Grave (23 page)

THIRTEEN

JESSIE

“F
lorian.”

He just stood there, looking at me, like his sudden arrival out of nowhere was any old afternoon. His face was like it must’ve been in life, no longer bone-stripped but still thin and angular. He had the same eyes, too, water-pale blue, steady and gentle, and when they were on you, like they were on me right now, it was like he wasn’t seeing anything else. I threw my arms around him and he chuckled, soft and low in his throat, just like before.

“Easy,” he said. I could feel the words rumbling through his chest. “It ain’t like you haven’t seen me before this—”

“Shut up,” I said, and hung on. Behind me all the others were muttering and murmuring, confusion, speculation, that awful boy repeating over and over he hadn’t meant it with the knife and Amy going
I know, I know
like the call-response of two scruffy starving beach birds. It was the substance of all hoo-talk everywhere, ignorant surreptitious conference that never managed to find its way to the truth. When I pulled back, Florian was smiling. Even his widest smile now was nothing next to the death’s-head grin he’d once had, that all our oldest ones had had. I missed it, that permanent skeletal dusty’s grimace. I missed hearing the echo of him inside my head, his music, his part of all our music, as I woke and slept. I missed everything.

Linc went up to him, grinning too, able to believe it now as he clapped Florian on the shoulder. Renee still hung back, almost shy, but then she’d barely known Florian and when she had, he was dying. Next to her, Billy—what was left of Billy—sagged against a tree trunk with his head down, laughing quietly at nothing. Sam, poor Sam always did say that without Mags around, Billy’d be like a cardboard box in the rain. That was putting it kindly.

Was he here to take us all away? It was all right if he was, I wouldn’t argue. Billy, he’d be so happy.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “Why now?”

Something sad flickered over Florian’s face, but that was him; he got sad, everyone got sad. You couldn’t trust someone who refused to let himself ever feel truly sad. He patted my shoulder and I reached up, clutched his fingers, still thin and bone-pale but strangely fat in my grasp from their layers of living-thing flesh.

“Can you stay?” Linc asked, still smiling and happy. He was the only person standing here who really understood what Florian was to me, and that thought gave me a fleeting lonely sadness of my own. “How did you get here, how—” Then Linc laughed, he was just so uncomplicatedly glad in a way he almost never was. “We’re not all just seeing thingsÖ”

“Oh, you ain’t just seeing things,” Florian said. He patted Linc’s arm in turn, fatherly, brotherly. “I’m here.”

“Who are you?” the girl, Amy, was asking. Almost timid. Her dog, Nick, sniffed assiduously around Florian’s bare feet.

“Florian was a friend of theirs,” Lisa explained. Dutifully reciting what little I’d told her, gazing in astonishment at its appearance in the skin. “A fellow undead. Very old. He died—rotted away, I mean, crumbled into dust, before the plague ever hit.”

“And now he’s come back.” Naomi, the kiddie, she looked the least surprised of anyone, pressed like a growth against Lisa’s shin. “Like all the zombies, all the dead people are going to as part of Tribulation, and Jesus will lead them to—”

“Tribulation is just a story,” Lisa said. Her mouth had gone thin and tight and I could see her thoughts like they were written out,
that goddamned Tina and her goddamned storefront Jesus freaks.
“All the Rapture is just a story. Judgment Day isn’t for a very long time and it won’t look like that, it—”

“I haven’t dreamed about you in forever,” I told Florian. Where the hell had he been, anyway? Why had he just stepped out of my head when I needed thoughts of the old days, now more than ever, to get me through? To keep me even halfway tethered to Earth. “It’s like you just left me. It’s like you just wandered away while I wasn’t looking.”

A crash behind us made us collectively jump. A long, convoluted branch thicker than my arm and sprouting webs of tributary twigs all down its length, a network of nerves feeding a great curved spinal cord, had pulled loose from a healthy tree and plummeted to the underbrush; it was bare, gray, hollow at its core as though it’d been rotting for years still attached to its host. Bits of it crumbled into ash when I touched it. As we looked up into the tree, there was nothing but that same dry dead grayness, the outer layer of greenery looking glossy as plastic and just as false. That tree was fully alive yesterday, when Linc and I passed under it going hunting; when I’d looked up into its branches, just like now, I saw green and brown and only the smallest flashbulb-spots of sunlight able to penetrate between. There was a bird’s nest next to the fallen branch, toppled as well, bottom edge facing upward like a little truck flung on its side in a tornado. I wasn’t going to look at what was inside it. That, too, had died before it ever hit the ground.

I turned to Florian and the sorrow in him was deeper and stronger than anything I’d ever seen. “I didn’t mean to leave,” he said. “Didn’t really want to. But here I am.”

Stephen, the mighty dog-beater, was staring at Florian with eyes gone beady in suspicion and just try it, you little shit, just try getting in Florian’s face and you won’t have one of your own left anymore. I won’t even bother, I’ll just let Billy go to work. Florian, though, just turned to Stephen and smiled.

“It ain’t out of your way to suspect me, no,” he told Stephen. “It’s just more complicated than that. I didn’t make any of this happen—but I guess I’m part of it, in my own way. I never meant to be, I—”

“Are you how the lab can do what it did?”

It was Lucy, Amy’s mother, who asked that. She reminded me of Renee, a skittish, shy core all wrapped up in an outer hide not nearly as thick as she thought it was, as thick as it needed to be. “They brought us back to life,” she said, “again and again, after they killed us, and Amy—” She motioned shakily at Amy, who was standing, silent and gray-faced, with her mother and Stephen flanking her like bodyguards. Prison guards. “We never knew how they did it. We can’t figure it out. Did you work there? Was it you?”

Billy snorted. Florian put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and she startled, then tried to look calm. “That lab,” he said. “All that trouble. All them unnatural things they did. I had nothing to do with that, I never worked there. Never knew ‘em. But.” He sighed. “But that was my beach, that they did all their work in. My beach, that I left behind, and they go and do something like that in—”

“That’s not
your
beach.” Amy’s voice was little, polite, but she shook her head like that settled it. “That’s Death’s beach, Death’s house. Death’s backyard. AndÖ and I’ve met Death—I know you’re not him, whatever you are.”

“Death’s backyard,” Florian agreed. Mild and amenable as always. “I guess so, ‘cause everything’s Death’s in the end—you, me, our bodies, our thoughts, everything we got that’s us. Everything we leave behind. Except, Death ain’t all there is. Something a lot bigger than him out there, even if he’s carrying it around inside himself”—gazing at me, again, seeing into and through and past me—”and sometimes it’s like he ain’t no different than the rest of us, in that respect. Full of parts of his own self he can’t ever understand.”

I turned his words over in my mind; they were like smooth cool lake stones without a single crack in their surfaces, no way to get to what was really inside. I’d had a fucking bellyful of this kind of thing from him during the plague, during the horrible trek from Great River to Prairie Beach, sickening and dying and watching everything fall to pieces with nothing to guide me but vague visions of him still living, disconnected dreams where he urged me onward. Not this time. We weren’t subtle artful people, we who’d not merely died but felt and lived all of death’s realities firsthand, and I wasn’t in any more mood to try and puzzle out poetry.

“Remember,” I said, “when we were on watch or out hunting and it was all boring as hell, and you had all those stories to pass the time? The ones about when you were living back on Prairie Beach, or the Three Dead Queens, or all the ones you made up in your head? Prophecies. You always called them your prophecies.” I plucked a handful of twigs from the dead fallen branch, watched them crumble to flakes there in my fingers. “Well, if you got one now, old man, that explains why you’re here—or how—just tell it. All of it. I’ve got no belly for riddles.”

Nick reared up, front paws pressed against Florian’s leg. Florian patted him absently, soothed him, until Nick dropped back to the leaves and stared up at him just like all of us, dark and expectant.

“I ain’t even supposed to be here,” Florian said. “And I guess that’s the whole damned prophecy.”

“I couldn’t talk face to face with living folks before all this. All this new change, I mean, that brought me back here in the flesh. That’s why I couldn’t explain who I was, when I followed you folks here—couldn’t speak with a human tongue, couldn’t say who I was. Don’t know how that changed. Us full-dead folks, we’re not meant to be able to talk to living folks at all. Not in any form. Not even in dreams.”

Florian sat on a dead bit of log right up at the top of the big sand ridge, wrapped in his huge black coat like a strong winter wind threatened to knock him aside. Even though I’d only ever known him as a broken-down dusty skeleton, he looked so much frailer than that now, like a living old man, shivering even in the strongest sun. Amy’s dog lay nose to paws at his feet, her dog that never needed to eat and came from nowhere into our world. Just like Florian had himself. Billy wandered around the periphery, not even glancing at Amy, all his killing and maiming fervor drained away. He and Mags should’ve just died back when the plague first hit, instead of hanging around to turn into this. Of course, you could say the same of all of us, sitting here, all except Lisa’s little born-human, stayed-human kiddie. Of course, nobody ever talks about all that.

“Those dreams I had about you,” I said, “back during the plague. You weren’t supposed to be able to do that? Come and... talk to me?”

Renee and Linc swiveled their heads around to stare at me. I ignored them. The breeze blew a sporadic mist of sand against Florian’s coat seams and pressed his thin pure-white hair flat against his face, each strand its own little down feather sticking to his skin, then lifted it up and let it flutter back again. “Don’t look like I was, no,” he said. “’Course, I didn’t mind it. I’d missed you.” He smiled a little. “And then, it was like the whole living world was coming back to me, stronger and stronger, while the place I’d gone to, after I died for the last time, was getting weaker and weaker.”

He reached a hand into his coat pocket, took out one of the smooth matte stones that were scattered like the start of some great mosaic all over the sands; this one was dull green, with a few brown streaks like muddy rivers chugging through mossy, overgrown ground. As he sat there, he examined it thoughtfully from all angles, a new-minted phenomenon, as though he hadn’t carried pocketfuls of them everywhere he went for centuries on end.

“The place you’d gone to,” Amy repeated. Her voice shook with nerves, though her eyes were calm; she wore one of Renee’s old shirts, her own torn to shreds by Stephen’s knife, with a stiff black jacket with “LCS” stitched on the sleeve pulled over it. The jacket was torn up, too, but she wouldn’t let it go. “When I... died, before, it wasn’t like everything just disappearing. It wasn’t just nothingness. It was like I went somewhere else, maybe only in my head, and then I came back. Like I sank to the bottom of the biggest lake there ever was, and then floated right back up again.”

She glanced at her mother, like she expected her to back her up with
yep, big lake, dying is drowning, you’re absolutely right
—but Lucy just kept quiet. Florian gazed down at his greenish-brown rock, like a tiny mossy riverbed in his hand. Then he placed it down in the sand by his feet.

“That don’t sound familiar,” he said. “Drowning and all that. But you got the rest of it right. It ain’t just nothing, afterward, when you die. It’s someplace. You can’t say exactly where it is, what it is—but it’s there, and you’re in it, and it’s too big for you ever to find the beginning or the end of it. And whatever it’s made of, that place, that’s what you’re made of too. Like it’s all a big giant beach, million times bigger than this one, and you’re one little speck of sand on one particular dune. And no matter what, no matter how strong the wind gets, it can’t ever shift you. You can’t ever be blown away.” He looked up at me. “Till now.”

A warm, pleasant breeze snaked over the sands, but Florian burrowed down deeper in his coat like it was December. He pointed out beyond the ridge, his finger finding some precise, faraway spot none of the rest of us could see. “Remember I told you there was a huge sand dune, used to be out on one of these beaches? Hundreds of feet high? They carted it all away in train-loads, boxcars of sand, to melt down and make into glass. Guess they got as much as they wanted, ‘cause they never came back again. Lately I feel like that dune, like something’s breaking up and hauling bits of me away, melting me into something I ain’t supposed to be—and whatever’s doing it just keeps coming back for more, and more, and more. It’s not just me, my particular dune, that’s disappearing. It’s the whole blessed beach, all around me.”