Grave (25 page)

Amy looked up at Florian, her face so drawn and chalky she seemed like a browbeaten little old woman who’d slipped into a young girl’s skin—just how much more shit would the universe throw at her, before it finally let up and let her sleep?—and swallowed, visibly, before she spoke.

“You said—you said you didn’t see how the lab could have anything to do with it,” she said. “Except there’s someone still there, one of their experiments from the old days, and she’s doing it. She’s trying to bring the lab back at Prairie Beach, just like it was before. She already did it to me, sheÖ killed me, and brought me back to life. Like I said about how I died, before. So I guess she knows what she’s about, and I guess if Death wanted to, he could be plenty mad about it.”

I was holding my breath, hearing all of this that Amy had already told me, and I didn’t know why. What would Florian say, do, if he took this as some kind of defiance? Jessie had told me about him over and over last winter—she’d loved him like a grandfather—but he’d been a real proper zombie just like her and their kind had been cruel, predatory, their notion of a kiss a closed and driven fist. She’d told me about some of that, too, more than I’d ever wanted to hear.

Florian got up from his perch and sat down in front of Amy on the sand; his thin hands took hold of hers and he gave her a look of such weariness, such self-reproach that pity seized me without any warning. Amy shivered, as if the skin of his palms were cold. Back on his feet again, Billy shambled past, completely indifferent, wandering his useless circular path.

“’Cept it feels like
everything’s
fallin’ apart,” he told her. “Even him, in a way, and why would he go and do that to the whole of existence? For no sound reason? When he could settle for killin’ off the last little bit of humanity left—”

“What do you mean?” Stephen asked. His voice was flat, dull, like he’d already resigned himself to nothing that came out of Florian’s mouth coming to any good: the false resignation of terror. “’Even him’? What does that even mean? What are you talking about?”

“It’s like I told you,” Florian said. “About Death always bein’ there, when he decides you’re one of his special pets, the weight you can’t lift and the itch you can’t scratch? That don’t stop after you’re dead, it never stops—’cept lately it’s not just like he’s gone from
me
, it’s like he’s nowhere at all that I could ever find him. You notice someone missin’ like that, when they’ve been that deep a part a’you for long as you can remember, and I can’t explain it better than that. D’you notice air? Not till you try to draw breath and suddenly, you can’t breathe. Then you start gaspin’ for air, and there don’t seem to be any of it anywhere that you could ever find it—and you sure do notice that.”

He studied Amy, his chin tilted thoughtfully. “Don’t you?” he asked her.

Amy didn’t answer. Lucy’s arm tightened around her shoulders. Couldn’t the universe just leave her the hell alone? Including that mother of hers, who showed herself only when she felt like it and seemed to think that warranted hosannas and applause? I was glad when Amy slid her hands from Florian’s grasp; he resumed his seat, back on the log, and when I slipped my own hand into one of Amy’s to squeeze it in reassurance, I almost gasped. It was, in fact, a little block of ice.

“Well,
everything
can’t just not exist,” Naomi declared, and the childish matter-of-factness—know-it-allness of her tone was strangely reassuring. Even if she was reciting things she couldn’t possibly be old enough to understand, even if it was all wrong that this conversation was happening at all. “God created everything, and God’s always existed even before He created everything, so something that isn’t God can’t—”

“It’s true, isn’t it,” Stephen said. He was almost shaking. “It’s true, all of it is true.”

Billy stumbled to a stop right in front of Stephen, his former slave, one of his many slaves; he grinned open-mouthed and let a little river of drool snake down the side of jaw, his chin, into his collar in that way that Jessie’s, Linc’s, even Florian’s rueful looks told me must’ve been a specialty of his in the old days. The hatred oozing from him was so strong it was like sweat drenching his filthy, torn-up gray suit.

“So you’re back here to
warn
us, huh?” he said to Florian. “Mr. Piss-Poor Prophet, who don’t know what’s happening or why or which is his tailbone and which the skull—you don’t fool me, you’re here ‘cause you’re
scared
.” The same sing-song sneer I’d heard him use to terrify Naomi, during our first nights in Paradise City, except now she sat watching him with hardened eyes and her small mouth set in a thin, contemptuous line. “Quaking in your boots, you sad fucking piece of shit, just like this spineless soft-headed little hoo”—he gave Stephen a mocking pat on the head, and Stephen jumped back with a snarl—”and even he’s less of a coward than you’ll ever be.”

“Be quiet,” Naomi told Billy, spitting the words through her teeth. She was clutching my hands for moral support, her whole body shaking in earnest, but she meant it. “I’m trying to listen to him. You don’t know anything. He’s an angel and God sent him and he’s going to tell us what to do, so when Jesus comes back and all the graves empty out, and all the other dead bodies fly up as angels too—”

Enough. God was one thing, Tina and I could agree on that—I hoped, anyway, unless that cult of hers was even nuttier than rumor said—but the rest of this necrophiliac nonsense stopped right now. She was too young for it, no matter what had happened, too damned young for all of this. “Naomi? Things are bad right now, I know that, but this is not the ‘Tribulation.’” I was trying to keep my voice calm, so she wouldn’t think I was angry, but I’d had it. She was
my
daughter now, not that church’s. “I don’t care what anyone told you, there’s no such thing as Tribulation and the Judgment Day isn’t anything like—”

“Leave her alone.” Lucy was sitting up straight and forward, like she was rocking in an imaginary chair. “She can believe whatever she wants. What makes you so sure she’s wrong, anyway? Or that you’re right? Six of one delusional self-satisfied fairy tale, half-dozen of another.”

She smiled into the silence, a quiet little smile like she’d meant to draw blood and had just spotted that first, satisfying surge from the wound. She’d probably been waiting her chance to say that for days.

“Please don’t tell me how to raise my daughter,” I said, as quietly as I could manage.

“Then why don’t you try returning the favor—”

“Mom,” Amy said. “
Enough
.”

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?” Stephen said. “All of us. Aren’t we? We’re going to become that... nothing, losing pieces of ourselves like—I don’t want us all to die. I don’t want to disintegrate into nothing.”

“He’s an angel,” Naomi insisted. She was half in my lap now, scared too, all that cult-dogma they’d stuffed into her cold comfort when it counted. “God’s warning us. So what do we do?” Her words skittered up a high, agitated octave. “Now that it’s Tribulation for real, now we have the warning, what do we
do
?”

Florian glanced at her, gentle, any old man contemplating a grandchild. His deep-sunken, pale blue eyes were an old predatory bird’s, so worn out and exhausted he just let his prey scuttle and fly right by.

“My God, pet,” he said, “if I thought I knew, I’d have told you the moment I could talk.”

“There has to be something,” Stephen said, too slowly, too thoughtfully. There was a flavor and echo in his voice of Florian’s down-country twang, too perfect an imitation to be mockery: an accent like my Bostonian ex-husband’s, that only came out to play when he was angry or upset or tired. Just like with my ex, it felt like a warning sign. “There’s gotta be something we can do, something we can give him, so he’ll leave humanity alone. Isn’t there.” Silence. “Isn’t there?!”

Florian seemed to think this over, just like Stephen had thought him over. His eyes were old and exhausted and resigned to anything that might come next. “Don’t know,” he said. “I don’t rightly know, and I wish I did. I ain’t special enough as all that, for Death to tell
me
personal just exactly what—but I passed on everything I do know, while I still have the body to tell it, before all those missin’ bits and pieces make me collapse. And I got to see my beach, one last time, before it don’t exist no more.” He gazed at Jessie, Linc, Renee, Billy in turn. “And I got to say my goodbyes.”

Stephen was on his feet and so was Jessie, so was I, both of us afraid Stephen might go after him—but Stephen just stood there, breathing hard, his face flushing deep and dark. “Don’t fuck with us,” he said softly, his teeth clenched.

“You know I ain’t, son,” Florian said. There was iron in his words. “You know it well as anyone sitting here. You
seen
it, especially when it strikes you blind. You know I ain’t.”

Nick laid his ears back and growled. Stephen barely noticed. “I’m not joking. Don’t you fuck with me, don’t you fuck with any of us—”

“Stephen,” Lucy said, standing up in turn and slipping an arm around him. Her movements were quiet, contained, deliberately soothing, but her features were grim. “I agree with you. I absolutely agree. But you can’t start panicking. Not now.”

“Tell us what to do to stop this,” Stephen said. “
Tell us
.”

“Enough.” Jessie stood in front of Florian, as if shielding him from Stephen’s nonexistent ambush, her teeth bared in a way that meant trouble. “I want you out of here. You can leave walking, or I can make it so you have to be carried out—”

“Don’t you dare,” Amy said, almost in a whisper.

Stephen laughed, a sound tottering and uneven with fright. “And that’s any worse than what
he
says is coming? For all of us? Including you?” Nick started barking and Stephen’s voice rose louder, sharper above the noise, little bursts of contained rage like dog-sounds of his own. “Because we haven’t all been screwed with enough, have we, dead and alive and dead again whether we ever wanted to be or not? Half my fucking life, half of theirs”—he jerked a hand toward Lucy and Amy—”and everyone who got sick turning into—and now we’re supposed to go, ‘Oh, sure, absolutely, everything’s coming apart and nothing will exist anymore, and we can’t do a damned thing about it so I guess I’ll just sit here and wait’? No! I’ve had it and they’ve had it and you’re not fucking with us like that! Nobody’s fucking with us ever again!”

“Stop yelling at him,” Naomi shouted, and started to cry. “Why are you being so mean to him? It’s not his fault! He’s an angel, he’s
going
to help us—”

“
He’s not a fucking angel
!”

“Keep your damned voice down when you talk to her,” I snarled as Naomi buried her face in my hip and sobbed. “This has been half her life, too, all of this, you don’t ever treat her like—”

“So you don’t care, that this’ll happen to her?” Stephen was laughing now, hard, his teeth bared like Jessie’s and every muscle in him tensed to leap. “We should all just sit here and wait to be eaten away into nothing? What if you have to
watch
while it happens to her first? Or Amy? You want that to happen?”

“Stephen.” Amy was tugging on his arm. “She’s not saying that. He’s not. I know he wasn’t. Listen to him.”

“You don’t understand.” Stephen wrenched his arm free and there was a wet sound to his laughter now, like he would have cried with frustration if he were all alone. “You don’t want to understand, all you want is to make me out to be the—”

“And you don’t know what the hell you’re seeing from one second to the next!” Amy yelled back. “You don’t have a clue what’s real and what isn’t! You even said so! So stop thinking you talk for anyone else, especially when thanks to you, I’d be dead right now if it weren’t for
him
!”

Stephen turned pale. So did Amy. “Okay,” Linc said. “Enough. Everybody just—”

“Just say it,” Stephen told Amy. “You think I hurt Nick on purpose. Just say it.”

“I—”

“That I hurt
you
on purpose? Is that what you think?”

“I didn’t—” Amy grabbed at her hair in frustration. “Now you’re just making shit up and pretending I said it! Is that what you did before? Was that your real excuse to go after Nick?”

“I told you what happened! I
told
you!”

“And
I don’t believe you
!”

Renee laughed and shook her head. “I’m not listening to this,” she said. “Jessie, Linc,
we’ll
talk later.”

She vanished swiftly into the trees, leaving the rest of us there with Naomi sobbing, Billy laughing in peals of lunacy, Nick running around the perimeter madly barking and barking while all the rest of us retreated into our own little columns of silence. Jessie put an arm around Florian, to help him to his feet like any old man, and her sharp intake of breath made me and Linc hurry over to them.

Florian stood there straight-backed and upright, nearly a head taller than Jessie, but his waxen white hands were gone, his arms were gone—his black coat sleeves flapped useless and empty, their contents eaten away before our eyes without any of us ever seeing it happen. Part of his face was gone as well; the dark hollow where that eye and cheekbone and ear had been wasn’t an open sore, wasn’t maiming, but simply a blank space where it seemed nothing, really, had ever been at all. As if we’d all only imagined his face had ever been whole. With what mouth he had left to him, Florian gave us a pitiless smile. Nick’s barking went abruptly silent.