The padded car seat felt good. The heater. Heat that came out of a machine whenever you wanted, the touch of a button, drying your clothes without leaving any damp or mildew behind. Already that felt singular, seductive. It was dangerous to let comfort suck you in, heat, soft chairs, the promise of gasoline and food and lipstick. Be like Lisa. Sleep anywhere, eat anything that comes your way. Don’t give a shit. But I’ve been doing that, I’ve been, and nothing’s worked out right.
The car clunked and skidded into the outskirts of Gary, a silent teeth-rattling ride over empty railroad tracks past steel mills and coil makers and warehouses gone to hollow caverns. Maybe it was Janey who called me, or Don, warning us they’d be right along. But it couldn’t be. Don would’ve smashed my phone right on the pavement, crushed it under his shoe, just for fun. He wasn’t getting my phone.
Stick with Lisa. She’ll help me. She’s got to.
We clattered down a residential side street, all overgrown forest patches and neat little houses with worn siding and tiny piebald lawns. The protective fences were torn down, or simply never there: Property taxes paid for all that, zombie fencing and warning sirens and sulfur lights up and down the roads, and you could tell these houses had never been worth much. Bodies by the roadside, flesh-picked or clean rotted away, skeletons curled up in the grass. Janey slowed the car to a near crawl, staring wide-eyed at each house in turn like a thief casing the neighborhood, and Don looked up from the shredded remains of his matchbook.
“There’s no point in foot-dragging, Jeanette Isabella.” He returned the matchbook to his pocket. “We’re almost there.”
“I’m not foot-dragging, I’m just enjoying the view.” Janey leaned back in her seat, let the speed drop from twenty-five, to twenty, to ten as she smiled beatifically at the dead grass, limp shrubbery, wan dilapidated little sardine-tin houses. “I love cities at night—they’re just so big and spread out, so full of people and life and activity. So many possibilities. Don’t you love the lights, Don? Look at all the lights.”
Other than her headlights, the street was completely dark. Lisa swiveled around in her seat to face me, eyes silently warning me to keep quiet—what the hell did she think I could say, anyway, to that?—and gave Janey a calm attempt at a smile. “My name is Lisa,” she said. “My friend, the human girl, her name is Amy—”
“Janey,” Don interrupted, calm and unruffled, “start the fucking car up again before I hurt you.”
Janey flinched, like some random noise had just jostled her from a daydream, and sped up. Still smiling. The rain had slowed, nearly stopped. Lisa squinted at the street signs. “Ogden,” she said. “This is near Prairie Beach then, I can tell just by all the trees—”
“An invigorating hike away,” Don agreed. “So close, and yet so far.”
Ogden, Illinois, Buell, Indiana, Pennsylvania. Janey pulled up at the curb right off Massachusetts Avenue and I saw the metallic glint of a restored fence, curving over and across the street, people with flashlights leaning bored against it like sentries. One of them had a gun in a holster, like Don. Another one, a hunting knife like Dave’s. Lisa reached back and took my hand and held it as firmly as she could without breaking it, to stop the trembling.
“This is my ‘pet,’ ” Lisa said, glancing from Don to Janey in turn. “Not anyone else’s.”
“You’re worrying about nothing,” Don said, squinting out the window. “We have nothing to worry about anymore, our kind. Nothing can touch us. Leave the fruitless hand-wringing to the weak and frail.”
A man was coming through the gate, tall, stout, white-haired, in a dark gray suit inches short at the wrists and ankles. He flapped an impatient flashlight beam at us and Janey leapt like a happy little puppy from behind the wheel, stumbling over to Don as he unfolded himself from the back seat and slipping her arm through his. She was in high heels, a good size too large, sliding precariously up and down inside them as she tugged the stiletto tips from the soft wet dirt at every step. I waited until Lisa came over to my side of the car, opening the door for me and taking my hand again as I made myself climb out.
“I’ll handle it,” she whispered, even as her wary glances from ex to ex—I didn’t need to hear them to know what they were—told me she had no more clue what she was handling than I did. “He said nobody would separate us. Let’s call his bluff. Just let me talk.”
“Why are we here?” The night was soft and hazy, the smallest bit of moonlight filtering through the clouds and making the budding tree branches look anemic, sickly; no lamplight eyes peering at me through the bushes, no black dog. I almost wished it were there. It wanted only me, if they tried taking its prey away it’d make them all shit themselves. Even smug, smirking Don. “What do they want?”
“Just let me talk.”
The short-suited man banged his flashlight on the car hood, like we didn’t already have his attention, shone the beam fast in our faces. Up close his hair wasn’t white but a pale golden blond, soft fluffy locks like feather tufts, his eyes narrow and ice-colored and as sour as his thick pink twisted-up mouth. He marched up to me and Lisa and his pale exposed ankles, his broad bare feet looked incongruously shapely and fragile, like wax sculptures threatened by a match.
“So whaddaya got for me, Don?” he asked, in a voice gravelly and thin all at once like a rain of tiny pebbles. “Because you never bring me shit no matter how far you drive, and this don’t look like any exception—”
Don laughed, a wispy stream of mirth like tobacco smoke. Janey clutched his shoulders from behind, massaging with her fingertips. “One of us, and a frail. Since when can’t you use more work crews, Billy? The frail’s young, strong—well, strong as her kind ever get, anyway.” He pulled out a packet of cigarettes, a lighter. “She’ll do. As for the other, well, ask her if she wants to stay. The frail’s her little pet goldfish, she probably will.”
Billy leaned forward, squinting at us like he had bad eyes. His breath had the same faint traces of brine and decay as Don’s had, and Lisa’s didn’t. I backed away without meaning to, as he looked me over, but he seemed pleased with that.
“That’s mine, what you’re nosing around,” Lisa said, cold and steady, moving in front of me. Almost nose to nose with Billy, staring him right down. “I’m Lisa.”
Billy didn’t seem put off at all. Normal meet and greet, maybe, for an ex. “That’s yours, huh?” He glanced over at Don, who’d shaken off Janey’s clinging fingers like someone flicking away an ant and was sucking deep on his cigarette, eyes squeezed shut in pleasure; Don held the packet out to Janey, who took her own cigarette with a delighted squeak, and Billy’s narrow eyes went narrower with distaste. Disgust, even. “Like we don’t have enough of that shit round here already—”
“She’s my sister.” Lisa spat the word, all shortcut sibilance like Don blowing out a match. “So just leave it. If you want her so bad, and I don’t know why you do, you’d better take me too.”
“Don’t lookit me.” Billy snorted, all lit up now like he and Lisa were just sharing a friendly joke. “The trash Don likes to collect from the side of the road, I ain’t got nothing to say about it, but she looks young enough to work and if you stick around you won’t have all the burden of feeding her, you should be fucking grateful—Phoebe!” He turned and shouted at the gate guards, so bored they hadn’t moved an inch from their haphazard posts. “Where the hell’s that Phoebe, I know she’s on night crew this week! Get the dumb bitch over here now!”
He hadn’t been looking at her but Janey jumped and twitched, taking a last guilty draw on her cigarette, before she dropped it in the dirt and pulled off her shoes to run; she scuttled at double speed through the gates, Don strolling leisurely behind her, and after a few moments another woman came running out. Curly black hair cropped close to the scalp, blue T-shirt, sensible red sneakers, an angular rail of a body vibrating with so much nervous energy everyone else looked half-asleep in comparison. She skidded to a stop in front of Billy, one narrow hand shooting up to her temple i
n a playful little salute.
“Chieftain?” She grinned, and actually clapped her feet together like some soldier on dress parade. Human. I was starting to get a little feel for who was who, even before anyone talked.
Billy stood there looking at her, nostrils flaring like she stank. Phoebe just kept grinning, a wide-eyed toothy cheekiness that made you tense up inside waiting for someone to slap it right off her face. “New meat,” he said, nodding at me. “Show it around. That’s Lisa, she owns it. Do what she says like you’d do what I say, or I’ll beat the living shit out of you. Go get them beds.”
He turned and stalked off, the bare bits of his nearly hairless shins gleaming like wax, like bleached bone. It should’ve been ridiculous, him striding away barefoot in his little short pants, but the edges of his heels looked sharp enough to slice skin. The moonlight bisected Phoebe’s thin ferrety face and she gave me this strange eyeblink of a look, like she thought she knew me from somewhere but couldn’t quite place the face, then she slipped between me and Lisa and locked arms with us like we’d all three been jolly pals all our lives.
“You must both be worn out!” she shouted, grinning at me like that was the best and jolliest thing she could imagine. Up close she looked older, faint webbing all around her eyes, patches of old acne surrounded by flaking skin; her teeth were uneven, unhealthy nubs, like crumbling tea-stained sugar cubes. “We all sleep in the women’s dorm, plenty of room for everyone. Couples and families, they have their own space—but they don’t like to encourage that, you know, the big bosses, not if they can help it, don’t want any more really little mouths to feed, know what I mean?” Her laugh was a soft low titter. “You’ll get your work assignment tomorrow, after you sleep—see, you can get a little shut-eye first, they’re not running Parchman North up here no matter what anyone’s been telling ya!” She squeezed my arm, hard. “Welcome aboard. You’ll be glad you came!”
Lisa? Make her stop talking. I’ll pay you. Lisa just studied the gate guards, glaring at them while they glared back but none of it seemed hostile; one of them nodded courteously and handed her an extra flashlight as we passed through the gate, into another emptied-out subdivision of plain lawns and sad shrubs and slightly bigger houses. A little group was gathered on one of the lawns, scooping something into a tall brown leaf bag. Phoebe was humming all high and sprightly under her breath, my theme-song welcome to Don and Billy’s Home for Wayward Batshit Crazy Humans. “Where are we?” I demanded, pulling my arm from Phoebe’s. “What is this place?”
The guard nearest us, the one with the hunting knife, turned and grinned at me. Her eyes weren’t unkind. “Some of you frails started calling it Paradise City. Why not. Compared to what things are like outside? That’s no lie.”
“We’re staying long enough for Amy to rest,” Lisa said. “Then we’re leaving again.”
One of the lawn folks, watching us as he kept the leaf bag’s edges standing upright, shook his head and laughed. “You’re leaving when Billy and them say you can leave,” he said, as another of his fellow humans dropped something into the bag: an armload of filthy old bones, mixed with clumps of last autumn’s wet dead leaves. Cleanup crew. “She is, anyway.”
“She’s with me. She’s my sister.” Lisa was glaring down the guards again, whipping round to spit rebuke at the bone gatherers. “I say when we leave and when we—”
“Lady, just let it go.” The second cleanup crew guy, big and sturdy as a linebacker but with a gentle, patient face, big blue eyes, straightened up and wiped his leaf-mucky palms against his jeans. Careful not to get his Bears jersey any dirtier than it already was. “You’ve been out there, haven’t you? You know what it’s like. It’s shit. It’s hell. Especially for a girl. If you care about your sister you should be glad you both got here, one way or another.”
“Let’s go.” Phoebe grabbed my arm again, right where Lisa had bruised it up. “The women’s dorms are over on Elbert Street. I’m on shift, y’know, I have to get back to the kitchens or old Mags’ll have kittens.”
She led us through a weed-choked backyard and a knot of elm trees onto the next street: Elbert, the fourth house down, a defeated-looking white clapboard pile with peeling black trim. There in what used to be the living room were cheek by jowl rows of beds, futons, cots, sleeping bags, more in the next room, maybe two dozen in all; some empty, some with shoes lined up before them and exhausted barefoot heaps lying fast asleep. Phoebe made a needless little keep-it-down hand gesture and motioned to an unoccupied cot in the corner.
“You can’t stay here,” she whispered to Lisa. “The bosses have their own housing; this is a human dorm—”
“I’m not leaving Amy.” Lisa’s ex voice turned down low was a seething hiss, like a pressure cooker threatening to blow. “You can’t just grab people off the streets, sweep them up like those leaves and—”
“You can’t stay here.” Phoebe had dropped all her nudges and nods and grins and stood staring up at Lisa, mouth in a grim line and feet planted wide apart like she was scared of being pushed. “This is ours, the sleeping quarters are ours. Bosses don’t get to come inside. That’s the rule. We get our own space, and you can’t just drop in and out whenever you want to. It upsets everyone.”
“I’m not anyone’s boss, and I’m not trying to do anything but—”
“Don’t make me get Mags.” Phoebe was hissing like Lisa now. “These here, they’re on day shift, they can’t sleep in, it’s not fair, it’ll wake them up and be all your fault but I’ll still get blamed for—”
“It’s all right,” I muttered to Lisa. My whole head was wrapped in cotton batting, my eyes stinging and pricking with exhaustion; just looking at the little cot made me dizzy needing to lie down. “It’s okay.”
Phoebe smiled at me again, a quick spasm of thin lips and bad teeth like someone had tugged puppet strings hidden in her hair, and gave me that same funny, penetrating look as she had back at the gate, as if I were telling her some unsavory secret without even knowing I was doing it. I sat down on the edge of the cot, fumbling with my LCS jacket zipper.
“We’ll figure all this out tomorrow,” Lisa told me, squatting down and pulling my T-shirt cloth free of the zipper teeth like she really was my mother. I got the message, as she zipped it to my neck: Keep this on. The rest of your stuff could disappear. She rifled through her own pockets, passing me another foil peanut packet, as Phoebe pursed her lips and shook her head in delighted reproof.
“Can’t do that,” she whispered. “Can’t do that, no special treats or favors if you don’t prove you can work—”
“I decide what my frail gets,” Lisa hissed back, rising slow and easy to her feet. “Not you, human.”
A little eyeblink pause, as some of the sleepers murmured and stirred, then Phoebe shrugged.
“No offense, memsahib,” she said. “No offense. Nighty-night, Amy.”
They went out, the door creaking behind them. I curled up on the cot, patting my pockets, and ate my peanuts with as little foil-rustling as I could. All these people made me want to slip under the cot and hide. Tomorrow. Sort all this out tomorrow.
I decide what my frail gets. Not you, human. It came out of her mouth so cold and hard, so easy. Frail. Mine. Like she’d been waiting her chance to say it, all along.
The second I closed my eyes I slid down a long, smooth chute, cool like metal and with the contained darkness of a womb. Somewhere far away, minutes or hours later, there were sounds of people getting up and leaving and others dropping into the beds, futons, cots they’d left behind; sunlight came hard and clean through the grimy windows, turning the womb-space behind my eyelids from soft black to a cloudy illuminated amber.
“Is she new?” someone whispered, right overhead. People standing over me, looking down at me. Maybe wanting something. Still couldn’t open my eyes. “Or did they change her shift?”
“How would I know?” someone else whispered back. “Who fucking cares. Welcome to Shit Town. Next nine exits.”
Their footsteps receded and a door slammed and I slept and slept.
SEVEN
The next thing I knew the sun was rich and fading like late afternoon and someone was wrenching my arm, my bitten arm, making me shout as I bolted awake.
“Night shift’s up,” she said, a barrel-built woman in her fifties, maybe older, deep lines in her face and a hard, unforgiving look in her eyes. “Get the hell out of my bed.”
“Rise and shine, night shift!” Phoebe’s voice came sailing from the porch steps, through the open door like a baseball whizzing toward window glass. “Don’t give me all that five-more-minutes-Mom, some of us have been out and about for hours already, you don’t see us complaining!”
She had my arm and we were out the door again before I could say two words.
“I am exhausted,” Phoebe shouted, half-dragging me down Elbert Street. “I mean, I couldn’t sleep half the day, tossing and turning, all this excitement! New people! It’s all too much! Don hasn’t found anyone alive in the longest time, you know, the last one cut her foot on something before he got there and the gangrene had already set in by the time they—here we are!” Half a street down, a canary yellow bungalow at the corner of Elbert and Massachusetts. “Welcome to our humble commissary as I like to call it, have to get you fed and dressed and pressed before your first assignment, we don’t want the bosses thinking I’m cutting you any slack . . .”
There were piles of clothing stacked against the front room wall, clean and filthy alike all neatly folded; little hand-lettered MEN’S, WOMEN’S, CHILDREN’S signs with pointing arrows divvying up the piles. Cardboard boxes everywhere, less organized, overflowing with all the same safe house stuff Lisa and I had crammed in our carts and then watched blow away. “C’mon, kid. Down this way, bathroom. Chop chop, said the executioner.”
“Where’s Lisa? You told me that—”
“All in due time, kid—she’s sleeping right now, she’s plumb tuckered out. Lotta work, looking after you!” Phoebe’s eyes got big and bright and she was laughing again, soft chuckles and indulgent head-shakes like she just couldn’t get over me. “Hell of a job, convincing her you were just sleeping like the dead and not roasting over a spit for the bosses’ dinner, plug up that bathtub drain like a good girl. I’ll be back in two shakes, once I get the water going.”
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