Don was out, driving the abandoned roads with Janey looking for more human conscripts. Or just getting away from us all for a while. Billy and Mags and a whole pack of exes were hunting on the other side of town, where the deer were too stupid to stop congregating. Time to move.
Stephen, who hadn’t said a word since we started out, he took Naomi’s hand and helped lead the way. We humans zigzagged through the gardens like we were foraging and Lisa walked ahead, an ex going where she felt like going, ignoring us at her leisure. Leading us out. A cleanup crew, not Kevin’s, came by dragging a fleet of empty wheeled garbage cans; we wandered around a yard digging for onions, not looking up, until they passed. (Naomi actually found one, a tiny shriveled thing like Lisa’s Leyton tulip bulb, and insisted on keeping it.)
Milstead. Clyburn. The soil was getting sandier now, the vegetation scrubbier and giving way to piebald vacant lots, a strip of empty fast-food places, a rusted metal bench with John 3:16 emblazoning the wooden seatback in defiantly huge black on white.
Kentucky Avenue. The enclosed little neighborhoods of Paradise City—Richmond Park in better days—opened up here to more lots and shops and a straight shot to Lake Street, the beaches, but we turned our backs on it and slipped like dead things after the hunt into the overgrowth consuming the yards and back alleyways, the stretches of woods reverting back to actual forest. People who’d never been here, my mother said once, who never lived here, they heard about the steel mills and oil refineries around Gary, saw from the interstate the city-sized spreads of smokestacks and thought the whole county looked like that, thought Gary wasn’t just too poor and too black and too flyover but also looked like the surface of a sulfur-stench moon. The beaches and the nature preserves were my mother’s own secret, growing up. She wasn’t afraid of the labs, the undeads, she’d slip in and out, she’d go anywhere. The cast-iron nerves you needed for security work. I tried to pretend I was her daughter, that way, as we walked.
Phoebe walked beside me, twitching, jumping at the sound of a calling bird like it was going to fly off and warn Billy we’d vanished. “Where’re we going, anyway,” she muttered.
“The long way around,” Lisa replied, her neck craned and eyes scanning the trees. “We’ll circle through here and back into the preserves near the beaches, and pick up U.S. 12 from—”
“Oh, Christ, you can’t do that.” Phoebe seized my arm and Lisa’s, her grip somehow tight and limp all at once, and though Lisa flinched she didn’t pull away. “There’s actual no-shit patrols on Route 12 ever since the spring started, those crazies who think they run the lab now are all—”
“Just what’s going on over there?” Lisa demanded. “And don’t tell me nothing. You’ve known all along it’s not nothing, poking at my past to see what you could dig up and use. Little scavenger, just like all of them. Worse than any zombie.” Nearly nose to nose with Phoebe. “Right?”
There was a hate in Lisa’s eyes that I’d never seen before, that made my own fist-swinging animosity a paltry petty thing. Phoebe twitched, wriggling a little under Lisa’s gaze, and studied the ground as she laughed.
“I told you,” Phoebe muttered, spilling her heart out to the underbrush and a clump of marrowy mushrooms, “they won’t let me back in. Supervisory head, my own research division, and I try to go back, I get nothing. But what I hear is they’re picking up people, humans, taking them over there, and I don’t know what the fuck happens now when they arrive. Hell, maybe what happened to you.” Looking Lisa in the eye now, no more smirky coyness, they both knew what they were talking about even if the rest of us were shut out. “Yeah, Billy knows about it, Don too, think they’ve got a little exchange student program going on. What for, I don’t know. Them and the lab. So we gotta go another way—”
“I don’t believe you,” Stephen said. As matter-of-fact as when he’d warned Phoebe he’d hurt her, again. “There is no way to get out of here without picking up Route 12. Unless you want to wander straight into the lab’s backyard anyway, right across Lake Street, because we’re way too close already—”
“Are we going?” Naomi pleaded. Not whiny, but afraid. Like me. “We have to go. You said we could go.”
“Look, I know some shortcuts, okay?” Phoebe paced impatiently in front of an oak tree, picking up sock-cuffs of last fall’s leaves caked in tarry mud. “You should know them too, I mean, considering, you go straight through and loop around the back end of the trees and—oh, fuck standing here arguing all night, follow me! Or don’t!”
Phoebe barreled over the leaf clumps and I could feel it in all the rest of us, even Naomi, that collective desire to let her wander off, go wherever she was headed all alone, turn our backs and head for U.S. 12 without her grinning, gesticulating crazy as our gyroscope. She’d stopped now, waiting, twisted and tense where she stood.
Lisa glanced at me, and her, and then just shrugged. “I can find our way back out again,” she said. “And she might be right. We don’t need to go through all this just to run back into Don.”
A penny for the widows and orphans. The four of us trailed after Phoebe, Lisa holding tight to Naomi’s hand, Stephen silent again. He hadn’t wanted this. He was a grownup, for Christ’s sake, he didn’t have to say yes. Phoebe led us deeper into the trees, like she’d promised, the ground a bendy lattice of dead branches over a pie-filling of sticky mud and the leaves overhead still new, almost sparse outlined against the darkness. Lisa stepped lightly over the underbrush, almost dainty on the balls of her feet.
“Over this way,” she told Phoebe, drawing us closer to the edge of the woods, the empty roads near the holy park bench and the shell of a McDonald’s, a dry cleaner’s. “If we follow the perimeter of the roads—”
“Then they find us, for Christ’s sake,” Phoebe almost growled. “C’mon. This way.”
“Hunters know the trees,” Stephen said, not moving from where he stood. “Lisa’s the hunter here, not you. Do you have a clue where you’re going?”
“Better than you do!” Phoebe was almost shouting again, her natural volume bursting out of the box. “I know, batshit crazy Phoebe couldn’t find her way out of—you think I don’t know what people say? If Kevin were still here, if he could still—”
“Phoebe.” Lisa’s voice was quiet, weighty, a stone dropped into a field of rustling, agitated grasses. “Don’t think about that now. We just need to get out of here, then we can fight all you want. Okay? So just tell us what this path is and where it leads.”
Stephen shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere she leads. We follow the perimeter, right, Lisa?”
“You don’t give the orders,” Phoebe said, whipping her head toward him like she’d been slapped. “I’m done with that, you understand? I’m the scientist here, the educated one, I supervised my own fucking research group, I’m done listening to the freaks, the workups, the experiments who think they can shove me around now just because—”
“The only good thing,” Stephen hissed back, a soft snarl, letting go of me and stepping forward so ready to hit her. “The only good thing about any of this, was watching all of you educated ones fall apart and fucking die—”
“Stephen.” Lisa moved between them, swift, pleading. “For Christ’s sake not now—”
“For Christ’s sake right now!” Stephen turned on Lisa, his face contorted with a fury I’d never seen in him before, not with Billy, not with anyone. “Right now, right here, if she wants to try to fucking pull rank like it’s still—”
“She’s trying to distract you,” I said, another smooth stone in the wind-whipped field. “You and all of us.”
“Oh, you smart kid.” Phoebe was laughing again, laughing in all our faces. “We coulda been friends, you know, Amy, I coulda helped you, but you weren’t having it, the second you could you threw your lot in with the freaks. Guess you can’t help it, with your family tree you just can’t help it, but—”
“What are you waiting for?” Leave her here, to rot or starve. Leave now. �
�Seriously, just come out and say what you’re waiting for—”
“Here!” she screamed, her eyes full of urgency and fear and horror at herself, at everything that had become of us all, and the triumph of following my unwitting cue. “Here! They’re over here!”
They spilled from the trees, from the path Phoebe tried to lead us down, from everywhere and nowhere all at once because she distracted all of us, so easy, so easy to take us all in. Tall and muscular and full of febrile eagerness, the faces of exes in a hunting pack, except they bristled with guns and knives and they shone yellowish in the moonlight, like the sulfurous lights that used to flood every highway, the watery eyes of a vengeful ghost dog. Lisa grabbed at Naomi, flung an arm toward me like she could somehow pick us all up and run, and then there were guns on me and Stephen just like when Don found us, there were knife blades like open scissors prodding the base of my throat. Not Phoebe. They didn’t touch Phoebe. Phoebe stood aside, watching it all.
“Keep clear,” one of them said to Lisa, in the hard dragging consonants of an ex: KAH-ee-puh! KUHLEARRR. “Keep clear and go away.”
“The fuck I’ll ‘keep clear,’ ” Lisa whispered, and I could see all the strength gathering in her, making her tense and flushed and ready to spring on them all. “Get away from them or I’ll—”
One of them, thin and redheaded and with eyes like granite, pointed a casual gun barrel at Naomi, cocked the trigger. “Keep clear,” he repeated. Almost laughing at how easy it all was.
Two others had a death grip on Stephen and even as he tried to wrench free his eyes were fixed with fear, like he knew what was coming, like he’d seen it all before. “Let her go,” he said, so calm, like he already knew begging would do no good at all. “I don’t know what you want with her but you made a mistake, Amy’s not like me, she—”
The redheaded man reached up, slammed a pistol butt in his bruised face. Stephen shouted with pain and I shouted, hauling at the hands holding me like a barge balloon against its ropes, and then the gripping fingers wrenched so tightly I went limp and light-headed, sagging without meaning to against a plaid flannel shoulder. It laughed, the thing hurting me, and Stephen thrashed and struggled but he was like I was, pinned and helpless.
“It’s been a while, Stephen, hasn’t it.” Another one, stepping forward, with a sleek dark ponytail bouncing against her shoulder blades and a smile like bits of putty pressed into a curve. “You’ve had your time off, we all have. It’s time you came home.”
“You don’t want Amy.” His voice was twisting in terror, a futile hatred he wasn’t even trying to hide. “You don’t want Amy!”
Her putty smile stretched, widened, then she was all solemnity. “We need her, Stephen,” she said. “We need her very much, just like we need you. Someday you’ll understand what an honor that is.”
“You’re wrong!” Lisa was thronged by gun barrels now, all pointing at Naomi, she’d pulled her jacket off and wrapped Naomi in it like that somehow made her bulletproof. “You’re wrong! I don’t know what you want but you made a mistake, it’s not them!”
“Okay, you believe me now? You finally believe me now I showed you? I gave you what you need.” Phoebe was trying to push her way back from the periphery, elbow into the center of attention, but it was like they didn’t even see her and so she kept getting louder, shoving harder at their backs. “I gave you this, Jesus Christ, they’re the real thing, the new flesh, look at her, you can see in her face who her mother is—”
“You don’t want them!” Lisa shouted, clutching the sobbing coat bundle that was Naomi. “You want me! You want experiments? I’m the first experiment! I started all this without even knowing—it’s my fault!” Her voice cracked and broke and something human-sounding slid out of it: fear, pain, panic, guilt, sorrow, all we frail ones had left to offer. “It’s my fault! Take me!”
“You have to bring him back now.” Phoebe found the ex who’d struck Stephen, clung hard to his arm. “I’ve done anything you could ask, reported back to you every fucking night, I’ve kept eyes and ears out all along for you and you promised me, if anything ever happened to me, happened to Kevin, you’d bring us back—”
“Get the fuck off me.” The man she held on to, redheaded and thin-faced just like my mother, like me, he shoved her aside and she hit the ground hard, gasping. She pulled herself upright and dug fingers into his chest, wild-eyed, vibrating not in fear but thwarted rage.
“You promised me!” she screamed. “Last night, just last night you stood here and promised me Kevin, you’ll bring him back to me, you fucking promised, you know how to bring people back—”
The man, the Scissor Man she clutched in entreaty, he shoved her away and stuck his gun barrel to her temple. Her head popped into pieces and sprayed into mist, like that man I’d seen shooting his family in the street, and she fell. Naomi moaned long and low and Lisa let out a sob, clapped a palm to Naomi’s eyes too late, and the man kicked Phoebe’s body aside like a crushed soda can, pressed the gun under Naomi’s chin. Naomi just stood there, a garden statue, and Lisa made a sound like something dying.
“Please,” she whispered, her arms wrapped around Naomi. “Don’t—”
“You two,” he said to Lisa, “get out of here. We don’t need you.”
“What do you want?” Lisa screamed. “What do you want?”
I was screaming then too because one of them was grabbing Stephen’s legs, pulling him off the ground, and Stephen was thrashing and horse-kicking and the dark-haired woman raised her gun, slammed him in the temple. He went limp with blood streaming down his face and they hauled him over their shoulders like he weighed nothing, just another bendy twig on the forest floor; they carried him away and the others already had my arms, my legs, I was going airborne as they kept guns pointed at Naomi and Lisa cried out, I’ll get you back, I’ll get both of you back, but she lied. They all lied.
The exes with Stephen were already yards ahead and I was still screaming, screaming up at the sky as they carried me and then a hand came around my throat, gripping and crushing until all the air left me and I fish-flopped for more. The hand went away and I gasped and gagged.
“Careful,” one of them muttered. “Need them both alive. Don’t break her neck.”
I tried to shout out, Leave us alone or Lisa or Fuck you, but my throat was closed up and no air got in, no sound got out, and we were deeper into the trees and I couldn’t see Stephen’s captors anymore. I was flung over someone’s shoulder now, face toward the ground, the sky shut out. They were moving faster, on the march, their footsteps everywhere, loud and crushing, rising up to blot out any other sound—
A tobacco brown dog, a real dog gone savage, was bounding toward us bullet-headed and muscular and huge. Its long dripping teeth were bared and hungry and it couldn’t kill them, the exes, nothing could ever kill them but it came at them over the twigs and leaves like it was happy to die trying. One of them raised a rifle as it approached us, took a calm steady shot—
—and he got that dog between the eyes, a neat little pop of red bursting forth right on target, but the dog didn’t fall. Its dark slitted eyes narrowed with hungry hate and it was running like bullets and blood were nothing, it leapt, it was on the ex who’d throttled me tearing furious at his legs, his hands, any bit of flesh within reach. The redheaded ex had a knife, like my big hunting knife Don took away, and he came running at the tobacco dog to slice its throat—and then there were more dogs, a pack, a gang, rushing in cacophony from behind every tree. Ghost dogs, phantoms, materializing from nowhere, I saw it happen, five, six, seven dogs baring teeth, jumping quick and high, savaging the exes who held me. Shouting, bewildered yells, and their damp, sticky inhuman blood oozed over my own skin as they lost their hold on me, let me fall hard and breathless to the leaves.
I couldn’t get up, not right away, so I curled in a defensive ball but the dogs didn’t want me, they had all the meat they needed. A couple of exes were on the ground now too, their wounds might heal
right up tight and quick but it still looked like it meant something to lose all that blood. You get them good, Fido, Rover, Champ, King, Cujo, hurt them horribly before you turn on me and I die. A pack of dozens now, big, small, every color of fur, every breed, every pitch from low rumbling growl to high piercing cry. Eyes squeezed shut, his own blood thick over his face, the redheaded man started shooting again, all for nothing. And then he was aiming at me with hate twisting his face into a monstrous thing and the bullet went wild, ricocheted off a tree, I was somehow back on my feet and I ran.
“Stop her!” someone screamed, her voice lost in the sea of howls. “Stop—”
I was running, stumbling and I couldn’t hear anything but the dogs, the sound of them kept getting louder even as I got farther away, and then it was right there in front of me. The tobacco brown dog. The same dog, exactly the same that had rushed me back in Leyton, no more collar and tags from bygone days, that red smear on his forehead that didn’t matter because he was dead, he died long before they shot him. A famished ghost, vengeful chimera—and the sulfur-eyed black dog padded out of nowhere, so soft and soundless against the night sky, stood side by side with the brown dog. Ready, at long last, to have his tribunal, pronounce his sentence, execute.
I ran.
My feet were raw in their shoes, my chest closed up and heaving, no sound in the world but growling, howling, the deafening thud of ghost-dog feet in pursuit. I clapped my hands to my ears but it was everywhere, I ran one direction into brown and another into black and they were trying to flush me out like a fox, just kill me now, just kill me. The night had gone watery sulfurous yellow and my whole head was full of their barking, agonized whining, and beneath that something high and shrilly insistent, like bells, like musical notes, like the ringtone of a phone—
I was doubled over nauseous for breath at the very edge of the trees, in a neighborhood of houses and giant scrubby yards I didn’t know. My chest burned and I let out coughing heaves and the cell phone in my pocket rang over and over again, the same musical loop, fifteen times, sixteen—I wrenched it out of my pocket ready to throw it against a tree and it wouldn’t stop, the screen all lit up but no number showing, someone was trying to torture me and I didn’t know how they were doing it. Someone calling me a liar. Someone who knew everything, knew how to find me, and wouldn’t come get me. My hands were shaking as I punched the receiver button.
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