“They’re not actually her mom and dad, you know,” she told me, sitting down next to me. “If that’s what got you all upset—”
“So tell her that,” I said. I took my jacket off, folding it up on my lap. Maybe I’d sleep somewhere around here tonight, use this as a pillow. Eating, that’d be a problem, but I’d think of something. Berries. Nuts. Spring was coming.
I want to go home.
“They hate each other, you know,” Phoebe said, her voice sprightly with the chance to pass on gossip. “They can’t stand each other.”
“I can tell,” I said. “I was there—”
“No, I mean, the bosses like Billy, Mags, Don, who really were dead? Undead, however you want it? Can’t deal with the ones like your Lisa, the plain old living humans who got sick and passed over. It’s like the Serbs versus the Albanians, or whoever the fuck they were fighting.” Her toes raked against the knifescarred asphalt. “I mean, makes sense, no? The undead ones, some of them kicked maybe a few years ago and some of them like Don, his time stopped in the forties, for God’s sake, I think Mr. and Mrs. Mae West are even older than that. Imagine your great-great-grandmother trying to make a clue of this world, for God’s sake they didn’t even have antibiotics.” Her face knotted up, imagining it, and she laughed. “Of course, neither do we, anymore, for now. But yeah. You and I only think Lisa’s the same species as all of them, but she’s as different from them as from Naomi. Or me.”
Don’s smell, Billy’s, that pungency of decay steeped in saltwater. Pickled. When I was five or six there was some sort of environmental security conference in Boston, discounted group rates for everything, and my mother got to go and so we flew on a plane for the first and only time in my life; there was a day trip to one of the protected Cape Cod beaches out by West Dennis, and for the first and only time in my life we saw the ocean. I grabbed a huge chunk of bright green seaweed and started chewing it and it was rubbery, sticky, oozing this salty sap that was like sweat solidified but brinier and I spat it out, Mom laughing at me. Then she chewed some herself just to see what it was like. Don and Billy, Mags, that’s what they smelled like. That seaweed, sitting on a dry shoreline oxygenating and going rotten. Lisa, her skin, it just smells like skin.
“Fine, so they can barely stand each other,” I said. “What’s that to me? They hate all of us. They hate Lisa because she doesn’t hate me—”
“Don doesn’t hate Janey either, or maybe you didn’t notice.” Phoebe beamed, lay back on her elbows on the grass. “Doesn’t hate her at all. Billy, I think it sickens him. Oh, well. My point is, kid, never make the mistake of thinking they’re all some sort of tight little tribe, they’d kill and eat each other if they could and I’d bet that’s actually happened, once or twice. They don’t like each other. They’re not each other, period. I mean, at least we can all say we’re one and the same.”
Phoebe one and the same with me, after she called me a liar right in front of Billy? Who the hell did she think she was kidding? She just wanted to get me out of Lisa’s corner, use that for her own leverage. Like my mom used to say, subtle as the Black Death. I hate people who think I’m stupid.
“Poor Naomi,” I said. I hadn’t even tried to help her. Too scared what’d happen, if I weren’t still and quiet.
A faint little line popped up between Phoebe’s brows, then subsided again. Up this close her skin was equal parts oil slick and iguana hide.
“That ‘bad place’ of hers?” she said, making little spinningfingertip quote marks against the sky. “The one they keep her hopping with, boohoo Mommy Daddy don’t send me away? It’s not half so bad. Honest. Sooner or later, folks will understand that—”
“It must be bad enough, if she got that scared.” I patted my pockets again, making sure nothing had fallen out of them when I ran from the house. “Or maybe you thought that was all a big laugh, like Mags did—”
“Oh, kid, for Christ’s sake don’t start with the melodrama, you saw what happened when Good Sir Stevie tried jumping in. Coulda told him. Have told him. But nobody ever listens to ol’ Pheebs! Not even her own damned husband!” She shouted that last part loud enough that I looked all around me, worried a gate patrol might find us. “There’s no ‘bad place’ and no Scissor Men and no whatever else that kid’s got mucked up in her head, she’s probably seen enough shit since last winter that she’s scared of everything that moves.” She shrugged, scratched hard at her scalp. “What’re you always looking for in those pockets of yours, anyway? Every time I see you, you’re patting yourself down like a cop.”
“Nothing.” I forced my fingers still. “Just habit.”
“The bad place,” she repeated. “So-called bad. It’s not so bad.” She tilted her chin, glanced at me. “You, kid, end of the day I think you’d actually understand that. Better than anyone.”
No trumpet blasts, no shouting. Just this concentrated look in her eyes and such quiet, intense purpose in her voice that something prickly and unpleasant began working its way along my skin, like a caterpillar undulating its way across droughty grass.
“I don’t know what place anyone’s talking about,” I told her, trying to talk in razor slices of rancor like an ex. Pretending I was singing it, up on stage, my own band. I couldn’t make the consonants punch and bleed like exes could. “There’s no such place, there’s a place but it’s not a bad place—make up your mind, is this a riddle?”
Phoebe pursed her thin colorless lips, like she really was thinking that over. “Kind of,” she said. “Kind of.”
She pulled herself upright in exaggerated fits and starts, like an actress imitating an arthritic old woman. “Go back to the ladies’ dorm and get some rest,” she said, curling her arms over her head, arching her back with a show of gritted teeth. She headed down Buell in a brisk little jog, and vanished from sight.
The sky was going soft and striated around the edges, the weakest bit of dawn sun showing like lamplight through a thick paper shade. Tomorrow. I will figure this all out tomorrow. I’ll tell Lisa. Right now she’s just got her hands full.
The few thin streaks of gray morning light were getting fuller, yet softer as I reached Elbert and the front porch steps, swung my hand to the wooden railing, and then I jumped and almost shouted as someone darted from the bushes right by the front door. A girl thirteen, maybe fourteen, long straight dark hair and a bottom lip chewed raw, holding something rolled up in a cloth napkin. I remembered her, vaguely, from the line of crew workers snaking into the kitchen.
“Are you Amy?” she whispered. “He said red hair—”
Wonderful, total strangers everywhere know me on sight. Can we trade scalps? “Yeah. So what?”
“Supposed to give you this.” She shoved the napkin into my hand. “Don’t show it to anyone. I gotta go.”
She ran off across the lawn and into the trees. I stood there holding the avocado green napkin, smeared stiff with gravy and wrapped around something hard, almost afraid what I’d find. I unrolled it—
A fork. Like the one I’d lost at dinner. Wrapped around the handle was a note.
This isn’t much of a gift, but after what happened at dinner you looked like you needed a token of . . . something. Ignore Billy, he likes to torture people. Your friend Lisa is burning up the place angry about what they did to you. And to Naomi. It’s good here to have Lisa’s kind on your side, get what you can out of it. Ignore Phoebe. As you probably figured out, she’s nuts. Speaking of how Billy likes to torture people.
Things aren’t usually as bad as this.
No signature. Janey? She wouldn’t be anywhere near this lucid. I read it again, turned it over but the other side of the paper was blank.
Ignore Billy. Laugh in the flying-glass face of a tornado.
I wrapped it all up again, fork and note and napkin, zipped them into my empty jacket pocket. The day shift was still sleeping but there was an empty futon in the far corner and I lay there curled on my side, waiting for tomorrow, waiting to see just how bad thin
gs usually got.
NINE
Commissary breakfast, this time, was honey-roasted nuts, sardines, stale onion crackers like plaster slices with little poppyseeds that burrowed into the gums. I was looking for Kevin’s crew again, like Phoebe told me to, when the girl who’d passed me the note ran up, still biting her lip, big brown eyes perpetually anxious and her dark hair a sleek shiny curve like the back of a seal.
“You’re supposed to go in the kitchens,” she said, whispering even though nobody was there to overhear. “Billy said, he decided it, ask anyone if you don’t believe me. It’s only Stephen there now, but the rest of the cooking crew comes in later—”
“What’s your name, anyway?” I demanded. Stephen. I didn’t want to see him again, it was embarrassing thinking what he’d look like after trying to stand up to Billy while I just sat there, like Phoebe, doing nothing to help. Up close every part of Seal Girl was in constant movement, eyes blinking and fingers twitching and body shifting from foot to foot like she needed to run to the latrines. Maybe she did.
“Natalie,” she said, and as I caught her eye she ducked her head and her soft-shoeing doubled. “I’m on gofer duty, I have to leave.”
“Where’s Lisa?” I grabbed her arm.
“I don’t know, out hunting with them or . . . why do I care? I’m not her slavey. I don’t want to know.”
She yanked free and ran, skittering into the bushes just like last night, before I could ask about Naomi. Kitchen duty. One of the best jobs, the most prestigious, all that food in easy reach—why in God’s name would Billy want me there, after last night? This couldn’t be right. Maybe it was all some horrible trick. Steeling myself, I walked down to Illinois, pushed open the dining hall door and went inside.
The front room was dim, just a few standing flashlights, remains of yesterday’s fight still all over the floor. The kitchen smelled of old grease and was crammed with canned goods, boxes of instant cereal and potatoes and rice, cartons of pop and bottled water, an aboveground safe house with an apple green wooden table in the corner. Stephen was sitting at it, with a notebook and pen and a pile of soft, sprouted onions, hacking at the tops and wrinkled skins with a knife. I cleared my throat. He kept on slicing.
“So where do we cook, exactly?” I asked. The stove was piled with boxes and cans nearly to the ceiling, but then it was dead anyway. Electric dials.
“Didn’t you see the grills, out in the backyard?” He didn’t look up. “We have a decent supply of briquettes and propane. There’s a couple more houses with wood ovens, the foraging team dragged back a bunch of camp stoves—the ‘kitchen’s’ out back and all up and down the street, this is just the dining hall.”
He put the onion down and gazed at me. In the beam of the big screwtop lantern on the table he had a lot of short dark hair and a washed-out face, homely in that mismatched way where nose, cheekbones, chin were like the wrong jigsaw pieces forcibly pressed together. One cheek was a faint purple, swollen so your fingertips twitched at how painfully tender the skin would feel, but nothing as awful as I’d imagined. His eyes were big and dark and impenetrable, so much like Natalie’s I wondered if they were brother and sister.
“Pity we’re not closer beachside,” he said, motioning for me to sit down. The chairs were hard, straightbacked, the same austere pale green. “The really rich parts of Prairie Beach, those houses some of the lab types had right on the shore? Backup off-grid stoves, gas-powered generators, unbelievable safe houses—”
“Lab types get everything,” I said. My mother used to complain about that, over and over again. Security people were all bitter, they got the actual work of dealing with zombies on the ground but maybe a tenth of the scientist perks. “Even now.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Stephen handed me a knife of my own, a soft slumping oversprouted onion. “Those gas generators, those safe houses? You have to be alive to enjoy them and the plague ripped through here like a forest fire. Half of Prairie Beach dead or dying in the first two weeks. Well, it would’ve, wouldn’t it?” His face, hunched over the onion, looked grim. “I mean, everyone says they created it, the labs, one of their experiments—”
“Nobody knows where it came from,” I said. The labs that spent all their time on “pest eradication”—you weren’t supposed to know that, but everyone heard stories—they created a disease to make zombies stronger? Invulnerable? That was the craziest idea yet, that one. “The labs, the Saudis, the Chinese, illegal immigrants, bioterrorists, I’ve heard all that too but nobody knows where it really came from—”
“I do.”
I put down the knife—so sharp I had to watch my sore fingers—and stared at him. I was sick of all that, rants and fulminations about What Really Happened. Bad enough, last winter, hearing Dave go on about how it was all Mexican illegals spreading disease—good luck to them or anyone getting past the Rio Grande, who needed a border patrol when that dry heat mummified zombies so they lived for centuries. So you heard. He and Ms. Acosta would scream at each other for hours when he got going about Mexicans: For shit’s sake, Alicia, I don’t mean you!
“You do,” I said.
“Of course not,” Stephen said. He sliced into the heart of the onion—rotten, just like the skin—grimaced and shoved it aside. “It’s just that everyone here’s got the inside story, and I don’t want to feel left out—whose fault do you think it should be? How about Freemasons? I’ve heard Jews but not Freemasons, and you’d think, wouldn’t you? Or the Vatican? Is there a Vatican anymore? Nobody knows how far this has spread, or if it’s just us, or what the hell we’re gonna do but by God, they all know exactly who did it. Help me sort through these.”
He hauled a dirty cloth bag from under the table, spilling over with potatoes. They all looked greenish and squishy, lousy with eyes. “Anyway,” he said, “gangs raided that whole bit of Prairie Beach, after the homeowners died. Used up all the gas running the generators, ate themselves sick in the safe houses, had a grand old time until the irregulars found them—”
“Irregulars?”
“Our overlords.” He nicked the eyes off a slightly less green potato, hand moving neat and fast like he was shuffling cards. “My name for them, they don’t call themselves anything. At least not that I’ve heard. We feed about sixty people on the dinner shift, thirty-two of their kind and the rest are humans. A lot of them kill and eat in the woods instead, but we still have to be on standby. For the ones who like to sit with a knife and fork and pretend, remember the old times.” He glanced up from his pile of potatoes, discolored and collapsed like shriveled, deflated tennis balls. “Or just use it as an excuse to play with people, like Billy does. The rest of the kitchen crew’s out right now hauling water—”
“Why did he want me here, anyway?”
“You’re new and he’s a sadist. Who cares why? You didn’t bust out crying, that’s the big thing.” He shook the bag, a few more salvageable potatoes clattering over the tabletop. “And you didn’t jump in to play superhero and get yourself hurt. Let them do the fighting. That and eating’s all they live for.”
“You mean like you just let them fight it out?” I winced, remembering him almost screaming in pain as Don’s foot slammed into his side. An ex on a tear could’ve torn him right open, easy as stomping Bubble Wrap with a stiletto heel. “And didn’t say a word?”
He shrugged. “You heard Billy, the poor bastard actually thinks I know how to cook. So I can risk it. You, though, what can you do for anybody?”
He tossed the empty potato bag on the table and stared at me with eyes gone hard and suspicious, demanding I prove myself. What can you do for anybody? A good question. I faltered in the face of it, bent my head back down.
Green potato, yellow potato. Green potato—it was hard to tell in the lamplight, some of them had that translucent golden skin that takes on a natural, copper-roof tinge if you squint. I held them up near the bulb for inspection. Stephen swept the rejects back into the bag, all tumbling and knocking against
each other like a lot of kittens set to be drowned.
That’d been a test, before, that talk about how he knew-hejust-knew the labs made the plague. To see if I bit, what bait I offered in turn. Jew-baiting, Mexican-baiting, whatever else. This was another one. I can’t stand it when people do that, play those games. There’s no easier way to get on my bad side.
“Thank you for the fork,” I said. “Thank you so, so much.”
I pitched my words sickly-sweet and sugary like it’d been roses, a ruby ring, and something in me felt better to see him scowl. He tossed another cankered potato in the bag with a dull, soft thunk. “Watch out for Mags,” he said. “She’s smarter than Billy, doesn’t fly off the handle like he does. Makes her more dangerous. Don, you don’t need to worry about him.”
“You’re kidding, right? He kidnapped us right off the highway. And then keeping that Janey like a slave or something—”
Stephen shook his head. “It’s not like that with them, it’s . . . I don’t know. It’s not sex, I don’t think, even though everyone assumes it is. He found her crying by the side of the road. I know something terrible happened to her, before, but I don’t want to know what.” He picked up the potatoes I’d dropped, shoved them into a little pile. “Don brings her presents and doesn’t ask her for much of anything. You saw how Billy likes that, to him it’s like one of us keeping a rack of lamb as a house pet—if you’re waiting for me to shut up just say so, for Christ’s sake, I was trying to help you out.”
“I never said you weren’t.” I picked up a potato covered in scaly gray patches, the skin dirt-dry, but it split and oozed a watery porridge the second my fingers touched it; the nauseating contrast of it made me shiver and I tossed it in the bag, scrubbed my palm on my jeans.
“Don’t run away next time,” he said. “There’s nowhere to run.” He dragged his paring knife over the tabletop, chips of apple paint flaking off the blade, his fingers twitching like they wanted to stab hard at the wood. “There’s nothing. Nowhere, and nobody, and nothing left.”
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