“There’s an undertow anywhere you go,” he said. His chin was resting on his knees now, dark hair falling over his face so I could barely see his profile. My fingers itched to cut it. “Anybody can get pulled under. Any time.”
“True enough,” I said.
The tide came in. The tide went out. The faint, faraway shadow of what was left of Chicago was harder to see, this far east, not a smoky charcoal outline like in Gary but a half-dissolved gray mirage.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I didn’t even know I did it.”
His fingers shook a little and he gripped his knees tighter. I’ve been there, I’ve been there plenty of times: if you don’t hold yourself as still as possible, you really will dissolve into a thousand screaming pieces. Having Naomi isn’t magic, but it helps.
“I believe you,” I said.
“I didn’t—I didn’t know I was doing it, while I did it. I’m serious.” He shook his head, somewhere between genuine remorse and bewilderment. “The whole world just went... blank, like the sun blacked out and everything disappeared, and then I saw Nick coming at me and I swear I don’t remember ever picking that branch up off the ground but then Nick was just—lying there, and I was holding it—”
He uncurled a hand from his leg and gazed at it, as if it could tell him something, then squeezed it closed and tight again. “Every time I look at him I think he’s about to do something terrible, or that he actually is doing it and I have to stop him, and then—I can feel how much he’s part of all this, except, maybe he’s not, maybe something’s playing tricks on him too. Maybe something out there just wants me to think that about him.”
I gazed at the water, the smooth wet strip of sand it flowed over, the lake stones embedded in the strip here and there like hurdles on a long flat track.
“Did Amy tell you my brother was a scientist?” I asked. I didn’t say who he’d worked for, I couldn’t think Stephen would ever want to hear their names again—but then, around here scientist and worked for the lab are pretty much one and the same, unless you’re writing up studies for the oil refinery about how that on-site cancer cluster doesn’t really exist. “It’s like he always used to say, correlation isn’t causation. Wherever we’ve gone, all of us, this has been happening. So maybe it’s all of us.” The thought of that being true made my stomach lurch, but on the other hand, what we all accidentally started we could deliberately finish. We didn’t get this far to just sit down in the sand and cry. “Maybe it’s that... entity, that was following us before, maybe it’s angry we wouldn’t play along and it’s acting out. It could be any—”
“I think I used to be someone you didn’t want to cross.” Stephen was frowning at the water now, frowning like he didn’t really know if this were confession or manifesto. “The kind of person who’d hurt an animal without thinking about it. I think I used to be, what’s that word, sort of a sociopath? Before the lab ever got hold of—I don’t know why I think that. But I’m good as sure, before all this, that I did something wrong.” His heels dug into the sand. “Something a lot worse than—Natalie, at the lab, she said I’d probably enjoy hurting her. She said it like she knew something about me, and she might, if she ever saw the files. They kept files on all of us, you know—where we were from, who we really were. But I never saw mine, and I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember at all.”
I thought about Amy, and her old teacher. The one she’d struck in the face with a shovel, again and again, until she died. Linc, who I was ready to hit with a shovel smashing his head in, because Jessie and I, traveling the roads when the plague was in full bloom inside us and out, were just that frenzied for any kind of meat. Jim, who died right in front of us both, his sisters.
All right, then. There was nothing to be done about any of that now, was there? We’d all done what we’d done, we’d all had our share of sickness and remorse, we all just had to keep moving. None of us were saints, but I wouldn’t countenance Amy, or Stephen, or anyone else, giving themselves up as a demon. That was the death of hope, and hope was all we had left.
“We’ve all done really wrong things,” I said. “It’s hard to get through life without doing at least one really wrong thing, it’s the nature of the—”
“You don’t understand. I’m not talking about—I mean, I think I might’ve been someone who should’ve been in prison. Or an institution. Someone who can’t be trusted around other people. I don’t like other people, I never did—not until I met Amy. Sometimes—” He broke off and laughed, a bleak little sound. “A lot of times, I feel like I’m just play-acting a regular person, like I’m actually in a play and I never got my script, but I can sort of figure out my lines from watching everyone else act. I do what I know I’m supposed to do, but I can’t even see the point of it, and other people, sometimes they just don’t seem real at all. Amy understood that. So I could talk to her without a script, I could”—he laughed again—”improvise. I don’t know why I’m like that, or what caused it. Or if I was born like that. And thanks to the lab, I never will.”
Homo novus, Amy said they called them at the lab. New man. Maybe it was beyond just screwing with life and death, maybe they were trying to make people new and not themselves in more ways than—oh, God, Jim, Jim, goddamnit Jim, what did you do? What did you know? All that money you brought home. All those promises you made. Did you know about Stephen, about Amy’s mother? Did you meet them? You always claimed you were just one step above the custodial staff, but you were always so cheerful when you said so; I should’ve known that meant you were lying. So much, so goddamned much went on in our house I can’t ever tell Jessie. That can’t ever be forgiven.
“You’re sorry you hit Nick,” I said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
His eyes, staring at me, were so dark and there was something merciless, perpetually unhappy, inside them. A complete lack of pity, turned on himself. “Does it?” he asked. “When I couldn’t stop myself from doing it in the first place?”
“Lisa?” someone called from up on the ridge. “You down there?”
Amy. I got to my feet quickly, brushing away sand and bits of twig as I walked. What’d happened now? Amy and Lucy met me halfway down the ridge, Nick trotting by Amy’s side; he was silent now, none of the barking frenzy of the woods, and they both looked perfectly calm. Behind me I could hear Stephen, panting to catch up.
“I just wanted to tell you we’re going into the woods,” Amy said. She glanced at her mother, who was holding a large tin bucket rusting at the seams. “I guess it’s a little early for berries, but Renee said there’s some wild strawberry plants, if you know where to look. Pass the afternoon.”
She was staring at Stephen as she talked, and he at her, and her eyes were just as cold and indifferent as his were open and pleading; the real conversation here had nothing to do with me. Nick didn’t growl or bark or cringe at the sight of Stephen. At least that was something. Lucy kept looking back and forth at both of them; she had plenty of sympathy for Stephen, I could see it, but if she had to choose sides here, then she already had.
“I’ll be around here, then,” I said. “Naomi’s asleep in the cabins, or at least she’s supposed to be. If you find her wandering in the woods, tell her she’s in for it.”
“Amy—” Stephen put out a hand.
“Okay,” Amy said. She took the bucket from Lucy’s hands, turned, and walked up the ridge without looking back. Nick followed close at her heels. Lucy hesitated.
“I’ll catch up,” she called to Amy. Who still didn’t look back. Lucy shook her head at us both.
“You’ve done it, I think,” she said to Stephen, without any condemnation. There were long columnar shadows beneath her eyes, ones I had a feeling would still be there even after twelve hours’ sleep. “I can’t get her to see things from—”
“You don’t need to run interference,” Stephen said. Weary, exhausted even, but also grateful. Something about Lucy’s presence had a tonic effect on him—a ma
ternal one, almost. Though I was sure he’d deny it up and down if I said so. “Just watch out for her. Okay? Because whatever happened, even if I made a mistake, just my mind playing tricks—that isn’t a real dog. It just isn’t.”
“Stephen.” Her eyes grew darker. It was like I wasn’t even standing there. “You can’t start this again.”
“He isn’t!” Stephen’s voice cracked with frustration. “I’m not defending myself, okay? I know what I did but I don’t change what he is, some sort of... harbinger, or—”
“You’re wrong.” Lucy shook her head. “Stephen, you’re wrong.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said. I wasn’t sure he was right, either, but then after everything that’d happened since last year, I wouldn’t feel sure of a damned thing ever again. “Sometimes, when she’s around him, she gets this sort of faraway look in her eyes”—Stephen was nodding in furious agreement now—”I can see it. It’s like he takes her someplace she’s not even—”
Lucy spun toward me, pivoting on her heel. “You know what,” she said, “you really need to quit imagining you’re some sort of expert on my daughter or what she thinks.”
The sensation started as a heavy walnut-sized lump in my gut, then melted and traveled molten and swift up my back, my neck, the muscles at the back of my head tightening with a scorching heat. An old familiar feeling, even now in this strange new body only half mine. “I was expert enough to get us both from Leyton to Gary in one piece,” I said. While you were still mucking around God knows where, while you were still letting her think you were dead. If you were my mother? I’d never have forgiven you. “I was expert enough to get her through Paradise City without her getting beaten or—”
“And then you just sit there, nice as you please, and listen while she as good as tells you she’s going to kill herself.” Lucy’s words wavered and she was blinking back a shiny-brightness in her eyes, but the core of her was stone. My own molten heat cooled and congealed in the face of it. “Behind my back, sneaking away to whisper like it’s got nothing to do with—”
“What do you mean, kill herself?” Stephen demanded. “When did she say that?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” I said. “It doesn’t have a damned thing to do with you. It’s her, and if she felt better talking about it to me than you, don’t stand there blaming me. Ask yourself what she could ever have to say to you, after you ran off like—”
“I was ill.” A confession full of remorse, but no useless apologies. “I wasn’t in my right mind, not at all, and I have a feeling you know something about how that feels. So I’m asking you again, how dare you just let her say those things without telling me—”
“What did she say?” Stephen shouted. “She’s going to kill herself? When? When did she say it?”
“She didn’t say that!” I yanked at my hair in exasperation, the old tug and sting that brought tears to my eyes but it brought me down a bit, too, doing that, tears of fleeting pain like cool soothing water. “She didn’t say—she’s confused, all right? She doesn’t know what she is anymore, she doesn’t know if she’s part of this life or, or—”
I didn’t want to say it. I wasn’t going to consider it, that other possibility, any more than I wanted to hear Jessie’s constant stories about how much better off she’d been dead. Zombies were extinct now, deal with it. So whatever had happened to Amy, or Stephen—or Lucy—they couldn’t be that. “She’s confused,” I said. “Anybody would be. She just wanted to talk it out.”
Lucy considered this, gazing down at her feet. “But me, I wouldn’t understand.” She shook her head, laughing, and there was an edge to that sound that reached out and stung me deliberately, anew. “I wouldn’t understand that feeling at all, no, it’s just got to be you. You’ve already got one damned foster kid, all right, that you picked up from who knows where. So leave off mine once and for all.”
“You left,” I said. Just like I ran away from Jessie, that first time at the cemetery, screaming, sick. “Whatever reason you had, you left. For years. She had to grow up all by herself, and you can’t control what she—”
“Jesus God.” Stephen was laughing now, as he walked away from us. “She wants to kill herself, and we’re all standing here fighting—I’m gonna go find her. Goodbye.”
“She did not grow up all by herself!” Lucy’s face had gone scarlet, as hot as mine felt. “How dare you? How dare you stand there on your fucking high horse and—”
The sound of screaming cut us off. Loud, tearing, panicked screams from the woods, the thickets of trees, where Amy had gone to hunt strawberries.
TWELVE
LUCY
Stephen froze where he stood at the sound, then darted into one of the cabins. I sprinted past the firepits and into the cottonwoods, desperate to keep up with Lisa. She hurtled past me with inhuman speed, our sneakers slapping the underbrush, vaulting over thick undulating roots toward—
“Jessie!” Lisa screamed, not slowing her steps. “Jessie! Where are you? Help!”
I heard more footsteps, the sound of shouting behind me, but I didn’t turn around. Amy’s screams had stopped. That sudden, abrupt silence was so terrible to contemplate that I kept on running, kept going so I wouldn’t have to think—and there, in a big, open clearing fringed with oaks and maples, I saw it. Lisa, Jessie, and the others stood in a semicircle around a tall, pale, barefoot man with hair the color of ice, drawn and emaciated like someone in the final stages of the plague; his face was contorted with triumph and hate, one arm holding Amy pinned to his body and the other closed around her throat. He’d lost a shocking amount of weight in just a matter of days, but I still recognized him: the man from the lab, the one who’d barked orders at the Scissor Men and then dragged Amy away to kill her.
I screamed as loud and long as I could, crazy enough with fear to imagine that might scare him into letting her go. He didn’t budge. I tried to throw myself at him, but Lisa had me by the arms, holding me back, barely even noticing when I fought and kicked and screamed some more for her to let me go. Across the semicircle from me Jessie’s eyes widened, her own face twisting in what looked like silent laughter; she rose up on her toes, limbs poised with a dancer’s precision, and nodded at the man like she wasn’t at all surprised to see him. Like she knew him, too. Her lips curled in the semblance of a smile.
“Billy,” she said. And took a step forward. “Long time, huh?”
Nick was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t want to think what might’ve happened to him. Amy stood there, rigid, gazing back at me desperate and sick with fear. Let her go. Let her go. Someone please, please, show me how to make him let her go.
“I never knew what happened to you,” Jessie said to him. She was circling them now, hands clasped casually behind her back, like a museum-goer studying an arcane piece of art from every possible angle. “You and Mags, taking off like that for Valparaiso, maybe ‘cause you were afraid of me—” She laughed in earnest. “That’s what Sam said, anyway. When you left. That you both went out Valpo way.”
Billy’s eyes were narrow and thoughtful and far beyond any of us. “Mags is dead,” he told Jessie. “This bitch killed her.”
Jessie nodded. So calm, how the hell did she dare to be so—I thrashed hard in Lisa’s grasp and she held me even tighter, muttered desperate calming syllables that my ears wouldn’t process into words.
“Well, that’s how it is with us, isn’t it, Billy,” Jessie said. Getting closer to him, little by little, not too much at a time. Amy kept her eyes on me, trying not to struggle, the berry bucket on its side at her feet. “Fight breaks out, you stomp a few heads, every now and then it’s someone you really liked who gets it, but that’s our way, Billy, that’s how it works. You know that. You’ve done it.” She was trying to soften her voice, the softest grating, scraping harshness her post-plague vocal cords would allow. “We’ve all done it. Remember Lillian, when Teresa got her? Remember Old Mike from the South Bend gang, that their chief was
so sweet on, when you tore him up? That’s how fights work. That’s how it goes. Their chief didn’t hold a grudge.” She reached out a hand, careful, still too far away to touch. “Neither should you.”
Billy’s arm tightened against my daughter’s chest, the slow strangling grip of a snake, and she closed her eyes, awaiting the inevitable. I made a low, animal sound I couldn’t hold back and Billy chuckled quietly, shook his head. “Sometimes, Jessie,” he said, “you’re still such a damned kiddie—not like that piece a’shit I left behind with the hoos, but you got your moments. Me, I don’t wanna kill anyone.” So calm. Sickeningly calm. “Ain’t no point in that, not with what I see coming—and when it does, I want her to live through all of it. With no eyes. No fingers. No tongue, no teeth, no face.”
He yanked hard enough on Amy that her head jerked back, eyes still tightly shut. “The bitty leftovers after a fight, nobody to show no mercy and just stomp her. She can live like that forever, she can live and live and live in the middle of all the nothing, just like they tried to make me do puttin’ me in this filthy hoo-body—but it’s okay, you see, ‘cause Mags is past it all already. Mags just went on ahead early.”
Tears leaked down his face, his words wobbling like a distressed little boy’s. “She just... went on ahead. So it’s all right. But for doing it? A fucking hoocow, thinking she can raise her hand to one of mine?” He bared his teeth, voice sinking to a hoarse, hissing whisper. “She’s gotta learn her place.”
“You can’t do that, Billy.” Renee stepped forward, bolder than Jessie, the bad cop. “We’re all as strong as you are. And we won’t allow it.”
“You don’t make the rules, ‘maldie bitch.” He pressed his fingertips to Amy’s shoulders, wrenching them, and her eyes flew open and she gritted her teeth in pain. “You keep your mouth shut and you stay happy Jessie took a shine to you, ‘cause you don’t make any of the fucking rules—”
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