Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  We kept finding excuses to touch each other but it was like we were doing it from across a chasm, the barest, split-second brushes of fingertips like gathering sustenance for more months, years, of being entirely alone. It was her choice to leave me, to walk out when I was fifteen, after she killed him, because she thought she was too dead a thing to raise a living child, half-crazy from obliterating something too much like herself; I understood that now, a little, understood the killing part of it all too well, but still, she left. Left me to the elements—and the elementals, while she was at it. If she hadn’t—

  If she hadn’t. If I hadn’t. If the whole world were bunnies and rainbows and disease hadn’t scorched it down to dirt and salt. I folded a blanket, made a smaller thicker square of one for Naomi, just to have something to do with my hands. Stephen had already taken several and wrapped them around his shoulders, indifferent to this effort to make the linoleum beneath us soft.

  “So what exactly is this sister of yours going to do?” my mother asked, handing out pillows. “I mean, when we show up.”

  Lisa’s sister, the ex-zombie. The one that we’d all fled the remnants of Gary to try and find. Because Lisa claimed she knew something about everything that’d happened to us all, that might still keep happening. Lisa shrugged, her arms jerking in a little whip-snap as she tried airing out her fleece. No point in that, it all smelled of dust and mold and stale corn chips. “Nobody’s in any danger of getting roasted over a spit, if that’s what you—”

  “I never said that.” My mother’s voice was sharp, impatient with tiredness. Full of rusty pins and needles of its own. “I’ve seen as much as anyone during all this, I’m not—”

  “Kidding. I was kidding. I swear.” Lisa pulled at a lank handful of hair, ragged and uneven from past tuggings, still acrid with the lingering smell of ash. “She’ll rant about how I’m dragging the whole world in like a lot of stray cats, do I think she’s running a fucking foster home, then she’ll pipe down to a dull grumble and maybe actually listen when I talk.” She gave me and Stephen a wary look. “Let me do the talking. She doesn’t like people—even when she was human, she always liked animals more. And she was never diplomatic. It’s nothing personal.”

  “She’d better not be looking for a body servant,” Stephen muttered, punching a pillow trying to get it to soften up. “Or a cook. I’ve had a bellyful of that.”

  “She’ll be looking to be let be,” Lisa said, adding another blanket to Naomi’s pile. “Don’t even try talking to Linc, her friend Linc. He’s a quiet fellow anyway, Silent Cal, but he’s a stubborn son of a bitch who just won’t see reason, Renee’s at least a little more—”

  “She wants peace and quiet, but here we are to tell her the world’s turned upside down, and we need her to do Christ knows what to help fix it, and if she doesn’t, then something or other might happen, we don’t know what, or then again it might not.” Stephen considered this scenario, giving me a look close to amusement. “And she won’t have certain issues with—”

  “I thought we agreed on where we were going.” My mother looked not just wary but stricken, like someone standing under a crumbling ceiling watching another of its struts weaken, collapse. “For God’s sake, hours of walking just to—”

  “I didn’t say to turn back.” Stephen turned on his side toward the shelves, his back to us all, clutching the pillow with tense fingertips. “I just said, I’m not expecting anything when we get there but more shit. You go on and handle it, Lisa. Just like you said you would.”

  Silence, for a moment, as Stephen made a great show of settling in for siesta. Then Naomi crawled onto her blankets, murmuring futile endearments in Nick’s ear and crunching hand-fuls of potato chips. I lay next to my mother, Nick a warm bit of pillow at the tops of our heads, and dutifully closed my eyes because there was nothing left to say to each other. I was vibrating with nerves and no way I’d ever sleep but it was less awkward this way, I’d just let my thoughts go adrift and—

  When I opened my eyes again, my shoulders were aching, the thin fleece rucked up uncomfortably at my back, and the store windows looked out on darkness. I rose slowly to my feet, snaking with great care from our pile of limbs so I didn’t wake anyone, and discovered too late how pleasantly warm that little nest had been. Crayons forgotten, Naomi lay with her chip-stuffed mouth half-open and arms not quite circling Nick’s neck; he surprised me with his closed eyes and the gentle rise and fall of his chest—wouldn’t eat but he was happy to sleep. Of course, there was nothing but sleep, where he came from.

  Lisa and my mother were stretched out rigid, like thin wooden planks side by side in a buckling old floor; Stephen was his own nest of fleece, a tuft of dark hair sticking out of the top. I smoothed the tuft down and went down the aisle, still wrapped in my own blanket, slowly approaching the door. Foolish to consider waking Nick for protection, foolish to think what was outside might’ve tired of us when I knew—we know firsthand, don’t we, Nick—that such things never tire, but maybe he changed his mind and wandered off to bother other Paradise City refugees, wretched crazy Natalie we’d left behind at the lab—

  The lab wanted to unlock control of life and death, let folks choose how long they lived and when they’d die with no rot, no decay, no sickness or age. My mother the lab rat got away; she escaped. She had me. And then my father died. And then years later, after she killed what was left of him, she lost her head, ran away without me, and they found her. And kept her. Their property. Their rules.

  And now, it’d started again. Natalie, another of the lab rats—the last surviving rat—still just a kid, but she learned as they worked on her, she remembered what she’d been taught. She lured us in, Stephen and me, killed us and brought us both back, held my mother half-hostage so she could hold some perverted family reunion: I owed her that much, really, she gave me my mother back. And we got away. And here we were, all the family I had left, off to find Lisa’s family; there were answers there, Lisa said, supposed, hoped. Me, I couldn’t imagine what anyone, anywhere could tell us. If I’d learned just one useful thing, this past autumn, winter, spring, it was that nobody ever tells you what you need to know. You have to work it out yourself, without words. You have to acknowledge you always knew it, all along, and just couldn’t stand to admit it.

  The sky outside the pharmacy was a deep, chalky ashen-black, the half moon and dottings of stars sparks of hot white flame in smoldering charcoal. The man stood there in the middle of the empty street, bare silvery head and bare pale toes pointed toward our makeshift lodgings, waxen hands folded against his expanse of long black coat. And his face... he had no face; every time I tried concentrating long enough to discern mouth, eyes, the shape of chin or forehead, it was like my own eyes couldn’t help sliding away, seeing only a half-scribbled pencil sketch crumpled in the trash.

  One of Natalie’s sketches, he looked like, the ones pinned all over the walls of her laboratory prison room (my mother’s cell, Stephen’s, what had they looked like, had they even had windows like hers?). He’d been following us since we left the lab and Prairie Beach, so quiet and just far enough behind us we could almost forget—but turn around, let your sights drift to the side, and there he was. Never came an inch closer. Never retreated one step. He was all loyalty and all constancy, and what he wanted from us, where he needed us to go, we wouldn’t find that out until it was right upon us, just like how Nick led me lamb-stupid toward my own death but I still never suspected it’d be from Natalie’s knife—

  He shifted from foot to foot, whitish feet narrow and bony with one of the big toes bulging a bit, crooked upward; human feet with all their asymmetries and imperfections, their color not artifice but anemia. It wasn’t Death. I’d seen Death, the thing, the entity, taking the forms of so many different dead people, but this wasn’t Death and I’d known that in my bones before Death ever told me so. It wasn’t what Stephen thought either, a Scissor Man, one of those damaged lab experiments recycled for guard duty, cleanup crew, g
oon squad. This was something waiting for us to forget ourselves, turn our heads, realize only too late the cold hardness we lay upon wasn’t the lino floor of an abandoned pharmacy, but the stone of a sacrificial altar.

  Soft rustlings behind me, rodent or canine or human; I didn’t turn around, I was too busy trying to fix in my mind some shape, any shape, for the features of that candle-wax face. Stephen came quietly up beside me, hair still standing on end, gazing at the man in black with an equanimity he could never manage with Nick.

  “We should have slept in shifts,” he said, his shoulder pressing against mine in a faint bony tap through layers of matted fleece. “He’s bound to try and come inside.”

  “He won’t,” I said. I was very sure of that. “He’s had the perfect chance already, but there he is.”

  “I wish he had come in,” Stephen said, and in the compressed tightness of his voice I sensed the yearning for more fights, more fists and feet, release from the clenched-up, tooth-aching tension of not knowing where we were going or what we’d find or what our uninvited guest might do when we got there. “He wants something from us? Let him try and grab it, I mean, we’re all right where he wants us, right now—”

  “We’ve got no clue what he wants,” I pointed out. “Maybe it’s not even us. It’s got to be something where we’re going.”

  I pressed a palm to my bad eye, wincing at the tenderness like a burn, the vague nausea that came both from pain and the nasty spongy sensation of swollen flesh. Hands hurt. Eye hurt. Arms, throat, back, madly itching feet, skin still winter-cracked after dozens of lotion-slicks and weeks of spring—I’d given up on all that, on the soft constant throb behind one temple ever going away. Stephen pressed his own palm over mine.

  “He must know me,” he said, and as he gently pulled my fingers away, his own jumped, twitching with tension. “It must be someone I knew from before, at the lab, wanting to grab all the lab rats before that Natalie gets us back. There must be different factions, fighting, even now—I know there were. Before.” A derisive little sound, aimed at himself. “Even if I’ve got no names. Or faces.”

  Stephen’s ruined memory was the wound he kept worrying at because it never healed, the blistering stone stuck in his shoe. Every time they experimented on you, you lost more of yourself, lowered inch by inch into Lethe until your head went under, until what little was left of you drowned. “It isn’t,” I said, again, for the fourth or seventh or sixty-third time. “It’s nobody you knew. It’s nothing like what you think. He just appeared, like he’s always been there, like he can’t help but—you have to trust me about this, Stephen. This is exactly what happened with Nick.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Stephen crane his neck, looking behind us where Nick still lay, then swivel back to gaze at me.

  “Nick’s a real dog,” he said, and the “real” was like a politeness, something we’d all merely agreed to say was true. “You keep saying that, even though he appeared out of nowhere and he never eats anything and he stares right through you and me and everyone like some kind of four-legged laser beam—”

  “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.” I was muttering under my breath, so nobody else would wake up, and the words came out almost in a hiss. “I know you haven’t forgotten he got us away from Natalie, back in the lab, he—”

  “Your mother got us out. Not him.” His brows had knitted up tight, the old thundercloud lowering over his face like another fresh bruise. “Lucy got us out of the lab. Without her, we’d still be wandering in circles.”

  “I’d never have found the lab without Nick.” Frustration drew my temples, my aching forehead, even tighter. “I’ve never have found you, my mother... it’s just, he knows things, okay? He’s keyed into something we aren’t, at least not like we should be, and he can sense what might happen next, like a smell, and lead me to—”

  “So which is it?” Stephen’s eyes were hard with a sudden, untoward triumph, a cop who didn’t care his confession was coming by the business end of a baton. “Which is it? A real dog? Or some sort of—” He flung a hand at the air. “—ghost? Like that, that phantom, that Angel of Death you said you saw—”

  “Said I saw—I saw it, Stephen, I saw him.” All those weeks I thought I was crazy, that I’d snapped inside from the blood on my hands and in my mind and that it was all a hallucination—I’d seen it all turn real, delusion made flesh, and now Stephen wanted to take that away from me. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair. “I saw him and I keep seeing him because he’s here, everywhere around us, Natalie might be fucked in the head but she was totally right about—”

  “Is Nick real, or isn’t he?” More baton, every word a hard, stinging tap. “Which is it? You can’t have it both ways, Amy—”

  “I can’t?” I bit back a shout. “Everything that’s happened, I can’t? Since when? Where the hell have you even been during all this, for Christ’s sake?”

  I glared at him, waiting for him to lose his temper in earnest and give that baton a real swing. Just try it. Why was he acting like this, why now? He’d believed me since before the lab, all the way back in Paradise; we’d known each other and believed each other on sight and now he was backtracking like all the others had been right, everyone who’d dismissed us both as tainted, stone crazy. It couldn’t be he’d forgotten, forgotten so soon everything we’d seen, could it? Maybe he really had, maybe it was all his memory. But Lisa, and my mother, I could tell they didn’t really believe me either. (Naomi, she didn’t count; six-year-olds would believe anything.) Everything that happened, everything we’d seen just hours ago—why didn’t any of them want to believe me?

  Stephen reached out a hand again, touched my hair with slow caution like he was certain I’d jerk away. I stood still, just watching, and he stroked it, rested fingers on my shoulder, let his arm drop back down to his side.

  “Scissors,” he said. “Your mother found some.” He jabbed an absent, almost brutal finger at his own throat. “And one of those little sewing hooks, that pulls out stitched threads. We can get rid of these, they itch like crazy when—”

  “Tell me about it.” All the way here over miles of road, congealing into one big expanse of potholes always circling the same dead steel mill, coke plant, used car lot—all that way, the soft ceaseless itch was like a tiny nest of millipedes, scuttling endlessly back and forth across my windpipe; my fingers kept twitching to crush all their dry dead filament-legs into powder, tear them from the burrows they’d scored in my skin. I pictured something laying eggs there, like a zombie hatching beetles and flies, and shuddered. “Tomorrow, before we leave.”

  “Tomorrow,” he repeated.

  He stood there for a moment, awkward, all the anger drained away. Then he leaned forward, gave my mouth a fleeting kiss, and walked back to the tangle of limbs, warm blankets, low steady sleepers’ breath. I didn’t turn around. We both needed to be alone, just now.

  Tomorrow. If we kept our pace, we might cross the county line tomorrow, find the beach farther east at Cowles Shores, meet Lisa’s sister and those friends of hers and it’d all be a big old party—ex-humans, ex-zombies, real live people all sharing and caring and merry like Christmas. Just like Paradise City, one big happy family of gimcrack lords and shellshocked serfs and how had I ever managed to kill Mags, to do that to poor murderous Billy whom she’d left behind in her impossible dying, how? Lisa’s sister sees things we don’t, knows things we don’t, that’s Lisa’s story and so we’ll find out everything, somehow, if we just keep walking and walking toward her for the rest of our lives, then all of this will be explained. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

  Toenails, clicking softly behind me, and then something leaning against my shin: Nick, waiting discreetly until Stephen was settled in and sleeping before fleeing his presence for mine. Rough, shaggy, unkempt fur, the bones beneath it hard smooth planes and the flesh warm and solid and alive: a real dog. Every bit as real even when he was still something that melted into air, just like Dea
th appearing and disappearing before my eyes, just like that man outside I couldn’t see and couldn’t stop seeing was nothing corporeal, but he was still real as real.

  Flesh isn’t reality; I’d figured that out with startling speed once I realized I wasn’t crazy after all—it’s just a testimony to reality, something you can touch and feed and love and hurt as a stand-in, a symbol, for the thing that’s really there. Like Lisa’s statues, inside the ruined church where she’d insisted on stopping on the way here. I’d craned my head inside, as we all stood there awkwardly waiting for her to finish, and saw her crouched silently before an impassive ash-gray Virgin Mary, thin slender fingers on one of its outstretched hands all broken off (someone surely tried to eat them, at the worst of the plague). It wasn’t the statue getting the love, of course—that was just the stand-in. We’re all just statues of ourselves; all our bodies, souls solidified. The sculpting clay rots away, all that was there before it still stands. Before he was there, Nick was there. Both at once.

  Souls. I hadn’t been raised that way, to think about souls. We were agnostics. I’d thought I was, anyway.

  They weren’t getting rid of Nick. They all wanted to, I knew that, all but Naomi (and I’d appeal to her if I had to, if they all told me Nick had to go, I’m not proud). He helped save us, back in the lab, gave us our avenue of escape, and this is the thanks he gets. Even if the only reason he saved us, just like last time, was to deliver us to something else, to what’s waiting outside. To that statue of a man, all livid wax and impassive stone... but those knobbly feet aren’t any artwork, stop just fucking standing there and move, for Christ’s sake, twitch a finger, sneeze cough fart do something halfway human before I—