“Daddy’s dead.” Her features tensed with actual grief. “He wasn’t my father for real but he took care of me and—he worked here. Daddy died in the plague. Grandma, I don’t know what happened to Grandma, she disappeared when everyone got sick and I haven’t found her. They ran the whole lab, you know, the whole thing. They supervised everyone, but I was their special project, the youngest one, they liked me—”
“The least squeaky guinea pig,” Stephen said, and smiled when she flinched. “Tell us how you brought us back. How they did, over and over again.”
“I thought you were dead, Amy,” my mother said softly. “I thought the lab was gone, everyone who ran it was gone, if I’d had any idea they could still—”
“So why did you keep sending me those messages?” All my edges were dangerously thin, filed down to a translucence that could slice through anyone who came close. I wasn’t human anymore, not human like other people are. Maybe I never had been, because my mother who conceived me, carried me never was. “Did you think it was cute? Did you like saying, Don’t worry, I’ll find you, just keep going, you just kept doing that even after all those men almost—and died right in front of—you called me a liar—”
I’d started crying again from plain confusion and Stephen was demanding men, what men and my mother was hugging me fiercely, the three of us were a huddled-up little flock of crows calling to each other and the prettiest little bird, the yellow finch trying so hard to show off her feathers, she was shut out. Even in the midst of misery that thought gave me an unholy satisfaction, scratched an itch inside me just like the sound of phantomsolid nails against a closed door.
“I never called you a liar.” My mother glared up at Natalie, certain she’d found the true culprit. “I didn’t send you messages, I wanted to, I wanted to so much but there wasn’t any—”
“Yes, you did,” Natalie said. “You must have.” She bit her lip smiling. “Or someone did it for you.”
That creature, the one who killed the men right before my eyes. The one who saved me. Shifting into the skins of dead people. The dead people I’d seen all over the road, following me and Lisa—my mother had been dead. They’d all been right, it turned out, all their nonsense about her dying. Because that creature, he only takes on the look of the dead. I drew back, studying her hard.
“You’re really you,” I said. “You’re really—you’re not him, again, in disguise.”
She touched my hair again, so bewildered I could see she didn’t know what the hell else to do, and that convinced me. “I—Amy, when I left I thought it was better to just leave. To go, and then everything fell apart—”
“It was the Friendly Man!” Natalie shouted, furious, triumphant. “He used to visit me too, when I was little, he can look like anyone who’s died! Anyone he wants! Once when he came he looked like me, that was so strange. It was one of the bad nights, something went wrong and I almost stayed dead, and my dissection stitches got infected, bad, and I kept calling for Grandma and—”
She broke off, gulping, hands balled up by her sides. “He came to me. Ever since I was little, whenever I had to stay locked in my room with my drawings and I was lonely or when it hurt so I almost couldn’t breathe. He said he loved me. He called me ‘kiddo,’ he kept saying, ‘Courage, kiddo.’ He told me I’d outlast everyone, everyone around me.” Her eyes were shiny-wet and she blinked ferociously, almost squeezing them shut to hold it back. “And he was right.”
Stephen turned to me. My mother. Explain.
“An Angel of Death,” I told them. “A demon, maybe. I don’t know. He can take the shape of anyone who died, sound like them—he’s been following me, showing himself to me all along, except I didn’t know what he was. He’s followed me everywhere, since I left Lepingville.”
He could sound like me. He could be walking around, looking and sounding just like me, somewhere else, just outside, right now. Because I’m dead too. The thought made me shivery and sick but Natalie was smiling, calm again, that Paradise moment of fear and loneliness she let slip vanished sudden as it arrived.
“We’re all his,” she said. “Everyone who’s died, jumped in that big cold lake, he becomes part of us and we’re part of him. He can look like us, sound like us. We’re his special ones. But the people who killed someone else? Who made death with their own hands? They’re the ones he loves best of all. He never leaves them.”
The smile melted from her mouth. “Except, he hasn’t come back yet for me.”
Outside the door came scritch-scritching, stronger, longer, then an abrupt, attenuated whuuuuufff! so loud I almost jumped. Made myself keep still. This wasn’t a confession I owed her, my own murderer.
“That’s very interesting,” I said. Bland and indifferent. He came back for me, my dog, he didn’t leave me here alone after all. He was looking out for me. Or about to tear me into pieces, and even that, it was okay. Better than being left behind, forgotten.
“Tell me why he never came back for me.” Natalie stood straight over me now and her foot prodded me in the thigh, urging me to get up, stop daydreaming and come recite for the class. “I knew you were family, even without looking like her I could tell right off. Just like Stephen could tell. The Friendly Man, he promised all the family would return here, everyone would—the birthplace!” She waved her arms, flinging them at the grimesmeared walls, the air so thick with decay it smelled like last autumn, an ordeal to breathe. “The family home. He promised we’d all come back here—”
“You’re going to tell me how you brought us back.” Stephen slid to his feet again, hands in his pockets, one corner of his mouth crooking up in a smile while the other was a stick-straight line of stone. “The medical records. The lab reports. Obviously you’ve got ’em, you went and—”
“I’m the lab report.” Natalie scowled, baring her teeth. “I don’t need records, good thing since they’re all rotted trash or eaten up—they taught me, Daddy and Grandma, they didn’t want me to be scared when they cut me up or injected me with stuff so they told me everything, how it worked, exactly what they did. They made me memorize everything, repeat it over and over until it was part of me. I’m smart. I didn’t understand it at first. But now I do. You’re proof, aren’t you?” Her eyes flickered to his torn-up throat. “But either way, it’s not all me. If you’re meant to come back, I can make it happen—if you’re meant to die, nothing I do can change it. Nothing anybody can do. But you’re all here now. We’re all here. Of all the test subjects, only us. That means something. It’s got to.”
My mother loosened her grasp on me and stood up. I followed suit. The scratching was louder now, the door handle rattling. It couldn’t just be me who heard it. My mother, the noise was lending her strength.
“You won’t keep us here by keeping secrets,” she told Natalie, so calm, so quiet. “If that’s your—”
“We’re all supposed to be here, and stay here. We’re family. That’s what families do!” Natalie’s voice rose to a shriek and then she subsided, startled at herself, gazing at me in desperation. “You were the only one of us who hadn’t died at least once, hadn’t dropped to the bottom of the lake. I had to do it. It was an initiation—”
“It was an experiment.” Stephen was hissing from between his teeth, quiet with purpose. “I can experiment too. I can do anything I have to do, to get you to talk—”
“Don’t,” my mother said quietly, putting a hand on his arm. Stephen shook it off.
“Phoebe and all the rest?” Natalie let out a curt little laugh. “The ones who thought I was somebody’s poor orphan treated me like trash—except you didn’t, Stephen, Amy didn’t, you knew I was family. Daddy and Grandma, they protected me, almost nobody else here knew about me. Didn’t matter how high their clearance was. I had my own secret rooms, so I’d be safe even when the plague hit.” She tugged on a hank of hair, tugged hard like Lisa as if aching to tear it into threads. “All too busy bowing and scraping and sucking up to, what d’you call them, the exes? They
’re all dead, the exes, they’re just rotting from the inside out now instead of—you get away from that door!”
I was reaching for the door handle but Natalie had her knife out again, and though she couldn’t hurt Stephen or my mother without surprise on her side I still dropped my hand, took a few steps back toward her. So close outside it made me ache were snuffling noises, an animal’s low pleading whine.
“It’s okay, boy,” I said, staring up at the windows suffused with daylight. “I’m here.”
“Stop that,” Natalie muttered, between gritted teeth. “Stop showing off.”
“I’m here,” I repeated, smiling. You cut me, kid, I cut you right back. That’s how it always works.
“Who are you talking to?” my mother asked.
“You’re staying here,” Natalie said. “Not because I’m forcing you, because you have to. You’ll never find out what you are otherwise, not without my telling you—”
“I can take care of that,” Stephen said quietly.
Natalie’s mouth quirked. “Yes you could, couldn’t you? You’d love it. I bet Amy doesn’t realize yet just how much you’d love it. In fact you’d love it so much you’d probably kill me before you got anything out of me—you know what Daddy used to say, before every new experiment? ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ You’d never bother with the measuring, you’d be having too much fun with the chop and slice—”
“You have to stop this now, Natalie,” my mother said, and her calmness was like a smooth, cool stone, sinking peacefully to the bottom of a great freezing lake. “You need to tell us what you’ve done, and why. That’s what families do, Natalie, families talk—”
“Like you talked to Amy?” Natalie snickered. “Like you didn’t lie and lie, all the time you were—”
“Shut up,” I whispered. “You shut your damned mouth about my mother.”
The doorjamb was rattling now, low persistent thud-thudthud as he tried to head-butt his way inside. I couldn’t be the only one hearing it. They felt it too, the vibrations inside their bones, even thinking they didn’t.
“No one they bring back is ever the same.” My mother was advancing on Natalie now, slow, serene, barely bothering to notice the lethal little blade. Stephen approaching from the other side, silently backing her up. “Memory shifts, distorts, or just vanishes. Cognitive changes. Little bits of your personality, it’s . . . you can actually feel things are disarranged, like someone broke into your bedroom, moved everything on the dresser just an inch to the left but you still can’t quite see it—and you did that to my child.” I could see the silent fury filling up every space inside my mother, for me, all for me. “You did that to her, because I lost my mind and left her to—you’ll tell me what you’ve done. You owe her, if she’s your ‘sister,’ to tell her.”
“This is the only lab anywhere that’s ever made dead humans live again at will. Do you realize that? They all tried, but this place, right here, this is the only one on Earth.” Natalie was alight with the excitement of it, the pride. “This place, this spot. It’s where the meteor hit, tens of thousands of years ago, that they think started all the changes, that made the dead revive. The secret’s in the sands, the rocks, maybe even the water—all the beaches of the lake. All here, our home.” The thought of that seemed to overwhelm her and she shook her head, brisk and swift, to bring herself back. “You have to stay. You have to stay because this is the place that made us all.”
I took a step backward, closer to the rattling, shuddering door. “Come on, boy,” I called. “Wanna go for a walk?”
Natalie’s face went dark. “You were my special sacrifice,” she spat. “You! I could tell you’d done something terrible, to get through the winter, the way you’d always act when Phoebe—you’re one of his special children, the ones he loves best. When I brought you here, gave you back to him, he was supposed to come.” A tremor passed through her, shook her, subsided. “He left me, one day, and just never came back. Why didn’t he come back? He was supposed to remember me, and come back like he promised, and I’d have all my family. Even without Daddy and Grandma, I’d have all of them.”
The tremor returned. Gripped her harder. “The hell with him.”
Muffled barking, outside the door. The tearing edge of a low growl. Stephen, my mother, they thought they couldn’t hear it but I could see them distracted and glancing toward the door, suddenly uncertain what to do, as if they couldn’t easily overpower a skinny little fourteen-year-old girl, knife or no knife. Maybe my dog had been Natalie’s all along—no. I knew that wasn’t true, I knew it because something inside me had shifted and moved that immovable bare inch after I raised up my hands to beat another human being to death, after I realized that though there were no witnesses the whole universe took notice. The very light of the world, inside my head, had changed. He was death’s and he was for me. And Natalie, well, I didn’t know why death wouldn’t come for her. Maybe it didn’t count, somehow, if you killed someone who could be brought back. Maybe Natalie was just trying too damned hard.
“He’s not for you,” I said, over the enraged animal frustration filling my ears, behind the door. “He’s not for you. He’s for me. I don’t know why, but that’s just how it is. Accept it, and tell me what you’ve done to us.”
“He was mine first.” Natalie’s head whipped from Stephen to my mother, back again, every part of her tensed up waiting for them to spring. “He was mine first, before you ever met him, every time I hurt until I screamed he was there for me, I’ve done everything he could ever ask of me and he’s supposed to come back—”
“Over and over, I came back. Are we still even human at all?” For just one quick moment Stephen’s expression buckled, like an awning’s last supporting rods snapping and veering back and forth in the wind. “Are we—immortal?”
Growling, banging, over and over, the slam of wooden door against metal doorframe and, like a hangnail tearing away from the skin, the exquisitely painful sensation of wood splintering.
“Immortality,” Natalie said, and her face knotted up with laughter and disgust like the very thought was obscene. “That was never the idea. Never at all. Who’d want to be stuck just living and living and living, people around you saying the same crap over and over, pretending to change but making all the same mistakes as a hundred years before and a hundred before that, same jokes told a thousand times, every place already visited, everything you liked torn down or paved over, nothing to do, nothing to think—nothing. Who breaks their necks running after nothingness? Idiots, that’s who.”
The thudding, the thudding of that door all through my bones. My teeth banged and clicked without meaning to and it was like small persistent feet inside me kicking me, making me all juddery-sick, and Stephen and my mother both stared at the door not knowing why and came to stand beside me, I was that door, they had to be nearer it and me too.
“Were those your drawings?” I asked. “In the other room? Was that your doll?”
“Imagine aging as fast or slow as you wanted to.” Natalie slashed the knife through the air, thick spongy fetid air like soft supermarket bread gone to mold. “You love being twenty-five? You can be twenty-five for fifty years if you want—but when you get bored with it, then you can move on. Someone dies in an accident, gets cancer, people are always all, oh, she was so young, she had everything ahead of her? Think if they could bring you back, the very moment where you were before you were cut off. You can choose when, how, if you age. You can choose when you die, tomorrow or a thousand years from now. Someday. And why shouldn’t we? Zombies got life again, they got it without rhyme or reason or doing anything to deserve it—why shouldn’t human beings have that too? Why couldn’t we climb out of the dirt too? That’s what they were working on here, using us. You and I, all of us, that’s what our lives amounted to.”
She swallowed hard, her eyes shiny and full. “We meant something. Okay? It doesn’t matter if the whole rest of the world forgot us, never wanted us, thought we were dog stuf
f on a shoe, they had no idea how much we actually meant—”
“So all of us, everywhere could just keep coming back and back and back,” Stephen said. Glancing toward the door, to Natalie, to me, right back again. “Any time we die. Not just us.”
“Not without help,” said my mother. “Obviously.”
“They were working on it.” Both Natalie’s hands curled around the knife handle, holding tight. She gazed at her fingers like something surprising, precious. “They were halfway there, and they needed us, and Grandma made sure I knew everything I needed to about their work so if something happened, something big, I wouldn’t need them—we’re the half-measures, the unfinished experiments. But I’m going to make us whole.”
Splinter. Crunch. The sound was all through me but the door was still whole, impenetrable, he wouldn’t show himself. I couldn’t stand it.
“Am I human?” I asked, and my splintering stomach clutched up wishing never to hear the answer. “Am I undead? What did you make of—what did they make of us?”
“People go on and on about God, God and heaven and damnation—” Natalie shook her head. “It’s all death. Life’s all just slow death, decay, rolling down this huge, endless slope with nothingness at the bottom—that’s what Daddy used to say. That’s what Grandma would say. They said it was horrible, and wrong, how death cast a shadow over living time. The only master of everything that ever lived, is death.”
She smiled, as lit up and young as she really was—not yet decaying like every human past their earliest youth, not yet rolling slowly downhill, still full of light and happiness and promise. “But we’re changing that. Us, the half-measures, the throwaways. Together. We’re enslaving death. He’s going to work for us. He was our master, the only one, for all mankind’s existence—”
A wet, crunching squeal outside, like the pain of something bitten through its soft fatty flesh straight to its bones. Pain, and outrage.
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