Dust (26 page)

“A few. I think. If they can outrun all the sick ones like me, who’ll eat anything they can—a few. Very few. I don’t envy them at all.”

Immune, just like Joe. Who got tired of running. “It goes away,” I said. “Feeling like this.”

“It did for a while.” Lisa turned to me, arms wrapped around herself, around her stomach aching like mine. She crunched another mouthful of bone fragments. “Then it comes back. The hunger comes back. And it’s even worse than before. And then, at the very end . . . well. You can’t eat at all. You just waste away.”

I slipped a hand into my pocket, gripping the lake stone that sat there like a long-ago promise, like a reproach.
Stop wasting them bits and pieces.
Why should I, Florian? Just because they’re all I have left now of
you
? Of anyone. The blistery feeling making my skin twitch and shiver subsided, receded as I stroked its surface, like something was gently touching me in turn. Florian’s pouch of stones still rested on my hip but someone had undone the ties holding it in place while I was out, retied them in an inept bird’s nest of a knot. Lisa must’ve been looking for more food. Stones were one of the few things my teeth, my good old undead teeth now stolen from me forever, hadn’t been able to crunch through. More food. We needed to look for more food. Run away from this horrible place where my afterlife ended, was stolen away. Where Joe, Linc, Renee, the Sam and Ben I’d known had all died, because I couldn’t hide and keep still around a grave-haunting hoo. Hunger and shame. And grief. Nothing else to offer Lisa, or anyone. I clutched the stone tight as I could.

“I have to get out of here,” I said.

“Might be smart. There’s all sorts of gangs and mobs wandering around out here now, looking for more meat. They’ll strip your forest clean in days. Every animal they can hunt. Until they start dying too.” Lisa looked thoughtful. “Though if we just lie low for a while longer, until they do—”

“I have to get out of here.”

Lisa stared at me for a minute. Then she nodded. “North,” she said. “Toward the cities. The dying part of the plague’s in full swing up there. Bodies everywhere. There’ll be a lot more to eat.”

Her voice was detached and casually distant but the flicker of horror in her own eyes, at herself, made her suddenly seem more like my Lisa, the sister I’d known living, than anything in her face, her voice, her hair reverting back to its old nondescript brown. Those things, those physical things, were mere familiar signposts along the road to her but that moment of shame, disgust, grief, all-consuming famine, that was the destination. I knew that place so well already, in such a short time. The look died in her eyes just as soon as it sparked.

“Can you walk okay?” she asked, as she twisted her hair into a chaotic ponytail.

“Never better,” I said, and almost laughed to realize it was true. “Lisa?”

“Yeah, Jessie?”

“I’m so hungry.”

It just came out and I was so embarrassed saying it, teary embarrassed, like a little kid needing the bathroom for the fourth time in a row and it really felt as urgent as that, worse. Lisa didn’t laugh, though. I saw anew just how thin her face was, how her beautifully taut unbroken unrotted skin outlined every bone in her wrists and arms.

“So am I,” she said. “So is everyone. Like I told you. Don’t worry, though—if it comes to that, you’re probably strong enough to fight me off.”

 

 

 

 

Ten, fifteen, twenty miles up the empty highway heading past Morewood, through the long-abandoned remains of Taltree Acres, veering toward Lake Station and Gary. I didn’t speak, just kept feeling my chest expand full of air by slow degrees, let it out, take it in again, over and over like it’d never lost the knack;
I breathe now
, I kept thinking, breathing with my lungs, it was so awful and so dependent of me, the thought the earth that gave birth to me could now suffocate me filled me with horror, but still I drew in long, short, fast, slow breaths until I hiccupped and grew dizzy, amazed at the sheer novelty. And my hand, my new hand, my new arm! And how quickly, easily my legs swung forward and forward again, like they’d been born to the task! Neither of us seemed to need rest, never mind sleep.

What stopped us was hunger, the need to pause every half hour, every quarter hour, every tick on the stopwatch to gorge on possum or rabbit until bloated and sick and then feel it all melt away in a mile. We didn’t find much possum or rabbit either, as we retraced Lisa’s path: She was right, the forests were being stripped. By the time we hit the old u-pick blueberry farm on the Lepingville outskirts we were chewing fistfuls of weeds, cursing the sweet wonderful berries denied us because summer hadn’t hit. At least it made it easy not to think about Joe or Renee or Sam or Linc. Too much. The flimsy box walls in my mind wavered, but they held. Who did Lisa think about? Jim? That guy Jim had mentioned, who didn’t stick around? She’d gone so quiet, chin dipped to her chest in a posture of mobile defeat, I was scared to ask.

When we got to Lepingville proper, the trees suddenly gave way to empty car washes, deserted office parks, abandoned strip mall after strip mall after strip mall; lots of abandoned cars now too, no more clean deserted roads, but nary a body in sight. Lisa abruptly came to life, yanking me right off the roadside.

“More gangs up here,” she muttered, as if we were house-safe crouching in a six-inch ditch. “We’re a moving target.”

“We’d be one anyway. Let’s hit the fast-food places, they might have supplies in storage, meat patties—”

“I told you, they’ve already beat us to it—you’ve been a little isolated, haven’t you? You were lucky.” She laughed, squatting there in the dirt. “Lucky, lucky. Nothing to eat here. Nothing to eat anywhere.”

She’d used herself up, I realized, in the retrieving of me and now was falling back into some sort of habitual starved torpor. So why even bother rescuing another mouth to feed? The surge of irritation I felt was another welcome distraction.

“I’m looking anyway,” I said, and ran across the road before she could stop me. She was right, of course: Burger Mart, Steak Shack, Mambo Italiano, the Mexican Grill, the Texas Grill, the Hawaiian Grill, Al’s Country Grill, all looted and stripped to the Formica and that too was scored deep with toothmarks. The stench of leaking gas was everywhere. At least there were still those lovely little packets of ketchup, relish, honey mustard, steak sauce, mayonnaise, jam, dozens of them that we popped into our mouths whole and let burst on our tongues.

As we walked on, spitting out plastic scraps, all else we found to eat were chewed-up bits of bone lying near the shells of cars, thrown into careless heaps like the remains of a jumbo-bucket chicken dinner. Through it all the seagulls still swooped and strutted around the empty parking lots, pecking at the garbage and rising upward with slow, mocking ease whenever we tried to catch them. The smell of burned flesh, a mere hint in the air just outside town, grew stronger and more acrid the farther we walked.

“I told you,” Lisa said, stuffing her pockets with bone leavings and shaking hard with hunger. “Nothing to eat anywhere, until we get to the cities. Maybe not even then. Nothing to eat except us. Tell you what, I really miss when all that ate humans were walking corpses you could outrun without trying. We were so spoiled. We didn’t know how good we had it.”

“I didn’t eat humans,” I said.

She made a harsh sound barely disguised as a laugh. “Then you were definitely a cut above us.”

A few more miles, and we started seeing signs of life: actual dead bodies mixed in with the skeletons (bird-pillaged, barely any flesh left for us), a few random figures wandering slowly, haphazardly around the parking lots with too little purpose to be an actual gang. As we watched they hunched in a circle, tearing a corpse to bite-sized pieces—a silent, weirdly harmonious scene—except for one who seemed confused and just kept squatting down, standing up, squatting again yards from the actual meal. Suddenly he collapsed where he stood, sinking to the asphalt and going instantly still. His friends, busy eating, didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, good,” Lisa whispered, her eyes glittering, and we almost ran across the highway: Only one of them looked up when he heard, but he just bent right back over his food. We tore off handfuls of corpse flesh and barely bothered chewing before we swallowed, too tearfully grateful for actual real meat to savor our meal, and I was in such a thick haze of hungry oblivion that when I felt something tap my shoulder I shouted in surprise.

Lisa growled like an undead, jumping to her feet ready to fight. It was another fellow from the group, this one older and even more gaunt, more of a starveling than Lisa. He raised his hands in surrender, then motioned toward his friends: One of them had grabbed a matchbook from somewhere and was building a fire with scraps of wood, roasting the last bits of corpse to a turn. He nodded at the fire, then the piece of flesh I gripped in my hands. It could’ve been a trap, I supposed, but what’s life without risk? I walked over and watched him fuss silently over the fire, blowing at it until it leapt to life, then move back so we could all cook our meals.

“Thanks,” I said.

No reply. It felt weird holding our food directly over the flames with our hands, seeing my own flesh go boiling red and then blacken and instantly heal again, but it’s not like we had any sticks and I didn’t feel a thing but a vague, faraway warmth. Cooked meat, it turned out, was so incredibly good I almost moaned biting into it. The others ate too but more slowly, indifferently, and one of them dropped his last bit of meat to the blacktop; they all shuffled away, abandoning the fire as they headed past the intersection and toward the county line. The second they were gone Lisa ran for the fire, trying to roast half an arm whole over the little flickers of flame.

“God,” she whispered between bites, shaking, “the fat just gets all hot and sizzling, it’s—God—”

Maybe the one we were eating would have offered us a place by the fire too. That bothered me, and the thought that it was supposed to bother me didn’t help (talk about your useless, bygone sentiments), but what scared me was that the others didn’t want his flesh anymore—that’s what the fire was really for, I could see it, a bit of novelty to try to coax themselves to eat. Was that what awaited us, after this horrible hunger finally ebbed? Lisa said so, by the end you couldn’t eat at all. And apparently, from the way my own charred flesh healed in seconds, the way Sam and Teresa got right back up again after being smashed in two, you couldn’t even kill yourself. You had to let yourself be scorched by famine, seared as if someone took a slow blowtorch to every cell, and then feel it consume you from the inside out, Prometheus and the vulture in the same body—

The liver. Lisa hadn’t found the liver yet, the guts, she was too human to know they were the best part. I tore at the corpse, determined to get them before her, and when I raised my head again I saw an old gray-headed fellow on a rusty bike watching me from the roadside. I just stared at him, and he must’ve been a true hoo because he moaned aloud, the
waaahh
of prey that knew it was only a matter of time, and pumped the pedals so hard down the road shoulder I could hear him wheezing and gasping even as I laughed. Off he went, right into the arms of our new friends.

I could have caught up with him, and eaten him, yes. Easily. That second. But looking at his crumb-encrusted beard, the parka deflated from all the holes where the cotton batting escaped, his shoes splitting off from the sole, I thought it was damned unfair to kill someone just because he couldn’t buy the fleeting protection of a car.

Lisa saw us both from across the parking lot, saw his bike becoming a vanishing spot in the distance and ran to me in disbelief, too late to get him. “You’re crazy,” she shouted at me, licking traces of blood and melted fat from her fingers, hands, forearms like a manic cat. “Absolutely out of your mind, you’re completely stupid and crazy, it must run in this family. Why the hell did you let him get away? You think that much fresh meat just waltzes by every day?”

“I didn’t want to kill him,” I said, and left it at that. “It wasn’t fair.”

“Fair?” I saw her fingers twitch to slap me, but she was too smart for that. The words surged from her hard and fast like Mom when she really lost it, like Mom when she was angry she couldn’t just let herself haul off and smack you. “So you let him go and now what, Jesus gives you a cookie? Like he’s not gonna die anyway, probably a lot slower than we would’ve done it.” She grabbed at the viscera, cramming a fistful into her mouth before I could snatch it back. “I can’t believe you don’t get it yet, how many ways do I have to spell it out, the world is ending, starvation or being eaten alive is all we’ve got to look forward to, and you—”

“Sorry,” I snarled, grabbing another fistful from right under her grasping hand, “but the world isn’t ending. We’re ending. Every other species alive’ll throw a big party, now that humans have finally gotten what they deserve right at the hands of one of their—”

“God, I don’t believe it—the same animal rights bullshit you were spouting when you were alive, at least then you were too young to know better. It’s pathetic.” Lisa gave me a shove. “You’re actually glad this is happening, aren’t you? The zombies’ big revenge on the humans? You’re glad!”

I threw her to the tarmac, punching and kicking until she shrieked. It felt incredibly good to have two working fists, the only thing about this horrible meat-body I could learn to love. “I was minding my own damned business when your species decided to screw with ours and destroy us both,” I snarled. “We were all minding our own business and I wasn’t hurting anyone, you did it,
he
did it, but you know what? I am glad. You think I want to be stuck in this filthy human body any longer than I have to be? With you for company? Hovering over me breathing into my face, pissing, moaning, whiiiining poor you—”