Then a sound came out of him that pulled all the energy from the tree roots, the ground, the air, a howling anguish punching holes in the sky. He seized her shoulders, shook her rotten remains like he could jostle the life back into her, and he turned toto me, his hands—both our hands—smeared with horrific stinking ooze, his eyes shiny and face feverish with wild impossible hope.
“Kill me,” he said, and as he laughed his pale round rabbit eyes brimmed and spilled over. “Can’t kill myself. We both tried, she and I. Tried and tried. You don’t know how fucking many times. So kill me.”
I just stood there, the swaying ground and trees finally straightening up, trying to understand how she could be lying there unmoving, unhealed, dead. Billy stroked her hair, passed a hand over her eyelids to close them, then screamed to me and the tree roots and the air, “Kill ME!”
What do I do? I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I did. It has to be a trick. It has to. Lisa was still murmuring, whispering, the nervous drone of some meditative mosquito. Billy laughing again, stony, hollow, as his face grew damp like rain.
“You wanna die?” he whispered, and all the hollowed-out despair in him flared up, searing, like a dead tree catching a discarded cigarette’s flame. “You wanna get outta this tramp-around, tread-around life and have any peace and quiet, ever? Any rest? You ain’t gonna.” Each syllable snapped and flared up as it left his mouth, more dead branches for the fire. “You’ll live forever, nothing but endless fucking living and breathing and stumbling around the trees, no point, no purpose, no nothing, everyone you care about gone and you don’t get to follow, you just keep going on and on and on and—that’s what you can have! You can have it!” Screaming, an air-rich roar of flame consuming the clearing, acres of trees, every last thing in its path. “You can have it! You’ll have it! And you’ll curse every worthless fucking second that you’re—”
He pressed his face to Mags’s forehead, choking, sobbing. The stench of her, strong and sharp and porridge-thick, still spilling out on every part of the ground, the leaves, the rug, the wall behind the sofa, the tablecloth of a mutual shroud. I wrenched away from Lisa and I ran.
I stumbled in the direction Stephen, my mother had gone but I didn’t get very far. Lisa was right behind me, she half-tackled me just the slightest bit gentler than Mags and then I was sobbing against her shoulder. That goddamned sound again, that there-there noise she kept dress rehearsing, her kind couldn’t even do that much without Brillo-scrubbing a human’s ears.
“Shut up,” I whispered. A good soft sound. “Shut up, shut up, shut up—”
“I looked for you all night,” Lisa said, and kept rocking me back and forth with a quiet ferocity. “I heard one of them screaming you got away and that’s my girl, that’s—I went back to Paradise, I thought maybe you’d gone back, and some of the buildings were already on fire. The commissary.” Her fingers touched the edge of my eye, now swollen almost shut. Her own face, she might never have been hit at all. “Kevin, Billy doing that, it was the last straw. I don’t know what’ll happen to them, everyone left, I’ve got Naomi, she’s here with me, but—”
“How did I do that?” I coughed, almost doubled over. “Mags. How did I do that. It’s impossible. How.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
She touched my hands, still sticky with what had happened. My mouth. “Your teeth,” she said, with a distant sort of wonder. “They’re like—they’re so sharp now. They’ve changed.” She made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “They’re like mine.”
My teeth. I touched them myself, ran a tongue along their edges: still square like human teeth, the slight up-and-down unevenness I’d always had. I put a fingertip to them, examining each in turn. When I took my hand away that finger was bleeding.
“What does that mean,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“The lab.” I put bleeding fingers to my swollen eye, felt a jolt of pain when I touched it and my hand flew back down to my side. Everything hurt, my eye, my mouth, my throat, my hands, my whole body, but something told me I should’ve been hurting more. Adrenaline. That’s all. “Lisa, the lab, when Natalie disappeared, it—”
“I know.”
“They’re taking people for it, human beings, they’re still taking them right now, it’s filthy and there’s not even electricity but they’ve been doing things that—”
“Amy.” Her face was somber. “Just trust me, I know better than you could possibly imagine.”
Patient Zero, Phoebe said. Poor crazy backstabbing dead Phoebe I wasted so much energy hating. Something about Lisa’s brother. He couldn’t be the “Daddy” of Natalie’s dreams, could— why couldn’t he be. Why couldn’t anyone. Lisa’s hand traced my jawline, tears in her eyes as she touched my throat.
“Oh, God, Jim,” she murmured, all to herself. “What the hell did you really do in that place, all those years. What’d you do to all of us.”
I pulled away. “So what did he do?”
She shook her head. I knew I’d never get an answer.
A wailing sound emanated from the trees, rising, falling, and I walked quietly back in because I wasn’t running away from what I did, not a second time. Billy lay on the leaves next to Mag’s torn-up, how-the-hell-did-I-tear-her-up body, his eyes squeezed shut and sobs convulsing him, like they were working their way up from his feet and out his mouth; he didn’t see me, he didn’t see anything around him. Phoebe had that same look, after Kevin died: a wild dizzy sickness, like they were both trapped on tiny boats spinning and drifting crazy onto a hostile, lethal sea. I saw what he did to Phoebe, I shouldn’t have any pity.
How could I not have pity? We were one and the same, Billy and I. Killers together. This wasn’t the second time, this was the third and I didn’t even know how I’d—I got out of there fast, I turned and fled like I’d sworn I wouldn’t and Lisa was standing there, waiting. She pulled something from her pocket, a squashed candy bar with a singed-smelling wrapper.
“Eat,” she said, shoving it at me without ceremony. I ate, every mouthful a big clump of stale peanuts stuck together with caramel like rubber cement.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” I said. Maybe that was actually true. My lips were coated with melted sugar, they came unstuck when I talked like an old envelope flap. The candy was dry and hard and it hurt like hell to swallow. “I didn’t know—how could she die? How?”
Lisa just shook her head. When she saw the fear in my eyes she smiled, ran a hand over my cheek.
“I’ve had nightmares since I got sick about never dying,” she said. “Never. Being trapped here forever. So if I’m wrong, if something out there could actually kill me—fine. I’m ready. It’s only Naomi and my sister I’m worried about.” She watched the chunks of peanuts disappear down my throat. “And you.”
I grabbed Lisa’s hand, and she almost jumped. I could see it on her face, her face that couldn’t hide her feelings for shit: My grip was far too strong, stronger than it’d ever been since she knew me. Sugar rush, Lisa, that’s all, right? “Tell me. Tell me how I did it. Tell me or I’ll—”
“Amy!” My mother’s voice, calling out scared, and despite everything something in me leapt up so high and easy hearing it, like a stag bounding toward a cool river. “Amy!”
“Here!” I shouted, and took off running, Lisa behind me, in the direction of her voice. “Over here!”
The trees here at the wood’s edge were a mere curtain scrim over the high uncut grass of the lab’s back lawn, the lab itself, just a few hundred yards up the hill. I saw two people there waiting for me, alive, and I laughed with an edge of true hysteria and then I stumbled over something and almost fell, and I looked down.
It was a foot. A human foot, unevenly severed, still in its black lace-up shoe and with a toothpick edge of bone sticking from the torn-away bit of shin.
The stench was an impenetrable fog rushing into pores, nostrils, mouths: the
same smell that poured from Mags’s body, when I somehow killed her. There were bodies strewn between us and one of them was the black lace-up’s owner, he lay there broken and in pieces and some of the pieces were missing. He bled red but the others around him, they were full of an indiscriminate stew of winey-black rot, their bodies tureens of bone cracked open along the sides. The Scissor Men, the ex-humans, who had pursued us believing like we believed that nothing could bring them down.
My mother stood there next to Stephen, ashen-faced. She gripped something in her fist, like a clump of hair, but holding it had stained her fingers red. Her face, her clothes, covered in tarry blackness just like mine. Stephen, his shirtfront and hair matted in winey rot, squatted near one of the bodies. He looked up at me, eyes full of defiance and fear, and swallowed down some of the same stuff smeared all over his mouth, cheeks, neck. A mouthful of blood.
I came forward and took my mother’s hand. Gently uncurled the fingers, one by one, and she let the bloody torn-off thing she’d been holding fall to the ground. Your teeth, they’re so sharp now. Like mine.
“Mom, this is Lisa,” I said. “I met her on the road. She looked out for me for a while. She and Stephen already met. Lisa, this is Lucy. My mother.”
Lisa nodded, looked suddenly almost shy and awkward as she glanced at us all together.
“Are you okay?” she asked my mother.
My mother thought that one over. “We can all pretend we are, together,” she mused, locks of salt-and-paprika hair falling over her face. “It’d help pass the time.”
Lisa nodded again. A good answer, I could see her thinking. A good answer.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “I have to go get—don’t go off anywhere, Amy. Or any of you. Christ, I told her to stay by the lilacs no matter what, if she’s wandered off I swear I’ll—”
She ran off, threading through the birches. Stephen reached up with his sleeve covering his hand, wiped what traces he could from his mouth.
“Are we dead,” I asked, again. “Living dead. Dead living—”
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I don’t know.”
“Do we—can we—eat human flesh.” The question was a hard suet lump in my throat and I forced it out, like coughing up something swallowed the wrong way.
Stephen put his hands in his pockets, stared at the ground with his face knotted up.
“There’s something in my head now,” he said, “when I get scared enough. I don’t know if it was there, before, it’s like I said, I have a terrible time remembering a lot of things—” He shook his head. “I can do . . . things like this. And it’s like I don’t even know I’ve done them, until they’ve happened.”
He glanced over at my mother and I saw the gratitude of knowing it wasn’t only him, of knowing that someone else had been forced or bred or made exactly this way. He looked at me and I saw him waiting for me to turn my back, resigned and waiting. I reached up and touched his hair.
“Mags is dead,” I said. “I killed her.”
His eyes widened. “That’s not even poss—”
“And this is? What you did?”
He had no answer for that.
“I didn’t even know I’d done it,” I said. “Until it happened.”
My mother took me in her arms, gave me a short, sharp shock of a hug. Stephen kissed me. When I looked up again Lisa was standing there watching us, arms wrapped around her body in the old way like she could somehow push this wrong skin of hers into a good fit. Beside her, leaves and dirt clods sticking to her hair and her eyes bleary with sleep, was Naomi. Here with Lisa all along, hiding, seeing and remembering God knew what.
My mother looked from Naomi to the bodies and back again with alarm, but Naomi’s eyes studying it all were big and dark and so very matter-of-fact, so used to the supposedly unthinkable. We had all seen all of it, before. There are Scissor Men, there are. Had she seen Mags’s body, Billy huddled crushed and broken beside it? She’d called them Mommy and Daddy, once. I nodded at Naomi, woman to woman, and she nodded back.
“This is Naomi,” Lisa said to my mother, curling a palm around the top of Naomi’s head. “My daughter.”
Naomi’s expression didn’t change, but she leaned into the touch. My mother managed a smile.
“That day back in Lepingville,” I said to her. “The day I snuck out to watch you on the intrusion call, and—”
“Yes,” my mother said. “I remember.”
“Was that my father?” I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Or my dad? It was, wasn’t it. Which one was it?”
Ooooooossss. Holding out his hand. Her hands, curling that much tighter around the flamethrower. She looked back at me.
“They never found your dad’s body,” she said. “I had nothing to bury, nothing to burn. Then—” She closed her eyes hard for a moment. “—and then, there he was. A body to burn. And that’s what I did.”
That screaming when he died again, ceaseless screaming, the noise like a scalpel teasing agony from bleeding skin. Right in front of me. Ms. Acosta, lying there on the floor, one pale, nearly bared breast and fingers half-curled in panic her last remnant of intact flesh. There she was. And that’s what I did.
“We have to get out of here,” I said.
She nodded and we headed side by side toward the patches of pink laboratory brick, the swaths of thick open grass. Everyone followed, Naomi bringing up the rear with Lisa and clutching at a long, curling, dead strip of tree bark like a teddy bear as she walked.
The wind was picking up, the grass around our shins bowing and flattening and the tiny gnarled trees at the top of the duneface doing an easy little list back, forth, back. We made our slow wounded way through the grass and toward the narrow white gravel road, waiting to be seen. Waiting to see who’d see us.
But nobody came out of the lab, ever. Instead we heard footsteps behind us, tracing the path we’d just deserted, and Stephen slid a protective arm along my shoulders as we all turned around. She was breathing hard, bruised, great smears of drying blood splayed like handprints over her cheeks and arms and sealskin hair, but she was bright-eyed, smiling. She still had her knife.
“I saw them,” she said, buoyant with pleasure. “The Scissor Men. You got them all. The ones who thought nothing could ever touch them.” Her eyes on Lisa were derisive, gleeful with triumph, and she laughed. “That’s what your kind thought, isn’t it? That you were better than all of us? Well, guess what, things are different now. The ones who came back—the exes? We’re the only thing that can kill them. God, Amy, your eye looks terrible. Sorry.”
“Give me my fucking dog back,” I said. “I know he’s not dead, however much of his blood you’ve got on you. That’s not how it works.”
Natalie snorted. “I told you, you don’t need Death now. You killed what they all thought could never die—and it was dying all along. Rotten, liquid, all on the inside.” Her eyes flickered contemptuously to Lisa again, back to me. “You should be dead right now, all of you. You aren’t. The master is the servant. That’s the whole point. We’re already halfway there.”
I studied her up and down, down and up, like the tougher girls at school used to do right before a fight. “Give me my dog.”
“God, you’re boring,” she hissed. “I can’t, okay? He just vanished, we were in there and he could’ve bitten my face off and then, it was like he was black sand or something, under my hands. He dissolved.”
Death had deserted her again, it still didn’t want her. I could almost have felt sorry for her, if things had been different. Stephen smiled as he stared at her, a thin mocking smile like he was thinking just the same thing.
“You still haven’t told us,” he said. “How we’re ‘almost halfway there.’ Or how we can kill what isn’t meant to be killed. I never knew we could do that, I never could do that before and God knows I tried—”
“Come back with me,” she whispered. A hand on my arm, all naked, unfeigned appeal. “Come on. Okay? Not them”—her
eyes flickered to Naomi and Lisa—“just, you guys. We belong here, this really is our home and I can’t clean it up all by myself—”
“You already killed me once,” I said, and the thought of that ridiculous statement being true made me want to dissolve into giggles there on the gravel. “You’re not getting another chance.”
Her expression hardened. “And if I hadn’t you’d be dead right now. You’d never have been able to fight any of them, you know that! Why are you so angry? I don’t have to tell you what Daddy and Grandma told me, it was a secret! I’m not supposed to tell anyone! It was all just in case something happened to them, if you stay with me you’ll see it for yourself!”
She was pleading now, actual desperation, like the Natalie I’d thought I’d known back in Paradise City. Like the person she really was somewhere inside, might have remained for her entire life, if this place had never had her. How could anyone live with themselves, knowing that? Realizing they’d never know just what they really were? The ringing chorus inside us both, in us all, human and inhuman and impossible to sort out each from each, it made me even dizzier and I turned my head away. My mother put a hand to the back of my head.
“You’re making too big a deal out of this,” Natalie said. “We’re all human beings here, we’re not monsters—you want to know how it all works? Then you have to stay. The story’s right here. In the sands. This is the only place on Earth, the only one where Death doesn’t have a boot on humanity’s neck—you’d be dead if it weren’t for me!” Shouting at my mother now, angry like a toddler sensing their promised candy treat slipping away. “You’d all be dead!”
“You disgust me,” I said. “Everything about you disgusts me.”
“You’re no different than me,” she hissed. Her face was flushed, tears of genuine hurt in her eyes. “I don’t know why he loves you better, why you get pets and presents and—we’re both the same, both of us are the same. Inside, you’re no different than me.”
I reached out a hand, touched her thick tangled black hair. She blinked back the wetness in surprise.
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