Lisa was right, it would probably fit, the skeleton was small like me. No way in hell you could pay me to wear it. If her baby got a funeral, family boxing up all her clothes and toys and whisking them away, it must have been long before all this.
“One of the people I was with, she was pregnant,” I told her. “She lost her baby. I mean, she had it, but she lost it. It was stillborn.”
Lisa scrubbed the coat lining with a bandanna, like that could clean it. “I want those boots,” she said. “Tell me I shouldn’t take them. It’s ridiculous.”
Why shouldn’t she? Plenty of room. Especially since we both knew we weren’t taking the coat.
“Tell me I shouldn’t,” she repeated. Louder. Harder. In a way that scared me.
“They look like someone posed them that way,” I said. “Like, they couldn’t bury them, but that’s close as they could get. You’d be desecrating a grave.”
Lisa thought that over, for a moment, and nodded. I stopped holding my breath.
“She didn’t starve, did she?” Lisa asked. I shook my head in confusion. “That woman you were with.” She picked at the tulip box’s splintering wood, pulling off robin’s-egg paint in little chips.
“Not exactly. There was food, but she couldn’t eat.” I glanced back at our carts, making sure they were still there. “She had an infection, I think, I mean, she was bleeding when she shouldn’t have been. And some of the blood smelled strange.” Kristin was sweating hot near the end, feverish. That wasn’t my fault. That part.
“Was it a girl or a boy?”
Even a heavy cart could take off, in a good gust of wind. It was picking up again. I walked back to the curb, making sure the wheels were tilted against sudden flight.
“The baby,” Lisa kept saying. “What was it?”
I’d grabbed some books from the remains of the library; I pulled up blankets, toilet paper rolls, making sure they were still there. The Wind in the Willows. My mother gave me that, one Christmas. Lisa stood by the curb, watching me, scratching at her scalp.
“Were you able to bury it?”
I put the books back in the cart, tucked salted almond cans more comfortably against my old folded-up Yale sweatshirt. Uncle John got that for me, we didn’t know anyone who went to Yale. That was him all over.
“The ground was still frozen,” I said.
Lisa turned back to the tulip box, unhooking the skeleton’s fingers like she was prising open a clam shell. She took the moldy, dirt-caked tulip bulb and perched it on the clothes in her cart’s kiddy seat, like she might need to keep staring at it to make sure it was still there.
“I guess we should leave,” she said. “No point putting it off.”
The sun was so hard and clean it was starting to hurt. As I slipped my sunglasses back on there it was, again, the faintest outline of a black dog with watery amber eyes staring at us from the fencing, from the town hall yard, from around every corner and inside every breath. But she couldn’t see it. I had no advantage in a fight so I had to keep her thinking she was the crazy one, not me, that she might need my clear sober skull when her nerves got jangly again. Don’t say a word. Not when she keeps asking so many questions.
“That’s a pretty paint,” I said, nodding at the tulip box. “That color.”
“That’s what my sister’s hair looked like. That time she dyed it.”
She walked back to the box and I thought she might take a little peel of paint, as a reminder. But she stopped just long enough to redress the skeleton in its rotten old coat, button it back up to the neck, and we took up our carts and headed for the expressway.
It’s sort of comforting, when nothing’s what it used to be and never will be again, how all the dull shitty soul-killing things keep right on being dull and shitty and soul-killing right up to the end of time. Get past the bodies by the roadside, jackknifed semis stuck in ditches, cars already rusting out and I-80/94 looked exactly like it always had, cracked chunks of tarmac, sad spindly trees, wispy grasses in a thousand tints of drab. Carpets of loosestrife, which they said was choking out all the native plants, but it was a relief how its clumps of tiny purple flowers blotted out the endless eaten-up grayish brown, the bare patches of dead dry dirt.
I’d stopped seeing the dog too the minute we left town. It must’ve been Leyton, must’ve been all the death clustered all on the edge of town where I hadn’t seen it. Does things to your head, makes you remember—
Tollbooths, with the old signs still on the side. DESIGNATED ABOVE-GROUND ENVIRONMENTAL SHELTER. ATTACKED? PURSUED? CALL *999 FOR ASSISTANCE. FUNDING ROAD SAFETY. TEN CENTS A MILE TO RIDE IN STYLE. (But take the wrong exit and you’re on your own, no protection for rural roads or poorer neighborhoods and private funding was a joke, my dad’s mill had to strike before the company hired mill yard sentries and the zombies got him anyway—but the lettering was too big for all that to fit.) Inside one of them, a thick pair of canvas and leather work gloves that actually fit my hands, hers were way too big. Lisa looked thrilled to death.
“Keep those on,” she said, as we pushed along. “Your hands look bad enough, even without the scrapes—did you have a decent pair of gloves, this winter?”
My hands had been scaly white and cracked bright pink for so long I barely noticed anymore; lotion vanished into them like a stream of water in a drain, half a bottle’s worth couldn’t get them smooth. “Sick folks got into my uncle’s house,” I said, “stole all our stuff. Tore it up trying to eat it. I didn’t have much left.”
“I was gone. By the time the plague really got going.”
“They kicked you out?” They started doing that, folks who were still well, when the sickness spread. Sometimes just shooting anyone they thought was walking funny. You had to hide.
Lisa shook her head. The wind was sharper along the expressway and she’d taken an old wool cap from her cart, dustmatted pink and gray yarn pulled low over her forehead and ears. “I said, I was gone,” she corrected me. “They wanted to kick me out, yeah, but Jim, my brother, he hid me. Then I got away.”
“They found out he was hiding you?”
“I got away,” she said softly. “Don’t ask me from what. Or whom.”
A coyote lay by the shoulder, its fur dancing and leaping with flies; Lisa stopped for a second, staring, then pushed forward. “You said you were with some people. I was all alone, until I found Jessie and her friends. I might’ve liked some human company—”
“They’re dead,” I reminded her. “All of them. So they weren’t much company, were they.”
“What were they like?”
She wasn’t going to just shut up about it, not ever. Push and push until she heard what she wanted.
Ms. Acosta looked so different with her face scrubbed clean of that streaky orange foundation, gray hair all crowding out the “auburn” because she couldn’t do a Bozo henna rinse anymore. Furzy silvery hair and clammy white skin and pale eyes, a washed-out watercolor woman, but they were big clear eyes, almost pretty; when she shut out everything else around her, dismissing the stink and mess and waste to concentrate on finding more bottled water or canned peaches or insulin or antibiotic cream, it’s like they almost shone from the inside. Shining with a sort of otherness, that everyone has in them but you never actually see: the person inside the “person.” The flesh in the breath, though everyone mistakenly thinks you should say that the other way around.
“Ms. Acosta pretty much told us all what to do.” I yanked my cart over another pothole. “She worked in the principal’s office at my high school. Dave was one of the janitors. When I got out of my house, my uncle’s house, when I got out of the basement, I couldn’t think where to go so I ran to the school, they were both there—”
“Out of the basement?” Weirdly interested now, like a detective whose murder suspect just let everything slip without knowing it. “Was this when they broke into your house? What happened?”
I woke up and my uncle was standing over me with a knife. That’s
what happened. Everything had disintegrated by then so there was no school, no 911 or 999, no LCS patrols, it was either wander the streets watching everyone die or stay home, hide what food was left, try to keep him away from it. I’d started keeping it under my bed, anything I could salvage; I had to eat too and there was no hope for him, none at all, I didn’t starve him. The disease did that. So I closed my eyes for just a second and next thing I knew, there he was. He was sick enough by then that his grasp was weak, his fingers unnaturally pliant like toothpicks gone damp, and that plus the headboard of my bed being in the center of the wall so I could slide out the other side, that’s why I lived. I was going to go out the window. Then the window broke. Other sick ones were coming in.
“Ms. Acosta told us all what to do. How to organize ourselves, how to—concentrate on stuff. She was good at that.” A crashed car, an ashy gray shell with burnt bread crusts of bones in the driver’s seat, sat cheek by jowl with the warped, bent guardrail in a little pool of melted glass. I’d seen a sculpture like that once, at a museum in Chicago. “Dave, the janitor at our school, he used to hunt and fish a lot, zombies never scared him so he’d go wherever he wanted. He had a woodstove in his house. They broke in there too, sick ones, but he shot a lot of them. That made it better, this winter. His woodstove.”
Dave died. But before that, before his woodstove and hunting and mud-smeared fishing-line snares that saved us all, I ran to the school, that night my uncle woke me up. Dave and Ms. Acosta were already there and he almost shot me before he realized, I couldn’t be sick, the sick couldn’t run, and I was doubled over gasping and my feet felt like someone took a knife, Dave’s big hunting knife, and stripped all the skin off the soles. When he realized what he’d almost done he came running out to me, shoved me through the school doors so hard I smacked into Ms. Acosta and we clutched each other not to fall, and there were more sick people coming out of the lilacs near the schoolyard gate. One of them staggered in a circle, fell to his hands and knees with a thud and a cry and sprays of cascading gravel, but sick as they were they’d still grab anyone they could, kill them, eat them, if you let them close. Dave stood there in the doorway, still pushing us back with one arm, huge expanse of shoulders hunching up the cloth of his shirt like a drawstring pulling shut on a sack.
“I don’t wanna do this!” he shouted, at the ones approaching the yard. “I don’t wanna do it! Go away!”
He’d have done them a favor, if he shot them. Dying so drawn-out, starving, screaming in pain. Dave knew that. Even then he must’ve suspected how drawn out it’d be for him, diabetes, no insulin. The set of his shoulders, as I stood behind him, was rigid and unyielding but the slackness of his fingers on the rifle told me he still just couldn’t do it.
“I used to hate the idea of hunting,” I told Lisa. “Not vegetarian or anything. Just squeamish. But he taught me how to make snares.”
“How to look out for yourself,” she said. Reaching out a hand to the melted-glass car, like a little kid in a museum needing to touch the smudgy haystacks. “Not just rely on his own hunting, fishing. That was smart of him.”
“I was squeamish. But the first time I got a rabbit, from one of my own snares, I was really proud.”
Dave stood there in the doorway, that night, and the sick people kept coming. “Don’t make me do this!” he shouted.
“We’re hungry,” one of them shouted back, and it was nothing but truth, the only truth left for him and for all of us, but the rasping, gulping ruin of his voice gave me a revolted shiver. “We just need food, all we need is—”
“You’re always hungry.” Dave’s fingers tightened. He didn’t want to. But he would. “And you’re dying. And we’re not. There’s not enough food in the world for you. And we’re not dying—”
“Help us!” another one screamed. A woman, her face one huge, skin-sloughing bruise, nails dangling crazily loose from her fingertips and her teeth already tarnished and far too long. “You have to! You have to! Jesus Christ, help us—”
Dave fired a shot, then another, over their heads. They crawled off, sobbing, still human enough that there was hurt and loneliness in that sound along with the agony of famine. Dave grabbed us both and we were running again and when I almost fell he tossed the rifle to Ms. Acosta, grabbed me, hauled me like the light inconsequential thing I was into the school basement. There might be healthier ones on their heels, guns of their own, mouths to feed. You had to hide.
“He acted like I was his daughter,” I said to Lisa. “Like it was his responsibility to look after me. He didn’t have to. But he did.”
When they got into Dave’s house, the night before my uncle and the others came for me, they’d grabbed his daughter. Starving mouths, famished hands. He got a lot of them then, no warning shots that time, but he never got her back. His wife was already dead. I don’t have anything to whine about, knowing that.
“And the one with the baby?” Lisa asked.
She wouldn’t let up—fine, hear it. Hear everything, it might surprise you. “Kristin. Kristin was sick. She couldn’t help much.” Soft pale hair like the feathers of some helpless little bird. Dried blood on her scalp where she’d deliberately knocked it on the floor and a raw rictus of grieving, vindictive fury for a mouth, that was the beginning and end of Kristin in my mind. I slept two feet away from her for months on end, and that’s honestly all I remember. “She couldn’t do anything. She was useless. She knew she wouldn’t live. She kept saying so, over and over. And she was right.”
“She didn’t kill herself, though,” Lisa said softly.
“What if she did? Why would you care?” I clutched my cart harder, pain shooting up to my wrists. “She’s gone. Dave’s gone. My uncle’s gone. He tried to kill me, there were a whole lot of sick ones with him wanting to kill me, but he died.” My voice was shaky and skittering, a shopping cart hurtling down an empty road in a blast of freezing wind. “I promised Kristin over and over I’d keep her baby with me and it didn’t make any difference, baby’s gone, Ms. Acosta’s gone, my aunt’s gone, my uncle, my mother—”
“Music!”
She stuck a foot right under my cart wheels, trying to block my path, and I shoved the cart over it without thinking and she let out a shout of pain. She grabbed my cart two-handed, watched impassively as the wheels spun in place on the asphalt; when I gave up and let go she reached into her own cart, pulled out the CD player, skipped several tracks ahead and pressed play.
I blinked in surprise. I couldn’t help it. “You like The Good Terrorist?”
“I guess so.” She turned it up. “I never heard of them before, I just grabbed a bunch of CDs from someone’s house. I like this song, though. Are they popular?”
“No.” Whose house? Nobody in Lepingville would know about a band like The Good Terrorist, or care. “They’re good. That’s what they are.”
She shut up and we stood there, listening. “One Door Closes.” Track five from Songs for Children Behind Chicken Wire, my favorite. I practiced the chords from this one until my fingers went raw. Lisa glanced at me, quick little eye dart like she feared I might try to break her foot in earnest, then listened until the last embittered little crash of drums at the end.
“Play it again?” I asked.
She pressed the repeat button and rested the player in the folds of her torn-up jacket, down in the cart, and we got going. Nick Hawley’s voice was thin and anemic against the wind, spiraling up lost into the air around us from cheap tinny speakers, but there it was, for as long as there were batteries. Things would get so much worse once the batteries ran out, the canned chili and chocolate and cool ranch chips were all eaten up, the last aspirin bottle went empty, the last bar of soap—“The Last Transit,” track six. The live version could make you cry. “Over and Out.” Track seven. The weakest on the album, Stefanie Scholl phoning in the bass line, but it was them and that was enough.
“I could play it from the start,” Lisa said.
I nodded and she cycled back t
o “Screams from Somewhere Else.” The cars were thinning out again, the clusters of phantom traffic jams fewer with every mile.
“So who else do you like?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about music, I never did, Jessie used to make fun of me for it—”
“Dirty Little Whirlwind. Do you know them?” She shook her head. She’d probably heard their one sort-of hit, the one that became a margarine commercial, two hundred times and didn’t even know it. “Tortoise D. Hare? The Medium Soft?” I’d have been amazed if she’d heard of the Medium Soft, nobody had. “Anyway. That’s who I liked.”
Sometimes when I was practicing my guitar or blasting The Good Terrorist or Tortoise D. or Pleasure To Serve my mother would come in and sit on my bed, just listening; it never felt intrusive or like she was trying to prove something by liking what I liked, she just plain wanted to hear it and I didn’t mind sharing. Nobody at school gave a shit about real music.
“My mom didn’t know anything about it either,” I said. “She said once you turn thirty it’s like a switch gets thrown in your brain and you don’t even know where to begin? Like you’re condemned to listen to whatever you liked when you were fifteen over and over again, forever? That’s bullshit. It’s never too late. I mean, look at Stefanie Scholl, right? She never even picked up a bass guitar until she was twenty-three.”
It was actually getting hotter as the sunlight weakened; the wind had died, the air felt thick and heavy. I stripped off the gloves and blew on my sore, sweaty hands. Lisa rooted around in her cart, tossed me another tube of Neosporin. I’d slather my dog bite in it once we stopped for the night.
“Don’t talk to me about your friends and family unless you really want to,” she said. “It’s just I haven’t had human company in so long, I like hearing about them and I forget—I’m sorry.” She pulled her cap off, combing fingers through her ponytail. “But I’d like it if you talked about music some more. Just, any time. Whenever you want.”
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