I headed for the door, absently patting the side of my leg, and then I heard a little whine and turned to see Napoleon sitting by the dead man, at the foot of the rickety filthy cot like he were keeping vigil. I patted my leg again, whistled. “Come on, boy.”
Nothing but reproachful, piss-hole eyes staring back. I was getting impatient. “Rex? Fido? Champ? King? I said, get over here—”
He wouldn’t move. The ferryman, he’d found his payment.
The room was growing lighter, the rising sun going from painfully intense tangerine to a softer, diffuse marmalade. Rover’s eyes, as I squinted, didn’t look sickly and jaundiced anymore; they were dual spots of that same strong, flame-shot color, flickering and changing as the sunlight changed. Sunspots. I went over and scratched him behind the ears and he half-closed his eyes in pleasure, like a real animal would.
“You’re a good dog,” I said. And I really meant it. I would miss him. I gave Chauncey one last pat and after making sure the hallway was empty, slipped out the door.
The hallways twisted and bent and buckled, the stink kept getting worse. Great patches of the floor were black with grime and there was a heap of dried-out . . . something, I wasn’t going to get close enough to confirm they were actual turds. We never sank that low in Lepingville, we dug actual shit-pits before the ground froze, but that’s lab types for you. Spoiled and lazy.
Wooden chairs and metal desks were piled high along the walls, I had to squeeze sideways past them a few times, but they gave me something to duck behind when I saw two more figures walking the opposite way, coming within yards of me and then abruptly turning and vanishing. They couldn’t be my Scissor Men, for one they were both too short—but anyone who attacks you in the dead of night looks taller, stronger than the trees. Maybe the Scissors only brought back corpses, and then drifted back into the woods.
My feet, I could cut off my feet. Burning, aching, rawer than hell. I want Lisa. I want Lisa and Naomi to have got away. I won’t think what Lisa’s like right now, if Naomi didn’t.
The hallway spilled into a wider corridor, two battered wooden doors sitting side by side. The first one was locked, all my rattling and tugging and a well-placed kick wouldn’t make it budge. I tried the second. Maybe there’d be a window in the second. Something to shove open, break, for living air.
I didn’t want to breathe in this fetidness for all eternity. That was Persephone’s real despair, in the stories, I was sure of it. Not the forced marriage, not the specters of the dead, not underground darkness half the year for the rest of eternity—it was the air. Just like this. Bottle it, sell it as a perfumed warning, a word to the unwise.
The second door handle stuck, gave a little metallic gearflutter, then opened with a soft click and there was sunlight, actual sunlight, from tiny rectangular windows too high in the wall to reach. A scratched metal desk in one corner, in another a rucked-up sea of blankets and flattened pillows bunched up together on the floor.
Lousy with mouse droppings, this room, and there was a huge spiderweb along the desk’s edge, thick cottony whitish-gray like an athletic sock unstitched and stretched open. I pictured a mouse running unwitting toward the sticky strands, some mama mouse’s blind hairless piglet babies, and made myself turn away.
A stack of notebooks sitting on the desk. A miniature filing cabinet next to the desk, warped and dented on the side; the bottom drawer was half-open, and peeking out was a little doll. A rag doll, like something Laura Ingalls might’ve played with before the undead forced her family out of their Kansas cabin, with a checked blue dress and bright red yarn for hair and a gray, grimy, resolutely sweet-smiling face. The whole drawer was a toy chest: picture books, a wooden top, a set of jacks, a kaleidoscope with a mouse-nibbled paper tube, toys a child might’ve played with a century ago or more. Taped above the desk, beneath the windows, on the closet door, all around the room were drawings, done on ripped-out notebook sheets or what looked like empty lab charts. The lakeshore, most of them, the Aquatorium, the shops along Lake Street, everywhere I’d passed getting here. One had groups of people dotting a beach, a bonfire of jagged orange lines in the middle: a beach picnic, after sunset, little white-coated figures holding marshmallows and hot dogs on sticks.
The tape on some of the pictures had given out, unable to stick to the greasy grime, but as I traversed the edge of the room, going from desk to closet to bedding to the tiny bank of windows, I could see that they laid out a pattern, told a story, marked the passage of time. The pictures nearest the filing cabinet were crude, clumsy, obviously the work of a small child. A child who’d learned proportion and a bit of perspective by the time we got to the desk, then shadowing and how to draw hands by the bedding, then sharper outlines and subtler facial expressions and by the time I got to the windows the skill on display was startling, the scrubby trees right above the dunes sketched out in black and white on a field of graph-hatched green but still so well, so painstakingly done, it really was those trees pinned down to life. Another picture, right next to it: A woman, carefully cross-hatched webbing all around her eyes but her expression youthful and exuberant, standing side by side with a younger, thatch-haired, unsmiling man. Both in lab coats.
Who’d lived here, in this room? For how long?
As I reached for the door handle I heard a sound from inside the closet, a rapid shallow intake of breath like an animal was inside. Is that you, King? A little test, to make sure I don’t go licking in someone else’s bowl? I’m pretty sure I passed. The sound became sharper, then forcibly stifled: a human being, hiding. Crying. Watching me through the crack in the door, as I made my little revolution of the room.
I went over and put a hand to the closet door, a steadying palm. “Who’s there?” I said quietly.
No answer but another little breath.
“I can hear you,” I said.
No answer. I turned the handle. I will not like what I see, I told myself, though nothing in this room or under that door smelled of death, I will not like what I—
I eased the door open and blinking into the closet’s expansive darkness I saw more taped-up drawings, and a broken chair, and Natalie, her face contorted with misery, huddled up beside it.
I grabbed her and pulled her out of there rough and fast, like I was yanking a toddler away from a stove covered in boiling-over saucepans, and when I put arms out her tentative breaths became deep, furious sobs. I stroked her coalface hair, gone dusty and dull and sticking in dark threads to her cheeks, and made vague ridiculous murmuring sounds; she had a sour smell to her, the same chronically unwashed odor that I and Stephen and every other surviving human gave off and I welcomed it, that faint little milky stench as she raised arms to clutch me back, it was the smell of actual living things.
“What are you doing here,” I whispered, too afraid to speak out loud. The shafts of sunlight filtering in made me squint and I turned eyes back toward the closet. “Did they pick you up, in the woods, after you and Maria—”
“She left,” Natalie managed, and expelled a cascade of small sobs like sneezes before she could speak again. “We were going in circles in the woods and she went off the other way, and I was scared to follow and I kept calling at her to come back, and she never did, and then I couldn’t find her at all and these men, they—”
“We’re getting out of here,” I said. Through those tiny windows, somehow, if need be. “We’re going to get out of here.”
Natalie cried harder. “They, they do things in here, they—there’s dead bodies in—”
“I saw them. We’re going to find a way back from here, and find what they’ve done with Stephen, and—” And cry, and scream, and know it’s all deserved, here in my dry hollow plasterboard insides where no one can see. “There’s barely anyone here, anyone alive. We’re getting out.”
“I found this room.” She was laughing now, jerky spasmodic little noises, close to sick with fright. “They locked me in the C-Lab but I picked the lock, there was something dead on th
e floor but they never bothered fixing that lock, it had whitewash all over it but the Recovery Room was apple green. This pretty pale green with a little fish someone drew in black marker in one corner. I wanted the Recovery Room but then I found this. Can you believe it?”
Natalie’s dead, Naomi said. They brought Natalie “home” too, the way they did Stephen. The way everyone in Paradise City despised them both, instinctively, all those good upright folk whose very cells recoiled from something they couldn’t or wouldn’t define. “How many of them are around here?” I said. “Do they make regular patrols? I saw at least four. Do they come down here?”
“I found this room. I can’t believe it.” She scrubbed her sleeve against her cheek and her face twisted up again. “They left it just like it was, my pictures, my toy box—”
“Do they patrol?” Natalie was telling me something I wasn’t ready to hear, whose implications I wasn’t ready to grasp and so I wouldn’t hear it. “Those Scissor Men, the ones from the woods, are they outside?”
“I hid in the closet. Because I knew they’d come back here, to find me.”
“Did you see when they brought you in?”
“I didn’t recognize your voice. I thought you were one of them.”
“Did you see anyone else?” I had her face in my hands now, part tenderness and part twitchy urge to squeeze hard and pop if she didn’t stop babbling and help me. “Did you see anyone else from Paradise, anywhere here?”
“I—let’s get out of here first, okay?” She pulled away from me, stood up with fists thrust deep in her jacket pockets, trembling horribly with the effort to keep calm. “You’re lost, aren’t you. I know my way back. I know it blind. They’ll be down here soon.”
Natalie took my arm, grasping tight, getting such a hold I almost stumbled. “I knew you’d come here for me, Amy,” she said, as I tried to pull us toward the door. “I knew you’d come here. It’s just I had to wait, I hate waiting, and I got scared.”
“We have to go now.” I was tugging back, trying to free my arm, but Natalie’s fingers sunk in and clutched my sleeves like a cop seizing a pickpocket. “They’ll be here soon. You said so yourself.”
“You’re lost. But now you’re found. I know my way back.”
“Good. Then we have to leave.” I turned away, waggling my arm to try to get her to let go. “We have to get out.”
“You’re right. We do.” I felt her swaying back and forth, trying to keep herself steady, not succumb to the instinct to run back into that closet and slam shut the loose rattling door. “We’re getting out. We’re getting out right now.”
At the far end of my vision something flashed and gleamed, not like the sun, like glass or metal made painful-brilliant by the sun’s reflection. Natalie’s other hand came up and my neck was searing, a single thin clean ray like sunlight burning it clean through, and my groping hands felt wetness and I opened my mouth to scream but the damp was all in my throat now, bubbling-thick, I spat and choked and fell to the floor. She let me go. I fell.
The sunlight was too strong now, much too strong, it had burned the whole wall away and let the lake waters spill into the room. The tides flowed ceaseless into my mouth, and I drowned.
NINETEEN
It’s dark down here.
Darkness all around me, thudding sounds all in my ears. My limbs waver and flicker, boneless jelly-things in the dark icy water surrounding them, as easily broken as the spines of sea plants. My shoulder blades, the back of my head are stuck fast in the mud, the cold gelatinous murk on the floor of this great icy lake, this freezing sea. I can feel the suction pull of it holding my body in place, down at the bottom where I sank and drowned.
I drowned and I am dead. The thought of that means nothing.
Something flashes behind the lids of my closed eyes, spasmodic, a sudden memory. The glare of early sunlight against window glass, every heated yellow-orange spot a little pool where you could dip your fingers. The sheen of a sharp, metallic thing catching that light.
The suctioning mud at the lake bottom tugs hard at my hair, my elbows, the cloth of my jacket; then suddenly it eases, relaxes, and lets me go. I float upward, flapping uselessly in the current, and then it’s as if I’ve taken the lake mud inside me, I breathe it and drink it and feel each limb growing full with it, nearly taut, air rushing into depleted balloons. There’s mud all in my nostrils but I don’t suffocate. The taste and smell of it is fungal, pungent, and as I rise through the depths I realize this dark muddy lake is no lake at all but a house, the house of my own body, mind, memory. I tunnel upward through the strata of myself, through everything hidden behind the thin pasteboard walls that I’d thought were all there was to me. I’m not hollow inside though, not anymore. The filthy mud, the hoarder’s junk fills every crevice and seam, weighing me so far down I should be buried miles beneath.
I’m not buried. I’m surfacing.
I remember everything.
March, a few months ago. Winter sleet turned to freezing earlyspring rain. Dave was long dead by then, in a blanket shroud in another house because the ground wouldn’t budge for burial. It was thawing out now. Kristin lay on the couch in Dave’s living room and she didn’t move, didn’t talk, didn’t eat and then late that March, as I brought her what passed for breakfast, she slid her knees up close to her chin and made a hissing sound. She looked down at her own body like it had nothing to do with her, like it was misbehaving just to annoy her out of sleep, but by the time Ms. Acosta returned from foraging Kristin had rolled on her back and kept arching up with pain, great invisible fingers continually drawing her back and down into the drama of her own flesh.
It ate her up even before we started. She couldn’t hear us as we hauled her up, tried to get her to walk between us, squat down for the delivery, the little skull was already poking out from between her legs like the hairy knuckle of some obscene, shoved-in finger and it all happened too fast, so fast. She bled like every period she hadn’t had for nearly a year came on her all at once, deep dark red and gushing all down her thighs and soaking the sofa cushions, the carpet, but Ms. Acosta just kept saying, Push, Kristin, for Christ’s sake just push, and there was nothing we could do.
I had Kristin’s throat under my fingers trying to keep track of her pulse, that artery on the side of her neck, and I’d grabbed Where There Is No Doctor and natural childbirth books from all the library shelves, what was left of the libraries, I’d studied for this test, but in the end it all came to nothing. I flunked. The pulsations beneath my fingertips were like the wing flaps of a bird flying away: hard and vigorous leaving the ground, a sudden panicked, palpitating rush of speed to catch up with the flock and then, as it caught the current, slowing, slowing, no way to feel or hear it so far away. Gone. Kristin was gone. My head was all hazy but I saw a glint of metal, heard the snick of scissors.
Something slick and wet was in my arms. My arms. “Oh, Christ,” I said. Very calm, like prayer. I wasn’t praying. We were agnostics, my mother and I.
“Careful,” Ms. Acosta said, her voice thick, distorted. She left the room and brought back a tablecloth, draping it over Kristin, and as the cornflower cloth took on new dark stains I turned away, I looked down at what Kristin had left me. A girl. Tiny, wrinkled, so red it looked raw and half-cooked at the same time and how could you tell healthy or sickly straight off, how did you even know? It cried loud, hard, that must mean good lungs, even though Kristin had stopped eating and there wasn’t much to eat a lot of the time anyway that must mean it’d be all right. A girl. I need a girl’s name.
“Susan,” I said out loud, as we wrapped it up in a towel. Susan. When I named her, touched her, Ms. Acosta said nothing. She just looked at the little face, like a bit of paper scrunched up and hastily smoothed out again, and turned to me, thoughtful. Quiet. The cloud of gray hair around her face was thin and broken, ribbons of bare shell-colored scalp all woven through.
“You need to go out,” she told me, her bird-whistle voice fluttering up
and down as she took Susan from my grasp, as she lifted her away from me. “There’s nothing here for a newborn to eat, try the other side of town where the hospital is. They might have formula left, something.”
We’d already foraged in the hospital, a good dozen times. I imagined Susan sucking happily at the tube end of an IV bag, the kind with sugar water in them, the kind we found slashed open for their contents and littering the first floors we ever stepped inside. “There won’t be anything,” I said, touching the crazy dark thatch of hair smack atop the baby’s head. Her dead dad’s hair. “I looked for more food, last time we went for Dave, I couldn’t—”
“So look again. Someone needs to check. I’ll take care of all of this, and . . .” She looked around the room, at the blood on the sofa and the rug and smearing Susan’s wrinkled sunken cheek, and shook her head hard like she often did to stave off crying. “Amy, just go.”
I went. Because I thought it was real. Because I promised to take care of Kristin’s baby. You won’t just leave my baby to fend for itself, will you? No, Kristin, no I won’t, I promised you, except right at the start right when it mattered I just handed her over, I gave her away without even the pretense of a fight, outside it’s cold and dangerous and she’d just slow me down—
That’s how faithfully I kept my promise. For a few seconds, until I thought it might slow me down.
For a shameful moment I’d actually wondered if we could somehow squeeze the milk from a dead woman’s breasts, but now as I stumbled through the slushy rain puddles down Madison and Overmyer and Cypress I was only thinking, Why hadn’t we done this weeks ago, when we had the chance, gathered supplies and stocked up blankets, baby clothes, formula—couldn’t they eat chewed-up people food, newborns, like baby birds or wolves? “People” food, like newborns weren’t people. Nothing at the hospital, I already knew there was nothing at the hospital.
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