Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “Mom,” she said, “look.” She pointed back into the trees, the path we’d all followed. Lisa was coming up too, gazing where Amy’s arm led. “Before, when we came down here, it was...”

  Green. It had been all sorts of colors not half an hour before, green with spring and brown with mud and purple-pink-white with blossoms, with only a few dead branches here and there—and now the soil was covered in them. The whole ground was a nest of gray twigs, dropping steadily from overhead, and the new, soft spring leaves had turned colorless and withered. The forsythia bush just ahead of us, that yellow everyone calls “butter” even though it’s so much thicker and brighter a color, all its flowers were decayed and dropped to the ground.

  The bird I’d heard singing, something brown-speckled but yellow as the petals had been—I knew it was the same one, I just knew—lay there in the twigs not just dead but swollen with decay, industrious carpets of tiny dark insects already working at feathers and flesh. Close by lay the crow, its wizened feet pointed suddenly and forever at the sky. All where we’d walked were huge, new bald patches of gray, brown, black; it was all falling to pieces like that poor little bird, like a great ripe fruit spotted with a sudden, deep rot.

  Lisa just stared, at the bushes, the birds, and then wild-eyed and already breathless she was running through the trees, back to the clearing. Amy and I stood gripping each other’s hands, too scared to move, too scared to speak aloud. We held our breaths, held them like it might trick whatever was out there into leaving us be, and then I heard Lisa’s voice, a rising-falling chorus of feverish relief, and the higher-pitched sound of a protesting child.

  Amy shuddered. I squeezed her hands harder and there was Lisa, still half-running as she headed toward us, Naomi in her arms and Nick trotting close at her feet.

  “I don’t need to be carried!” Naomi kept saying, trying and failing to squirm out of Lisa’s iron plague-dog grasp. “I’m not a baby, I don’t need to—Lisa, look, the birds.” Her head twisted around and she stared, stricken. “Poor little birds.”

  Her face convulsed as she tried not to cry; then she snuffled and mopped her eyes and turned back to Lisa with an air of reproof. “We need our bags,” she said. “You left them.”

  “I’ll go get them,” Lisa said, her grinding voice coming from somewhere far away; she didn’t move, didn’t set Naomi down. Her arms were trembling. Nick kept making a circuit around the clearing, sniffing not just at the birds but at the dead bushes and branches, at the poor possum. Dogs loved dead things and loved rolling in them and I was bracing myself for that, but all he did was sniff and pace, round and around, over and over. Amy watched him in silence, and we all watched her, and finally she stepped back and out of my grasp.

  “Here, boy,” she said, a quaver in her voice. “Come on.”

  Nick abandoned his rootings-around and trotted obediently toward her without a moment’s hesitation. They both headed back toward the long grass where she and Lisa had sat, and we all followed her, as if surely she knew the path like we didn’t, as if she’d been leading the way all along. The sun had finally come out in earnest, weak and clouded over but still steady against our backs. Amy headed slowly around the uneven perimeter of the woods, the thick tangle of former backyards still alive and green and flowering with weeds. Still untouched. She came to an abrupt stop and we all looked warily around us, waiting for the man, with his long black coat and pale cropped hair. Waiting for him to appear before us, his face that none of us had ever quite seen lit up with triumph: How’d you like all that back there, huh? How’d you like that? What makes you think I won’t do it to you?

  But he wasn’t there, not anymore, at least not where we could see him. Only Stephen, still walking up and down alone in the long grass not fifteen yards away, hands thrust deep into his pockets and dark head bent under the weight of his own thoughts. Amy turned to me and I could feel her pent-up urgency to speak, to speak now and say something I needed to hear, something even Lisa and that boy had never...

  Quick as I observed it, the moment passed, and she turned away.

  “Stephen?” she called, startlingly loud in the too quiet, rotten woods. “You ready? We’re gonna head out.”

  FOUR

  NATALIE

  “You gotta come see this,” he kept saying. Over and over.

  You gotta, you gotta—I didn’t have to do anything. This is my house now, it’s always been my house, I’m in charge here and if I want to walk up and down the hallway the whole day, then I will. If I want to not talk to anyone, then I won’t. Amy and all my other real family hate me, my Friendly Man just shows up to be horrible and say things that don’t make any sense. I might as well just walk up and down. The man, his dirty blond hair clipped short, his voice almost southern-sounding like you hear sometimes even this far north, I knew he’d worked here for years but I couldn’t remember his name. Like it mattered. He grabbed at my arm and I yanked it away, almost hissing.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Kid—”

  “Don’t call me kid.” Hissing for real, from behind my teeth, trying to make my face a slitty little Halloween mask like an actual cat. If I’d had fur to make stand on end, make me look and feel like a big deal you didn’t mess with, my man would’ve treated me better. “Don’t you ever call me that, I—”

  “Miss Beach.” He looked past patience and I didn’t care. His skin, the patina of worked-in grime all over his clothes... he looked as close and musty as the hallway smelled and his big thick-necked body seemed somehow to blend into the floor and walls, dissolve into it, one great aura of unclean. “Ms. Beach, whatever the hell you want, I must humbly request you come with me and see what’s going on outside. I don’t know if I’m seeing things, or—”

  “So ask one of the others.” I shook his hand free and rubbed a finger against the wall, the protective glass covering a huge photograph of the lab staff circa... 1925, the writing said, even though their clothes looked awfully modern for that. Long rows of men in suits where only the collars looked really old-fashioned, one or two women in straight up-and-down dresses and short fussy hair. “I know they’re still wandering around here even though I told everyone to leave, I’d be paying your salary but nobody listens. Go ask them.”

  His thick curve of a mouth, pink lips rubbery and flabby all at once, he twisted it up like I’d just shoved something sour into his cheek. “I can’t,” he said, and something flitted fish-like across his face and swam away again, that look when you can’t decide whether to run from something or hit it in the face. “I can’t. You’ll see why. For fuck’s sake, you wanna be in charge here so bad, this is something you gotta see.”

  The layers of dust over the photograph glass left all the faces in shadow, dust so thick you couldn’t even make a proper clean line with your fingertip. If Amy thinks she’s too good for a little dirt she can just shut the hell up and grab a mop. I don’t have time for that, I’ve got serious work.

  I don’t have time for this either. “So what is it, anyway?”

  Because nobody around here listens to me, he just turned around and headed out the hall, like he was just so sure I’d drop everything and run after him, and since nobody tells me anything unless I go looking for it, I followed him out, through the A-Wing and across Residency and out the old double back doors. The beach was just a rumor back here, a quiet prickling sensation that traveled through the air so everything felt lighter, cleaner, and at the same time ponderous with the sheer weight of water. The grass was up around my shins, the woods bordering the lab grounds on three sides thick with leaves and blooms; at the far edge of the trees, a deer nibbled away, too used to humans to do more than stop and look up when it heard us. I was about to ask where the hell he was taking me anyway, I wasn’t getting lured into the woods on some pretense so he could kill me and take over, when he stopped in his tracks and pointed a few feet in front of us, down in the dandelions.

  “Okay,” I said. “So wha
t?”

  The bodies weren’t torn or bitten up like what Stephen and Amy’s mother had done, when they fought everybody off. These just lay there staring sightless at the sky, intact, dead. I squatted down to touch one and she was cold and stiff, clothes soaked through from the saturated grass and last night’s rain. “So what am I supposed to do with this?” I asked him, as he paced back and forth with fingers curled tight over his gun holster. “So you guys were stupid enough to get into another fight yesterday, before they left, you should’ve just let them go—”

  “This is nothing to do with those frea—with yesterday, okay, you get it? Do I have to spell it out?” He halted in his tracks and stood there big and bristling angry, but with hunched-up shoulders like he was cringing away from some invisible hand about to slap him sideways. “This just happened now. It just happened, what, half an hour ago. We were out here, talking shit over, and I turn around—I mean, literally, I turn around ‘cause I think I hear someone coming out the back—and when I turn my head again, boom. Gone.” He waved a hand at the bodies. “All dead. Right in front of me. Or, in back of me.”

  Why are the people who work for me so stupid? “They’re stiff,” I said. “Full-blown rigor, they’ve been dead for—”

  “I know they’re stiff. I know they’re cold. I know what it looks like—and whatever it looks like, it was just a half hour ago.”

  He was pacing around again, walking a perimeter of the bodies like a dog sniffing tracks, that filthy dog of Amy’s who hated me most of all. “You gotta do something,” he said. “You think you’re in charge of this shithole now, they’re supposed to have taught you all kinds of medical shit, you’ve gotta do something. You’ve gotta bring them back.”

  Like it was that easy, you just snap your fingers and whoever you decide to bring back—even under the very best conditions, the best test subjects, it didn’t work anything like that. Like I’d even waste my time bringing one of his stupid friends back, if it did. “I can’t do that,” I said. “How long did you work here, anyway? You know it’s not that simple, a lot of times you do everything right and dead people just stay—”

  “You have to do something!” He had my arms now, digging in the fingertips hard and abrading like how it’d felt when that drawer kept slamming, all inside my bones. “They were right here, we were all right there, then I turn my head and they all just fucking drop like something flipped a switch—you think you’re in charge around here, you gotta get your ass in there and figure out what happened, how to—”

  “Let go of me.”

  “This is just like before.” Still had his hands on me, the grinding pressure of his fingers boring straight through to my bones, stuck drawer slam-slam-slam. His eyes were big and luminous with panic. “Just like before, when everyone here started getting sick and then everyone else, everywhere. You fuckers went and did it again.”

  “You let go of me,” I said, quiet, calm as you please, “or I won’t ‘figure out’ a damn thing.”

  He let go. The hatred smoking and heating him up all inside like a brazier felt good to see—it didn’t bother me at all when weak little humans or plague-dogs hated me because they were so jealous. Because the world was mine now, not theirs—and not my man’s either, I didn’t care how much he tried to scare me. He was a liar. “I don’t have time for this,” I said, and turned right around to go back inside. “You bring them inside if you want, I can’t stop you, and I’ll look at them if I get a chance, but I’m not promising—”

  “Oh, shit.”

  His voice sounded torn in two, pain and shock and fear all twisted up and made into sound, and that’s what made me turn around again.

  It had stormed during the night and my first thought was that somehow lightning hit the trees while I was sleeping and I didn’t hear it, hit them so hard it fried them from the inside and then all the land around them too. Except lightning didn’t work like that and the trees didn’t look scorched or heat-blackened, they were just gray and bare and dead. And those trees had been living just seconds before, living and covered in tiny pretty green leaves like those salads they used to serve in the lab refectory, bushes exuberant with tiny pink and white bits of lace, branching sprays of deep red berries, maples letting off winged seedlings like candy thrown from a parade float. Gone. The grass, the unmown weedy grass almost up to my knees, that was still living, but the deer who’d gone right back to its lunch after it saw us was lying there in the clover and dandelions. Lying still.

  The lab man whose name I couldn’t remember, his arm was reaching in vain up to the trees, the wall of sticks that’d been trees, like he could entreat them not to do what they’d gone and done. His face was drawn and white. “What’d y’all go and do?” he asked softly. The southern in him was coming out stronger now he was really frightened, hillbilly drawl, those families that came up here a hundred years ago or more to work the steel mills and still sounded like they’d barely left Alabama. “The hell did you—now everything’s getting sick.” He started to laugh and the laughter was a scary sound, scarier than the wall of sticks. “Wasn’t enough just to kill people, now everything everywhere’s getting sick, I can’t believe you went and did it again—”

  “You shut up,” I whispered, Halloween-mask hissing, and then I was running toward the deer, the green grass it should’ve been bending down to eat. It just lay there on its side, big pretty liquid stupid deer-eyes wide open and a mouthful of clover, torn-off bits of creeping Charlie, still wedged in its teeth. I pushed at it with my fingertips, ready to jump back, in case this was some sort of prey-animal trick and it might any moment spring back to its feet. Playing possum.

  It just lay there.

  Those things my man said to me, back in my room, they were lies. The thing about everyone suffering because of me, because I had his secret and I wouldn’t leave. I knew lies when I heard them, nobody ever said anything to me but lies. Except him, a long time ago. He was lying, and even if he weren’t he couldn’t have meant things like flowers and deer. They never did anything to him. Trees. He couldn’t stop me, couldn’t stop our work, trying to scare me with a few dead trees.

  He was lying! It was all a trick!

  The deer felt cold and stiff when I touched it, like it’d been lying there for hours. I got up, my bent leg already cramped beneath me, and brushed the dirt off my shins. “Hey,” I shouted to Lab Man, Hillbilly Scaredy-Boy. Jerkface pronouncing Miss Beach so precise and proper, over-enunciated, trying to make it sound like another word. “Come help me carry this back in. You wanted me to look at your stupid friends, okay, fine. But this first. Come and help me!”

  No answer. Because nobody was standing there anymore.

  I walked back to where we’d both been, slow as you please, because all that happened was he got disgusted standing there waiting for me, went off down the hillside, still whining and crying about how I cared more about some dumb animal than his buddies. That’s all. Because I know lies when I hear them. I’m no fool.

  The other bodies were still there and he was next to them, curled up on his side just like the deer, one hand on his holster though his gun wasn’t drawn and the other arm still stretched out, full length, like he was grabbing for a dandelion from where he lay. Eyes wide open, liquid-clear with fright. Cold and stiff. Like he’d been there for hours.

  No more dandelions. In the time it took me to walk from the deer back to him, all those bursts of yellow suddenly went damp rotten brown, right there in the grass, and died.

  FIVE

  JESSIE

  “Well?” I asked. “What d’you think?”

  Renee frowned, squinted. “Do you want an honest answer?”

  Why the hell do people always say that? If I didn’t give a shit what they actually thought about something, I wouldn’t waste my time asking. “Spit it out,” I said.

  “Well—” She squinted harder, looking her own face up and down as it stared back at her from the paper, then she broke into a grin. “You ain’t no Picas
so. But we already knew that, right?” She ran her hand along a cheekbone, like she was checking its measurements against the drawing. “And you didn’t put my nose totally out of joint, so I like it. It’s good.”

  Renee broke her nose last autumn—shattered it, actually—fighting over food with the other Prairie Beach refugees, and even though it healed right off like these new bodies do, it never looked quite the same as it did before: it skewed to the side in a way Linc and I barely noticed and Renee couldn’t stop thinking about. Her fingers reached up constantly and unconsciously, stroking and tracing the bridge-slope like she could coax it back where it’d been. I’d offered to re-break it for her, see if a strategic blow from the right might push it over left, but she always said no. She’d had her last fight, she kept saying, even though I wasn’t angling to fight her at all. Those last buried bits of hoocow in her kept showing up, like some burrowing thing inside her had turned over all her earth; it made Linc impatient, those sudden outbursts of delicacy, but I kept telling him, she was barely out of the ground a month before everything started changing for good. Barely that. You had to make allowances, like it or not.

  “I really do like it,” she insisted. Teresa’s rings clinked and rattled on her thin fingers, the faintest little wind-chime sound, as they traveled from cheek to nose and back again. “I’m not just saying that—”

  “Okay already, I asked you once. I ain’t no Picasso. And you ain’t no Botticelli.” She laughed and I laid the drawing out next to the others on the old short-legged table I’d stuck in my cabin for a desk, reaching for a pencil. “What month is it?”

  “May. I think.” She frowned. “You better ask Linc, but I’m pretty sure it’s May.”

  I wrote that down at the bottom left corner, then leafed through all the others; May’s nose was less flattering but more accurate than April’s, hair texture was a lot truer to life than December’s, still couldn’t draw hands for shit but I gave up on those back in January. In November, Linc had brought back some art pencils and a tattered yellowed book called The Mind of the Artist Within—he said it’d been a big thing for a while, back when he was still alive; a lot of hoo-babble inside about Jung and Myers-Briggs types and accessing the right side of the brain, but in between the bullshit was line and perspective and other actual useful stuff, full of drawings for examples, and the babble plus Renee’s face to practice on helped pass the time.