Frail

by Joan Frances Turner

  Stephen got a fist square in a Scissor face and the man’s grunt of pure shock made me cough up a laugh, and then something heavy was on my back and my hand was torn away from my mother’s, I was pitched full-face in the leaves with the breath knocked out of me, a knee stabbing into the small of my back. Inchoate shouts of rage all around me, the roar of what felt like dozens of voices at once, and I wouldn’t ever stop screaming, I wouldn’t go quiet. One of my hands was pinned behind me, the other sinking fast into the decaying layer-cake of the leaves. Those huge lolloping tree roots would let me hold on, save me, my fingers were white-knuckled clutching the bark but he had that arm now and was twisting hard enough to break, the pain shaking me loose, fingers unfurling—

  From behind me came a howl of pain and I was free, lying in quiet agony against the leaves. I rolled onto my side, tears welling up when a dead branch stabbed one of my palms, and saw my ambusher sprawled breathless on the forest floor. Mags’s candy-apple hair spilled in a great snarl past her shoulders, shins caked in dirt and her flowered green dress smeared with blood; she’d tossed aside my Scissor Man like a spent cigarette, he actually cowered and tried to scoot away from her in a great rustle of mucky leaves. Stephen and my mother were still wrestling with the others, they had Stephen by an arm and a leg but he was punching, kicking, his face distorted in rage, my mother’s arms were bent back as she screamed and screamed. I crawled toward her, tried to run, and then someone else had me so light and quick as if fights like this were nothing, as if humans were all fragile-winged things lighting on his palm just to be trapped in his fingers and crushed. His big wide bare feet were sickly pale, spotted in sticky leaf-tattoos, his breath against my back consumptively rasping and deep.

  “Our deal’s off!” he shouted to the others, the gear-grind of his voice rolling right over all our frail little squeaks of protest. “You understand me? No more guinea pigs! No more meat deliveries until we get what we want!”

  “What you want?” The Scissor Man Stephen punched had bled from the mouth, bled and healed so quickly I wanted to rip the skin open all over again, but his eyes were lively and sparking with derision. “This ain’t about what you want, maggot trap, it never was! You just keep feeding ’em up and handing ’em over because you won’t get a fucking thing out of us if we can’t test—”

  “Fuck your tests!” Billy wrenched an arm up behind my back, so high I almost screamed again. “Fuck your tests and your experiments and your dicking around, lolling on the throne doing fuck-all but wasting fresh meat—you promised us! You said you could reverse all this! You said you could turn it all around! We want our old lives back! We want to die!”

  “Get your hands off my daughter!” my mother shouted. “She’s not what you want, I’m the—”

  Choking noises, as they shoved her face back into the leaves. Stephen doubled over as a fist sank into his stomach, gasping.

  “We won’t bring you back this time,” the Scissor Man muttered. “We don’t need your ass. We’ve got plenty others.” He looked up at me, smiling past me right into Billy’s face. “That one you’ve got there, we actually need. Put it down—”

  Mags kicked the Scissor Man still lying on the ground, again, again, grinned in glee as he moaned and doubled up. The others had their hands full, panting as my mother rabbit-thrashed at the leaves and Stephen tried to grab the knife they held to his throat. “You heard him,” Mags said, her tongue crushing glass. “Give us what we want, or you don’t get shit.”

  Mags had my legs now, they were carrying me off between them just like yesterday, only yesterday. “Stephen!” I shouted. “Mom!”

  “Shut it, you little bitch,” Billy muttered, jerking my arm so hard my vision almost went and I prayed, godless prayer, for it to stay in the socket. “You open your goddamned mouth when I tell you to, and then you don’t open it ever again.”

  Back on my feet again, barely, each of them gripping an arm and my sneakers dirt-dragging with every step. I saw the brownand-white flash, the startled polished-stone eye of a deer bounding away as we approached, saw Mags gaze after it with a sudden, sorrowful longing past any sort of bodily hunger. Then they pushed me farther into the trees.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “You show up,you and that bitch Lisa,and everything gets fucked.” Billy’s voice dropped lower with simmering rage. “Jessie’s fucking hoo-family she didn’t kill when she had a chance, destroyed everything, that sister of hers and you gallivanting around turning everything to shit with your—”

  “I never wanted to be there!” Wasting what energy I had left yelling, tearing and ripping at my own fiery-raw throat, but anger turned me reckless. “I never wanted part of your shithole, Lisa didn’t, Don made us come with him—”

  Billy snorted. “Yeah, Don, that goddamned frail-fucker? If I ever see his ass again, he’s dead. I’ll find a way to kill him.”

  “We’ll never see Don’s ass again, Father William,” Mags said, hauling at my elbow. “His or his little bitch’s, they couldn’t clear out fast enough after—”

  “Your Lisa? Your fucking Lisa?” Billy, oblivious, jerked at my other arm so hard I cried out, gulped back nausea. “They rioted on me, all the little frails, and she helped them! I fed and clothed their asses, me and Mags, and they try to burn the place to the ground! All of it! And she helped them!”

  “No, I can’t believe it,” I shouted back, breathing shallow and sure I’d throw up from all their wrenching at me, “why would anyone do something like that after you kidnapped them, and put guards up everywhere to try to keep them in, and killed Kevin—”

  “She helped them! She actually went and—”

  “Fine, so she fucking helped them, she and the other little saints.” Mags had already shrugged it all off, burdens of queendom thrown aside like some heavy moth-eaten coat. “Wintertime comes around again, let them riot over that, they’ll be begging for us to come back and—quit dragging your goddamned feet!”

  “Let go of me!” I screamed, and she hit me across the mouth. My head snapped back and I tasted blood and help me, Lisa, Mom, Stephen, somebody, I’m about to get my throat torn open again and this time it’ll stick—we’d stopped now, another dark little clearing lousy with clumps of mushrooms and sickly white ruffles of fungus all over the trees. Billy threw me against a sticky tree trunk and leaned over me breathing in ragged swallows of air, pupils down to pinpoints despite the dim light and pale blue irises flat and glassy as a doll’s. My shoulders curled up, trying to pull away, but Mags was breathing down my neck from the other side and there was nowhere to go.

  “She helped them set fire to the place,” he whispered, and like a quick flame jumping on a gas burner there lit in his eyes something beyond the deposed king’s anger: an atavistic animal fear, smoldering perpetual inside. “Kitchen burnt down, whole row of houses, all in a night—Don found you by accident, you know that? It was all nothing but a goddamned accident.” He had my face in his hands now like he could kiss me, like he could crush my cheekbones and squeeze me for pulp. “Wouldn’t have known what we had until that bitch Phoebe started yapping, you and that Stephen, there was supposed to be something special about you—”

  “Me and the whole kitchen crew,” I said, and the insanity in me, in him, was leaking out of both of us ready to blaze in fury and consume everything I’d known of the world. “All of us, right? Except you missed one, you missed Natalie. You missed the most important one of all.”

  My words meant nothing to him, to Mags, even if they’d been listening. “You were supposed to help us,” Mags snarled, grabbing my shoulder and shoving it against the slimed-up bark. “I don’t know how, but—you and that boy, something in you would show them how to turn all this around and let us die.” She turned and spat at the lab, the lake, the bent-up old-man beachfront trees. “Be patient, be patient, we’re working on it, all we ever got—fuck patient, fuck secrets.” Another shove. “You tell me what it is about you, what’ll change it all back. You spit it out now.”
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  “I don’t know!” Her hands twisted hard enough to snap bones, I really was going to throw up—“I don’t know why I’m even here! They killed me, I died, but I came back!” I tilted my chin up, the evidence right there, the itching trickle of blood oozing from behind my ear down to the collarbone. “I came back like you did! Just like you! I don’t know how it happened, I can’t change anything, I—”

  “You fucked with us!” Billy screamed, and twisted some more at my arm so the pain made me start crying in earnest. “You and that little shit Stephen, you don’t fuck with me, you don’t fuck with her! Nobody and nothing fucks with us ever again!”

  He touched his forehead so perversely gentle to mine that I started shaking, it would hurt, whatever they were about to do would hurt until I cried and screamed to die. “You start talking. You start talking and don’t stop until you spit out everything you know or Mags here’ll start with your fingers. You don’t fucking need those. One, by one.”

  That man in the street, that man so hunger-crazed from the plague he put his own hand in his mouth, bit down in a mass of blood until—“I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  Mags took my hand, grasped the index finger, started to twist and bend it back. I screamed and screamed and then something made Billy thud against me, knock foreheads and pull away with a grunt of surprise. He was staggering backward against an assault of kicking feet and bared animal teeth and Lisa, it was Lisa come running from the trees, a singed stench clinging to her skin and clothes and she threw herself on him. They rolled together on the damp-dry ground, their eyes wild, and my ears filled with the hollow smack of fist against flesh and bone. Mags hadn’t let go of my hand, I’d force her to let go.

  “Run, Amy!” Lisa was screaming, gasping at another blow to her face, kicking Billy so hard he growled. “Run!”

  There was nowhere to run I wouldn’t end up back where I started, all alone. Mags twisted at my fingers like nothing had interrupted us, so calm, and knowing I’d die for it I grabbed a knot of taffy-colored hair, sank my free hand in and pulled. We were rolling on the ground now too and her fist met my eye, I’d go blind, I’d suffocate under her soft rollicking fleshly ex-weight.

  I’d hurt her, I’d hurt her. My head spun, my fingers throbbed, my shoulder ached, my torn-up hands stung and burned, I’d hurt her badly as that, ten times worse—I got a knee into Mags’s stomach, my head snapped back again under her fist and silvery slivers of light swam from behind my lids, not stars but little fish. A blow to my bad arm, making it shudder and vibrate. My ribs. My stomach. I choked trying not to retch and my hands were scrabbling for a hold in that soft pale flesh that couldn’t scar or bruise, that had no memory in it at all. She punched again and I made a high, scared and scary sound, a rabbit in the jaws of a cat, all I could grab hold of was folds of filthy green flowered cloth like grandma upholstery, that goddamned spill of matted grease-locked hair—

  “I won’t tell you anything!” I screamed. My fingers flailed, trying to press down against her eyes—they didn’t want to bend, my swollen-jointed fingers, it hurt so much to bend them and that was her fault, all of this, all her fault. “I’m never saying a fucking thing!”

  She had my shoulders now, pushing with both hands, it hurt so much I wanted to pass out. Her gray eyes were wide and serene. “Then I’ll tear your tongue out,” she whispered, and I knew she wasn’t joking, that smile reminiscent like she’d done it before. “You can write it with a stick in the dirt, you filthy piece of rotten meat—”

  I was weak, weak and stupid and about to die, it hurts, it hurts so much, I don’t want it to hurt. Little frail, about to be gutted, killed, eaten, killed again, killed forever. Mags settled her weight against me, enjoying the show.

  “I haven’t had a really good hoo-kill in years,” she said. “Not a good feeding one, not since before Billy and I got sick. You came along just the right time.” Hand to the side of my head, yanking my chin up and back. “That’s one thing they can’t take away.”

  A good hoo-kill. Hoo. Oooooosssss. You’re dead, you talk dead, you shouldn’t even be here. I shouldn’t be. I’m dead. I died. I died like you died. There were riots in the grocery stores and I kicked a man’s head so hard something crunched and broke, I didn’t mean to do it but then came the second time, the deliberate time, I’m you, Mags, Billy, I am you. You’re all I am and all I’ll ever be. Mags’s cushiony, columnar fingers explored the sutures on my throat, a mocking little tap dance from one side of my neck to the next. She laughed, doubly happy.

  “I knew it,” she said. “Little lab rat.”

  Then she dug her fingers in, to rip them all open.

  I don’t know what happened next. I’ll never know. Every part of me was screaming-hurt and drained dry and her nails were sliding in to tear me all up, but inside me something caught hold. It caught fire. It didn’t matter anymore how much I hurt. My arms shook and something hot and scorching brought a different sort of tears to my eyes and I pulled so easy from Mags’s clutches, I wrenched my head away like her iron-band hands were nothing. I took her by surprise, I so loved taking her by surprise. I sank teeth into her arm, hanging on, head shaking to bite down deeper and she roared in rage.

  “Rotten little bitch!” she screamed, a hand in my hair slamming my head against the leaves, the tree roots again, again. I didn’t even feel it. My body’s just a dead skinned hide draped over what’s actually me and you can’t get to it, wet stickiness dripping in my hair now that must be my own blood, it didn’t matter. You can’t kill me, bitch, I’m dead.

  “I won’t tell you anything.” Laughing still, my arms and legs flying up to hit, kick, scrabble heels back down in the soft forest ground like I was built for this place, born-reborn to it. “Nothing, not a—” She got my jaw again, my teeth slamming together under the impact so it echoed through my skull. “Not a thing, nothing!”

  “Then you’re nothing,” she whispered, with the sighing softness of breath, the last breath, leaving a body for good. “You’re nothing. And this is all over.”

  Her hands were around my throat. Throttling. About to snap.

  My nails caught on soft powdery-smooth flesh that tore open, that spilled a wetness far too thick over my hands, and with her fingers still circling my neck I twisted, kicked. My feet thudded and something bent and cracked beneath them, I heard a shocked scream that wasn’t me, my teeth found flesh again and a taste foul and necrotic coursed into my mouth, this isn’t me doing this, that dark lake water is rushing over my head again but I’m breathing it in as air, flying through it, sailing over dark coursing tributaries like the veins buried in my own body—

  A pulsating thud, all in my ears. What a child like Kristin’s child hears in the womb, its mother’s heartbeat, dwarfing and drowning out its own.

  I was standing over her. I had no memory of rising up but I was standing over her, over Mags where she lay on the ground, and the rushing searing drowning thing inside me, hot enough to melt glass, cooled and congealed into dark, spiky, shining shards. Hard glassy bristles, like the fur of a great black dog. My own breath, sobbing and ragged in my ears. Over and over again.

  The taste coating, sticking to my mouth was so foul I bent over and spat, again and again. My hands were winey-syrupy, a purplish tarry stuff ground into the nails and smeared over my palms and I tried scrubbing them on the tree bark, flinched at the pain, stared at Mags where she lay still and quiet on the ground. Her face, the eyes wide-open startled, scored with lines down the cheek like my own fingernails. Throat a torn, tarry mess. Her gut. Ripped open, kicked open, a great soup of decay where vital organs should’ve been soaking her flowered green dress, coursing down her soft pale springy-firm thighs, saturating the leaves and tree roots and ground.

  The smell. You can’t imagine the smell, oozing from all inside her. Kill it, Mom. Kill it. Set it on fire.

  I staggered backward, waiting for her invulnerable undying ex’s body to close up, knit together. It just lay there, limp and deplete
d, a wineskin burst open. I was dizzy and my slammedaround head kept doing a kaleidoscope tilt and then there were sounds behind me, Billy and Lisa had smelled it too, heard it too and they let each other go. We both had black eyes, Lisa and I: Mine swelling up, squeezing my vision down to the slit in a window blind, hers already yellowing and fading as the blood sank back into subsiding flesh. Billy, torn up, fucked up, heaving breaths like he’d run a race. All of us, staring down at Mags not believing what we saw.

  Billy kicked at the leaves, like they were road barriers blocking his way, and came so slowly closer, waiting for her to wake up. His pale blue eyes were round and wide, the whites on full display, taking it all in and not seeing what they saw.

  “Not funny,” he said, as he stood over her. “Not fucking funny, Margaret May, get the hell up.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Mags,” he said quietly.

  The ground beneath my feet danced, circled, like it was taunting me, playing tag. I staggered again and almost fell and Lisa caught me, hung on, made murmuring sounds of would-be comfort that had no words, no end, no point. Billy was kneeling in the stinking saturated leaves, a hand touching Mags’s snarled auburn hair.

  “Mags. Get up. Wake up. Mags.” Order. Bargain. Plea. “Mags.”

  Lisa kept an arm wrapped tight around me, a hand to her mouth.

  “Mags,” Billy said again. All quiet.