Frail

by Joan Frances Turner

  “Hello!” I shouted. My voice was heated and shaky. “Hello!”

  No answer. Not even the sound of breathing. Just flat, airy silence and no one could have called me, there was no way but it was all still lit up, I heard it ring, I imagined nothing. “Is anyone there? Can you hear me? Is anyone—”

  The screen light sputtered and faded out. I cradled it in my hands, pushed every button on and off; it just lay there, warm and stone-smooth in my palm, a useless chunk of sparkly purple plastic.

  I shook the phone, pressed star-six-nine. So what if it were crazy? Who’s watching but some squirrels? Nothing. No noise, no light.

  I’d be ready. Next time, I’d answer it quicker, on the very first ring, I’d be ready and they wouldn’t hang up. There’d be a next time. I knew there would be. Because this couldn’t be me, huddled up mud-soaked in the remains of another destroyed subdivision in the dozenth destroyed town, waiting for a monster to feed me like a baby bird and then abandon me to strangers who’d die all around me when the winter came, all over again. They’d find me, the stranger on the phone line, wherever they were. They’d help me. I knew, without having to call any tribunals in my head, that they were on my side. They’d know what to do about the dog too. I was sure of it. All I had to do now was wait.

  Lisa was walking back with something limp and furry and dead dangling from each hand, and I slipped my secret back into my pocket. I was surprised somehow that she wasn’t lolloping along on all fours with the dead things gripped in her bloody mouth and I was ashamed of myself for those thoughts, after Lisa fed me and prayed over my body and saved my life outright twice in two days. But she’d understand, I knew she’d understand. Why’d she ever have left them behind, her own family, if she didn’t?

  We had rabbit for dinner that night, roasted. I don’t know what else Lisa ate in the woods, by herself.

  “How’s your arm?” Lisa asked. The rain was coming down again in long thin streams, trickles of pure cold damp making me shiver and twitch as they rolled from my jacket collar down my back, but neither of us wanted to stop walking. Clearly no good ever came of rest or sleep.

  “It’s all right,” I said. It still ached, all the way down to the wrist like something was sinking in dozens of fingernails. My palms felt less raw but were starting to itch, which my mom always said meant the skin was healing. “You were right. Let it bleed.”

  She glanced at me, then the sky, as our strip of expressway wound past a used-car lot shiny with smashed metal and glass. Nighttime was closing in again and Lisa looked pinched with exhaustion, head bowed and sodden withes of hair plastered over her face, but I had that dangerous sleep-deprived second wind where everything’s louder, sharper, more colorful: I could walk forever, march right past Elbertsville until I found another empty movie theater, all cool and dark with a concession counter still half intact. Wish Lisa luck at Prairie Beach, sleep on more thin flowered utility carpet until the popcorn was down to the last half-exploded kernel and the rats, the black dog, closed in. Until my secret caller found me, and helped me. I kept taking the phone out to check, I couldn’t help it, but the call screen looked just like the sky, dull dim gray that wouldn’t light up for trying.

  “I bet it rains all night,” I said, grabbing a handful of hair and squeezing more water all over my sleeve. “We could stop in one of those cars, or a tollbooth. If you’re tired.”

  “Just another mile or two,” she promised. A squirrel snakedanced across the road and something in her started for a moment, drawing up all tight and eager, then subsided. “Then we’ll wring ourselves out.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  It wasn’t sarcastic but she whipped her head round, glaring at me like I was trying to start a fight, and I just squeegeed more rain from my hair and pretended not to notice. The sky was a deep slate diminishing to black, the soft rushing sounds of the downpour nothing but an amplified silence all around us. My tangerine canvas sneakers had gone blood orange from the puddles, my feet would never stop itching once they were dry again, if they ever were dry again—

  A sound at my back, a soft clomp, clomp noise like someone stumbling slowly along in shoes far too large. It teased my ear, an itch of noise growing louder and more persistent beneath the wash of water, and I grabbed for Lisa’s hand; she stopped in her tracks like she already knew why.

  “Behind us,” I said. Softly as I could, like something might overhear. “Do you hear it?”

  She shook her head. “Count of three,” she said, just as softly.

  One, two—we both turned around, quick, sharp. Nothing. We kept walking. No more noises.

  “Another squirrel,” I said, under my breath to myself, brushing streams of water from my face. A deer. A possum. They’re heavy-footed things, possums, besides being ugly as hell. Lisa kept hold of my fingers, gently as she could manage, swinging her arm idly like we were having a happy little romp through the puddles.

  Clomp. Clomp.

  I whipped my head over my shoulder ever so casual, just checking the perimeter, and there following in our footsteps was a tiny, upright skeleton in winter coat and hat and mittens and knitted snowflake scarf and miniature bright red boots. It stumbled as it walked, clomping in the boots, like a living toddler just learning how to find its feet; empty sockets like black-tarnished coins stared up at me, a flesh-stripped little jaw grinned at me, when my eyes met the remnants of its face and couldn’t stop staring it stumbled faster, nearly fell, held out its puffy chrysalis arms for me to pick it up. Its bit of a jaw opened wide, and it made a sound. A sound like a whimpering, wounded dog.

  My fingers closed around Lisa’s and I jerked us both to a stop; she spun on her heel looking where I looked and then shook her head. She saw nothing. It opened its jaws again and whined louder, a stray’s furious arrouuuu of uncomprehending, starving loneliness. Louder, yelping piteously like an animal in pain. Like the dog Lisa hurt to save me.

  I was so tired that every cry, every noise was magnified and it was like being in a dream, like when I was asleep before the tornado hit and didn’t even realize what my brain was inventing right before me. No dream, though, not now. No dream. I stretched out my arms.

  “Amy?” Lisa was frowning in confusion, the beginnings of fear but she sounded so calm, contained, like she could will us both not to fly apart. “What are you looking at?”

  Stumbling toward me now, slowly. Crying harder, like a living baby.

  “Amy!” She grabbed my arm, forgetting to be gentle. “I’m not joking! What are you looking at!”

  Go away now, Lisa. It doesn’t concern you, what I’m seeing. It never did.

  The baby, the dead thing, took another step, inside its rotting stuffed-cloth shell, and then finger bones became claws and something in the shape of a huge black dog flew at me, its yellow lamplight eyes and filthy white teeth gleaming in malice, starvation, murder. It knocked me to the pavement, out of Lisa’s grasp, and no mere ghost had that weight, that power; it growled deep and low against my face like the rumbling of another storm and I kicked, furious, screaming.

  Lisa struck out shouting at what I knew she couldn’t see or hear and her hands passed right through the dog’s body, all that solid muscle and skin-soaked fur was nothing to her but an armful of dead air. She grabbed my forearms to haul me up, grabbed me too hard and I screamed again, it was agony, her fingers were vises twisting down to break my bones; the black dog howled in frustrated fury, sank teeth into her arm that never even pricked the skin, and I was up again running in blind panic down the road, back where we’d come from, down and down all the way back to Lepingville where I’d die, where I should long since have died—

  “Amy!” Lisa was screaming. “Oh, Christ! Stop!”

  Blinding sulfur-yellow light flooded the sky, the ground from nowhere and there was a hard screeching noise that went on forever, searing the asphalt, a stench of burnt rubber and gasoline—my palms hit smooth, rain-slicked metal and I crumpled to the pavement, out of breath, curle
d up unhurt and disbelieving against the hard, thick prune skin of a car tire. Headlights, that searing yellow glow. Squealing brakes. An actual working car, barreling the wrong way up the exit ramp and down the middle of an empty expressway and now someone was climbing out of the backseat, coming toward me as I edged away. Tall, thin-faced, a neatly clipped head of thick gray hair, wrapped in a capacious oilskin raincoat with a faded yellow logo splotching one arm.

  “Well, hey there!” he said, stretching out a hand, all bouncy, brisk footsteps and crocodile smiles even as his eyes looked me up and down, down and up, like something too distasteful for words. Like some little rodent from the woods, that runs in front of your car. “You need to be more careful than that, Janey almost hit you!”

  JUH-uhhhh-aaannEEEEE! allmust HIIT-T-TCHAA! I knew it. Your people, Lisa, your lost tribe, you handle this. Lisa had come up behind me, circling and protective, rubbing through my jacket sleeves like an apology at the bruises she’d left on my arms.

  “I’m Don, by the way,” the man said. Smiling, still smiling, in a way I didn’t like. “What’s your name?”

  I shook my head, trying to look stern, disdainful; let Lisa talk for both of us, maybe he’d think I was one of them too. No chance of that, my hand was bleeding from where it scraped the asphalt and I’d seen his eyes flicker to it and then back to my face, he saw how it didn’t heal. At least his car scared my dog away, it was nowhere in sound or sight. The woman behind the wheel had a tidy blonde pageboy and bright red lipstick, like an actress from some old fifties movie, scarlet mouth curved up pondering some private joke I knew I didn’t want to hear.

  “I asked you a question,” Don said, and stopped smiling. Raindrops rolled down his oilskin like little waterbugs sailing the surface of a river. “Didn’t I.”

  “Leave it,” Lisa said. “We’re both tired. We’ve been walking all day.”

  “Wonderful exercise,” he said. “Can’t beat it. You going somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said, and there was a gun from inside the folds of his black raincoat and it was pointing at me.

  My head felt all floaty and dreamy, like I really had fallen asleep standing there. Maybe I had, because that black dog growling nose to nose had felt so much more real than this. Lisa drew in a sharp, angry breath and he shrugged, actual apology in his eyes.

  “Get in,” he said, talking over my head to Lisa. “You want Prairie Beach, right? Like everyone else? Well, they’re full up now, no room at the inn, but I can take you to the next closest—”

  “We’re not going with you,” Lisa said. “We’re not going.”

  He shrugged again. “That’s all right with me,” he said. “But you seem fond of your little pet frail, I know how easy it is to get attached, and she’s a stain on the road shoulder if you don’t come so just think it over, ’kay? Think hard. And hurry up.”

  He had a hand on my arm now, closing tight on the spot where Lisa nearly broke it, and the barrel was right up against my cheek as he cocked the trigger. Just like in a movie. The woman behind the wheel kept sitting there, dreaming her own little dreams as she waited, and Lisa said something to Don I couldn’t seem to hear, and he laughed, and then Lisa was in the car’s front passenger seat and I was in the back with the gun and Don. Don had my knife too, Dave’s knife. I wasn’t sure how he got it, all that was another blur. The seats were so soft, a dried sticky streak on the leather like some kid had spilled a can of pop ages back, and the heater was turned up so high I felt cool steam evaporating from my soaked skin. I shivered, folding my arms in my sopping wet jacket they hadn’t yet taken from me, and looked from the side of Lisa’s anxious, knotted face to the dark paper-scroll of the interstate to Don, who tilted his gray head and gave me a grin.

  “Am I dreaming?” I asked, as we headed right down the middle of I-80/94 at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour.

  Don laughed. The same sort of laughing sound Lisa made, a deep, barking cough that shot the air from his throat like he was angry at it.

  “You were all daydreaming,” he said. “All humanity, everywhere. Now you’ve had your wake-up call. So how d’you like it?”

  He looked suddenly almost warm and wistful like the very thought of that made him happy, like some great iron band binding him tight had just loosened and his whole being was shifting, stretching in relief. The rain clattered against the car windows, the headlights illuminating the deserted expressway, defunct service stations, signs counting down the miles to cities now inaccessible if they still existed at all; I drew my fingertips across the condensation on the glass, three thick, clear, foreshortened lines in the fog, and waited to see how long it would take my last little traces to be erased.

  BOOK TWO

  TOPSY-TURVY

  SIX

  “Well, my God, you don’t need to look like that.”

  Janey, the woman behind the wheel, stared at me in the rearview mirror, big gray-green eyes narrow with amusement; up close her hair looked disheveled and glassine, like she’d coated it thick with hairspray without bothering to comb it first, and her lipstick was a haphazard greasy smear. “Nobody’s driving you to your funeral, now are they?”

  Human. Her voice. I don’t know why that surprised me so much, but I sat up straighter against the padded leather and scrutinized that little rectangle of her eyes, nose, mouth like it were a rebus full of clues. “I don’t know what you’re taking me to,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t,” said Don, who’d put the gun away and was cleaning his nails with a little paring knife, bored as you please. He was sitting passenger side, right behind Lisa. “You’re a human. You don’t know anything, you don’t understand anything, it’s like expecting a muskrat to stand up and recite Racine—”

  “Don,” said Janey, her greasy mouth screwing up in a reproving pout. “Be nice.”

  “The truth isn’t nice or not nice, dearest Jeanette,” he said, not looking up from his pinky finger. “It just is.”

  “I want to know where you’re taking us.” Lisa kept twisting around to look at me, then back at the road signs. If it weren’t for me I bet she’d just throw herself right out of the car, any broken bones a mere fleeting inconvenience. “If you won’t tell her, you can damned well lower yourself to telling—”

  “I told you already, didn’t I?” Don put the paring knife away, stretched out his long blocky legs so his knees pressed into the back of Lisa’s seat. “You said you’d been walking all day, and you were heading north. That makes your destination fairly obvious, if you have any clue what’s left standing—and I assume you do, you may be ignorant but you’re not fools. You—” He pointed a finger at Lisa. “You want Prairie Beach. You’re a bit late in the day, they’re not taking anyone new and they wouldn’t want your frail anyway—”

  “What about Elbertsville?” Lisa demanded. “There’s a human settlement there. That’s what everyone told me.”

  Don pulled a matchbook from his pocket, digging under his nails again. Janey squinted at the road.

  “You ran into one of those twisters, didn’t you?” he said, his mouth pursed with concentration as he sawed the matchbook’s thin paper edge back and forth. “A couple touched down in Hammond too and one right outside Lake Station. Bad, bad weather. You don’t look like the sort who’d travel with a pet but no supplies, you must’ve lost them all along the way. You might as well come with us.” The matchbook edge frayed, bent, and he turned it over for a fresh plane of attack. “Janey and I patrol the roads sometimes looking for folks just like you, who’ve lost your way—you’re lucky we stumbled over you. We’re open to everybody. We don’t discriminate.”

  “They don’t discriminate,” Janey repeated, veering such a sharp left to avoid a fear-frozen deer that I grabbed for the door handle, nearly bashed my head on the window. “Everyone’s welcome. You’ll be happy there.”

  “Where is there?” I asked. “If it’s not Elbertsville or Prairie Beach, then where are we going?” />
  Janey sped up to seventy-five and clunked right over and through a pothole, a yawning frost heave, so roughly I winced for the car’s transmission. North, obviously, still north, to Gary. But not Elbertsville. Lisa fumbled in her pockets and stretched her arm back, handing me something: a little half-crushed foil packet of peanuts, like the kind you get on airplanes. Spicy Red Hot flavor. Don chuckled when I tore it open.

  “You’ll be earning your food from now on,” he said. “No more handouts. But it won’t be bad. You’ll see. Plenty for everyone.”

  “Plenty for everyone,” Janey crooned, her smile filling up the rearview mirror. Her tongue swept over her large, square front teeth, mopping away a lipstick streak. “And nobody will take you away from—what’s your name, anyway?” She turned to Lisa, who glared silently back. “Nobody will take you away from each other, we respect family ties. It’s all about family, one way or another.” She sailed through a standing puddle, a soft swishing sound of water as the wheels sank inward, and onto the U.S. 12 exit ramp. She rubbed a hand over her eyes and I saw violet-gray circles beneath them, soft crushed-looking skin like flower petals in a mud puddle, and something in her sagged wearily against the seat cushions before she straightened up, clutched the wheel tighter, gave the mirror a resolute smear-free smile. “All about family,” she repeated.

  Nobody’d asked my name. Maybe I don’t have one anymore, as far as they’re concerned. I guess they can have the knife, it was Dave’s anyway, but they’re not taking my cell phone. My cards. The CDs Lisa gave me. I licked my fingers and rubbed them over the oily foil, picking up the last peanut crumbs and salt.

  I want to go home.