Grave (4 page)

Stephen reached out a hand again, touched my hair with slow caution like he was certain I’d jerk away. I stood still, just watching, and he stroked it, rested fingers on my shoulder, let his arm drop back down to his side.

“Scissors,” he said. “Your mother found some.” He jabbed an absent, almost brutal finger at his own throat. “And one of those little sewing hooks, that pulls out stitched threads. We can get rid of these, they itch like crazy when—”

“Tell me about it.” All the way here over miles of road, congealing into one big expanse of potholes always circling the same dead steel mill, coke plant, used car lot—all that way, the soft ceaseless itch was like a tiny nest of millipedes, scuttling endlessly back and forth across my windpipe; my fingers kept twitching to crush all their dry dead filament-legs into powder, tear them from the burrows they’d scored in my skin. I pictured something laying eggs there, like a zombie hatching beetles and flies, and shuddered. “Tomorrow, before we leave.”

“Tomorrow,” he repeated.

He stood there for a moment, awkward, all the anger drained away. Then he leaned forward, gave my mouth a fleeting kiss, and walked back to the tangle of limbs, warm blankets, low steady sleepers’ breath. I didn’t turn around. We both needed to be alone, just now.

Tomorrow. If we kept our pace, we might cross the county line tomorrow, find the beach farther east at Cowles Shores, meet Lisa’s sister and those friends of hers and it’d all be a big old party—ex-humans, ex-zombies, real live people all sharing and caring and merry like Christmas. Just like Paradise City, one big happy family of gimcrack lords and shellshocked serfs and how had I ever managed to kill Mags, to do that to poor murderous Billy whom she’d left behind in her impossible dying,
how
? Lisa’s sister sees things we don’t, knows things we don’t, that’s Lisa’s story and so we’ll find out everything, somehow, if we just keep walking and walking toward her for the rest of our lives, then all of this will be explained. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Toenails, clicking softly behind me, and then something leaning against my shin: Nick, waiting discreetly until Stephen was settled in and sleeping before fleeing his presence for mine. Rough, shaggy, unkempt fur, the bones beneath it hard smooth planes and the flesh warm and solid and alive: a real dog. Every bit as real even when he was still something that melted into air, just like Death appearing and disappearing before my eyes, just like that man outside I couldn’t see and couldn’t stop seeing was nothing corporeal, but he was still real as real.

Flesh isn’t reality; I’d figured that out with startling speed once I realized I wasn’t crazy after all—it’s just a testimony to reality, something you can touch and feed and love and hurt as a stand-in, a symbol, for the thing that’s really there. Like Lisa’s statues, inside the ruined church where she’d insisted on stopping on the way here. I’d craned my head inside, as we all stood there awkwardly waiting for her to finish, and saw her crouched silently before an impassive ash-gray Virgin Mary, thin slender fingers on one of its outstretched hands all broken off (someone surely tried to eat them, at the worst of the plague). It wasn’t the statue getting the love, of course—that was just the stand-in. We’re all just statues of ourselves; all our bodies, souls solidified. The sculpting clay rots away, all that was there before it still stands. Before he was there, Nick was there. Both at once.

Souls. I hadn’t been raised that way, to think about souls. We were agnostics. I’d thought I was, anyway.

They weren’t getting rid of Nick. They all wanted to, I knew that, all but Naomi (and I’d appeal to her if I had to, if they all told me Nick had to go, I’m not proud). He helped save us, back in the lab, gave us our avenue of escape, and this is the thanks he gets. Even if the only reason he saved us, just like last time, was to deliver us to something else, to what’s waiting outside. To that statue of a man, all livid wax and impassive stone... but those knobbly feet aren’t any artwork, stop just fucking standing there and move, for Christ’s sake, twitch a finger, sneeze cough fart do
something
halfway human before I—

Nothing. And nothing.

Lisa’s sister knows things we don’t.
Lisa
says. I wonder if she knows, if the man outside knows I’ve killed three people, all in a row, in just under a year: one for autumn, two for spring. That’s serial killer numbers. Who’d ever believe how it happened? You’d have to be crazy, snapped, to think any of it was true. And it’s
all
true.

“Three,” I told Nick, a soft murmur though this was a confession he’d already heard over and over again, before ever I spoke it aloud. “An ex and two humans makes three.”

He stretched his head up toward my palm and I stroked his fur, ran a hand up and down his snout.

People aren’t very imaginative, really; they like stories best when they know they’re true. And what I know to be true, is this: like everyone else’s, my own flesh and blood is just a statue, a stand-in for what I really am, but I don’t know what that real thing
is
. I never have. I confessed it to Stephen, that feeling of unoccupied housing and hollow plaster-space all inside me—inside him too, just like me, such an overpowering rush of love and relief when he said
Then it’s not just me
—but the spaces don’t magically fill up just because a mother, a lover, a sort-of older sister come to help you, listen to you, try and save you. There’s something inside me that was never human, never right, long before any of this happened, and I could blame it for making me a killer, but I chose that fate. A choice made from rage or fear or a warped notion of justice is still choosing. The hollowness inside me didn’t make me evil. I did that. I chose.

No matter where I am, whatever I do or think or feel, it’s always like I’m somewhere else at the same time, the way Nick is flesh but still a ghost, the way the man outside is following our path but on his own road entirely. Life hits me in the face, overpowers me physically or psychically like it hasn’t stopped doing since I thought my mother died, but even as every part of me feels it, even as it thuds through me like my one truest heartbeat and I choke on it all, drown in my own blood, somehow I’m always somewhere else, standing aside, forever watching the watcher inside me. Depressed, I bet someone would say (had said and said and said, after my mother disappeared, tone-deaf broken records all). No. That’s such a useful word,
depression
, a damp musty flattened-fleece blanket to throw over anything someone else doesn’t want to think is real. I might very well be
depressed
but I’m much more than that: I’m absent. Absentminded, but also absent-bodied; here, and not. Living in the moment, as everyone does because they have to—and yet, I’ve never been here. I never have, all my life, been entirely here.

Is that why it seems like I can see things, sometimes, before anyone else can? Jenny-Jessie-Ginny-Lisa’s sister, whatever her name is, does that happen to her too? Nick, Death himself, they weren’t even the half of it. Though I knew now it had really happened, that I hadn’t imagined it, what it
meant
I didn’t know at all. You, outside, you faceless thin-fingered slab-footed thing only yards away, but still somewhere I can’t follow—do you know? You must. I’ve died once already, walked unknowing straight to my own execution. Is it happening again, are you taking me there again? Taking all of us? Stephen’s right: if you are, then just walk right in and do it now.

Come on. Do it. You can hear me. I know I don’t have to say a word for you to hear what I’m thinking.

The spring that had started off so hot, dry and hot, was rolling over itself and going cold; the wind outside picked up, rattling the shattered door’s metal frame, rushing up the legs of my jeans, whipping the blanket-edges hard around my ears. The man outside was still. Even as the tree branches bent and twisted under the assault, his sickly-pale moonlight hair, the hem of his long black coat, they merely stirred, ruffled faintly, and then subsided.

What are you?

He uncurled his fingers. Stretched them out, long and straight. Then folded them again, resting so decorous against his coatfront.

What am I?

Still and decorous, like prayer. I don’t pray. Not like Lisa. There’s nothing out there that wants to hear it.

Where are you taking us? And wherever it is, will I end up back where I was, all alone?

The moonlight dimmed and faded as the wind increased, the clouds growing thicker in preparation for rain. Whatever fell from the sky, however furious the rush of water, he’d never soak to the skin, it’d never touch him. As the first large, fat drops came down, I went as close to the doorway as I dared, stretching a hand outside just to watch the water roll down my palm, my sleeve go damp and then dark, clinging to me saturated and wet; not like him, never like him. No matter what I was, not him.

I wrung the cloth out as best I could and retreated inside, to try and sleep.

TWO

NATALIE

T
hey were gone.

Everyone was gone!

It wasn’t fair, I didn’t plan it this way—I was going to stay at Paradise City long enough I’d get to be Amy’s friend, I’d explain things to her. Where she really came from. Where her mother really came from (I couldn’t believe it, how much they both looked alike, I’d searched months and months for anyone else from my real family, my lab family, and here they just fell right into my lap). We were going to be friends. She’d bring Stephen along, of course. I was so happy when they fell in love but of course they would, they’re the same type, same blood, how would they not fall in love forever? How could she not see right away we were supposed to be friends?

But I couldn’t stand how they treated me in Paradise. I couldn’t take it anymore, humans treating me like dirt when it’s folks like
me
who should be telling
them
what to do, so I left early and then Phoebe, that rotten crazy bitch Phoebe,
she
jumped the gun and told the lab workers, my workers, about who Amy really was. She guessed it, she turned them in.

If I ever found Phoebe, I’d kill her. I sat there rocking back and forth, under the big pine tree in the woods behind the lab where I’d gone to cry, and I prayed and hoped that she’d died in that fire. I kept hearing that the humans set Paradise City on fire—they couldn’t stand things there anymore either. I hoped they all died in it.

It wasn’t my fault things turned out this way!

I was going to show Amy everything, the laboratory space, the dissection rooms, the rooms where I grew up. Where her mother stayed, all that time, when they were experimenting on her. I saw Amy sneaking around looking, the nosy bitch who thought her shit doesn’t stink—except
he
wouldn’t want her if she were that kind of virgin, the kind who never did anything wrong and never had any dirt on her. Smile and smile and pretend that blood on your teeth is just a little old lipstick smear.
I
made her just like Stephen, like her mother, like me.
I
did!

I did it, and why wasn’t she happy? How could she not be happy! I killed her, dropped her like a stone sinking-drowning in a sea no one but us can cross, and then I dove right in and retrieved her from the full-fathom-five bottom where no one but us can dive. I brought her back from all that brand new and one of us. I made her
what she was always supposed to be
and gave her a mother, a boyfriend, a best friend just like her. We could’ve been best friends, if she’d just let me explain! She was always inside out all her life, without ever knowing it, and I turned her true face out to the world and if I could’ve just explained that, if she’d just
shut up and let me talk
, she’d have understood and been happy about it. She’d be my best friend.

And she would have talked to
him
about me. Death, the Friendly Man, who came and went and was there for me and loved me all the time I was growing up and then he was gone, he just vanished—I was always so good, but he left me. I loved him and it turned out he was nothing. It was like thinking you had a pet bird, a big beautiful black bird strutting along on a pure-white parapet right outside your window, back and forth, any time day or night you cared to look, and then he collapses into a heap of black feathers and falls like a stone and when you rush to catch him you realize, he never was: it was always a heap of rotten feathers, a dirty discarded rag, an old leather boot squashed and huddled up on itself like something nesting. What a joke. What a nasty trick—