“The gang’s over with, Billy,” Linc said. “Over and done with. That world’s over. The old hoo-world’s over. Everything we knew, or thought we got used to, is—” He broke off. “Just be glad Mags is well out of it, one way or another, and leave the kid alone.”
“You can’t touch her anyway,” another voice said, from right behind me.
Lisa whipped right around with me, both of us nearly tripping over each other’s feet. “Naomi?” she said, not bothering to try and prettify her voice. “Go back to the cabins. Go back there now.”
“You only think you can touch her.” Naomi stood there, defiance beating back fear, small feet planted wide apart in the mucky ground. “You think you can. But you can’t.”
“I should’ve snapped your neck and eaten you when I had the chance,” Billy whispered. “You know what stopped me? You wanna know? Mags!” His voice rose to a shout. “Only thing that stopped me! I told her, lady, it’s a fuckin’ piece of meat, you start getting all hoocow-sentimental on me and I’ll—but it don’t matter now. She’s dead. She’s dead and it’s time to punish the—”
“Naomi!” I shouted. “Do what your mother says, now!”
Naomi just shook her head. “He can’t touch her.”
“The youngun’s right.”
That voice wasn’t any of us. It was coming from inside the trees and as all of us, even Billy, stood there astonished, he came out from amid the branches: the man in black. The tall thin silent creature that had followed us from the lab down the road, night and day, and then vanished as abruptly as he’d appeared. There in the flesh, silent no longer, with waxen white hands folded against his coat-front and a black hood, a death’s-hood, pulled up to obscure his face. Trotting along beside him was Nick, unharmed, as obedient as if he knew this stranger from long days past. And something told me he did.
“Billy.” The man halted a few feet away, watching from under his hood. “You gotta let go.”
Jessie and Renee both drew in startled breaths. Linc looked sharply from them to the man and back again. Did they know him? Were we all supposed to know him? Amy looked as confused as I felt. The stranger stepped forward, putting out a thin, pale, finely sculpted hand.
“Enough, Billy,” he said. The faintest little trace of a drawl flavored his words, like a broth nearly boiled away in the pan. “That’s enough.”
Billy stared back at him, still clinging to my daughter like he was a little boy and she his big cheap stuffed-animal prize from the fair. I kicked and struggled against Lisa with renewed force, my foot slamming into her shin hard enough to make her gasp, and then suddenly I was staggering free while she, Renee, Linc, and Jessie were on Billy all at once. Naomi went running headlong to join the fray and I grabbed her, almost tackling her in the underbrush to keep her back; Naomi was screaming, I was screaming, the others surrounded Billy in a volley of feet and fists. Nick sat there, watching impassively, just like the stranger in black. Lisa was grabbing for Amy as Amy thrashed like a fish in Billy’s grasp. Billy yanked Amy backwards, Amy howled in pain—
And then I saw a metallic flash from the corner of my eye, a head of dark tangled hair. Stephen had come the long way through the trees, to try and take Billy by surprise; he had the big hunting knife from Jessie’s cabin, still rusty with animal blood. Billy sent Renee thudding onto the leaves and Stephen shoved his way into the breach, spitting and seething with hate, slicing at Billy’s back, his shoulders, his gripping arms. The wounds were deep and bloody and completely useless, sealing themselves tight mere seconds after they opened up. I flew toward them, Naomi abandoned and forgotten, desperate to try and draw blood myself. Then I was in the middle of the fight, dead at the center, and I had Amy in my arms. Lisa and I both had both in our arms. Billy threw himself on us with a grunt of rage, and Stephen raised the knife once again—
There was blood everywhere, spattered all over my clothes and hair, and Amy and I were both screaming at once. Screaming together, as the knife went in.
Jessie and Renee had Billy, panting in their grasp. Linc was sprawled beside them, out of breath. Amy was beside me, on her knees in the leaf-muck, clutching her side where the last knife-thrust had gone in. Where the knife stuck out of her flesh. Her shirt, jeans, groping palms all soaked in red.
“Oh, Jesus—” Stephen, his face chalky and drained, knelt beside us with horror and panic in his eyes. “I tried—I was aiming at—”
“Don’t pull it out!” I shouted.
I was sobbing now, my sleeves and jacket front turning wet as I clutched Amy to my body, and Stephen was frantically pulling off his jacket to try and stanch the blood that wouldn’t stop coming. “Don’t pull it out, Stephen, it’ll bleed even more—if—”
“I didn’t mean it!” Through a blur I saw him pressing the wadded-up jacket to her side, trying to hold her like I was holding her; I shook with terror and that shook Amy’s body in turn, and everything was hot and cold all at once. Stephen began to sob. “I was aiming for him! I thought I got his—Amy, I didn’t see it was you! I didn’t mean it!”
Billy chortled in glee at the sight of us, there on our knees in the mud and blood. Linc punched him hard in the gut, but he still wouldn’t stop. Nick, that horrible thing Stephen had been right about all along, just sat there staring like it was a movie; I’d thought he loved Amy at least, I really had, but he just sat there, watching her die. Amy lolled against me, ashen-faced, dazed with surprise that something hard and sharp was sticking from her flesh. That she was bleeding all over us, all over me. That my baby was dying. Her muscles were going slack, limp and useless to outrun death—and then suddenly the man in black was there, Nick at his side, calm and easy as if Amy had all the time in the world. The man reached down, a long graceful bend from the waist, and before I could stop him, he slipped his thin fingers between our bodies, pulled the huge horrible hunting knife out of Amy’s side, and let it drop like a great thick splinter into the leaves.
So he was here to kill her after all, just like I’d always feared. He was here to kill all of us. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to live, not without Amy. I was crying, ugly sounds forcing themselves in great hiccups from my chest; Stephen rocked back and forth where he sat with his head in his hands. But then, as the knife thudded to the ground, I saw the man put his palm to Amy’s side. Her blood welled up rich and dark between his fingers, like flood water overwhelming a drain; then the horrible gushing flow became a thin, steady trickle, then a weak sporadic drip. Then, nothing. When he pulled his bloodstained hand away, there was no wound. Under the torn-up shirt, Amy’s flesh was smooth and unmarked as if she were like Jessie or Lisa or Billy—an ex, a plague-dog made incorruptible by chance.
Please, please let me not just be seeing things, like Stephen. If the whole universe doesn’t hate me and Amy and all our kind, and everything else that lives, please—
Amy clung to me like she was a baby all over again, taking a cautious breath, then another. Nick wagged his tail, nuzzled at her leg. Stephen stared at us in disbelief, one hand reaching out to Amy but not daring to touch her. Naomi squatted at the edge of the clearing, eyes closed tight and her hands pressed flat over her ears. Lisa, glassy-eyed with shock, went over to her, tugging gently at her raised wrists.
“It’s all right now,” she told Naomi. “It was an accident. Amy isn’t hurt.”
An accident. Just an accident. Nothing to get all worked up about. How is my baby not dead? Is this like the lab all over again?
Naomi slowly opened her eyes, clutching Lisa like Amy clutched me; Stephen had his head back in his hands, wretched and lost there in the leaves. The man in black knelt down beside him and he cringed, like Nick, like any dog knowing he was about to be beaten, but the man’s bone-white hand patted Stephen’s shoulder with soft, fluttery little beats. Beats like the wing-flaps of some tiny bird.
“It was an accident,” the man agreed. “That kinda dustup, all them arms and legs, I’m just surprised you didn’t manage to stab yourself.”
>
“Who are you?” I asked. My voice was so steady, it amazed me. I reached out and laid my own hand on Stephen’s arm, to let him know I didn’t blame him, not for this or anything else; it was all a mistake. Disaster was averted. Somehow. “What are you?”
Billy laughed, a long sharp sound like a gunshot reverberating through the air. He thrashed in Jessie and Renee’s grasp; Linc punched him again, hard and fast to the face, the gut, and he subsided.
“No,” Billy shouted, not the least out of breath from the blows. “You ain’t nothing like what I want. Where is it? Show it to me!” His face darkened, flushed the color of brick with rage. “Show it to me now!”
The man didn’t seem to hear Billy. He stood up again and the hood slipped from his head, revealing a head of short-clipped hair as silvery pale as Billy’s. This wasn’t a young man’s light blond, though, like Billy’s; you knew, looking at him, that it was the true white of old age. His face was thin, intelligent, with long deep seams at the eyes and mouth that could’ve indicated a hard-living forty-five, a well-preserved seventy-five, or any point in between. His lips had a firm humorous twist; his eyes were a pale, clear blue that seemed to see into and through us like he knew everything we thought, everything we felt. Everything we were.
Death? But he couldn’t be. He just seemed too... friendly, for that.
Linc opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, then closed it again; he stared at the stranger with an uncertainty, a disbelief that had an undercurrent of something else in it, something I didn’t understand. He turned to Jessie, both of them silently seeking clarity from the other and not finding it. Lisa had no idea what all this meant, either. I could tell by her face.
Then Jessie let go of Billy, who lolled sullenly in Renee’s half-hearted grasp, and went up to the stranger with slow, measured steps. Though I could hardly believe it, she looked afraid, but not of him: afraid, rather, that something she had guessed about him might be wrong. She touched his sleeve, brushing it tentatively with her fingertips, and as she looked up at him, I suddenly realized I was wrong. That wasn’t fear in her eyes. It was hope.
“Florian?” she said.
BOOK TWO
SPIRITUS MUNDI
THIRTEEN
JESSIE
“Florian.”
He just stood there, looking at me, like his sudden arrival out of nowhere was any old afternoon. His face was like it must’ve been in life, no longer bone-stripped but still thin and angular. He had the same eyes, too, water-pale blue, steady and gentle, and when they were on you, like they were on me right now, it was like he wasn’t seeing anything else. I threw my arms around him and he chuckled, soft and low in his throat, just like before.
“Easy,” he said. I could feel the words rumbling through his chest. “It ain’t like you haven’t seen me before this—”
“Shut up,” I said, and hung on. Behind me all the others were muttering and murmuring, confusion, speculation, that awful boy repeating over and over he hadn’t meant it with the knife and Amy going I know, I know like the call-response of two scruffy starving beach birds. It was the substance of all hoo-talk everywhere, ignorant surreptitious conference that never managed to find its way to the truth. When I pulled back, Florian was smiling. Even his widest smile now was nothing next to the death’s-head grin he’d once had, that all our oldest ones had had. I missed it, that permanent skeletal dusty’s grimace. I missed hearing the echo of him inside my head, his music, his part of all our music, as I woke and slept. I missed everything.
Linc went up to him, grinning too, able to believe it now as he clapped Florian on the shoulder. Renee still hung back, almost shy, but then she’d barely known Florian and when she had, he was dying. Next to her, Billy—what was left of Billy—sagged against a tree trunk with his head down, laughing quietly at nothing. Sam, poor Sam always did say that without Mags around, Billy’d be like a cardboard box in the rain. That was putting it kindly.
Was he here to take us all away? It was all right if he was, I wouldn’t argue. Billy, he’d be so happy.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “Why now?”
Something sad flickered over Florian’s face, but that was him; he got sad, everyone got sad. You couldn’t trust someone who refused to let himself ever feel truly sad. He patted my shoulder and I reached up, clutched his fingers, still thin and bone-pale but strangely fat in my grasp from their layers of living-thing flesh.
“Can you stay?” Linc asked, still smiling and happy. He was the only person standing here who really understood what Florian was to me, and that thought gave me a fleeting lonely sadness of my own. “How did you get here, how—” Then Linc laughed, he was just so uncomplicatedly glad in a way he almost never was. “We’re not all just seeing thingsÖ”
“Oh, you ain’t just seeing things,” Florian said. He patted Linc’s arm in turn, fatherly, brotherly. “I’m here.”
“Who are you?” the girl, Amy, was asking. Almost timid. Her dog, Nick, sniffed assiduously around Florian’s bare feet.
“Florian was a friend of theirs,” Lisa explained. Dutifully reciting what little I’d told her, gazing in astonishment at its appearance in the skin. “A fellow undead. Very old. He died—rotted away, I mean, crumbled into dust, before the plague ever hit.”
“And now he’s come back.” Naomi, the kiddie, she looked the least surprised of anyone, pressed like a growth against Lisa’s shin. “Like all the zombies, all the dead people are going to as part of Tribulation, and Jesus will lead them to—”
“Tribulation is just a story,” Lisa said. Her mouth had gone thin and tight and I could see her thoughts like they were written out, that goddamned Tina and her goddamned storefront Jesus freaks. “All the Rapture is just a story. Judgment Day isn’t for a very long time and it won’t look like that, it—”
“I haven’t dreamed about you in forever,” I told Florian. Where the hell had he been, anyway? Why had he just stepped out of my head when I needed thoughts of the old days, now more than ever, to get me through? To keep me even halfway tethered to Earth. “It’s like you just left me. It’s like you just wandered away while I wasn’t looking.”
A crash behind us made us collectively jump. A long, convoluted branch thicker than my arm and sprouting webs of tributary twigs all down its length, a network of nerves feeding a great curved spinal cord, had pulled loose from a healthy tree and plummeted to the underbrush; it was bare, gray, hollow at its core as though it’d been rotting for years still attached to its host. Bits of it crumbled into ash when I touched it. As we looked up into the tree, there was nothing but that same dry dead grayness, the outer layer of greenery looking glossy as plastic and just as false. That tree was fully alive yesterday, when Linc and I passed under it going hunting; when I’d looked up into its branches, just like now, I saw green and brown and only the smallest flashbulb-spots of sunlight able to penetrate between. There was a bird’s nest next to the fallen branch, toppled as well, bottom edge facing upward like a little truck flung on its side in a tornado. I wasn’t going to look at what was inside it. That, too, had died before it ever hit the ground.
I turned to Florian and the sorrow in him was deeper and stronger than anything I’d ever seen. “I didn’t mean to leave,” he said. “Didn’t really want to. But here I am.”
Stephen, the mighty dog-beater, was staring at Florian with eyes gone beady in suspicion and just try it, you little shit, just try getting in Florian’s face and you won’t have one of your own left anymore. I won’t even bother, I’ll just let Billy go to work. Florian, though, just turned to Stephen and smiled.
“It ain’t out of your way to suspect me, no,” he told Stephen. “It’s just more complicated than that. I didn’t make any of this happen—but I guess I’m part of it, in my own way. I never meant to be, I—”
“Are you how the lab can do what it did?”
It was Lucy, Amy’s mother, who asked that. She reminded me of Renee, a skittish, shy core
all wrapped up in an outer hide not nearly as thick as she thought it was, as thick as it needed to be. “They brought us back to life,” she said, “again and again, after they killed us, and Amy—” She motioned shakily at Amy, who was standing, silent and gray-faced, with her mother and Stephen flanking her like bodyguards. Prison guards. “We never knew how they did it. We can’t figure it out. Did you work there? Was it you?”
Billy snorted. Florian put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and she startled, then tried to look calm. “That lab,” he said. “All that trouble. All them unnatural things they did. I had nothing to do with that, I never worked there. Never knew ‘em. But.” He sighed. “But that was my beach, that they did all their work in. My beach, that I left behind, and they go and do something like that in—”
“That’s not your beach.” Amy’s voice was little, polite, but she shook her head like that settled it. “That’s Death’s beach, Death’s house. Death’s backyard. AndÖ and I’ve met Death—I know you’re not him, whatever you are.”
“Death’s backyard,” Florian agreed. Mild and amenable as always. “I guess so, ‘cause everything’s Death’s in the end—you, me, our bodies, our thoughts, everything we got that’s us. Everything we leave behind. Except, Death ain’t all there is. Something a lot bigger than him out there, even if he’s carrying it around inside himself”—gazing at me, again, seeing into and through and past me—”and sometimes it’s like he ain’t no different than the rest of us, in that respect. Full of parts of his own self he can’t ever understand.”
I turned his words over in my mind; they were like smooth cool lake stones without a single crack in their surfaces, no way to get to what was really inside. I’d had a fucking bellyful of this kind of thing from him during the plague, during the horrible trek from Great River to Prairie Beach, sickening and dying and watching everything fall to pieces with nothing to guide me but vague visions of him still living, disconnected dreams where he urged me onward. Not this time. We weren’t subtle artful people, we who’d not merely died but felt and lived all of death’s realities firsthand, and I wasn’t in any more mood to try and puzzle out poetry.
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