Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  The beach, looking at it, walking on it, it felt like the only thing we had or did that made any true sense, that wasn’t just distraction or marking time. Like our only happy thing. Even hunting—hunting!—didn’t feel like that anymore. It was just another endless, never-finished chore in the long line of perpetual chores that made up living again. Our new neighbors, down the road, how the hell did they put up with having to cook and serve their food all hoo-proper on top of it all? I’d go crazy. Crazier.

  Maybe this is how Teresa felt, back in the first-born days of the sickness, when she stopped hunting altogether, started demanding all the rest of us in the gang fetch her food. Maybe we’re all getting sick again, like before. But it’s not that I can’t eat, that I’m not hungry. It’s that even as I need to do it, as I can’t stop feeling it, satiation’s gone from bliss to fleeting pleasure to work and I just don’t see the point of it at all anymore.

  Neither does Linc, but then, he never did. The discussions we’ve had, late at night, when we were sure Renee and especially Lisa were both asleep: I’ve tried it, Linc said, I’ve tried all this, living and dead, and I’m like Sam was: I just don’t like it. Jessie, if we ever get the choice back and can decide for ourselves, again—

  I didn’t know what to say, back then, lying with foreheads touching and fingers twined together, hearing the rustles and calls and cries of nighttime through the newfound barriers of walls and window. We’d fought for this life-afterlife-after-death, all of us had; we’d wrenched it back and dropped it into our own waiting laps and how am I supposed to promise to give it up again, say a fuck-you that big and then agree to just get fucked in turn? So I didn’t promise to give up on life, not then, because I couldn’t decide and because even if I said yes, even if I wanted to right then and there, we’d been left no choice. Just like poor Sam, who tried so hard to get out of his human life and then just woke up again, right where he was, as one of us. At least now Sam, my old Sam, he had what he’d always wanted. He was gone.

  Enough! Annie, back in the old days, she’d look at me right now and go, Girl, you’re turning soft, what you need is a good goddamned fight. Her, Joe, always right there to give me one. I missed that, the constant mad twitching urge to kick, punch, bite, wrench necks and break bones, do something with all the energy pulsing inside me. Did I miss that? Would fists and feet be anything now but another dutiful task? I didn’t even know that feeling now anyway. It all drained straight out of me when I became a new sort of human. Inhuman. I’d had no choice.

  And if Renee wanted her Big Answers so bad, she could fucking well find them herself. Whatever this was—if it was anything at all—we’d just get through it, like we had the sickness, and not waste time asking any damned questions.

  Because when we weren’t looking and we still thought we owned ourselves, that life and death might actually be in our own hands, getting through it had become our one duty, our sole and endless chore. Because one way or another, we just didn’t have any choice.

  Sitting on the last bit of powdery piled-up sand before it all went damp and smooth from the tides, it felt like being on a little island unto itself divorced from the rest of the beach. I perched at the edge of the dry with my heels dug into the wet, the lake rolling inward in a heavy, easy wave that never quite reached my toes, and when I looked up again I saw a vast, dark figure silhouetted against the horizon, walking slow and easy toward me over the surface of the waters.

  A muscle in my leg wrenched and twisted as I struggled to my feet. The ashen pearl sky, the sun swelling up flame-colored and full as sunset crept closer, they made a pale illuminated border all around him, a corona, his darkness like the burnt-out hole in a photograph someone set on fire. The great shadow of him took shape as he came closer and it was Jim, my brother, it was my father, it was poor blinded Lillian from the undead days and it was Ben who’d died alongside Sam and it was me, it was my own self and my dead departed face coming toward me faster and faster, walking so easy on the Lake Michigan waters. I was smiling at myself standing so small and astonished here on the beach, pleased to meet me. Every step I took from horizon to shore covered miles in a single moment. I was inches away from myself now, smiling and holding my arms out in greeting and all around me was that same border of pearly light, fiery rays of sun, blinding suffocating light all outside and inside me, inside the arms I’d wrap around me in ceaseless, perpetual embrace, nothing but night—

  I was lying on my side half-coated in wet sand, no memory of stumbling or falling. I took in shallow gulps of air, like a beached fish, and my whole chest was one hollow constricted ache; something had passed straight through it, seizing my breath as it went, then tossed it back to me as an afterthought. I pulled myself upright, whipping my head around to take in the woods to my left, bluish silhouette of dead steel mills on the horizon to my right, the sands themselves and the now-empty dune ridges above and the dark undisturbed tidal sweep of lake waters. I squinted and then stared into the swelling blood-orange sun, in search of his lingering, thieving shadow—and there was nothing. He—it—had passed straight through me, and was gone.

  God damn you, Renee. God damn you for being right.

  With gleaming spots still dancing before my eyes, I rushed back up the ridge, urgent strides kicking up cascades and miniature sandstorms with every step, and back on level ground I ran past the thickening clumps of dune grass, down the dirty sand that became sandy dirt with each new step, along the trodden-down path our feet had made before Lisa’s empty beach house, Renee’s, the one Linc and I shared. I nearly thudded straight into Linc as I rounded the corner of our house, the one farthest in the woods and nearest the outside road. When he instinctively threw his hands out in self-defense, I grabbed his forearms, let my fingertips sink in to assure myself he really was flesh, that he wasn’t that sunset specter that could take the form of anything that’d died.

  “Down on the beach,” I managed, out of breath, cursing the fucking air for crippling me once again. “I saw—”

  “Tell me later,” Linc said, glancing over his shoulder. “I was just about to find you.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘tell me later’? Linc, down on the beach, what Renee said, I saw—”

  “Jessie?” He jerked his chin toward the trees. “It’s just right now we’ve got company. Hoo company.”

  “Oh, fuck.” I started laughing again because this was too much, too goddamned much in one day. “For the love of God, tell them to fuck off back to their little Garden of Eden, right now I can’t take any of their—”

  “It’s not them,” Linc said, his face closing up like it always did when something beyond him had him angry. “Just... come with me.”

  He turned for the woods. I followed, puzzled, brushing off drying sand as we passed the cottonwoods and oak that grew thickly in this part of the forest, the little cluster of pine trees that signaled the approach of the white gravel roadside and the faded, weatherbeaten sign marking the beach. The trees were still shedding pale new spring leaves for the fuller deeper growth of approaching summer, growing so close together they made a natural green-tinged tunnel of the road. As we emerged, Renee was standing there, looking tense and lost for words, and as the last sunspot streaks faded from my vision, I could see why.

  Weighted down by a half-dozen backpacks bursting at the seams, her eyes ringed bruise-blue from fatigue, Lisa swayed from foot to foot on the gravel like she was poised for flight, like the backpacks were folded-up wings that would unfurl and carry her up toward the dying sun. Standing next to her was a little knot of strangers, humans I hadn’t seen in the settlement down the road: a red-haired girl maybe the age I was when I died; older skewbald-redhead, obviously a sister or mother; tall skinny boy with dark hair and a tense, wary face; a kiddie not more than seven clutching hard at Lisa’s hand. A great black dog, shaggy-furred and with watery, red-rimmed, strangely beatific eyes, sitting obediently by the red-haired girl’s side, watching the hoos do their hoodom thing with an expressi
on of elevated patience.

  All of them, except the dog, looked like they might drop where they stood; all of them, except the dog, kept glancing from Lisa to me and back like they were expecting bad trouble, like they’d been told to anticipate a fight. Because fucking with humans is still one of the few pleasures we’ve all got left, I gave them a deliberate, calculated smile, a sarcastic little bow of the head. Lisa didn’t smile back.

  “Long time,” she said, calm and measured, like all the others weren’t even there. “Good to see you again, Jessie.”

  “Is it?” I asked. Linc and Renee, the hoo strangers, they didn’t say anything. They just watched.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. Blinking hard, all of a sudden, a convulsive little muscle-twitch subsiding soon as it arrived. “It is.”

  I thought that one over. Long enough for the mother-red to start looking truly nervous, the kiddie to frown and give an anxious, instinctive tug on Lisa’s sleeve.

  “So put your goddamned luggage down, already,” I replied. “How the hell many miles did you walk around like that, anyway? You look like the hunchback of Notre Dame’s daughter.”

  SIX

  NATALIE

  All my drawings. My desk with the special locked drawer, broken now, that Amy couldn’t open. My filing cabinet. My doll. I huddled in the far corner of my room, holding Sukie my doll I named after my favorite of the old lab staff clutched close to my chest, waiting. The residential doors only lock from the outside and the desk was too heavy for me to move by myself, nobody left to help me block the door, when he came to kill me that wouldn’t stop him anyway. When my man returned to kill me, like he was destroying everything else that was mine: the oak trees, the lilacs, the deer, anyone who could help me out. Before he comes back for me.

  Unless he was going to kill everything else and leave me here, all by myself, the only thing still alive. Temporarily.

  The windows here were too far up to look or climb through, so I didn’t have to see what was happening outside. Was it every-where now, all the dying, all the—I couldn’t be this afraid, it was ridiculous to be afraid when I had his secret. I knew exactly what brought dead things back to life, I’d brought them back, if I could do it with people there was no way I couldn’t figure out how with cottonwoods and anthills and rabbits. I had his secret right here, where nobody would think to look for it and even if they did, they couldn’t use it like I could. That’s why I was so important to Grandma, when she ran this whole lab; even among all the Homo novus, us new people their experiments created, I was special. He couldn’t do a thing to me. He had to know he couldn’t—

  There was a sound, beyond my closed door, faint but unmistakable, close down the hallway. A sort of moaning sound, laughing and moaning all at once.

  I missed Grandma. People laughed at me here, when I called her that, but she never did. She had this way of looking at someone, all level and unyielding just the same way she always carried her back, her long swoop of a neck perfectly straight and dignified, and when she gave them that stare—bright blue eyes that sparked and smoldered, when she was angry, like coals feeding a peculiar flame—people shut their mouths quick and scuttled to do what she’d told them. And she was always right, what she told them, if she hadn’t gotten sick and then vanished during those horrible few first weeks of the plague things around here would’ve been different, I wouldn’t have had to rebuild everything myself from the ground up. If she were here, right now, she’d stare Death himself straight in the face, just like she’d been doing through the experiments all along. She’d spark right back at him not the least afraid and he’d snivel and cringe for favor, oh did you think I wasn’t a Friendly Man anymore, how could you think that of me, or even better he’d just turn tail and run away—

  That sound was growing louder. Like a man singing, horrible slurred off-key singing like someone drunk, except without a single recognizable word. It was words to whoever was singing, though, it was words to him in some secret language or other long since dead. Somehow I knew that. Somehow I knew that without ever having seen him.

  If it were Death coming for me he’d have long since come in by now. He didn’t wait around for introductions, he never had.

  I felt for my knife, my little surgical scalpel I’d salvaged for safekeeping, almost lost for good when I dropped it fighting Amy’s filthy dog. The singing was getting louder, I felt like I knew that voice—

  “Open the fuckin’ door!”

  The doors only lock from the outside so nothing could keep him from coming in, but he kept shaking the handle so it shook and shuddered in its metal frame until I thought of Death and the desk drawer and almost lost my nerve all over again. I wasn’t answering it, though, I didn’t have to do anything he said, not anymore. The rattling got louder and my teeth clicked and ground in turn.

  “Stop that!” I shouted. I held tighter onto Sukie, clutched the scalpel until my fingers hurt. “This isn’t your house, get out!”

  Drunken-sounding laughter, loud and phlegmy like a cold-cough caught in someone’s throat. “I’ll get out when I’m good and ready to get out, there ain’t anyone left here but us two chickenshits so just open the goddamned door!”

  I didn’t budge. The door was slowly going rusted and warped, a loosening tooth in the lab’s great spacious mouth; it creaked and shook as it opened, the outside deadbolt rattling and ready to fall out in one piece. He stood there swaying in the doorway, clutching the frame two-handed like he might fall over, his pale bare toes flexed and poised against the floor as if the doorway were a barre and he were about to go up en pointe.

  “You look like shit,” Billy said. Looking me up and down, staring at the dried blood streaks like it was all something brand new. Like he didn’t even know what blood looked like anymore.

  “You look worse,” I said. I was on my feet now, my little knife extended. “Stay away from me.”

  Billy’d always been a big pale fattened-up thing, a walking waxen puffball ever ready to burst his poison straight in your face, but now he looked shrunken and diminished, like something inside him really had blown up. His suit jacket hung in loose folds around his torso, his shoulders hunched forward like he might pitch to the floor at any second, his face was drawn and tired and flushed like he’d just wept himself sick and was quietly gathering breath to do it again—all for that Mags? That nasty bellowing bitch who led him everywhere by the nose, thought we were all her little barnyard pigs? I laughed when she died, when Amy killed her without even meaning to. Still wish I’d done it. The look she’d have had on her face, seeing me do it...

  “What do you want,” I said. Flat and terse, no fear, like someone from a movie.

  He didn’t budge from the doorway, just grinned hollow and sad from beneath those hollow sad eyes and swayed back and forth, forth and back. “So they left you behind, too, huh. Figures.”

  “This is where I live,” I told him. Teeth gritted. “This is where I live, I told them to get the hell out of—what do you want, anyway? More human slaves? Well, I’m not human, I never have been. So you can just get the hell out.”

  Not one word got through, I could tell just by his eyes. He shuffled his feet, bleary and confused, his head hanging down.

  “I saw somethin’ out there,” he said. Arms still raised, fat waxen fingers curled over the doorframe. “Out in the woods. I saw something... out in the woods. Walking around. Spreading place to place like another fucking disease, doing its thing.” Falling forward the short, stubby length of his own arms, pitching back where he stood. Over and over. “Doing its thing. And you don’t wanna know what it is.”

  “I already know about it.” I lowered my knife. He wasn’t even seeing me, never mind wanting to hurt me. “So it’s spread even further? Is it everywhere?”

  “I ran to it.” He laughed and shook his head, ran a hand over the darker blond stubble at his jaw. “I ran to it, see, ‘cause I can run now like I couldn’t ever run before, I never get over how fast I can move. Didn
’t you always say that, Mags? They might think old Billy’s a fat slow swelled-up slug, but he sure can stir his rotten stumps when he wants to, he’ll have you down in the mud neck-snapped and open-faced like a sandwich before you can scream help or goddamn you—she always said that.” Tears streaked down his pale dirty face, making clean damp tracks in the dried mud, then subsided again. “You always said that. And now, you’re—just lying there in the leaves. For the animals to eat. Like something true dead.”

  He looked up at me again, and smiled. “Except, no more animals. Looks like. Everywhere I go. That thing, out there, it’s taking ‘em.”

  Something deep in my stomach stirred and coiled around itself, tight and hurtful. That deer. Animals never did anything bad to me, the couple I’d killed to test I knew what I was doing I’d felt really sorry about afterward. Everywhere he goes.

  “I ran toward it,” Billy kept saying, again and again. Like a chant. “I ran toward it, but I couldn’t reach—it was like, not a mirage, I knew it was really there, but like it was hidden behind some door or wall that I couldn’t see and so every time I almost got to it, it threw me back.” Shaking his head ruefully. “Threw me back like a fucking fish off the line. And then it just, went away.”