do it. Don’t.
Joe kept talking to her all the way to the clearing, calm, quiet, no furious guitar chords and no sneering at her soft-headed hoocow pleading.
We’re doing you a favor, Lillian. You can’t hunt this way. Can’t fight. You’d die slow. We’re making it quick. You’d do it for us. You know you would
.

“We’ll figure it out,” I repeated. “What Teresa’s up to. This sickness. All of it.”

“Together,” said Joe.

Lillian just stood there in the clearing, waiting, no matter all her hoocow pleading and sniveling she wouldn’t lie down to die, we’d have to knock her down. We’d have to fight. Joe nodded slow in renewed respect and I started backing away, backing away and now he was grabbing me instead, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do this to her.
Yes you will,
he told me, still quiet, still calm, so much merciless pity in his eyes I couldn’t stand looking at him, at Lillian.
Yes you will. Because you’re not leaving me to do this all by myself, Jessie, not if you love me. I’m not shouldering this one all by myself.

“I’m not sick,” I told Joe. “I’m just tired. Sick and tired. Of everyone and everything.”

Joe nodded. Sadness flittered fast and evasive across his face.

“I know the feeling,” he said.

So we both did it. Quick. She started crying again when we were on her but that didn’t last long. Afterward we sat in the woods together, far from her body, not saying anything. So that’s that, was all I kept thinking. That’s that for that. And now there’s no there there. One thing when it’s an out-of-control pickup truck that does it, another when it’s me. Us. Joe was right. Let it be both of us.