Grave (30 page)

I wasn’t afraid of him. Apprehensive, yes. Confused. Impatient. But not afraid. Dying did that to you, maybe. I bet Jessie knew all about it.

“I don’t know what’s the truth,” I said. I shoved my fingers hard into the sand, past the first knuckle, wincing as the wet grains drove themselves past the quick of my nails. “I don’t know what to do, or what to think.”

“Then I guess we’re all in the same boat,” Jessie said behind us.

SEVENTEEN

LUCY

A
s Jessie spoke, I caught the faint smell of ash from the morning’s breakfast fires. We turned without rising and saw her standing with her hands shoved in her pockets—God knew how long she’d been there, listening, and it felt weirdly familiar—her snarl of auburn hair tangling itself into new shapes with the wind and her mouth set in a tight, tense line.

“There’s lunch,” she said. She wasn’t the least bit conciliatory, just announcing what was so. “If you want it.”

We shook our heads. She came up beside us, tilting her head so she was squinting straight into the veiled afternoon sunlight. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner,” she said. “Like living little squares on the calendar you mark off to know you’re through another day. And another, and another, and another. Except it never quits, does it? You never don’t need to eat—well, we can’t really starve ourselves, our kind, but hunger’d still drive us up a wall if we didn’t eat. I had a calendar, Linc brought me one a while ago. But we couldn’t figure out just where we were on it—Renee didn’t know the date and Linc and I had good as forgotten how to use one, and all those empty squares on that empty paper going on and on and on, it depressed me. It was depressing as hell. So we used it for kindling. Like we could just tear out and burn up all these days that keep going and keep going and never, ever end.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “It never felt like this, back when we were all properly dead. Even when we spent ninety percent of our time eating or hunting to eat. It never felt like this at all.”

Her voice unspooled evenly and steadily, like the tape machine on some old cop show where the killer finally gives her confession. I had the strange, distinct feeling we were being offered some sort of apology.

“Time does drag, sometimes,” I finally said. “That’s the truth.”

Nick pulled away from Amy, padding over to sniff at Jessie’s feet. She petted him, smiling—her soft spot for animals was obvious, deer kill or no deer kill—and he planted his front paws on her calf, wagging his tail hard as her nails raked his head.

“Florian,” she said, still giving Nick an energetic scratch. “He—I kept seeing him, dreaming about him, all through the plague, that’s how I know I was delirious. He helped get me where I was going, but—” She laughed again, the sound verging on a snort. “You don’t want to take much of what he says literally. I mean, he’s never lied, I don’t think he could lie to anyone if he wanted to—except Teresa, maybe, but Teresa was the most bone-stripped bitch who ever walked the planet so that hardly counts—but he gets to the truth in pretty roundabout ways. So all that talk of his, about... it doesn’t necessarily mean what it sounded like he said.” She patted Nick, who obligingly set his paws back on solid sand. “It could mean a thousand and one things you won’t figure out and he won’t tell you until you’re really in the shit, feeling like you’ve got nothing to go on, and then suddenly the light will go on.”

She turned to look toward the ridge, at the dry gray latticework of dead trees that had spread so far, so fast, it was like the ridge was a hem and the trees, the standing kindling, a long strip of dingy lace trim. She didn’t believe what she was saying, I could see she didn’t; it was just what she had to tell herself, she was so afraid of what it might mean if she were wrong. I knew the feeling. Amy, though, she didn’t look the least afraid as she sat there, quiet, listening to Jessie ramble on. As usual, and even after everything she’d told me, I had no real idea just what Amy was thinking. What were we doing here? Why, even after everything that had happened, was it so hard to convince her to just get up and leave? I felt a selfish nostalgia for the days when she’d been Naomi-sized, or smaller, when I could just pick her up and
go
and ignore any fireworks and operatics.
Tonight
, I thought.
I’ll talk to her again tonight.

Even though I was starting to suspect that Jessie, much against her will, didn’t really want us to leave, and that she couldn’t have said why.

“Florian,” Amy said. “Is he still... here?”

Jessie gave Nick another thoughtful pat. “He asked us to let him just go into the woods, all alone, while we went about our business. Leave him be. I don’t think he wanted us to—we saw him die before, you know, back when we were all proper undeads. Maybe he thought it’d be dÈj‡-vu all over again, if we saw the rest of him disintegrate. Haven’t seen him since. But I’m still
feeling
him”—she thumped herself on the breastbone, so hard I winced—”in here, and then suddenly gone again, and then back so I think it’s like he said, he just keeps fading in and out of the flesh. So I don’t know where the fuck he is. But I feel like he’s still... around. Billy keeps yelling at him like he’s there, anyway. ‘You rotten fucking coward! Stick around in this misery if you want but the rest of us ain’t afraid to fucking die!’”

Her voice was such a perfect raspy, spitting imitation of Billy’s that I felt an instant, involuntary unease. Amy, her jeans and my old civil defense jacket stained with great splotches of her own blood, stayed silent. Jessie shook her head, measured and slow, and as she scratched under Nick’s chin, she laughed.

“You’re so quiet
now
,” she told him. “So quiet, and the air’s so heavy. Does that mean something? You’re not going to tell me what it means, are you?”

Nick rolled on his back in the sand, caught up in the canine ecstasy of petting, silent as the grave. She looked up at Amy, her eyes unyielding.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

Amy shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And he doesn’t say.”

The air felt hot, suddenly, hot as July: an oppressive heat that bore down on our skin and lungs and eyelids in a way not at all like an approaching summer storm. I saw Renee and Linc hurrying down from the ridge, one blonde-haired stick figure and one black-haired, panting slightly as they ski-slid through the sands to reach us. Jessie went half-running up to meet them, panting too like the heaviness of the air was sapping her strength.

“What now?” she asked them. She sounded afraid. Just like all the rest of us were afraid. Amy wrapped her arms around herself, as if gathering strength from inside for the next big blow. Her breath, like mine, was starting to come in short, almost painful-sounding bursts.

Like a weight on your chest.
That’s what Florian had said of Death.
That you feel every time you breathe.

“Nothing,” Renee said. She looked harassed and strung out, like she’d been chasing for hours after an out-of-control toddler. “Just, we’ve got to do something about Billy. He’s broken all the hunting snares, Linc’s gardening tools—”

“And there he is!” Linc jerked his chin toward the top of the ridge, scowling in disgust. “Following us everywhere, like a goddamned—and we can’t even stomp him.”

“And he’d be thrilled if we could,” Renee said.

There he was, with that peculiar side-to-side toddler’s walk of his as he made his way down the sand: the thing that tried killing my daughter two times over. I stood up fast, cursing myself for not retrieving that hunting knife when I’d had the chance, and Jessie actually patted my arm. “There’s no more fight left in him,” she said. “Trust me, I can smell it on our kind—he’s hollowed out inside. All he can do is rip snares and break flowerpots.”

Why was I supposed to believe that, when just hours ago he’d been ready to gut Amy with his bare fists? And all the rest of us, for good measure? Amy was back on her feet too, both of us steeling ourselves for round two. The air, burning and leaden, was sore in my lungs. Billy’s torn gray suit had sand caked in every fold and seam; dirt and twigs festooned his pale hair. His shoulders sagged, his hands dangled low, and he smiled at nothing, nobody, spots beyond all our sight, as tears leaked like some slow, perpetual fountain from the corners of his eyes. I could’ve felt such pity for him, for anyone who looked like this, if I hadn’t known better. Nick came up beside Amy, poised and alert, as Billy came closer.

“Snares,” he said, still grinning as he twisted his head to Linc, not bothering to wipe his eyes. “Little pointed sticks, trapping pits—you’ll be fucking around with guns next, won’t you, ‘cause you can’t kill nothing anymore with proper bare hands? Won’t you?” He thrust his face into Renee’s, disgust creasing his features. “You ain’t real hunters anymore, not like we were. Didn’t need any fucking
toys
to bring our meat down. So I broke all that shit, everything you shouldn’t need. But it don’t matter anyway.” He grinned at Jessie now, barely noticing me or Amy, happy in the way a man broken by torture is happy to see the executioner. “Soon enough, none of us’ll have anything left to hunt ever again.”

“You gotta stop, Billy.” Jessie was calm and quiet, running a hand along his arm and pretending not to notice how her touch made him shiver and twitch in disgust. “You gotta stop. I told you, fights happen and folks get stomped and that’s our way too, you can’t demand one part of it and cry over another one. Mags got stomped, farewell Mags. The rest of us gotta keep going.”

“Going.” Billy held the word in his mouth like it were strange and foreign, then grinned wider and peeled Jessie’s fingers, one by one, off his arm. “Going and going and going and—hey! You two! The fucking mutant and the cry-babby hoo-calf that thinks it sees angels!” He was bellowing that at the ridge, where Lisa descended, Naomi slung heavily on her hip. “Come join us! Come one, come all, you gotta see this new sideshow, the woman who shits from her mouth instead of her—”

Linc punched him, swiftly and casually like that was a long-understood shorthand of their speech, and Billy grunted and staggered backwards; he kept right on laughing, unfazed, and the salt water kept trickling down his cheeks. “We’re leaving,” I said to Amy. “We’re taking Nick and leaving, tonight.”

“He has to go,” Lisa said, jerking her head toward Billy as Naomi rubbed her eyes, glaring down at him in cold childish contempt. “He was wandering right outside our windows, saying filthy things, while we were trying to sleep. Right after he got into Renee’s cabin and tossed half of it into the woods. We can’t have a living poltergeist wandering around the—”

“Did I ask him here?” Jessie demanded. She turned on her heel, glaring at Amy. “It’s not us he followed here.”

“It’s you that’re his people,” I snapped. The air was like fingertips, pressing down hard and painful against my skin. “He’s your family, whether you like it or not, so don’t you start in on mine!”

“Billy,” Linc said, appealing wearily for calm, “Jessie’s right, there’s too much going on right now for us to deal with your shit. We can’t kill you, but we can blind you if you don’t leave us be. You know we can.” That gravelly, old man’s voice was so incongruous, ominous, from such a young, thin throat. “You know we would.”

The way he said it so offhandedly, the way Jessie and Renee barely reacted, it was clear he meant it. Amy made a sharp sound, stepped back like it was about to happen right there in front of us, but Billy just mopped his eyes on his sleeve and chortled into the cheap, shine-worn cloth. Naomi’s eyes were wide with fright.

“You’d never do it,” Billy told Linc. “Not when we were dead, not now, you
could
but you won’t. I know you. Don’t you forget I know you. You couldn’t live with yourself, and living and living with ourselves is all we got left—ain’t that the shit, Jessie?” He sneered at her, the sharp corners of his eyes and mouth drawn up in mean-spirited mirth, but somewhere in his expression was a flash of sympathy, a sudden hint of regard that almost shocked me. “I know it’s fucking you up inside, all three of you, just like it is me. I can see it. I can see it in all your little
pastimes
—” The sneer was back again, a thick blunt shadow blotting out the light of any past feeling. “—in your precious gardening and your hoo-books and drawing pictures of each other because you can’t just be here and now, part of everything like you were before, you just watch everything and report on it from behind a little screen. I tore ‘em all up, y’know. All those drawings I found.”

His reddened eyes almost twinkled with triumph, as he shoved his chin right in Jessie’s face. “Tore every one of ‘em up, made ‘em rotten pulp-paper just like they oughta be, ‘cause you and me, Jessie? What we really are, were, before your brother went and fucked us all up? We don’t lurk and watch and tell tales from behind a fucking screen.”

Jessie kept her composure—clearly, not without a struggle. Renee shoved Billy away from her, snarling as he laughed.

“Get out,” she said. “Get out or I’ll do it, instead of Linc, and I won’t lose a second’s sleep.”