Grave (7 page)

I saw Lisa’s shoulders twitch, somewhere under their lumpy load of nylon, but she didn’t say anything. Naomi marched on in silence, neat little steps still tramping in reverse, frowning crestfallen down at her shoes. Not looking at Nick anymore.

“He does like me,” she insisted at last, small and timid. “He—”

“I’ve had it.” Stephen snapped a bending branch straight off a tree, barely missing a step as he reached up and wrenched it away. Gray and dead, that branch, the whole tree looking like it had sickened and withered months back. “I’ve seriously had it.”

“You are not her father.” The mud beneath Lisa’s shoes was firmer now, cake-packed deep, but her toes plowed through it like boat prows slicing the surface of a lake. Her voice was stone scraping at metal. “Understand me? All the shit Billy and them put her through, everything that happened, you even
think
now you’re gonna turn around and—”

“I’m not putting anyone through anything,” Stephen hissed back. “I’m trying to talk some sense into her head.”

“Calm down,” I said, as if anyone would listen. “Everyone just calm down.”

“You’re not my father,” Naomi reminded Stephen, almost shouting. “You’re never my father.”

“You’re right about that,” Stephen said, a false brightness in his voice that presaged trouble. “Because maybe if I were, you’d actually listen when I say that so-called dog is nothing you should be within a hundred feet of, much less trying to make some sort of
pet
, and if Lisa actually had half the sense Amy keeps telling me she does, then she’d—”

“Okay,” said Amy, stepping between him and Naomi. “We’re stopping.” She slid her arms from the limp, waterlogged rain slicker and threw it at Stephen like she was aiming for his face. “Right here. We can all dry off, and—”

“We have to keep moving,” said Lisa, swaying with her parcels, stubborn and angry. I’d step between her and Amy, if I had to. We’d have words. “I want to get to Cowles tonight.”

“Or what? Or your sister gets mad ‘cause her dinner got cold waiting, and kicks us all out?” Amy stroked Nick’s head with agitated vigor, almost scrubbing it, her fingers tight and tense. “She doesn’t even know we’re coming. She could kick us all out anyway. And some of us, you know, we can’t walk forever, we’re still just barely human enough that we need to—”

“Let’s just go.” Stephen had the rain slicker crumpled in a big deflated ball, fingers tugging its rubbery edges like a dog’s teeth gnawing a chew toy. “All right? Just forget I said a damned thing, and—”

“We’re stopping because I said we’re stopping, all right? God! You and Naomi and all of it, you’re driving me up a fucking wall, okay? Naomi can rest and try to play with Nick and Lisa can take a load off and everybody can just calm the hell down! Ten minutes, fifteen! Believe it or not, fifteen minutes off shift, we can still somehow get to the damned beach before tomorrow!”

Silence. As I reached up and pulled strands of hair away from her bad eye, Amy brushed a hand against her throat, her sliced, stitched-up throat that made me want to cry every time I looked at it. More of my own handiwork, in leaving her. And with every passing hour, she seemed closer and closer to forgetting it was even there.

“Also,” she muttered, “I really, really have to pee.”

The rain was dying down. We raised our arms to cool the sweat from those plastic slickers, scraped mud off our shoes, laid the slickers down as tarps over a wet tree trunk toppled on its side in a clearing of cottonwoods. Amy, Lisa, and Naomi all went off to pee. Stephen and I sat there on our log, knee to knee, in silence.

Remnants of houses fringed our patch of forest all around, standing like great grayish ruffles of fungi ringing an invisible oak. Every man-made surface had WARNING: CONDEMNED stamped over it in regulation waterproof red, the color still fresh and bright even after months, maybe years of hard sunlight, snow, rain. Nick sniffed all around our log and all around the dirt, and when he got to Stephen’s feet, Stephen drew back, rising abruptly from our perch.

“I’m gonna walk around a little,” he said, throwing a vague arm toward the waist-high backyard grasses. “Clear my head.”

He walked off without waiting for an answer. The rancor of just moments before had vanished, abruptly as a swift-moving storm passing over a prairie; he looked almost confused now, as if something outside him had been driving his temper and tongue. Maybe sharing close quarters with three women and a little girl he barely knew was a lot to ask of him, of any boy that age. Maybe getting killed and brought back as much as he had, every last cell grist for someone else’s mill, maybe it just screwed you up for good. It’d explain a lot about my own life, right after Amy was born, when I was trying so hard for her sake to be an ordinary average human. So much for that.

It was weirdly quiet here; no birdsong, no branches snapping in the wind, no soft scuttling sounds of animals in the underbrush. Everything was muted, silenced, as if the rain had been a heavy smothering blanket muffling the sky and ground. Nick ignored me and sniffed round and round one particular tree, probably chasing some elusive squirrel. Lisa had piled the backpacks at the end of the log, garish and bumpy like painted rocks, and I rummaged inside one for lunch: a bar of Honey-Kissed Bunches Of... some silage or other, best not to ask. The chocolate chips were like little bits of something charred, and the crispy rice had gone soft. Naomi came back, alone, and I handed her a bar of her own.

“Where’s Lisa?” I asked.

“Over there,” she said, angling her head toward the backyards as she sat back beside me and unwrapped her granola bar. Her face scrunched up suddenly in conspiratorial child-mirth. “She has to poop,” she confided, giggling a little as she tore clumsily at the paper. “I didn’t want to look.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said, shoving her shredded granola wrapper in my pocket. Something about the way she drummed her heels against the log, a slow steady left-right-left of pink and silver sneakers gone gray with mud, it reminded me of Amy at that same age: even her restlessness was thoughtful, methodical. As she made short work of the bar, Nick suddenly abandoned his tree and, as if he wanted to prove he wasn’t just angling for food (though really, I’d never seen him eat anything at all), sat himself beside Naomi and put his nose to her empty palm. Her whole face lit up with joy and she wrapped arms around his neck, hugged him hard, and was rewarded with a considered, careful thump of the tail. Whap against the ground, pause, whap again. Then stop.

“See?” she said, reproving and triumphant like I’d tried to come between them. “Nick likes me just fine. I know he does.”

Nick snuffled and scratched hard at an ear and let her hug him until she was satisfied. Those watery eyes of his, red-rimmed, always looking like they’re about to stream over with tears... I didn’t like him, I didn’t like Naomi touching him, but there was no reason at all she shouldn’t pet him if she wanted. Stick her finger right through that burnt melted hole in the photograph. “Nick’s a stray,” I said, not using the word I was really thinking. “We don’t know what he’s like with people, or if he’s used to them. Stephen was just afraid you might get bitten.”

The look of scorn Naomi threw me might’ve made me laugh, if things were different. “He’s jealous of Nick,” she said, scratching the dog behind the ears; whether or not Nick was used to humans, she was definitely accustomed to dogs. “He thinks Amy loves Nick better than him. And he’s scared of Nick. He’s scared of everything, but he thinks nobody can tell.” Her face fell, as her fingernails patiently worked Nick’s fur. “I don’t know why he’s so scared. Stephen was nice to me, before. He brought me extra food, and helped me hide when Papa Billy was angry at me. Now all of a sudden, he’s mad at me all the time.”

Papa Billy. Amy had told me about Mags and Billy, about how Lisa had claimed Naomi as her own. She seemed to make a habit of that, this Lisa, with other people’s daughters. Mama Mags, who my Amy killed in the Prairie Beach woods, and Papa Billy, her furious, grieving, monstrous widower—had they been little Naomi’s real parents? Alive and human, once, then turned by the plague? I couldn’t ask, didn’t want to know. She saw it all happen yesterday, little Naomi, and there was nothing we could do about that. She saw me like that, too, just yesterday, with the blood of supposed fellow humans all over and in my mouth. Feverish with biting and tearing flesh, flushed with a glorious liberation from scruples and care and letting bygones be. It had been there inside me all along, that need, that instinct, even as I tried so hard to appear normal, human, to be patient, methodical—

“Sometimes,” I said, “people get angry when they’re afraid. They say things they wouldn’t if they were thinking straight. Stephen’s been very afraid. Like we all have. It’ll all be better once we get to Cowles.” I didn’t believe that, not really, but I had to. “Everyone will calm down again.”

Naomi wriggled on her plastic cushion, hopped off the log, and dragged away the draped slicker to settle herself on the wet, rough bark. The damp of the tree trunk seeped right through her pink corduroy pants; Lisa wouldn’t be at all happy when she saw it, but we didn’t have any changes of clothes. “I had a bad dream last night,” Naomi said. “It felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

I put a hand to her forehead: only as warm as it should be and the damp was from rain, not fever-sweat. “Are you getting a cold?” Just our luck if that happened, but then, it was something of a miracle none of us had gotten sick yet.

“I mean in the dream. Not for real.” She was drumming her heels again, slow, steady, right and left. Nick sat at her side, watery eyes trained on her face. “We were walking to the beach, like we are now. Then this giant dark thing, like a shadow, or a big hand smushing an anthill, it came down on top of everything and it was like we were the anthill, and I couldn’t see or think or breathe at all. In the dream. Then I woke up.” Her feet pedaled faster. “I think Amy is right—that man who was following us is a monster. Even though you can’t see him, he’s still there. But Nick saved us.”

Her eyes studied the muddy ground, a thick dead dirt-caked stick arching up like a tiny dinosaur struggling in its tarpit. “Stephen, in the dream, he was fighting with someone I couldn’t see, and he fell over covered in blood. But Nick saved him. Nick can fight better than he can, maybe that’s why he’s scared of him.”

She opened her fingers, exposing a sticky last remnant of granola, and held it out to Nick. He didn’t even sniff it, and finally she gave up and shoved it in her own mouth. I craned my neck toward the backyards, but nobody was in sight. Where was Lisa anyway, gastric call of the wild or not? And Amy? Billy had already attacked her once; there was more than one monstrous thing that might be following us.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. Nick wouldn’t leave without Amy, that much at least I could say of him. “Stay here with Nick—”

“You should pee now, if you have to,” Naomi advised me. “Lisa said we’re not stopping again until we get to Cowles.”

Lisa can quit thinking she’s in charge of this expedition, sister or no sister. Even if she stepped up for Amy when I wasn’t there.

The thickets of trees diminished to a thin scrim as I walked toward the lost backyards; Stephen was right there, walking back and forth in the grasses a few yards away, lost in thought. He wouldn’t leave here without Amy either. Despite the rain, there were tiny patches of dead grass everywhere I looked, poking up in the midst of deep green like wheat stalks, like the islands of sharp-edged beach grasses that broke up the Lake Michigan sands. The thought of Prairie Beach—not the lab, but the land around it—gave me a pang and I shoved it aside, concentrating on the thought of Cowles Shores. I hadn’t visited there since my first civic security training exercises, when Amy was barely a year old. At the farthest edge of the trees was a little spot of light brown, another of strawberry red: Lisa and Amy, sitting shoulder to shoulder with their backs to me down in the long grass. I walked closer.

“...like even when I’m right here, sitting and talking, I’m always somewhere else.” Amy’s voice was low, clear, carrying back to me where I stood still in the trees. “I mean, not even like I’m standing aside watching myself, even though it can feel like that, it’s more that I’m always two places at once.” Her hand snaked up, tugged at the grass stems. “And I don’t know where the other place even is.”

“Nobody’s thinking right anymore,” Lisa said. Her consonants snapped and her vowels scratched glass even when she tried to keep it low; even Naomi sometimes winced at the sound of her voice. A strange plague-remnant. “The entire world’s just been upended, everything’s changed-everything you’ve seen—that wasn’t even a year ago, Amy. Not even one year.” Silence. “And barely weeks since...”

“Since I killed Ms. Acosta.”

Those words sent a hot unpleasant thrill through me, listening: not horror or agony at the confession, but a ferocious desire to stand between her and any accusers, snarl them into silence. Don’t you say a word against her, Lisa, not one word.

“Since you killed Ms. Acosta,” Lisa repeated. Her hesitation hung in the air like rain. “Amy, when people are pushed to their absolute limits, beyond their limits, sometimes everything just—”

“Have you ever just wanted to die?”

The heat inside me pooled, liquefied: a sickening sensation like my insides were a wax candle, bits melting in drips and streaming away.