Dust (21 page)

So afraid, I thought as I drifted away. It occurred to me that if they were that afraid they might just decide to send me up while I was out, and how easy that would make it for Joe, but vigilance and heartache were both undercut by sleep.

 

 

 

 

When we woke up, Mags and Billy were gone. I wasn’t surprised they’d lit out for the territories, not after what I’d overheard, but it was weirdly hurtful all the same. Poor Sam sat there all by himself on the gazebo steps, picking indifferently at the carcass of a duck.

“The mister and missus got nervous, decided to head out Valparaiso way,” he said, with the permanent inviting grin of death but tired, tired eyes. “Ain’t heard no stories of sickness there. But I guess they’ll find out. I guess it’s just you and me, kiddies. So, who’s got the energy for a manhunt?”

Hardy-har. We grabbed the slowest-moving possum we could find and gorged ourselves, talked about nothing, told stories until the sky became streaky and pale. I went on a flower search with Sam, who’d been a gardener when he was alive and still got a kick out of spotting the first crocus. The bulbs must have been late this year. We fell asleep all in a pile, firm still-elastic ’maldie skin up against rot-softened bloater and bone-stripped dusty, and for the first time in forever it was like being a real gang again, a real us, however foreshortened. I pressed my forehead into Sam’s exposed shoulder blade, my feet into Linc’s shin where it softened like a blister, and dreamed of running around the park playground like a kiddie. Running. Had I really once been able to run? My feet twitched as I chased sleep.

Running. I wasn’t just running but breathing in this dream, breathing with my lungs like a hoo instead of through my skin and bones, and I heard my own short, tired pants of breath in my ears as I slowed down, walked, tottered like a proper undead into the playground’s sandpit. The pit got bigger and wider and stretched out like a beachfront, the water a vague greenish-gray streak in the distance, and Florian was lying in the sand in front of me half-buried, curled on his side. Sand up over his arms and streaking his shoulders like folds of a rumpled blanket. I winced at how much all those infernal glassy grains must have hurt.

“I gotta congratulate you,” he said to me, and smiled up at me calm and sweet. His eyes were the same quiet, peaceful blue. “You’re gonna have a baby.”

The hoos used to think we really could get pregnant, have “zombie” babies, or maybe that was just their worst made-up nightmare. A whole new
breed
of undead. The uterus is one of the last things to decay, I remember I read that somewhere. All that thick muscle. Maybe that’s where they got the idea, that and seeing our bellies swollen up with rot-gas. Sometimes I do wish I’d had sex while I was living and actually had a sex drive. Not that it matters now.

“Quit talking like a crazy hoo,” I told Florian, even though I was smiling back that he wasn’t dead after all. “I’m about as knocked up as you are.”

“Not that kinda baby.” Something glinted in the sand beneath us and I saw the corner of a pale green lake stone, half-interred. He reached a hand out, brushed its surface clean and I suddenly saw stones laid out everywhere around him: pink, brick red, gray, pearly white, dusted with sand, organized in close spiraling rows, like a mosaic being uncovered in an archaeological dig. “You. It’s you who’s the kiddie-to-be. You’re gonna birth yourself.”

Another one of his dusty flake-outs. Some things never change. “I’m not a baby,” I pointed out, then immediately felt like a foolish toddler saying it:
I’m no baby, I’m nearly three!
“You’re out of it, old man.”

“Born once,” he said, a fistful of stones cradled in his hands. “Born twice. Born times three. Third time’s the last.” He gazed down at the stones, grinding them slowly with his fingertips into a fine, variegated powder. “The last for everyone. Everything. Everywhere. Unless they learn how to lie down and rest.”

He blew on his palms and the ground-up bits of stone scattered in that little breeze, sprayed all over my sand-caked feet. The bruise-dark, gassed-up flesh there seemed to collapse, disintegrate like I’d passed through my full feeder time in seconds, and I was suddenly buried in pink and pale green and pearly white sands up to my shins, my knees, it was eating like a painless quicklime through all my rotten skin and as I became bare bleached bone I collapsed right next to Florian in the sands, tunneling my stripped-down skeletal self through the sand-sea’s dry tides downward, and downward—

He’s dead, I remembered then, even as I slept. Florian’s dead. Never again, not on the beach, not in the woods, not anywhere but in your own idiot head. No more. I sank further into sleep, beyond that knowledge, beyond any sort of dreams.

When I woke up, Joe was still gone and Sam was missing.

We tramped around and around the woods and found nothing but a strange heavy smell of living hoo-flesh mixed with our own rot, a smell that led nowhere and seemed to come from nothing. That’s what we’d come to, wandering the woods like idiots tracking our own stink. A too-warm sun rose steadily higher in the sky and none of us could sleep that day. The air felt funny, heavy and almost spongy as it soaked up the weight of quiet and emptiness.

“He must’ve gone to Valpo too,” I said. I knew he hadn’t.

“Didn’t your brother ask when he’d see you again?” Renee demanded. “So let’s . . . find him, somehow, and make him explain all this.”

“How?” asked Linc, his voice harsh with anxiety. “How the hell are we supposed to do that? He got what he wanted, we won’t see him. Never again.”

All that day and the next night he and Renee and I tramped through the woods, fields, trails, underpass, cornfield, and no trace of Sam. On a hunch—a hollow hunch—we headed for Renee’s cemetery on the opposite side of the highway, and found it empty as we’d expected: gates swinging wide open, grass unmowed, old floral arrangements scattered thick on the ground. The old church building was empty, nothing but human leavings and Carny’s and Adriana’s bodies eaten down to mere splinters of bone, sucked marrow-dry. No Sam. No Ben. No Joe.

That next morning, we slept in shifts. When Renee took the watch she gripped our hands in hers, glaring fiercely toward the woods waiting for the strange entity that would swoop down and tear our entwined fingers apart. I wanted to laugh at her and couldn’t. Florian came alive again in my dreams, this time big and gassed up and mocking like Billy, and wrapped his finger bones around my neck and throttled until I woke with a jolt. Renee had fallen asleep on watch, her hand slipping from mine; she and Linc were there and snoring, no boogeyman in evidence. I lay there twitching in the fading afternoon sunlight, finally gave up on sleep and headed for the riverbank in search of some luckless otter or squirrel.

The sunset was building, streaks of raspberry and orange jam filling up a big shallow jar, as I headed down the Potawatomi Trail and farther into the trees. The deer loved to hide there. A mile in by the river’s bend I heard footsteps behind me, and then the unmistakable
chitter-chitter
of bugs in their most active, greedy phase, methodically devouring whole square feet of flesh. Joe stood there in a little thread of pink light. He might’ve been not half a mile away, all this time.

“You,” I said.

He looked me up and down. “So, you having a fine old time running around with Linc? And the ’maldie?”

“You having a fine old time hiding from us?”

He put a hand to my new fight spots: the small smashed-rib crater in my side, the long strip on my thigh torn open to the bone, the black-bleeding bruises surfacing on my arm and neck. His fingers lingered on my throat, where I’d always liked being touched. I shook them away.

“The apple trees haven’t bloomed yet,” he said. Like nothing had happened. Like there was nothing bigger to say. “The ones by the old baseball field? It must still be March. I could never get over that—one day bare branches and the next, boom, fluffy pink everywhere.” He tossed a dead branch into the flowing water. “But I don’t know anything about trees or plants, not like Sam—”

“You lied to me,” I said.

He just shrugged. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand what I’ve been—”

“Yeah, it’s incredibly easy not to understand when someone won’t tell you a damn thing, Joe.” My voice shook and I hated it. “Really easy, when they go on and on about how much you mean to them and then stab you in the back without—”

“Are you gonna stand here bitching and moaning all night, or are you gonna come with me and let me explain?”

I sized him up in the weak watery moonlight. Whole patches on him now where the bugs had done their final work and departed: scraped-thin skin flapping like an empty tent, no fat or muscle left beneath, shriveling into the parchment-paper bone covering of the dusty, the
zombi ancien.
His eyes were sunken and mournful and giving-up tired. When, how, had he suddenly grown so damned old? Rommel died decades before Joe—he remembered World War One if he wasn’t lying—and he’d never looked like this. I felt Joe take in my shock and pity, loathe me for it, realize it was all he had left to keep us on speaking terms. He led me along the path toward the old playground, over a footbridge whose wet, rickety wood made him grab for my hand, to steady me. I reached over and gripped the railing instead, crabwalking across.

“I’ve had to talk Mags and Billy out of stomping my skull in, thinking I was like Teresa,” I said. We picked our way through the underbrush at the bridge’s end, thick and knotty with no more work crew to cut it back. “Thinking I might kill them like she killed Ben. Scared of me. Can you explain that one?”

“You’re a lot safer with Billy scared of you. That’s common sense, woman—”

“Don’t you pretend that was to protect me!” I shoved him, hard enough that he stumbled into the bushes. “You told them I was changed, a freak, you said I was going behind their backs, collaborating with hoos—”

“Weren’t you?” Joe said.

“I was trying to find out what’s happening! I wanted to find out for
us,
like you kept saying, and you—”

And
you.
After everything between us. I wanted to hit him again, knock him down and punch until my knuckles were thick with syrupy black but he looked too old to hit now, too bone-stripped to bleed, he couldn’t have gone dusty so soon. Time doesn’t give a shit what you want. Slams right into you and leaves you bleeding, broken, dying on the pavement while you weren’t even looking. Fine, Joe. Go ahead and laugh. Laugh at how fucking stupid I’ve been, all along. Well? Go on.

“Go on, then,” Joe said, backed up now against an oak’s peeling, desiccated bark. “Hit me. It’s all in your eyes, I can see it. Kick the shit out of me for lying to you. It’s what I deserve, right? Look at me, look how fucking old I am now, fuck knows you could grind me to powder without breaking a sweat—right? That’s what you want,
right
?” Glaring. Waiting. “Well? Go on!”

He was vibrating with anger but his limbs were slack, relaxed, like he wouldn’t strike back or even duck if fists and feet came at him. Waiting, resigned and open, for oblivion. There was a little tremor in his fingers, as he clutched at a branch.

“You’re not old,” I said.

His eyes were giving-up tired, hollowed-out sad. Like Sam’s, before he disappeared. He turned and kept walking and I followed him.

That smell was back again: that same strange, heavy mixture of living and undead flesh saturating the air, like whole milling mingled crowds of human and undead. The park playground was empty, though, nothing but rusted-out swings and a jungle gym of thick softening wood planks; its metal was a ghastly, peeling shade of sulfur yellow that must have been blinding when it was new. And that huge sandpit in the middle, roiled and lumpy as old oatmeal, ground glass to rotting skin. No pretty faded lake stone colors in it, just a dull listless swath of beige. I gave it a wide berth, sitting on the swings. There was something else in the air around us, something urgent and expectant making a slow burn of my skin and nerves; it wasn’t anger or sorrow or anything like, it was the tremors that echo through the arm after a hard blow of the fist, the taste of still-warm flesh forever fading from the mouth. Joe paced in front of the jungle gym, seeming restless as I felt.

“I’m here,” I said, stroking the swing chain. “So let’s hear it.”

He draped his arms over the rusty metal bars, fingers picking idly at the peeling paint. “Feel funny lately,” he said, staring down at the dirty yellow chips all curled up like skin flakes. “Feel funny right now.”

I did too. Which wasn’t the point. “Well? You wanted me here, I’m here. So tell me more about how you’ve gone behind everyone’s back, lying, making up stories, disappearing for days at a time and never bothering to—”

“Jessie, you know, you just don’t listen to me no matter what, you get your teeth into an idea of how things are and you won’t stop biting, you won’t—”

“You lied to me.”

“You won’t goddamned hear me when I tell you it’s not that simple, even the flat truth’s never that simple and if you keep biting that hard you’re gonna break your jaw—”

“You told them I was diseased, Joe! You made them think I was a freak, something to run from, you threw me into the Rat nest without even—”

“Jessie?” He had my arm now and was grabbing hard, vicious, finger-bones sinking in and eyes urgent and almost feverish like it was him who was dying to hit me, again, like he was starving and the last lingering taste of meat from the bone was melting away, gone. “Jessie.
Listen
.”

The slow burn all through me was heating up, crackling hard and fast like the electrical current searing Stosh’s bones as he fried and died his first death; I was twitching, struggling to evade not the hand clenching my arm but the overpowering ache in every cell, and then suddenly I was listening, listening just like Joe demanded, because I couldn’t not hear it. The crash and chaos of two dissonant, discordant brain radios suddenly hearing secret harmonies, a mutual music low and mournful and so far beyond ordinary sound that I stretched out my hand as if I could try to seize it, felt Joe twine fingers in mine as gently as if all our young, old, inexorably crumbling bones might shatter. No triumph in his eyes, no smug glint of pleasure at distracting me from my own anger—he didn’t do this. He couldn’t do it.