Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  “He was attacking me!” I shouted. Hadn’t he been? Hadn’t it been real? Then why didn’t I remember hitting him? “I didn’t mean to do it—he came after me!”

  “Like he ‘came after’ Naomi? And me? Just say it, Stephen, you hate him, you’ve hated him ever since he—”

  “He’s part of all this!” Wasn’t he? Was something else doing this to me, turning me against him? What was happening to me? “I can feel it! It’s him!”

  “He’s not part of anything! He got us out of the lab! He got me there in the first place, to try and rescue you!” She shoved Lucy’s embracing arms away, the slick brownish-black leaf muck clinging to her sneakers as she paced back and forth, back and forth. “We wouldn’t even be fucking standing here without him and Death gave him to me and Nick’s trying to warn us! He’s been warning us all along, he’s been getting us where we need to go! We had to get here because everything’s falling apart and we couldn’t face it separately, it had to be all of us—even Death is coming apart at the seams and we’re all going with him, all of us together, and we have to save what’s left and Nick was trying to warn us, you fucking son of a bitch, that everything’s going away! Everything! Everywhere! But you’re so fucking selfish you can’t even see it!”

  Her words reverberated through the clearing, words making flesh everything we’d all been hoping, pretending was just our own ghosts. It wasn’t just me. Not just me. Jessie and Lucy stared at her, astonishment and fear on their faces, and now Amy looked like the one who didn’t know what was real, what wasn’t, what she’d even done. It was true, what she’d said. The truth of it was deep in all of us, just starting to show itself, like something at once sunlit and shadowy rippling against the surface of a lake. As it all echoed in her ears, Amy shook her head, laughing in a way that scared me, and I reached out to her just like Lucy had, knowing she’d push me away. But she didn’t even see me, not anymore.

  “Don’t ask me why I said that,” she warned us, backing away like a robber on the getaway. “Don’t ask me why I said that, or where I got it from, because I don’t know. I don’t have any damned idea.”

  “Amy!” Lucy shouted, as Amy ran. “Amy! Please!”

  She didn’t go after her. None of us did. We stood there in the clearing, all of us together but still miles apart, and Nick gazed silently up at me, his jaundiced eyes as clear and calm as ever I’d seen them. He wasn’t cringing anymore. He wasn’t afraid of me. Those eyes were clear and calm and full of... forgiveness. Understanding, a dumb canine understanding, and forgiveness. I felt such shame seeing it that my head dropped down, as if someone were about to beat me in turn, and I looked away.

  “It wasn’t just clouds,” Jessie said. “That we both saw.” There was no apology in the words, just a simple, flat correction of fact. It had nothing to do with me. “But it has to be. It has to. Because otherwise...” She broke off. “It has to be just clouds.”

  We heard the sound of shouting, Amy’s voice hurling fury and frustration at the universe, at us, at everything coming apart. We stood there, in the clearing.

  TEN

  NATALIE

  “Where are we even going?” I said. “Are you sure you know—”

  “Just shut up,” Billy mumbled. His latest bout of half-silent weeping had passed and now he just kept stumbling forward, head hanging down, a drunk trying to walk a straight line miles long. “Just follow me and shut up and don’t open your goddamned mouth ever again.”

  I shut up, not because crazy Billy said so but because I had bigger things to think about. Meeting him out in the open, I’d be, the Friendly Man, after all those years shut away in secret, and the thought of it was like I’d been stuck in a stifling stale-stinking room and a door I didn’t even know about opened up wide, cool sweet air rushing through my nose and over my skin and the scent of spring just coming to—he knew we had him on the run. We had his secret, our lab could stop Death in his tracks, and that’s why he was trying to scare us. Scare me. It wouldn’t work. I pulled Sukie out of my pocket and hugged her tight, for strength.

  Billy’s chin was still down close to his chest but he turned his head, saw me and Sukie, shook his head and snorted as the thin creeping curl of a grin twisted up his mouth, a caterpillar crawling slow over a waxen leaf. “How fuckin’ old are you?” he demanded. “Fourteen? Fifteen? Unbelievable. Dolls. Jessie was fifteen, sixteen, when she died, if she could see this—”

  “Your Jessie’s dead,” I snapped, settling Sukie in the crook of my arm. When he wasn’t crying or singing or muttering to himself, he kept throwing out names of people I’d never met, his fellow rotten things, jabbering how they were probably somewhere out there dead like they were supposed to be and eatin’ fuckin’ fresh deer liver right now and—boring, people who can’t stop sobbing over what’s dead and gone are so boring. “They’re all dead. I don’t care what she’d say anyway.”

  Billy just shook his head, laughed in a soft rumbling way that made me hate him, trudged forward and forward over the rain-damp dirt and unmown grass at the side of the road. I kissed the top of Sukie’s head when he wasn’t looking. She had her own secrets too, Sukie did. Deep inside. Billy was the last person who needed to know about those.

  “Pierre Beach,” Billy said, stopping in his dirt-smudged tracks, squinting at the road sign and frowning and saying it slowly like it’d been decades since he’d read a word. They’d all good as forgotten reading and writing, the ones who’d been dead long enough, of course some of the oldest ones born last century or whenever had never been taught how at all. “Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. So how the hell far is this from Prairie Beach, anyway?” He turned his squint on me, eyes pale like how an icy lake is tinged with an afterthought of silver-gray. “We barely ever went up here, Mags and I. Don’t remember the half of it.”

  “What difference does it make?” I asked. What was he asking me for? I’d never been outside Gary in my entire life. “We’re not going back there anyway, it only matters where we’re going. I want to know where we’re going—”

  “God, you’re a fuckin’ kiddie, dollie-babies and whining and when do we get there, when do we—you’re worse than that Naomi. I’ll know it when we find it, shut your fucking squirrel-trap and I’ll know it, I can listen for it—”

  Pierre Beach, what was left of it, was a tiny little beach town set right at the bottom of the lake basin, at the shoreline we’d been following as Billy dragged us east; the warped bent remains of security fencing, the bright orange AUTHORIZED RESIDENTS ONLY signs and stickers on abandoned cars, the big sprawling houses behind high walls of their own. All that useless used-up fuss and bother told you who’d lived here, senior lab personnel and anyone else rich enough for a beachfront view and protection from the “elements.” Once I heard some of the techs laughing about how they’d shot a couple kids trying to scale a beach-fence, without bothering to check they really were undead first, but they probably made it all up to scare me. But I hoped it was true, that the kids they’d shot really had been alive. It’s what the unchanged humans all deserved, what they all got in the end one way or another.

  The main street was long and pale and empty and if you were going to have a shootout, like in some old movie, this was a perfect place; was this it, was Death going to meet me here? I wasn’t afraid, I had Sukie, and my knife, and secrets. As my steps slowed, waiting to see if anything came out to meet me, Billy realized he was trudging alone and turned back and grabbed my arm so hard I shouted.

  “No,” he muttered. “You gotta come with me, I don’t know much but I know you gotta come with—”

  “Don’t you touch me!” I rubbed at my arm, throbbing where he’d dug in his fingertips. “How d’you know it’s not here, anyway? How do you know anything?”

  Billy’s eyes went to narrow pinpoints like two little clear glass beads, the look that always made the humans at Paradise scramble for cover and speed up frantically to look busy. “Kid,” he said softly, “you follow me. That’s wh
at I know. You follow me, we both go where we’re supposed to go at the same time, or I get left behind, and if I get left behind? You’re gonna be fucking sorry.”

  His face, the look on it made my stomach twist up hot and sick and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair he could do that to me when it was me Death really cared about and we could kill his kind, like Amy killed Mags dead right where she stood. Nobody ever remembers who they’re talking to, when they talk to me. “You don’t know anything,” I said, and when he took a step closer so his breath was on me I clenched my teeth, like that could tamp down my racing heart. “Maybe I’m staying here, maybe—”

  “Please don’t fight. Please? You can’t. We have so long to go before we’re finished.”

  Billy and I both jumped. She’d emerged from one of the houses, a rambling mansion done in “rustic” gray shingling whose roof had nearly caved in from some storm, and her blonde hair had gone wild and unkempt and no more lipstick but there was no mistaking Janey. Her eyes that always looked half-dazed, so pleasant and friendly in the wrong sort of way, those hadn’t changed.

  “How the hell did you get here?” Billy demanded. I could tell he was as surprised as I was at her turning up, because he didn’t yell right off or hit her. “Yeah, why am I even asking, of course that fucking Don would jump ship and get out before—”

  “Don’s dead,” Janey said. A tiny little quaver in her soft voice, gentle convulsion of her features that soon subsided. “I don’t know how it happened, we got out of Paradise City before the really big fires started, he said he knew someplace he could take me where I’d be safe, and then—he just fell.” Her hands twisted around each other, wringing out an invisible washcloth. “He made me put on sensible shoes before we left, but I could have high heels again later on, he said. When we got there. He was right there, walking, talking, and then he wasn’t anymore. East, all I know is he said we were going east. He didn’t say where. I never needed to ask him things like that. I trusted him.”

  She raised her head and I saw the motion of her throat as she swallowed, gulping down a hard little stone. “But I can’t stop just because he’s dead, I—I need to look for something. I don’t know what it is, but I have to look for it, I have to find it.” Her hand fiddled at her throat, at a teardrop-shaped black pendant like onyx round her neck. Another of Don’s useless gifts, like the lipstick. “There’s somewhere we all need to go, Don too, and if I just find it I can—I keep thinking, I’m supposed to tell someone something, I don’t think it’s you, there’s a message I’m supposed to give someone but... I don’t know who they are.” She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know what it is.”

  I looked at Billy, as if he could explain this. He stared at her, pondering, then smiled at her all slow and bright like she were a stupid little child. Just like he thought I was. “Did Don say where the safe place was?” he asked, his whole mouth a bucket sloshing with sugar-water. “Did he tell you?”

  “East,” Janey said, and tugged at her necklace harder. There were bruises at the base of her throat; Don never hit her, I didn’t rule out she’d put them there herself. “We have to go east. All of us. I still have to deliver my message.”

  Billy studied her a little longer, then he turned to me. “Y’see? I told you it wasn’t here. I told you.”

  Maybe this was a trick of Death’s, to test me. Maybe they were trying to lead me off track on purpose, both of them. “But—”

  “We’re going now.” Billy had my arm again and was shoving me forward, and I was so confused by Janey showing up and everything else that’d happened that I just went ahead and let him. “All of us. We’re going.”

  I can’t believe I used to wish so wildly to get out of Prairie Beach, see the rest of the world, when the rest of the world all looks exactly the same. One tiny little beach town after another gone to plague and ruin, the same tall sharp grasses and cakey sand as back home, the same thick clustering clumps of trees and random daubs of foliage you could see anywhere but at least these were all green, all alive, Death had let off trying to scare us so easy when there was a bigger fight coming around the corner. When we came around the corner, when I finally fought him in earnest.

  As we walked, Janey pressed fingertips to the bridge of her nose, winced like something had struck her; Billy had her other arm, he was dragging her along like he’d tried to drag me, but of course, she wasn’t complaining. Janey was like that. At least she wasn’t a snotty bitch like Amy, thinking she was better than everyone else. She was all right for company.

  “My whole head hurts,” Janey murmured, as we passed the remains of some kind of factory; what looked like big piles of steel girders still sat in the yard outside, higher than our heads, rust slowly overtaking them like a creeping orange moss. “It just won’t stop.”

  Even with the old mills right there on Prairie Beach, shadowy bookends at the far corners of the lake, I kept being surprised at how you’d see an oil refinery, then right up against it huge untouched swathes of sand or forest or wildflowers. I wished she’d be quiet so I could look at them in peace. “There’s probably rain coming,” I said, pointing at the clouded-over sky. “I always get headaches right before it rains.”

  Janey just shook her hanging-down head, almost gritting her teeth at the sensation. “It’s my whole skin,” she said. Not the whiny way Grandma sometimes said I complained—Natty, now do you really think one little girl’s petty complaints should be such a universal concern?—but all matter of fact, like these were things we just needed to know. “And my eyes,” she said, closing them hard for a few moments, “it’s like this weight is coming down on them, pressing—”

  “Yeah, things are shit all over.” Billy tugged her along, letting her stumble and trip. “Mags is dead, some fucking frail’s got a tiddy-headache, my heart’s breaking will you two quit foot-dragging and move!” He whipped his head around, glaring at me clench-toothed and feverish, angry waves of heat stirring up a lake of ice. “We ain’t got all year to get there!”

  Janey’s sensible flat shoe I knew she hated hit a rock hard and her eyes snapped open from pain; she smiled in her old vacant far-seeing way, she didn’t complain. I didn’t like it, how Billy treated her, Janey was all right. It was like watching someone keep yanking a kitten’s tail. Don would have killed him, if he’d seen it.

  “He’s right,” she said, and something in her voice was so sad and it had nothing to do with Don or Billy or any of us, I could feel it. “He’s right. Nothing’s got all year left.”

  So she knew about it too, just like Billy: that the showdown was coming, that I had to face Death with just wits and science and Sukie as my weapons. She was literally sensing it in her bones, that’s what was hurting her. I felt sorry for Janey, I’m not some psycho sadist like what Amy liked to think (too bad she never saw her precious Stephen’s juvenile record, before the lab, before she ran off with him, if she thinks I’m so terrible), but at the same time knowing everyone could feel it and sense it inside themselves, it buoyed me up and made me happy inside. The same feeling as when Grandma brought me back from death and it turned out I’d been part of some hugely important new experiment, I’d just proven something in the very flesh about life and death, except better. Because I was in charge of all the proving now. The proving grounds. That’s where we were headed.

  “It’s not long now,” Janey said suddenly. Her eyes that were always far away, they were practically orbiting Pluto. “It’s so soon, I didn’t expect it nearly so soon, if only Don were—”

  “Shut up.” Billy grabbed a hank of her blonde hair, something I’d seen Don do when Janey got too far away to reach without a reminder, except Don just took a little bit of it and tugged careful but Billy jerked her whole head backwards with his fist and she shouted. “You keep walking and you keep walking and if I hear another word outta you, Janey, I’ll send you right back to Don, I’ll break your fucking neck. Shoulda broken all your necks.” His laugh was a skittering perilous thing, a little boy flying a
long the ice knowing any moment he’d crash into a tree. “All the fucking hoos, everywhere. Back when we were dead and had a chance.”

  Janey put her tongue away. I kept my mouth shut sightseeing the mills and flowers and maybe a half mile later she turned around to look at me, the look on her face, there was such pity and sadness and it was all directed at me that I didn’t even want to think how crazy she’d got. Why was she feeling sorry for me? I had important things ahead of me, I had the whole universe at my back and I was saving it from him. I wasn’t upset about Amy anymore, things were so much bigger now than her. They always had been.

  I stared back at Janey cool and calm and she nodded, a sorrowing nod like she’d just known I wouldn’t understand whatever crazy thing she was thinking, and swiveled her head back to the path; US 12/20 kept inching forward and forward, everything on it new to me except so much of it looked all the same. She kept walking. Billy’s shoulders were hunched forward; he’d started crying again.

  The road ran parallel to a set of rusted-out railroad tracks for two or three miles, then it widened and went gravelly underfoot, then turned narrow again, the trees overhead curving together in a canopy. It would’ve been nice, I guess, all dark and green and cool inside with just little bits of sunlight glinting through like lighter panes of stained glass, except half the trees were bare gray branches and as we walked, Billy still with a grip on Janey’s arm, little pencil-shavings of dry bark drifted onto our clothes, our hair. My feet were killing me, my stomach twisted up starving, I’d been so wild to leave I hadn’t even thought of food, but now I couldn’t think of anything else. My little hoard of chocolate bars, the really good expensive kind from the lab’s emergency stores that I’d hidden during the plague, I could’ve been eating one of them right now. Up ahead, even though there was nothing around us but the woods and beaches I was already sick of looking at, Billy suddenly stopped.