Frail

by Joan Frances Turner

  “They just were,” I echoed. “And nobody’s ever figured out why some people came back after death, and some stayed dead. Or why sometimes there were so few you could go all your life without seeing one, and other times they were everywhere. Pittsburgh. Detroit. Ypres. St. Petersburg. They never found any reason for those big outbreaks.” I was enjoying this, perversely, reciting all this third-grader’s who-doesn’t-know-that back in the face of her public-minded work. “People complained about that, a lot, you know. Taxes funding places like this when the labs didn’t find anything new, didn’t accomplish shit—”

  “Because of course,” Natalie said, entirely unruffled, “if you didn’t know about it, it mustn’t have happened. Sorry, Amy, but if only what you know is what’s true? Then God help us all.”

  She was back on the floor, fingers combing through a chunk of hair: Three thick strands, divided between fingers and thumb, and she reached up her other hand, started plaiting a decorative little braid. “Perception’s as important as reality, that’s what they always said around here. People liked hearing the labs had ‘very promising’ research results, how they were this close to eradicating the undead—they really did get close, you know, they were working on a sort of pesticide, something you could spray like they do for gypsy moths, mosquitoes. Of course, that was a big mistake.” Natalie laughed, shaking her head, a vindictive little mother watching her child tumble off a tricycle. “That’s what caused the mutations, you know. That pesticide. There were rumors someone meddled with it. Who knows. They sprayed it around the labs here and yeah, the zombies got sick, some of them died, but others lived and turned into what Billy and Mags are now, and then the humans all got sick and started dying and mutating and, you know, here we are. Last remnants of the Prairie Beach feeding plague.” She shrugged. “You’re right, though. All this happens, and still they never knew why some dead people revived and some didn’t, genetic or environmental or what—”

  “Perfectly easy way to make sure nobody ever came back.” So weary, my mother sounded, as she held on to me. Like she couldn’t believe it was me, like she couldn’t trust her eyes and needed the solid tactile proof of bone and flesh. I felt the very same way. “Easy and proven. Cremation. Fire killed any undead, and a box of ashes can’t revive. But people just didn’t want to give up embalming and burial. Even with more and more bodies reviving and nobody knowing why. They believed the funeral homes, all that bullshit about how ‘second-step embalming’ would guarantee they stayed in the ground forever—and the labs needed to stay just that close to finding the big answer, without actually finding it. Lot of jobs depending on their not figuring it out.” She glanced down at my jacket, her jacket, the LCS insignia with the mustard-yellow C slowly unraveling. “Their jobs. Their money. They could’ve just mandated cremation, and avoided all this.”

  “They had to string folks along,” Natalie agreed. Her head was tilted toward her fingers, the fat, shiny little braid halfway complete. “For funding. Especially after the pesticide made things even worse. Perception was everything. But the real money, that went to the real research. The stuff nobody was supposed to know about.”

  “Us,” Stephen said.

  The word was flat and dull, a dirty coin dropped in a rusting slot. He gazed down at the floor, mouth held straight and grim, as though he were ashamed; as though he’d done all this, not had it done to him. I slid my fingers tighter around his and he gripped back almost hard enough to hurt.

  “They didn’t just want to keep people in the ground.” Stephen rocked back and forth, forth and back as he spoke. Pulling his own memories together piece by scattered piece, shards stuck by force into the barest semblance of a vase. “They wanted to learn how to revive certain folks. Their own wives, husbands, children, parents, friends, each other—they wouldn’t have to worry about cancer or car accidents or anything taking them before they wanted to go.” Still rocking, tugging my hand in a gentle seesaw. “They wanted the power of life and death.”

  “Except not to create more undeads,” said my mother. “Undeads are, were a whole different species, different brains, biology—the labs wanted to wake the dead, but keep them human. Keep them what they always were. Drop a stitch, unravel a little, start knitting the whole row again like you never stopped.”

  The Fates, from my old mythology book, with their scissors to snick-snack off the long, short, infinitesimal thread of a human life. Scissor Women. The lab wanted a way to grab the two ends of each thread, tie a hasty knot, keep unspooling. I’d been made a fishing reel, the bait hook snapped off in Natalie’s hands and sunk to the bottom of a dark, freezing lake; then she repaired the line. And wound me back up here again.

  “Why me,” I said. My mouth was dry.

  “They tried and tried and tried.” Natalie’s voice was a bored singsong as she completed her little braid; her fingertips held it together, her other hand stroking up and down its bumpy, uneven twists. “Hundreds of test subjects. Maybe thousands. So many of the records got lost or destroyed during the plague. They’d bring people here, drugged, and kill them—with more drugs, like executions, it didn’t hurt—and work on bringing them back—”

  “How.” I could’ve slid fingers around her neck and throttled but she was our only source of answers, my murderer, my reviver. “How did they bring them back. How did you bring us back.”

  “Drug addicts,” my mother said. “Prostitutes.” The corners of her mouth quirked in a rueful smile. “Homeless people. Criminals. Foster system children.”

  “Runaways,” said Stephen. More bits and pieces, sharp and cutting, as if something here in this room, this building, had been waiting to hand them back. “The institutionalized. People nobody missed. The facilities got bribes, kickbacks for letting them take people. Supposedly. Assisted living, group homes, nursing homes—”

  “Most of them died.” Natalie let the braid go, combed it out again with her fingers. “Others, their brains post-revival were just . . . gone. Mush. They could maybe say a few words, follow orders but lights on, nobody’s home. They’d dispose of those, fast, until they realized they’d created a whole group of workers they wouldn’t have to pay.”

  That poor woman, Mike and Jason’s gang fuck-toy. The deadness in her eyes, I’d thought it was from everything they’d done to her but maybe it was there before, maybe they saw it in her eyes and knew they could grab her without a struggle. She still tried to get away from them, though, there was still enough her in her to try to run away. My free hand clenched up, nails slicing at my palm.

  “Naomi’s Scissor Men,” I said.

  “I guess.” Natalie shrugged. “They hang around here, they mostly do what they’re told. They’re not that scary.”

  Stephen raised his head, gazing at Natalie, and smiled. “Dozens of times,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how many, it ate holes in my brain too, but I know it was that many or more. But I could never figure out how they did it. How they brought me back. They were so careful never to let that penny drop. Tell me how we’re all alive.”

  “Homo novus.” Natalie was back on her feet, happy and excited, stretching like she’d just had a long, comforting nap. “The ‘new man.’ Human. Whatever. That’s what they called us—”

  “Us?” I said. “You’re—”

  “Of course I am, for God’s sake.” Sharp, impatient, like she were my kindergarten teacher and I’d just failed numbers and colors for the dozenth time. “You think I’d have wasted my time in Paradise, that dead freaks’ dump, if I weren’t looking for the rest of my family? However many of us were still alive? Scoured half of Gary those first months looking but—nothing.” She plunked back down on the floor, arms wrapped tight around her knees. “I bet you believed all the rumors that those plague-dogs, those dead things who got the diseases, that they ran this place—”

  “The exes,” I said.

  “Exes.” Natalie thought that one over. “I like that. Yeah, some of them lived here for a while but they kept fighting, c
ouldn’t make things stick, a lot of them drifted into the woods and never came back. They’re all just animals anyway, plague-dogs, exes. Dead animal carcasses walking around. All they want to do is fight and hunt. A few hung around, or made deals with me like that Billy, because they wanted something. They wanted the stuff I remember from before, the stuff the lab knew. They don’t know they’re doomed.” Her voice cracked in a much older woman’s laugh. “I couldn’t help them if I wanted to. They’re all doomed.”

  She leaned forward, smiling, as if all of us together shared in a wonderful joke the rest of the world couldn’t fathom. “Everything you know,” she whispered, “is wrong.”

  “You run this place,” Stephen said.

  He sounded every bit as disbelieving as I felt. That room, Natalie’s room. Her drawings, I was sure of it, for how many years in this place? All her life? She knew Stephen, he didn’t know her. All along. Even while I’d felt so horribly sorry for her.

  “You really don’t remember me at all, do you?” she asked him, and underneath the smiling triumph there was a flicker of something that almost, if you fixed your eyes just right, might have been wounded feelings. “We were both here at the very same time. Your mother, Amy, of course I’d heard all about Lucy, everyone had, but she was still way before my time, she was ‘Sarah’ back then—”

  “I thought I got away.” My mother shook her head, silent mockery of her own delusions. “I actually thought I got away. I escaped, I—there was a guard here, he liked me. I used that. I escaped.”

  She raised her head, brushed strands of hair away from my forehead. I was still so angry at her leaving me behind but the touch of her fingers to my skin, it made the horrible feverish shovel-wielding thing inside me calm down and curl up to sleep. “Your father,” she said.

  “Dad worked here, before?”

  She shook her head again. “Mike Holliday, that was your dad. The guard was your father.”

  My uncle and aunt, my dad’s sister. The way they’d both look at me sometimes, like I were some drunken stranger at a party that only painful, martyred politeness kept them from throwing out. They knew. And she left me with them. “What did he know? I mean, my dad, about—”

  “He knew what I was. Whose you were. He didn’t care. He loved us. That I know. It’s a long story.” My mother glanced toward Natalie, and her eyes went hard. “And she’s not going to hear it. It’s none of her fucking business.”

  My dad was a mill worker. He died coming home, when I was five, when his car broke down on the Skyway and a gang of undeads dragged him away. I’d thought. I’d been told. Except that he knew things, maybe, he wasn’t supposed to know. They never found his body. Which “they?”

  “I was your age,” my mother said to me. Her eyes were closed now against the sight of the room, the disjuncture of her own thoughts. “Around your age. I’d run away from home, from my father. Nobody looked for me. Squatting in those rotten old hazard houses here, maybe in East Chicago, with a bunch of other kids—I don’t remember who or where. Like Stephen said, when you die and come back enough times you start losing the whole thread of—there was a man, in a car, he looked like he had money, and so I went with him. And I woke up in hell.”

  Natalie sighed. “That’s so melodramatic, okay? You don’t need to make it all sound so—”

  “I think I was in jail,” Stephen said. He slipped his hand from mine, rising to his feet. “Juvenile detention. For fighting. I got angry a lot. I was somewhere else, and I woke up here. We had rooms here, cells. Locked. That felt familiar. They wouldn’t tell us why we were there, what they were doing to us. Like we were dumb animals, in cages, just waiting for—”

  “They did use animals, to start, but it never worked—of course it wouldn’t work, who ever heard of a zombie dog? Stupid to try. Anyway, it wasn’t that bad.” Natalie shrugged, impatient, this was all so very much not the point. “They did what they had to. None of us would be here if they hadn’t.”

  “Injections, usually. But not always.” Stephen tilted his head up to the windows, to the sheen of sunlight filtering through our mucky aquarium glass. “Hypothermia, sometimes. Afterward you were cut open, studied. Take samples of everything. See if your physiology was really still the same. How’d you do this to Amy, to all of us. Tell us how.”

  “There were—six of us, maybe, seven?” Natalie stood up too, fingers fluttering nervously. “After the plague, though, I thought I was the only one left.”

  “Killing each other in the hallways, here,” Stephen said, and his lips curled back in the semblance of pleasure. “For meat. All the staff, the scientists. I got out, then. During the plague they caused.”

  “They never brought me back here,” my mother said. “After I got out.” She was combing her fingers through my hair now, the limp greasy ponytail halfway down my back, trying to work out the tangles. “I was stupid enough to think I’d lost them. But they knew. They knew all along where I was—they were watching me. Watching us, to see how I integrated, back with normal people. I integrated like shit is what I did, you saw, Amy.” Her hand rested against my head, trembling. “They had plans for you. All along. I know they had plans for you.”

  “And you still left me. By myself. With people who knew I wasn’t really theirs.”

  She pulled her hand away like she’d burned it. Like I’d burned it.

  “I’d lost my mind,” she said quietly. “After—that day. After I killed—I knew him, he stood there dead and rotten and his eyes, his voice, I knew them like my own and I went ahead and I killed him anyway. Just to prove I could do it. Just to prove I was on the side of the living.” Her eyes, her voice, were faded and flat, worn down with a self-accusing misery that never ceased. “But I’m not one of them, not since the lab got hold of me, I’m a dead thing too and for like to kill like? Like I did that day? It’s murder. He came back to find me, and I—and then I thought, but my daughter, she’s a living thing. Leave her to the living. A corpse shouldn’t care for a real live child. Go with the dead where you belong.” Her hand came hovering close to my hair, my skin, needing to touch. “So I left you behind. It didn’t take them long to find me. Bring me back here.”

  Past time you came home, they’d told Stephen. He’d turned his back on Natalie now, was watching me and my mother in silence. “So you were here all this time,” I said.

  “I wandered away, when the plague hit. Hid. Wandered back again. Nowhere else to go. I was sure you were dead.” She touched my face, lingering on the wonder of our mutual flesh, half-conjoined, together in this rotten womb. She turned to Natalie. “I lived in the basements, hiding, I never lured anyone here, I haven’t hurt anyone. What have you done to this place? What did you do to my daughter?”

  “So I went to Paradise,” Natalie continued, as if nobody else had spoken, “to see if more of us were left—and there was Stephen. Didn’t even remember me, but he was nice, felt sorry for me with my whole poor-orphan act. Tried to protect me.” She beamed. “He knew me, still. In some way. Deep down.”

  “And this is how you paid him back,” I said.

  Her eyes sparked. “He was valuable. The work here, the real work using our kind, it’s valuable. I mean, Amy, my God, you were—I couldn’t believe it when I met you, I’d seen your mom’s picture in the files, you’re a dead ringer, it had to be you. All those rumors she’d had a baby—do you have any idea what it means, that homo novus could come back to life, conceive a living child with another living human being? Do you even know? All those plague-dogs are sterile, but us”—her smile was proud, so proud, like she’d been behind all of it all along—“we’re truly alive. Just like human beings, but better. You helped prove it.”

  Just like human beings. But not human, not really. Not deep inside. Stephen saw my face and he sat back down next to me, gripping my hands like he knew this feeling, that his whole life and everything he’d thought was true was retreating and receding like a hometown in the rearview mirror. A town I was hurtling away from do
wn an empty, deserted highway, late at night, Don’s car, no brakes. Of course he knew that feeling. Of course my mother did. And they didn’t even have the memories of what they’d lost.

  “And what have you proven,” I asked.

  Natalie shrugged. “That we can grow, age. That we’re not degenerate-rotten like zombies, or stuck in glue like the plague-dogs, we live, breathe, change—I’ve lived here all my life, since I was two or three. I’m the youngest one they ever brought back.” Her face was suffused with half-embarrassed pride. “And I’m bringing all of us back. I’m finishing what they started.”

  She looked from me, to Stephen, to my mother, and smiled. “Daddy’s dead now,” she whispered, “and I don’t know what became of Grandma. But now, I’ll have a real family—but first, Amy, you have to tell me about the Friendly Man, the one who comes and goes. You have to tell me why he likes you better. Why he always comes for you, and he always leaves me behind.”

  A sound prickled at the edge of my consciousness, a subdued tinnitus I knew no one else could hear. It was the sound of an animal, a dog, scratching persistently at the room’s heavy, impenetrable door.

  “Daddy and Grandma,” Stephen repeated. He held the words thoughtfully in his mouth, let them take on an edge of derision. “But you were here since you were little—they came to visit? Your real family?”

  There was a flash of envy, resentful sadness in his eyes. Natalie was oblivious. “Tell me why he likes you better,” she asked me, with desperate urgency. “I know he loves you best if you’ve killed someone, doesn’t he. Well, I’ve killed things, I’ve killed rats and squirrels and one of those cats that used to hang around here, I meant to kill that Paradise girl I ran away with—”

  “So what the hell stopped you?” I felt not anger but dull contempt at her excitement: A sullen child again, I was, stuck at the birthday party of a classmate I’d never liked. “Not nerves, obviously. Afraid Daddy would find out and ground you? Take away your bike?”