Grave (34 page)

But
I
remained. All of us remained. This whole so-called den of thieves. And if we went looking for our slanderer, our tormentor—if we demanded some
actual answers
, once and for all—and our punishment was that we’d no longer exist... how the hell was that any different than this? I didn’t even care anymore. Because I’d had enough.

“Stephen’s right, isn’t he?” a voice shouted, straight in my ear. “There isn’t anything we can do.”

I reached into my pocket, letting my fingers close around the hot little coal that was one of Florian’s lake stones, from his first beloved beach. The one the hoos ruined with their fucking lab. I’d hurl that stone in Death’s face, if I had a chance, while I still had an arm to throw it. He thought some sorry piss-ant little
scientists
were hot to fuck him up? Seriously? He had no idea. The stone vibrated in my hand. It sang. I could hear it, above the cacophony of the dead, deep in the emptiness inside me where once all our voices had echoed.

“There isn’t,” Amy repeated. I could feel her eyes on me. “Is there?”

I turned, and just stared at her. And then she laughed, a wild sound thrown in the face of the storm. In her hoocow face I saw my own thoughts, my own reckless anger and spinning bewilderment; a germ of certainty untwisted from a split seed inside me, shoving toward the sunlight, and I knew, I’d known all along, what I’d do. What
we’d
do. What I should’ve let Lisa just go ahead and do.

Why was the thought of oblivion, the thought of simply not existing in any way, any form, at all, so much more frightening than death
or
life? Maybe I’d just had too much of those last two, too many times, to feel any fear. Maybe that bitch Teresa had been right, in the old days, and my ego really was just that fucking huge. Maybe it was that it was one thing if it were only me, or anyone I loved—but everything everywhere never being and never really having been, never ever, was just too much to bear. But that would happen anyway, no matter what, if I did nothing. And there was one thing left I could do. That we could all do, right now.

The roar of death and the panicked lost grew higher, and louder. It didn’t matter. The singing of the stone still drowned it out. I took Amy’s hand, her hand that she’d slid from her mother’s grasp. Lisa sat up straighter and stared at us, a dawning suspicion in her eyes. “What are you doing?” she demanded, and when neither of us answered, she was up on her feet. “What are you doing?!”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry,” I told her, shouting over the roar of the displaced dead. “I’m sorry I held you back—but you can’t pull a Billy and just run off by yourself. We should all go together, when we go.”

Lucy’s mouth dropped open and she shook her head in disbelief. “No,” she said. “Stop talking like that. Stop it right—”

“What else can we do?” Stephen asked. Now that it seemed we were finally bowing to the inevitable, all his fear, all his hilarity had vanished; he looked almost serene, like Sam from the old gang in his last hours of dying. “This is it.” He kissed Amy, knelt down to kiss Naomi, gave Lucy and Lisa a solemn embrace. “Goodbye.”

“This isn’t how Tribulation’s supposed to work,” Naomi cried. “The angels didn’t come! I said the Last Days prayer and they didn’t come! Believers are supposed to
win
!”

Hang in there, kid,
I thought,
it ain’t over yet.
Even if Lisa was right about her whole weird-ass religion being even crazier than most. Linc kissed me. Renee kissed us both. Lisa hoisted Naomi up against her hip, long since ready, her eyes and mouth gone grim. Lucy was still shaking her head, like she could somehow talk us out of it. Like Stephen wasn’t right, and there was nothing else we could do.

Like it wasn’t clear to anyone with eyes that now that she had Amy back, no matter what happened, she’d follow her daughter to death and beyond.

“You’re going to look for him,” Renee said, her face drawn and pale. “Aren’t you?”

“I should have listened to you,” I told her. “When you asked me to do it before. I should’ve listened. But I was never was much good at listening.”

“It won’t work,” Linc said. “Just like I told Renee, before. It won’t.”

“No. It probably won’t.” I shrugged. “
Nothing
left to lose.”

“Amy!” Lucy was shouting. Panicked with the knowledge that she couldn’t stop us, that she couldn’t stop herself from following. “
No
!”

Too late. Time to all hang together, and my feet and Amy’s were already swinging in midair. We walked forward, Lucy right along with all of us, into the endless ocean of the forever dead, and the undertow of their limbs and joints and formless disoriented terror pulled us out to sea, swept the eternal wave over our heads.

And so we drowned.

BOOK THREE

CASTLES MADE OF SAND

TWENTY

LUCY

Q
uiet. Everything was so still and quiet.

We were alone, together—Jessie and her friends, Lisa and Naomi, my daughter and Stephen and me—in a blighted wood on the edge of a lake whose horizon seemed to recede forever and ever into the distance. Bare, chalky gray ground, like soil destroyed by decades of drought, stretched in every direction; sparse handfuls of thin, unhealthy saplings broke it up, taking shallow root in the ruination of beach and forest. The last teeth left in an old man’s mouth. The lake looked cold and gelatinous and still. Between the trees, in spots that seemed to shift and crawl away every time I tried to focus on them, blank spots of nothing nibbled slowly, quietly, relentlessly at everything they saw.

Were we dead? Was this all that was left of that other world, that afterlife Jessie’s old grandfather-ghost had assured us was real and true?
Mike, my poor sweetie, do you hate me now because I followed these folks here, but not you? Because I put you here, some version of here, in the first place?

But he hadn’t hated me for putting him here, back when it was still what it was meant to be; I’d hated myself instead, because I hadn’t understood, I hadn’t seen. But now that I was standing here in this monstrosity of blight I knew, without having to be told, that these empty, miserable remnants were the wreck of something once unfathomably beautiful. The terrible, overpowering once-was-ness of it all hit me so abruptly, so brutally, that I nearly doubled over; my body cried out for the loss of a limb I only now knew had been severed, my insides contracting with a sadness that could never be assuaged. Because it meant that something, the something that contained
everything
, was going. Gone.

Was this what it felt like, to be Jessie and her friends? Was this what it had meant, to have been a true part of Death and his—its—endless unknowable world, and then to be thrown by force, by the plague, by the lab’s arrogant incompetent gameplaying, back into dreary, ignorant, eternally purposeless life? I hadn’t known. However many times the lab made me die, I guess I’d never been dead long enough to be here, to have
this
. I wept, suddenly and silently, at the thought of it, the knowledge of just how badly and how often we’d all been cheated, and I wasn’t the only one wiping my eyes. Next to me, Naomi stared around her in disbelief and then, like the rest of us, started to cry.

“If this is heaven,” she whimpered, “I don’t like it.”

Renee and Linc turned slowly round and round where they stood, blinking back their own tears and craning their necks in a way that, another time and place, might’ve almost been comic. Stephen squatted down, taking a cautious pinch of dirt in his fingertips, then let it trickle away.

“I keep feeling like I hear something,” he said, not rising to his feet. Leaning back on his haunches, his dark hair a shaggy tangled mess, one ear unconsciously tilted in the direction of some elusive unknown sound, he suddenly put me so much and so strongly in mind of Nick that I almost jumped to see it. “But there’s nothing. Is there?”

I knew what he meant. There was a ringing in my ears and the feeling of something lurking just unseen in the corner of my eye, something that would vanish anew every time I turned to try and see it full face. Just like those spots of nothingness, eating up the world. Jessie, gazing out at the immobile lake with a hand shielding her eyes—even though there was no sun—snorted at his words.

“I think I know exactly what you’re hearing,” she said. She dropped her arm and reached that hand into her pocket, as if reassuring herself something was still there, and then, satisfied, turned back to the lake. “No worry.”

Lisa knelt down beside Naomi, hugging her, murmuring reassurance. It wasn’t helping. “So maybe you could tell the rest of us?” she demanded, hoarse and worn down by sorrow.

Jessie didn’t answer. Amy, standing beside Linc with her arms wrapped tight around her middle, shook her head, as if settling some sort of private argument with herself, but she didn’t speak either. Something, if only the instinct of having lived with my own daughter all—most of—her life, told me she knew what we were hearing too.

“I want to leave,” Naomi said. Then, louder, “I want to go home! I don’t like it here! Miss Jessie, figure out how to take us back home!”

“Miss” Jessie, “Miss” Lucy—they’d trained them that way at that strange little church of hers, the kids, to be preternaturally polite to any adult they saw.
Excuse me, ma’am
, a trio of them had nervously asked me back when Amy was still a toddler, when they found me behind the house weeding the tomato patch,
but may we please cut across your yard? We want to get to the park but we’re not supposed to cross Lombard Avenue, there’s too many trucks.
Yes, of course they could. They scuttled swiftly across and away, treading on as tiny a scrap of grass as they could manage, and a few days later—I couldn’t believe it—I got a
thank-you note.
It read like a parent had dictated it, but still. I was almost relieved when I discovered one of them, in the great migration, had grabbed a clumsy fistful of raspberries off the canes I’d planted near the easement: not all the alien seed pods under their beds had opened up. Still, they didn’t beat the shit out of their kids like some of the Baptists did, so there was that.

They were right after all, Naomi’s strange little church. Didn’t they always say that the dead would return in the flesh to the living world, just like Jesus had allegedly walked from the tomb, and lead us all bodily to some great judgment? That the trees, the rocks, the whole world would rise up and sing when that happened, and their song would start as a great endless wail of Tribulation? That’s what it said, anyway, in the church pamphlet one of those kids “accidentally” dropped in my yard. And, more or less, they’d been right. What a happy mistake.

Jessie glanced over at Naomi, at all the rest of us. Her expression said it all: we weren’t her concern right now, we never had been. We were all just along for the ride. She didn’t look half as sad as I felt, but that didn’t fool me. She and her friends were merely resigned by necessity to what for me, for all the rest of us, was an acid-bath shock of grief.

“What are we hearing?” Lisa repeated. More quietly, but with an edge presaging anger. “Tell us.”

Jessie dropped down onto the shore, cross-legged, her back curved like she were shielding something cherished in her empty lap. “I don’t know.”