Frail (2 page)

It was a man, had been a man, its penis swung limp and useless from its gaping trouser holes but more indecent than the sight of that ever could be was the smell. You can’t imagine the smell, so strong and sharp and porridge-thick that I gagged, gasped as it rolled over me, my lungs squeezing shut under the assault: an overpowering gaseous stink that wasn’t even a proper smell of death but of
life
. Nasty, fetid, wriggly life, bursting in horrible exuberance from that thing once a man, fields of mold blooming on fabric and skin, grubs and bluebottles breeding, hatching, crawling from the crevices around eyes, nose, crotch, armpit, elbow crooks, eating and being eaten from the inside out—the police and firemen heaved and retched but not my mother, she didn’t even flinch, just pulled on her breath-mask and stood her ground. Kill it, Mom, for God’s sake kill that
smell
. All the rest of them just watching. Like me.

They stood aside, the other security guys, they left her to it all alone: The bitch thinks she can handle it? Yeah, we’ll just see about that. Cowards. She walked right up to it, there in the middle of the street. The cops raised their guns. Bullets wouldn’t kill an intruder, but wounding it might buy some time. My mother took her time. Why shouldn’t she? It couldn’t run, it could barely walk. Its kind relied on ambush and paralyzing panic.

I stuck a jacket fold to my nose and crept nearer, keeping to the trees. I never even considered how trees, bushes, dark shadowy overgrowths where they could lie in wait were their friends, how I’d never smell others coming over this one’s reek.
Sanguine.
That word sounds a lot better than
reckless
.

It made a sound, looking at my mother, and the noise it made sent a strange, prickly disquiet through me because it wasn’t like in the movies, it wasn’t the right sound. It was a low, full moan that bore an edge of surprise, a living human’s dismay and uncertainty turned to stretched-out toffee in that undead mouth. It kept staring at my mother, wide gaping eyes from the collapsed ruin of a face and make it stop, Mom, tell it to knock that off; it’s not hungry, I can tell it’s not. It’s like it thinks it knows you, somehow, from somewhere.

The stench was so awful my throat closed up; I was making little
huhh, huhhh
heaving sounds I couldn’t stifle, warm acidy puddles pooling in my mouth. Kill it, Mom. Make it stop.

She took off her mask. The cops, the security squadron muttered in confusion but nobody tried to stop her, they weren’t taking a single step closer than they had to. The thing moaned again, an oh-shit, what-now, what-do-I-do noise and some of the squadron snickered. My mother wasn’t laughing. Her eyes looked like that thing’s voice sounded.

“Get out,” she said, her voice shaking. If the smell was getting to her, you’d never guess it. “Go back through that fence and get out.”

Why was she talking to it? They didn’t understand us. They were beyond speech. She took a step forward, tugging her boot from the soft thick dirt. The thing didn’t move.

“You’re trespassing on human territory!” she shouted, a strange, strident agitation buoying her voice up over the squadron vans, into the trees, as she rattled off the black-book gobbledygook it couldn’t possibly understand. “As a civic security official I am authorized to use all necessary levels of force to address Class A environmental disturbances by Indiana Code Section 17, paragraph 8(d)—”

It made another sound.
Oooooo,
it went. Still looking my mother up and down, like it knew something about her and had no idea what to do with what it knew, and then
ooooooosssss
. Airy, hollow whistling, trying to make sounds a rotten tongue, lips, palate wouldn’t allow anymore.
Ooooosssssss.
And it took a step forward.

My mother didn’t move. The squadron snapped to attention; you could see it on their faces, fear, and some smirking, because they thought she’d frozen up. It wasn’t that, I knew it wasn’t, but something was very wrong and even over the horrible stink of living death you could smell, feel, hear the wrongness all concentrated in her voice as she raised the flamethrower and screamed, “Get out!
Get out!
”

It opened its mouth again, making softer, cow-lowing cries like it wanted to wheedle her into something. Coax her. It stumbled forward, slow as they all do, holding out its arms.

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen when it caught the flame. Maybe that it’d drop to the pavement and lie there like a proper corpse, a genteelly singed peaceful stinking dead body, or give a little
pop
like marshmallow char in a bonfire and collapse, instantly, into a sighing pile of shitty muddy ash. But instead it stood there with its puppet arms waving, each filthy rag of clothing a tattered fiery flag, and then its mouth opened and jaw came unhinged around a long, hard, sustained scream of agony. Not like the alarm siren, not like in the movies: It sounded human, the sound of those screams was a human being just like me or my mother or Ms. Acosta or anyone else in such awful, unimaginable pain they’d do, give, promise anything to make it stop but there was nowhere to go, no way out. It couldn’t run, not like a panicked human on fire. Instead it rotated in a slow tottering circle. It sank to its knees, groaning and sobbing. And it rolled on the ground. And it bubbled, and cooked, and slowly died.

The firefighters moved in to keep the grass from igniting; didn’t matter if they doused the flame, the heat would still keep working its way in, sloughing off rotten skin and bone. It was covered in sprayed-on extinguisher frost now, a grotesque Christmas window mannequin with arms curled into useless, foreshortened boxer’s fists, and the screaming wouldn’t stop.

The smell, as it burned. Kept burning, even without any fire. Mom. I need you to make it stop, now.

She sat down hard on the grass, watching it writhe and sob and burn, and someone grabbed her and dragged her to the vans. It was crying now, full-throated sobs of pain as its bones disintegrated, skin falling off in thick charred pieces like slivers of briquettes from a barbecue. The same sort of dirty gray ash. They’d surrounded my mother now, going Good job, Lucy, you
did
it, you fucking toasted it, just listen to it wail, and I ran from my hiding place because I couldn’t stand it anymore. It
had
to stop crying, she had to make all this stop happening and go away, tell me it wasn’t really a person and everything would be—and that’s when she saw me, and shoved them all aside to get to me.

“What are you doing here!” she shouted, pulling me out of the path, away from the sobbing howling skeleton lying in its own ash. “You’re at school, you’re in the
shelter
! Why aren’t you—goddammit, can’t you stay out of trouble longer than five minutes at a time, why are you here! What the hell are you doing here!”

I didn’t have any answer and my mother grabbed my arms in a pincer grip and shook me, yelling things I couldn’t hear, and Ms. Acosta was suddenly right there puffing and panting in white sneakers like nurse’s shoes, and my mother screamed at her to mind her own goddamned business for once in her life, and I wrenched free and ran fast as I could from the smell, the shouting, the cries of pain that just kept growing louder. It all got lower and fainter, faded out entirely around Hollister, and I sat there on the sidewalk like my mother had on the grass, letting my nose and ears fill up with the clean airy quiet. A good hour, maybe more. The color faded and retreated from the sky, everything bathed in the soft formless dark.

I went home and threw up and then sat in the basement, on the cots we had set up in case of tornadoes or what had just happened, and that’s where my mother found me. Staggering tired, she looked drained dry, a dried streak of something like blood except sticky and ashen smearing her cheek. She didn’t yell at me, we had the leftover baked beans for dinner and went straight to sleep. The next morning and all afternoon she just lay there, quiet, staring at the wall next to her bed. And the day after that. And the day after that.

My aunt Kate said later my mother hadn’t been right in the head since my father died, that even before that she’d been strange. Off. A lot of people said that, about my mother. But I knew her, and they didn’t, and all I’ll say is that after that evening something inside her seemed to bend and twist like that thing’s rotten twiggy fingers, tearing in two without making a sound. She never cried. She wasn’t the type. She never talked to anyone. She could take care of herself. She went to work. She came home. She asked me about school, how anyone smart as I was (ha) could be barely passing history, asked me about my music, cooked the pancake dinner we ate every Friday she was off-shift. No more lying around in bed. There was no time, and she liked to keep busy.

And then one winter morning a year later, when I was fifteen, I woke up and she was gone. No note.

She used to go out sometimes at night, long after dark, when she thought I was asleep; all she’d ever say was she was taking a walk. Walking for hours, sometimes not coming home until dawn. That was so reckless I got scared, even knowing I couldn’t stop her, that her job meant she knew “stranger”-danger better than I ever would, that like everyone else she never went anywhere without her lighter. I’d lie there half-awake, drifting, as the sky lit from iron to pearl, and sometimes I’d fall back into thick heavy sleep and when I woke she’d be lying beside me on the bed, fully dressed, snoring. We never talked about it. Always, no matter what, she came back.

They found her LCS jacket, folded neatly at the edge of a forest preserve a half-mile outside the town gates, her badge and ID in one pocket. The jacket’s too big, but it’s warm. I like to imagine it’s what got me through this past winter.

If you’re going to get anywhere in life—this is how I see it— it’s important to always show the truth of things, even when it doesn’t make you look good. Even when it makes you angry. You have to be honest, no matter what, or it all just goes to shit. So the truth is that she’s not forgiven, my mother, for what she did. I have the power of forgiveness in me and it’s the only power I have left; I wave it inside my head like a July sparkler, letting the little line of fiery floating light it traces in the dark mark out the saved, the damned, those forever left behind. She’s not forgiven. My father isn’t forgiven, for disappearing while coming home from the mill when I was five. Ms. Acosta isn’t forgiven, for . . . I’d thought we finally understood each other, when there was nothing else left. But we didn’t. That dead thing isn’t forgiven, ever, for spreading its filthy contagion of crying, pain, despair—

No, I change my mind. I forgive it because it hurt so much. Only for that. Just like I have to forgive my uncle and aunt, for getting so sick. The way everyone got so sick, the way everyone died—human, zombie, everyone. Everywhere. Except me. I’m one of the only ones left.

Last spring, a year after my mother disappeared, it started. A plague. A famine. Everyone around me got sick, a disease nobody had heard of, no doctor could diagnose. It made people hungry—no. It made them ravenous, insane with hunger and the more they ate, the more the disease ate at them, turning them to great gobbling mouths crammed with meat, drink, garbage, soap, grass, paper, tree bark, dirt, insects, vermin, antifreeze, glue, face cream, Styrofoam, gammon, spinach, anything, anything they could chew or swallow. They attacked and killed their pets, children, each other. For food. Everything they’d ever feared the intruders, the real flesh-eaters, might do to us—

But the undead too. Even them. They got sick too.

But not me. I don’t know why. I hid and kept hiding until the sickness burned itself out, hit a peak and a slope and finally the living, the undead, every eating thing couldn’t eat anymore, didn’t want to. After all that, they starved to death. The disease binged on them, gorged itself sick, and then it purged. And they all died.

No. Not
everyone
.

Some who got this sickness—living, undead, didn’t seem to matter—they survived the ceaseless hunger, the self-starvation afterward, and became something else. They look human, some of them used to be, but they’re not. Not anymore. As strong as zombies ever were, even stronger, but they don’t rot, they don’t decay and no matter if you stab, shoot, starve, freeze them, drown them, smother them, torch them with fire, they can’t die. They heal right before your eyes, and it’s the last thing you see before they kill you. Fast-moving, fast-talking, fastthinking as humans. Strong as zombies. And no matter what, they can never, ever die. The intruders are dead, but they’ve left a new generation behind. So many of them. So few of us.

There were only four of us in Lepingville who stayed human, who never got sick, and I’m the only one who got through last winter. And it was a mild winter, this year.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do now, and there’s nobody to tell me. One foot in front of the other, my mother always said. Step forward, keep going even as your feet sink into the soft lawn mire all around you, the
shuuuck
of your shoe yanked from a pocket of mud making you flinch like a starter pistol just went off by your ear. Keep going. Somewhere. You’ll figure it out. You’ve got no choice.

I think somehow, from all her years working cheek by jowl with death, my mother sensed this was coming, the way animals sniff out impending earthquakes and flee. She was going to take me with her, but it was too dangerous and she knew someone would take me in, they have to because it’s a felony otherwise, and once the sickness ceased she’d find me and we’d figure out, together, what to do next. I couldn’t die, we had to find each other. I didn’t kill myself. I didn’t starve. I didn’t freeze or get sick or butchered for my flesh, I didn’t ever mean to do what I—
I stayed here.
I have a right to be proud of that. I stayed.

That’s what they tell you, when you’re little. Right? If you’re lost, stay right where you are. Somebody will find you. It’s inevitable. Someone. Somewhere.